Sustaining Pastoral Excellence: Supporting Ministry Over the Long Haul

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1 Sustaining Pastoral Excellence: Supporting Ministry Over the Long Haul Trudy Bush 1 At two o clock in the morning four pastors arrive at the Great Harvest Bread Company in Austin Texas, ready to do some baking. Somehow, I had forgotten that bread people are nocturnal, one sleepy pastor quips. The four make up the Undying Metaphors cohort, one of more than 60 peer groups funded by Austin Theological Seminary s College of Pastoral Leaders. A generous grant from the Lilly Endowment, Inc. has made it possible for Austin Seminary to award grants to more than 200 ministers from 23 denominations and 32 states thus far. The seminary is one of 63 not-for-profit organizations participating in the Endowments Sustaining Pastoral Excellence (SPE) initiative. The metaphors cohort explores such biblical tropes as bread-making, vinegrowing, wilderness-wandering and war-waging as a step toward their goal of making theology relevant to ordinary people. How can we articulate a message of faithful living in this culture, since our images are so vastly different from those when Jesus walked the earth? they asked themselves. Rather than jettisoning the biblical images, they decided to experience them for themselves so that they could make them more meaningful for churchgoers of their own generation. While the undying metaphors peer group consists of pastors similar in age and theological outlook (all four are graduates of Duke Divinity School), another of the Austin-based initiatives illustrates the diversity that characterizes SPE groups nationwide. In a small town near Austin beset by a contentious, intolerant atmosphere, six pastors from diverse traditions, and from both sides of the culture wars divide (Church of Christ, Episcopalian, Christian Church [Disciples of Christ], Pentecostal, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and Assemblies of God) formed a peer group that began to meet weekly for breakfast to discuss how to improve the town s spirit by teaching people to be more tolerant. They decided to begin with themselves, affirming their common heritage by traveling together to Turkey and Greece, following in the Apostle Paul s footsteps. Some members of the cohort had never been outside of the U. S. or even Texas. Two asked their travel agent to be sure that their guide would be Christian. But when they arrived in Greece they found that both their driver and their guide were Muslims. As they traveled, the guide and driver s knowledge of and respect for Christianity more and more impressed the group. After the group had participated in 1 Trudy Bush, an editor-at-large for The Christian Century magazine, lives in Gambier, Ohio.

2 communion on the final day of the trip, one of those who had initially asked for a Christian guide carried the plate and cup to the two Muslim men and said, You are not our brothers in Christ, but you are our brothers in Abraham. Will you please join us in this meal? The group more than succeeded in its original mission: to show that if they, with all their differences, theological, ecclesiastical, and otherwise, could find ways to celebrate each others ministries, their congregants could do likewise. As a member of the ECLA pastor s church affirmed, these pastors example taught parishioners to be more tolerant of those whose traditions differed from their own. These are just two among many hundreds of varied projects made possible by the SPE program, launched by the Lilly Endowment in But, it should be noted for the sake of perspective, that SPE is itself the latest development in the Endowment s Pastoral Leadership Initiative (PLI), which, according to John Wimmer, program director in the Endowment s religion division, is based on two fundamental questions: What can the Lilly Endowment do to help the church recruit the next generation of pastoral leaders? and, What can it do to help sustain ministers who are already out there doing the job? These fundamental questions have led to the four strategies that form the pillars of the PLI. The first supports programs that give high-school-aged youth opportunities to engage with theology, and college students the chance to take part in theological exploration of vocation. The second helps theological schools strengthen the education they provide for those preparing for parish ministry. The third focuses on helping seminary graduates make a good transition from classroom to parish. And the fourth, the one that undergirds SPE, provides resources for excellent pastors who are already serving congregations by helping give them what they need to stay in the ministry for the long haul. SPE s Genesis The Endowment s effort to assist established pastors the fourth pillar of the PLI actually takes two forms, the Clergy Renewal Program and SPE. The first funds pastoral sabbaticals through grants given to individual churches. It helps pastors devise their own renewal activities Whatever they ve dreamed up with their congregations and their families, as Wimmer puts it. It s a way of honoring pastors services, of providing renewal, and also of helping the church see that renewal is part of what pastors need along the way. The SPE program follows a different strategy. Instead of focusing on individual pastors, families, and congregations, the creators of SPE asked themselves, How can we help a variety of organizations that work with pastors do Page 2 of 11

