Jim Goodmann
Regional Director, Calling Congregations
Recent entries:
October 06, 2010
Through its Cultures of Call grants, Calling Congregations at FTE has
been investing in congregation-based initiatives around the vocation of
the next generation since the spring of 2007. Pastoral internships have
been a constant part of that investment. Out of 49 Cultures of Call
grants made thus far, nine have been for internships for those of high
school and college age. With this history of funding has developed a
conversation with grantees and potential grantees in making
opportunities for internships mutually enriching - for congregations and
interns. In our newest grants initiative to fund pastoral internships
for young adults of college age or recent graduates, Calling
Congregations has chosen to meld the energy for hosting pastoral interns
with our VocationCARE practices...
Read More »
September 10, 2010
As we approach the ninth anniversary of 9/11 our attitude toward those
who do not share our faith perspective or nationality might lead us back
to the lawyer’s question to Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, “…And who is
my neighbor?" That story from the Gospels always makes me wonder about
our capacity to appreciate this presence of God in the stranger, in the
one who is not like us and in language foreign to our vocabularies of
belief. The advent of a mosque in Lower Manhattan has stirred both
local and national anxiety but the validity of the Gospel question
persists. The fact that a Greek Orthodox congregation
has been attempting to rebuild in the same neighborhood without success
might also help us see that there are religion communities that we may
fear and then there are also those we just ignore.
Read More »
June 26, 2010
“Resurrection isn’t easy,” says Noele Farrell, the teenage heroine of
Andrew Greeley’s novel Lord of the Dance. Rev. Dr. Mary Louise Gifford,
pastor of Wollaston Congregational Church (UCC) in Quincy, MA, can cite
chapter and verse why this is so. In her book, The
Turnaround Church: Inspiration and Tools for Life-Sustaining Change
, she tells the story of a congregation that had moved from 900 members
in 1950 to twenty five and into virtual hospice care according to the
Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ when she arrived
as the pastor in 2003 – their first full-time pastor in more than
twenty years.
Read More »
May 12, 2010
Judy
Cannato’s book 
of
the above title 
suggests that our being bound to one
another is immutable and not even a matter of being local to each
other. Her careful and stunning study intertwines the new physics and a
spirituality that takes as necessity the development of another
language for our identity in the human condition, that one universal
spiritual tradition to which everyone belongs, willingly or un- (Thomas
Keating).
Read More »
March 01, 2010
The Old Testament contains many stories of leadership. Noah, Moses,
Samuel, Deborah, Ruth, David, Jeremiah, the “Servant” of Isaiah (or
Israel in exile) all come from communities which cultivated a way of
knowing or coming to know who and whose they were. Even
Jacob comes to terms with his birthright and a divine mercy in ways
unexpected and holds together an unruly and sometimes violent brood that
includes another son of promise, Joseph...
Read More »
February 12, 2010
I recently introduced Calling Congregations’ Vocation Care practice to my home parish in Atlanta. The way I presented it was telling our stories as a way to care for our lives. Our conversations have had a surprisingly rich character. Though the identified object of that curriculum is vocation – yours, mine, and ours together as the church – the way to a calling, it seems, is less systematic than textbook theology and closer to a practice of careful attention to our lives, to their warp and woof, formed and fashioned as they are by our Creator “in the depths of the earth” (Ps. 139:15) as well as by our choices. If the Psalmist’s phrase suggests a kind of mythology it may just be the needful imaginative platform that helps our thinking about our lives, about who we really are—creatures who belong not only to ourselves but to others and to the great Artifacer. Our divine origin is a given.
Thomas Moore in his now-famous Care of the Soul says that “care” is a more appropriate posture toward our lives than heroism, however desirable heroics may be to the ego. We engage the stories of our lives, he says, not to make them problem-free but to “give to ordinary life the depth and value that comes from soulfulness.” Our lives just as they are with their story-woven content just as it is. Our attempts to heal, says Moore, “can get in the way of seeing.”
Read More »
December 06, 2009
Eight years ago the church I was serving was invited to participate in the Youth Ministry and Spirituality Project (YMSP), a Lilly Endowment grant project that was created by Mark Yaconelli and co-directed with Michael Hryniuk. As youth minister at St. Paul’s in Richmond, VA, I had tried to encourage spiritual practices among the youth and the adults who worked with them, but I always failed to find the traction that was needed to sustain the practices. The curriculum we were using in youth ministry was demanding in terms of content and in terms of adult time commitment. St. Paul’s youth and adults were busy people with multiple important demands on their time and energy. “Contemplation” was seen as another good thing to do, but the schedules of those in the church were already filled with plenty of good and important things. Besides, the youth curriculum was full of lesson plans on prayer, so we concluded that we should just fully implement the curriculum.
Read More »
December 01, 2009
Eight years ago the church I was serving was invited to participate in the Youth Ministry and Spirituality Project (YMSP), a Lilly Endowment grant project that was created by Mark Yaconelli and co-directed with Michael Hryniuk. As youth minister at St. Paul’s in Richmond, VA, I had tried to encourage spiritual practices among the youth and the adults who worked with them, but I always failed to find the traction that was needed to sustain the practices. The curriculum we were using in youth ministry was demanding in terms of content and in terms of adult time commitment. St. Paul’s youth and adults were busy people with multiple important demands on their time and energy. “Contemplation” was seen as another good thing to do, but the schedules of those in the church were already filled with plenty of good and important things. Besides, the youth curriculum was full of lesson plans on prayer, so we concluded that we should just fully implement the curriculum.
Read More »
December 01, 2009
Greetings! This issue of CALLING comes just before Christmas with an emphasis on the lives of young people and their primary places of nurture—our churches and our families.
Read More »
November 18, 2009
Two weeks ago Calling Congregations introduced a curriculum of practice with five congregations to nurture vocations through inter-generational conversation. These are practices which ask us to see ourselves and each other through the question, “Who am I? Who has God created me to be?” The movement of these practices allows participants to view themselves with an appreciative inward look, with the tender regard that God has for each of our lives. We tell stories of when we were noticed for our giftedness—whether that occurred through a church community or in some other place in our lives. Not the polished story, not all details but the story’s core where the compassion of God and the nurture of others is at work.
Creating the space for this kind of exploration is a kind of gathering of the community for a hearing of the word of God as it sounds through each of our lives.
Read More »
