Melissa Wiginton
Vice President for Ministry Programs and Planning
Recent entries:
November 05, 2010
A Presbyterian recently told me there are 2,000 pastors looking for jobs in her denomination and 500 openings in congregations. I had heard this from another Presbyterian not too long before and have heard similar clergy-to jobs ratio from other denominations as well. The obvious next question: Do mainline churches need more people preparing for ministry?
Denominational leaders (including pension boards), sociologists, cultural observers, theological educators, congregational pastors and theologians are all working through this question from their particular contexts and with the tools of their disciplines. Their conclusions remain to be finalized.
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September 17, 2010
You may have heard that Stanley Hauerwas, theology professor, ethicist and pacifist, has written a memoir, Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir
In a recent interview with Christianity Today, Hauerwas spoke about teaching seminary students preparing for pastoral ministry. He said:
I try to give them a sense of what a wonderful thing it is that they are doing by going into the ministry. What an extraordinary privilege to every week be asked by people to preach. Our lives hang on it. I try to give a sense of the marvelous adventure it is to be brought within God's providential care of the world through the every day acts of preaching and Eucharistic celebration.
Wow. What do you pastors and would-be-ministers think about Hauerwas’s vision? Romance, reality or just rarely remembered?
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August 20, 2010
Driving through downtown Decatur, GA last week, I passed the sign in front of First Baptist Church at least a dozen times. It announced the title of the coming Sunday’s sermon: "What If I Can’t Forgive?" That’s a pretty gutsy sermon title.
Just asking the question lays certain claims, namely that (a) forgiving is a good, something I should do; (b) forgiving is hard and sometimes I can’t do it; and (c) something happens if I can’t forgive. If we could get CNN to conduct a poll, I doubt a majority of Americans would agree with these as blanket claims, true no matter what it is that needs forgiveness or whether the offender apologizes. This question goes against the grain; it calls us to how we should live. "What If I Can’t Forgive?" is a prophetic question.
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October 20, 2009
Last week at the Calling Congregations conference in Atlanta, people spent more than four hours (in three sessions) talking about something they really cared about with other people who also cared. It was kind of luxurious—no problem to solve, no personnel issues or budget revisions, just time for going as deeply as you wanted to go.
Reading the notes from the sessions on theological education and spiritual formation, it sounds like that group touched near the heart:
“We confessed the tendency of some of our institutions to be hijacked by scarcity and political battles, and noted that not only are congregations and theological education institutions in tension—and that distracts us—but that there should be a greater tension, actually, between all the manifestations of the church—the body of Christ—and those aspects of the culture that would undermine it. How do we liberate theological education from capitalism? Preserving the powerful essence of the Christian gospel is what theological education is, at its best, all about—not simply preserving institutions. Seminaries want to be bigger in thought, vision, heart: less bound by tasks.”
What does this say to you?
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September 26, 2009
Memorial Day weekend was, in our family, more importantly, the occasion of the oldest grandson’s high school commencement. Relatives from both sides traveled from four cities to celebrate, to visit and to reconcile: remarried parents saw each other for only the third time in nearly 25 years. And all was well, thanks be to God. Even the very 18 year-old grandson, nephew and big brother survived the festivities with grace and gratitude.
Our families were tied together long before my sister and her husband were married: we all grew up in the same congregation. We aligned with a tradition known for its strict adherence to one truth and its intolerance for alternative points of view; the truth was, after all, set out in the Bible which anyone could read. (No need for theological education here.) Our particular congregation, however, was renegade and reviled as heretics. We were branded as liberal.
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May 18, 2009
Sitting and waiting in the Houston airport one day, my father looked around and said to my mother, “Joyce, where are the beautiful people?” Well, last week I found a whole group of them having lunch in downtown Princeton, NJ: thin, fit, elegantly understated in dress, sophisticated in intellectual conversation and assured of their place in the world. It was quite something.
I was there for Princeton Seminary’s conference on “Emerging Adulthood,” a title taken from a book by developmental psychologist Jeffrey Arnett. Arnett claims—based on 300 interviews with people between ages 18-25—that he has identified a new life stage between adolescence and adulthood. Emerging Adulthood, he says, is an age of identity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling in-between and many possibilities. EAs, as he refers to them, have a somewhat wary but yet robust optimism about their future. They believe that will find their soul mates and do meaningful work. Arnett endorses them: They are wise to explore before they marry and settle down—before they emerge as full-blown beautiful people. (That last part is me.)
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March 04, 2009
Newsweek recently reported that applications to seminary and divinity school may be on the rise in the wake of the economic downturn. In Divine Refuge in the Storm, Lisa Miller suggests that people are entering the world of theological education to re-evaluate the cynical world of commerce and capitalism. The Dean of Yale Divinity School says people are turning to religion; one of his students says, “People turn to God when things are so grim.” These re-evaluators will indeed find riches in theological education—the luxury of reading and writing about ideas that not only quicken the mind but also move the heart and soul, the adrenalin high of talk about things that really matter with other smart people who love to learn. I see how theological education could be a refuge from empty work or no work or work confusion. I also know that engaged solely for our own sake, to satisfy our own personal needs, theological education can turn us back into ourselves rather than opening us up to the life of God and the people of God.
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February 03, 2009
As the political life of our country makes a sharp 90-degree turn from choosing a new president to being governed by one, we let certain civic practices rest for a while: campaigns, debates, conventions, constant polling. I am happy to let them lie and will be excited when their time comes again, but I really miss Tim Russert.
Mr. Russert—Washington Bureau Chief for NBC, 16 year host of Meet the Press, familiar commentator on MSNBC and The Today Show—died unexpectedly in June 2008. It felt like an especially cruel time for him to go. A lot of people counted on his smarts, his wisdom, and his presence as ports in the rough political seas. But even more than that, he himself loved it so.
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January 15, 2009
The New York Times magazine gives us this week a story about “the cussing pastor,” Mark Driscoll, 38-year-old pastor of the Mars Hill Church in Seattle. If you are fascinated by American culture as I am—and especially what Americans do with Christianity—you should read this very well-written article by Molly Worthen, “Who Would Jesus Smack Down?”. I come to this story from a place of attention to the call and formation of young leaders for the church. It sounds like a prototypical American story of revival: charismatic leader emboldened by the Gospel radicalizes people hungry for salvation from meaninglessness, loneliness and isolation and forms a community set apart by its convictions. The Mars Hill Church in Seattle meets on seven campuses around the city, with a reported total weekly attendance of 7,500, and a growing ministry, mission and organization. Clearly, something is going on that attracts people.
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January 07, 2009
A few days before Christmas, amidst the growing anticipation of new life we Christians celebrate as Advent, I heard a commentary on NPR about in-vitro fertilization (IVF). (http://kut.org/items/show/15152). More than a half-million frozen embryos are currently being stored in American facilities and thousands more are being added each year. Some will be thawed out, implanted into a mother and grow into real, live babies; others will be kept for future use, either as siblings to the now-born babies or … well, that’s the problem, the “or for what.”
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