3 what is necessary to support excellent ministry? Answering that question began with the following steps: Affirming that many pastors already are doing an excellent job Describing various dimensions of excellence in ministry Recognizing that excellent ministry needs to be supported and sustained The conviction that pastors are best able to figure out for themselves how they can grow and be renewed in their vocations underlies SPE. The initiative s planners asked potential grantees to figure out what they could to do to give pastors agency to design their own programs, not in isolation from one another, but, instead, aided by their organizations as part of a larger network of institutions that works with ministers, such as denominational judicatories, seminaries, and retreat or counseling centers. Instead of saying, We re telling you what we think you need to do, these organizations are saying You tell us what you want to do and we will help you build and implement your own learning plan, Wimmer explains. Another hunch that has more than proven itself also underlies the SPE initiative: that peer learning groups are key both to sustaining excellent ministry and to the effectiveness of a wide-scale initiative that aims to help pastors. Inspiration for the peer group model came from a program called the Methodist Education Leave Society (MELS) in Alabama, a cooperative effort between the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church and the Dixon Foundation. The MELS began more than 30 years ago, when a concerned Methodist parishioner, Edwin M. Dixon, decided he wanted to help pastors whose preaching he thought needed considerable improvement. As the story goes, Dixon wrote his bishop a sizable check and asked him to use it to improve preaching in Alabama Methodist churches. When a year passed and Dixon had heard nothing from the bishop, he went to see him again and asked, Bishop, what happened to the money I gave you? The bishop pulled open a desk drawer, rummaged through it, and said, I know that check s in here someplace. Dixon and his family foundation decided to proceed on their own. Dixon had been a grateful participant in several peer learning groups at Harvard Business School and decided to try the concept with a group of pastors. He invited them to put together peer groups focused on improving their preaching and funded the venture himself. Over time, this effort grew into a highly developed program with facilitators who guided groups of pastors through the process of developing their own curricula for improving their preaching. The groups met regularly, discussed books and critiqued each other s sermons, and then capped off the experience by traveling to the Holy Land together. The program was eventually established as the Methodist Education Leave Society. Page 3 of 11

4 Page 4 of 11 Drawing on the MELS approach as a model, Lilly Endowment provided funds to Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis to enable Bruce Roberts, a professor there, to start a peer-learning program for Indiana pastors. Roberts and his colleagues studied and adapted the Alabama model to make it ecumenical, to reflect the diversity of pastors and congregations in Indiana, and to focus on a wider range of pastoral responsibilities and interests. After tracking the success of this and other pilot projects, the Endowment launched SPE. Up to that point, said John Wimmer, in the Religion Division had mostly worked with educational institutions and with research in theological education. In this initiative, it combined the idea of peer learning with the idea of opening the door to let a wide variety of kinds of organizations apply for SPE grants any kind of notfor-profit organization that cared about pastors. We didn t insist on peer learning, since we knew that other learning methods can be equally fruitful, but most of our grantees use it. When we first launched the initiative, we received 731 proposals, the biggest response ever for a new undertaking. The Endowment ultimately made 63 grants for programs that in most cases are still continuing. All in all, the Endowment has invested some 120 million dollars in SPE, and the grantees have committed to raising over $80 million more to sustain and endow their programs for the future. Grant recipients include theological schools of many denominations, regional and national judicatories, church-related colleges and universities, retreat centers, pastoral counseling centers, and ethnic ministry centers. To date SPE programs have hosted between 1,400 and 1,500 peer groups and, when all SPE programming is taken into account, more than 46,000 clergy and other congregational leaders from a wide range of denominations have been involved. The Endowment s conviction that more pastors need access to programs that will help them sustain the rhythm of an energetic and satisfying pastoral life has been confirmed. Describing Pastoral Excellence A great deal of thought went into naming the SPE program. Its creators wanted to emphasize that the initiative focuses on sustaining an already existing excellence. It s not about remediation. Most judicatories actually spend 75 percent of their energy on the 25 percent of the people who are having the most problems, Wimmer says. The Endowment wanted to focus its program on good ministers who are working hard and serving their people well. The Endowment s aim has been to recognize, honor and encourage a vision of excellence in ministry and to build on the strength that is already out there. That s why the word excellence in our title is so important. But that word itself has led to considerable debate, so much so that at least one grantee has refused to use it. In a cultural climate of high stakes competition for

