Resurrecting Excellence in Ministry By Tracy Schier An Interview with L. Gregory Jones Dean and Professor of Theology, Duke University Divinity School L. Gregory Jones is Dean and Professor of Theology at Duke University Divinity School. Before assuming the deanship at Duke in 1997 he was on the faculty of Loyola College in Baltimore. An ordained United Methodist pastor he has preached in major pulpits and at annual conferences nationwide and is frequent lecturer at distinguished colleges and universities. Duke s Divinity School has grown significantly during his deanship and numerous initiatives result from his leadership. These include the Duke Institute on Care at the End of Life, the Reynolds Program on Church Leadership, the Learned Clergy Initiative, the Duke Youth Academy for Christian Formation, the Walltown Neighborhood Partnership, and a partnership with the Methodist Church of South Africa. Dean Jones is the author or editor of 13 books and more than 100 articles in varied publications. His writing and teaching cover issues such as forgiveness and reconciliation, Christian vocation, and strengthening the church and its ministry. He is a strong proponent of interdisciplinary conversation and ecumenical dialogue. With his wife, the Rev. Susan Pendleton Jones, Dean Jones has written two books (and accompanying videos) for the United Methodist Publishing House s new Living the Good Life Together series. Dean Jones also writes a regular column, Faith Matters, for The Christian Century where he is an editor-at-large. Among his books are Embodying Forgiveness; Everyday Matters: Intersections of Life and Faith; and (co-authored with Kevin R. Armstrong) Resurrecting Excellence: Shaping Faithful Christian Ministry. The latter book grew out of the experiences of a Colloquium on Excellence in Ministry that was part of the Pulpit and Pew research project on the lives and work of American Christian pastoral leaders. Page 1 of 1
This conversation, which is edited, centers on the experiences covered in Resurrecting Excellence. Q. The Colloquium on Excellence in Ministry was a catalyst for much of the material in Resurrecting Excellence. What was the duration of the Colloquium and what qualities were you looking for in the pastors, lay leaders, and theological educators you invited to participate in it? A. It extended for three years and we met twice a year for two days each. As far as the membership goes, it was important that we had a mix of ethnicity, denomination, intellectual background, and vocational focus as laity and clergy. We also wanted people with different sensibilities in their pastoral experiences people from big churches and people from small churches. And we wanted people who were theologically thoughtful and imaginative, and would make good conversation partners. We ended up as a group of a dozen plus Kevin (Armstrong, senior pastor of North United Methodist Church in Indianapolis) and me. Q. You say that you struggled with the word excellence to describe what you wanted to commend in Christian ministry. What aspects of that word made you hesitant to use it? And then, what aspects of the word helped you to accept it? A. There were some major issues around the word excellence. First, it is a word used, and sometimes co-opted, by the business world and in those usages it is sometimes incompatible with Christian faith. If excellence is understood to be competitive and comparative then it depends on what is not excellent to get its full meaning. As Christians we cannot live with that. Also, we needed to be sure that we could tap the right biblical connections to articulate what excellence is. Pivotal to this understanding was a Bible study we did around Philippians (1 and 2) where Paul tells us that if we are to be worthy of the gospel we have to look away from our interests and consider the interests of others. There are wonderful passages where Paul leads us to renounce selfish ambitions and to achieve another kind of ambition that leads us to the sufferings and death, and finally the resurrection, of Christ. Our imaginations in the group were inspired by Paul and we were drawn to fleshing out the concept of excellence, which Paul uses in Philippians 4, in theological and noncompetitive ways. Christine Pohl s work on the value of ministry with people who live at the margins was valuable to us this became a kind of touchstone for our deliberations. We settled on the image of resurrecting excellence because of its multifaceted resonance. It lifts up the importance of excellence, yet does so by focusing on how Christian excellence is patterned in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. The Page 2 of 2
phrase accents the new life that comes with the resurrection. And it also reminds us that we face a perennial task, particularly important in our time, of resurrecting raising up our own commitment to lives of excellence in Christian life and ministry. Q. Your group seemed to draw widely from the Bible, historical figures, theologians, and even contemporary fiction writers such as Toni Morrison and Marilynne Robinson among others. How important (and why?) was this wide-ranging, interdisciplinary approach to your understandings of excellence in the practice and vocation of ministry? A. We discovered the importance of story telling for narrating excellence. We wanted to do more than define excellence, we wanted to share how excellence looks in diverse settings. In our group were people who liked to engage varieties of experience. The members of the group also wrote. We asked them to write short reflections in between sessions, think pieces that would be shared with the other members of the group before the next meeting and then discussed when we were together. They understood that they should write from their heart and their experience and not worry about it being publishable which was not the point at all. Although, I would mention, some of the pieces found their way into print in a variety of places. Q. How do literature, drama, poetry, etc. contribute to the ongoing life of a congregation and to the health of the minister? A. These things cultivate the Christian imagination and for us, as church leaders, they inspire the pastoral imagination. We need to care for words and to hear and tell stories well. We need to locate our lives in those stories. I think there is more need for seminaries to encourage the study of literature and the telling of stories, and for churches to nurture faithful storytelling in the lives of members. Q. The status of clergy in our time is widely seen as problematic. What are some of the factors in society in general, and in congregations in particular, that contribute to the diminished status of modern pastors? A. Frankly, over the last years we have lowered the bar of expectations in the churches and have cultivated mediocrity. And of course, the media has helped this along by portraying church leaders either as predators or amiable buffoons. It is not easy to find portrayals of clergy as thoughtful persons, as disciplined and holy persons, or as skilled leaders. Also, clergy salaries fall behind other professions and this certainly can lead to morale problems with clergy, especially those in the 45-54 age Page 3 of 3
