Calling

LEAVE COMMENTS FOR THIS POST AT BOTTOM OF PAGE

August 06, 2009

Transition into Ministry: A Program Perspective

Lilly Endowment’s Transition into Ministry (TiM) initiative is an effort to help new pastors get off to excellent starts in the early years of their ministries.Since 1999, the Endowment has awarded grants to 35 congregations, denominational offices, seminaries and religious organizations to develop and test new approaches to assist new pastors in making the critical transition from seminary student to competent pastoral leader. This includes 20 congregations that provide intensive two-year residencies for recent seminary graduates and 15 religious organizations that bring young pastors together in peer groups. All of these programs provide opportunities for new pastors to be mentored by seasoned clergy, encourage relationships with colleagues, emphasize ongoing study, and assist in the development and fine-tuning of leadership skills. In all, more than 700 new pastors have participated in the TiM initiative.

Several observations gave rise to the creation of the TiM initiative. Seasoned pastors noted the critical importance of the first years of their ministries. The leadership habits and pastoral practices (both good and bad) established in these years tend to endure. Further, the experience of the transition from seminary classroom to congregation is often abrupt, untutored and haphazard today. One result is that beginning pastors often report feeling isolated and unprepared, lacking crucial support and guidance when they most need it. New pastors who drop out of ministry note that a sense of professional, relational, generational, intellectual and cultural isolation was the primary cause of their decision.

Several insights have emerged through the TiM initiative:

• First, learning to be a pastor takes time.It begins in seminary and extends into the earlier years of pastoral ministry. When congregations become full participants in the teaching and learning of ministry, the formative potential of these early years is more likely to be actualized and the benefits of a seminary education are drawn forward into the practice of pastoral leadership.
• Second, the importance of mentoring from seasoned pastors. The importance to be highlighted here is as relevant to those who mentor as it is to those being mentored. When seasoned pastors learn how to teach in and through their practice of ministry, their own pastoral leadership is deepened and enhanced.
• Third, the important role of wise lay leaders. When lay leaders are given the opportunity to participate in meaningful ways in the teaching and learning of ministry, a positive and deeply collaborative relationship with pastoral leaders flourishes. And, fourth, the cultivation of ongoing relationships with peers in ministry is critical to one’s capacity to grow in and through the practice of ministry. Of all the insights identified by TiM participants, it is this realization of how important peers in ministry are to vocational growth and development that is the most valued and the least expected.

In sum, we have discovered the importance of creative and collaborative relationships among seminaries, congregations, denominations and other religious organizations in the preparation of new pastors. We need to create more settings in which seasoned pastors have opportunities to share their hard-won wisdom with new colleagues. New pastors need more opportunities to create and sustain relationships with their peers. We need to attend more deliberately to the important role that congregations and lay leaders play in shaping the leadership practices of pastoral leaders. The challenge now is to lift up and elaborate these insights broadly in order to motivate congregations and organizations to create more opportunities for new pastors to begin their ministries with the support needed to develop healthy, life-giving leadership practices and thus continue to provide effective leadership to congregations.

As long as the seminary context is perceived as the sole, or even as the primary, domain for the learning of ministry, the forms and conditions essential to an education sufficient to the practice of ministry will remain elusive. Instead, both theological educators and church leaders need to empower the practitioners who already reside within congregations, both lay and ordained, to host and foster the kind of learning that becomes possible when a new pastor arrives in their midst. This may happen when all parties recognize the powerful curriculum that is already intrinsic to congregational life itself and devise a range of creative ways to offer it to learners in the early years of ministry.

From January 2002 until June 2009, David Wood was the FTE Coordinator of the Transition into Ministry Program. For more information on the program, go to http://www.thefund.org/programs/coordination_newpastor.phtml or http://www.transitionintoministry.org/ and see David Wood’s essay, Transition into Ministry, in For Life Abundant: Practical Theology, Theological Education, and Christian Ministry (Wm. B. Eerdmans, publishers).