5 Page 5 of 11 prestige, wealth and power, the idea of excellence is often used to separate winners from losers in a zero-sum game. If that s what excellence means, how can the word be applied to churches and pastors who seek to live a Christian way of life. We wanted the word excellence to suggest that Christian Life and Christian ministry demands our very best that God s own profound goodness and generosity calls forth from us a full and grateful response through which we bring our whole selves and our fullest energies. We wanted to foster a conversation about the qualities of self and capacities for service we have to offer, rather to focus on our failures and limitations. We were eager to help pastors and congregations talk about quality and to consider what practices pastors need and want to engage in to sustain them in what they do well and to encourage them to keep growing, says Craig Dykstra, Senior Vice President for Religion at the Endowment. He has found that younger pastors are especially eager to engage in this way of thinking and welcome the setting of a high standard for ministry. Through SPE the Endowment launched a conversation about what excellent ministry is a great debate that is itself raising expectations and hope, says Janice Virtue, a former executive director of Leadership Education at Duke Divinity School. As the Endowment struggled with describing what excellence means theologically, it found an important resource in Gregory Jones and Kevin Armstrong s recent book, Resurrecting Excellence, which gives explicit attention to, as one chapter title puts it, resurrecting excellence in the pastoral vocation. In that book the authors assert that the term resurrecting excellence reminds us of the perennial call to discover in God s excellence a vocation for the life-giving character of Christian discipleship and, more particularly, the vocation of pastoral ministry. Kenneth L. Carder, a United Methodist bishop and professor of the practice of ministry at Duke Divinity School, has also made important contributions to the debate in the articles he wrote for SPE s monthly newsletters, now archived on Duke s Faith and Leadership website ( Carder reminds us that excellent Christian ministry is a person, not a theological and ecclesiological abstraction. Jesus Christ is the incarnation of authentic excellence, the love and power of God to reconcile and transform persons, communities, and the entire creation. When defined by the Incarnation, excellence is stripped of its cultural and class baggage as popular images of success, elitism, and control are turned up-side-down. Over the years the SPE programs themselves have taught the Endowment and the church important lessons about how to sustain pastoral excellence. In a presentation at an SPE forum held in Indianapolis in 2007, Wimmer identified five of these key learnings. Excellent ministry takes place in the context of a flourishing Christian way of life;

6 Page 6 of 11 is collegial: it can be done only in the company of others, in community; is best sustained when pastors have the appropriate balance of agency and accountability; is embodied; must be properly resourced. These learnings are congruent with the careful thinking of theologians and church leaders like Jones, Armstrong, Virtue, and Carder. All agree that the well-lived pastoral life must first be a well-lived Christian life. This involves participating in the practices that constitute a Christian way of life keeping Sabbath, forgiveness, discernment, hospitality, and many others. As Armstrong puts it, excellent pastors are likely to be people who have developed life-long patterns of prayer, who have remained attentive to God and holy scripture, and who participate regularly in those activities that have come to be called Christian practices. The many SPE peer groups confirm what those who care about pastors have long suspected: isolation is toxic to excellent ministry, and true collegiality in ministry is its antidote. Peer groups and other activities that allow pastors to build holy friendships rather than competing with each other can do much to sustain pastoral excellence. A pastor from Texas related that his SPE experience has led him to understand the function of Christian community. It is almost as though the picture of Christ alone in the Garden of Gethsemane is the model for ministers, rather than that of the community of Christ with the disciples, or the Pauline picture of the firstcentury church, he emphasized. I have experienced myself moving from an isolated, defensive, self-protecting individualist toward one with greater openness, willingness to risk and vulnerability....one cannot become excellent in any practice without the input of others in community. Not only do pastors need to form connections and build community, so must the varied organizations and institutions that seek to help them. One of the tasks the Endowment has set for itself is to bridge the institutional isolation that contributes to pastoral isolation. It has done so through funding the SPE Coordination Program at Duke and bringing together institutional leaders in peer group gatherings. As a result, a new ecology of institutions and leaders focused on pastoral leadership is growing organically. Though the SPE program s emphasis on giving pastors the agency to design their own programs has been the hallmark of its success, Wimmer emphasizes that agency must be accompanied by accountability, and accountability, in turn, must be linked to the standard by which accountability is assessed. Here, again, the definition of excellence is crucial. If excellent ministry is fidelity to the nature of God as revealed in Jesus Christ, then excellent pastors embody practices disclosed in the gospel. They embody faithfulness to God s justice, mercy, grace and healing power. In their persons they suffer, speak and act prophetically in contexts of

7 Page 7 of 11 injustice. They seek reconciliation and healing. They sow love, joy and hope. It is not surprising, then, that the most effective programs have kept this focus on excellence. When pastors get together, it s sometimes easy for the gathering to dissolve into a complaining or bragging session to lose the discipline needed to do the spiritual, intellectual and emotional work that the SPE groups were intended to do, Wimmer says. The programs that keep the conversation about excellence going, that keep a steady focus on how to improve in ministry and grow in faith, have yielded the best results. Wimmer also stresses the importance of good content, by which he means a focus on intellectual study or the choice of good resources to develop such things as a rich prayer life. Many of the programs have taken a holistic approach, since pastors realize that it isn t any one thing that keeps you going over time. Staying intellectually alive is crucial, but so is health and physical well-being. An especially important question for pastors is How do you tend to your spiritual needs and keep your spiritual life vital? One of the ironies of ministry is that you can be so busy helping everyone else grow spiritually that your own spiritual life atrophies. For a lot of pastors the issue is how do I stay alive as a Christian, not just as a pastor? Evaluation In 2007, the Lilly Endowment awarded a grant to Austin Presbyterian Seminary to conduct evaluation research on the impact of SPE-initiated peer groups. The study was conducted by Janet Maykus, principal of the College of Pastoral Leaders, and Penny Long Marler, professor of religion and grant and research coordinator of the Resource Center for Pastoral Excellence at Samford University. Based on surveys and focus groups, the study, titled Is the treatment the cure?, demonstrates that the Endowment s hunch about the value of peer groups for pastoral leaders and their congregations was right on target. It found that pastoral leaders who participated in peer groups were significantly more likely to: promote a culture of involvement that actively assimilates newcomers and fully involves members in leadership; devote time and effort to community service and positive community change; support an active youth ministry that also is integrated into the life of the church; lead congregations that experience numerical growth. Not surprisingly, the study also found that the peer group experience differs for men and women. Female pastoral leaders are much more likely to say that they join peer groups because they feel isolated in their ministries. They also tend to participate in SPE peer groups that are denominationally diverse. Much more

8 Page 8 of 11 frequently than men, they engage in group practices that focus on spirituality. And they are also more likely than male pastoral leaders to say that participation in their peer group helps them see the world in different ways and be better listeners. An excellent example of these findings is an SPE program created by women for women. Called Women Touched by Grace, this spiritual renewal program for ordained clergywomen from various denominations across the United States and Canada is offered by the Sisters of Our Lady of Grace Monastery at the Benedict Inn Retreat and Conference Center in Beech Grove, Indiana. It aims to bring the best of Catholic and Protestant practices to a group of Protestant clergywomen (Protestant, since Catholic women are denied ordination). Because participants are widely scattered geographically, the women meet twice a year for ten-day retreats, and stay in touch through and conference calls between meetings. Each woman is paired with a prayer partner from the monastery and a spiritual director, and joins a five-member peer covenant group. Since isolation is an especially acute problem for clergywomen, forming community is the project s primary goal. It gives the women what the program s director, Sister Mary Luke Jones, calls an extravagant welcome, and enables them to form sustaining holy friendships and to build their congregations into real communities. The program s third cohort, for which the program is currently taking applications, will come for its first retreat, Women Creating Community, in April Subsequent retreats will focus on the practices of the spiritual life; the Sabbath time of a silent retreat; women leaders, systems theory and spirituality; and the pastoral leader as spiritual mentor. Sally M. Brower has written movingly about the experiences and friendships of the first cohort of 30 women, as has Sister Mary Luke Jones. See their articles Praying for our sisters, singing for our lives and The wisdom of women on the Faith & Leadership website ( As Women Touched by Grace demonstrates, geographical and denominational diversity affects how peer groups are structured. Diverse groups usually require a skilled facilitator, a sponsor-delivered curriculum offering content of common interest for generating group cohesion, and a focus on spiritual practices. Though such groups are more likely than homogeneous ones to experience some initial conflict, members of these heterogeneous groups are also more likely to report that group involvement has a strong positive impact on their day-to-day ministry, the study found. According to the Austin Seminary study s focus groups and survey, sharing personal concerns, enjoying fellowship and sharing and getting feedback about ministry are key components of SPE groups. Also important are praying for each other, discussing common topics, and exploring new approaches to ministry. A wide variety of intentional spiritual, experiential, and intellectual practices are also

9 Page 9 of 11 either key or minor emphases in over half of the peer groups. Groups meet with experts, travel together, engage in a discipline of silence or meditation, utilize case studies, and express their spirituality through art, drama, and literature....some of these less conventional group practices directly affect a range of positive outcomes such as enhanced creativity... [and] intimacy with God. The study concludes by giving prescriptions for sustaining a variety of qualities of pastoral excellence through peer groups. For example, one prescription is aimed at those who want to renew their ministry. They need a peer group that promotes a high level of contact between group members, not only through meetings but also through s and phone calls; a leader/facilitator who inspires confidence; a group that provides accountability and practical help, with some attention to intellectual challenge and spiritual refueling; a group culture that is cohesive, like family; and, a group whose practices focus on ministry improvement through exploring innovative ideas and resources, as well as reciprocal feedback about personal and ministry problems. Those who want their peer-group membership to have a positive impact on their family and friends are given a prescription with a different combination of ingredients, as are those who seek a group that will bring them into greater intimacy with God, or one that will enhance their creativity. The prescriptions may seem whimsical, but their point is serious: different combinations of the elements that make up good peer groups lead to different emphases, but all are important and effective for sustaining the well-lived pastoral life. Change and Development Anything vital develops and changes over time, and SPE programs are no exception. A number of the programs have expanded their focus to include laity and pastor spouses. The Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRCNA), for example, has begun a parallel Sustaining Congregational Excellence project. Others have come to recognize, and expand upon, the importance of coaching. And as the programs move closer to sustainability without Endowment funding, many have found ways to be leaner, often by eliminating the expensive foreign travel component that was part of many of the initial projects. The administrators of the Pastors of Excellence project at Ashland Theological School in Ohio tell a story about how they became aware of the need to include pastors spouses. Rather than peer learning groups, Pastors of Excellence offers its participants five small-group retreats. At the conclusion of one of these, its leaders overheard pastors talking about the burden their absence placed on their spouses. The project administrators decided to send flowers to all of the left-athome wives. When the spouses thanked them for noticing that we re a part of this too, they began to think about ways to make spouses be a part of the SPE project. Now each cohort s program concludes with a week-end retreat to which spouses are

10 invited. In 2006, four years into its SPE project, the CRCNA held a retreat for pastor spouses, attended by 138 women. It also proposed offering 16 retreats for clergy couples, retreats that would combine continuing education with time for rest and refreshment. In addition, a task force began planning SPE groups for spouses. These initiatives met with an enthusiastic response and still continue. But while 67 percent of the denomination s pastors had taken part in pastoral peer groups by 2009, a relatively small number of proposals for spousal peer groups have been submitted. In the CRCNA s annual reports to the Lilly Endowment, leaders speculate that this is probably because many spouses have jobs of their own, and because some women are reluctant to join groups based on their husband s, rather than their own, vocations. But those who have formed groups predominantly younger women speak glowingly of the help and support they have found in them. Over time, many of the SPE projects have moved to a model that combines peer groups with coaching. Coaching goes hand in hand with the concept of giving pastors agency. A coach is not a mentor, a consultant, a counselor, or a spiritual director. A coach is someone who asks you good questions about your ministry and helps you develop your ministry and self-care plans, your intellectual or spiritual discipline. He or she is someone with whom you check in and who holds you accountable. The coaching model respects ministers as healthy, capable people who know how to do their job well and who, like everyone else, need help to keep doing that job well. Pastors are adult learners responsible for their own learning. They don t need an expert to tell them what to do. But they do need someone with whom to be in dialogue. SPE programs respect pastors agency by giving them a coach rather than a teacher, consultant or counselor. As the value of coaches became clear, several of the SPE projects have developed programs to train them. Auburn Theological Seminary now has such a program, as does the Samaritan Institute, which oversees a national network of more than 100 centers that mostly have focused on pastoral counseling, but are now defining the difference between coaching and counseling and are developing the capacity to train coaches. The Endowment encourages SPE projects to focus on what they are learning and on how they are adjusting their process as a result of those learnings. Project developments like adding coaching or bringing laity and spouses more fully into the program are examples of project leaders paying attention to what they are learning and then adjusting their programs accordingly, Wimmer says. The Endowment gives its grantees the flexibility to adjust their budgets when elements in their programs that they thought would go well don t, when they discover what will work better, and when they become aware of needs and opportunities they did not anticipate. We encourage project leaders to take failures as learning opportunities. Page 10 of 11

11 We encourage them to stop doing what doesn t work and to put their energy into what does. We ask them to pay attention. The SPE initiative has been invaluable to pastors and those they serve because the Endowment s grantees have done just that. Some Concluding Observations In this grants initiative, as in others, the Endowment has employed a highly generative strategy: it has enabled its grantees to invite pastors to design their own projects to address their own problems in ways that fit their own circumstances. This strategy invites and honors variety, creativity, and local initiatives that have a greater capacity for change and endurance. SPE has also demonstrated in some cases that pastors gathering across denominations can sustain one another in significant ways, perhaps in ways more vital and future oriented than might have been possible had participants remained within established ecclesial boundaries. Is it too much to wonder if some SPE programs are not remaking the church in important ways? Other findings from SPE evaluations, already mentioned or alluded to, are worth emphasizing: Peer group learning creates a space for authenticity, vulnerability, and honesty key ingredients for ministers who want to embody a Christian way of life and lead others in that way. Peer group learning creates a spillover effect. A thriving pastor can help to build and sustain a thriving congregational community. When excellent pastors are invited to create communities of learning, they often create a larger sustainable environment both for themselves and the church. While excellence is a term that carries varied cultural meanings, the focus on excellence helps to raise awareness of higher standards of competence in the practice of ministry standards ultimately rooted in the gospel. Any practitioner who wants to improve her or his craft or practice must continually work at it, gaining fresh insight, new information and critical feedback from coaches as well as peers. Finally, a question: SPE grant support, which is limited in time and scope, has allowed pastors to be nourished and renewed in ways not previously imagined. In what ways can denominations and congregations sustain pastoral excellence? Page 11 of 11