range who have kids in college and who are looking ahead to retirement. There is a slowness today to grasp the realization that pastors are, and need to be, more than just chaplains to the establishment. Q. Do you think people studying for ministry have realistic expectations about what their ministerial life will be like? A. Many students whom I know seem to have significant awareness of what ministry is like particularly after their first experience in field education in a congregation. But this leads to anxiety as well as hopes. My wife and I team teach a course and recently a student said this to us, I am struck by the tensions between how good ministry can be but also how challenging it is. It is important that students understand these things. Personally, I am more hopeful than anxious about our future ministers. The caliber of students in seminaries is changing. Our students are passionate and talented, and some are even overcoming objections from their own parents about their vocational choice. There is definitely a drift upward in the quality of today s ministry students. And as far as the seminaries themselves are concerned, they need to keep focused on the primary task of seminary education that is to prepare church leaders of the future. Q. In many places in the book you say that resurrecting excellence is rooted in the paradox of strength in weakness and that it is necessarily communal in nature. Can you unpack this a bit for our readers? A. One of the key notions of our conversations was the metaphor of intersections. For example, sometimes we assume because there are bad ways of understanding strength, things like being overly competitive for example, that we have to assume a stance of weakness. Philippians 2 was a wonderful source for understanding how we have to have a life patterned after Christ in coming to grips with seeming paradoxes thinking as well as feeling, in joy as well as in grief, whether we are young or old. The intersections where joy and sadness meet, where strength and weakness meet, where the church meets the world, where the individual meets the community are extremely important. We need one another in order to find the complementarity of our lives that is to be found in the Body of Christ. Q. You say that the excellence of a pastor is inextricably related to the excellence in ministry of all Christians. In other words, excellent pastors need excellent congregations. Please talk about this is this kind of a chicken/egg situation? A. It is a kind of chicken/egg situation where you can t identify one without the other. An excellent congregation can survive a bad pastor but not for long. And an excellent Page 4 of 4
pastor can survive a bad congregation but not for long. How soon deterioration takes place depends on the internal strength of the excellent pastor, or of the excellent congregation. As it is with our personal lives, the health of pastor and of congregation has to be nurtured intentionally. I know of congregations that have as their stated mission to nurture new pastors. The analogy here might be with Jesuit colleges there is something in the water and the walls that carries a sense of commitment, that reaches a deeper cultural level than the personalities. Both pastor and congregation have to have intentionality of mission and purpose and this cannot be self-enclosed, it has to be open and worked on constantly. Q. The 2001 Pulpit and Pew national survey told us that clergy are not as healthy as they should be. What are some manifestations of the unhealthy? A. Depression, loneliness, isolation, deterioration of physical health. And desperate, misguided attempts to make connections, even improper sexual ones. Attending to Sabbath is most violated. There is truth to the idea that If you don t attend to Sabbath, sickness becomes your Sabbath. Q. It seems that friendship is an important antidote to some of what you have just named. In the book you have a wonderful story about a holy friendship between Robert, a high-powered lawyer, and Clement, an elderly shoeshine man. An unlikely pairing, certainly, but a powerful example. What does it take on the part of each person to develop and sustain such a holy friendship? A. In a holy friendship the participants support and challenge the other. And they have to find time for each other. There has to be more intentionality about the calendar. In our society we allow our time to be defined by so many others and so many things and that leads us to unhealthy patterns. We always talk about how we need to build in time to read and reflect, but we also need to build in time to develop friendships as well. The friendship theme resonated deeply with all of us in the group. Many clergy will say, we were told not to because of the risks involved. This is an example of taking the unhealthy notion of friendship and saying therefore no friendship. Augustine reminds us that we are made for God and for others. A good friendship requires time (that s where our calendars come in), and a willingness to be vulnerable, and an ability to listen. A good friend will listen, but will also be able to say, listen to me. A good community cultivates this in its members. Q. There s a lot of complexity member friendships isn t there? involved with pastor/congregation Page 5 of 5
A. It is always important to realize that a pastor s first responsibility is to God and not to be needy and to be liked by everyone in the congregation. And a pastor has to be careful not to be partial in ways that exclude others. It takes a lot of maturity to attend to the whole congregation, to the whole community, while having necessary personal relationships. But those personal friendships are important. Q. In the book we are reminded of a J.F. Powers character, a priest in Wheat That Springeth Green, who confuses sanctity with sanctimony. There seems to be a lot of that going around. What is your take on that? A. It really amounts to whether your life is centered in God or whether the primary focus is you. Sanctity is about de-centering of self; sanctimony is when everything is about me. This is, of course, a lifelong challenge for all Christians. Q. Craig Dykstra, Dorothy Bass, among others, have written a lot about Christian practices. Did your Colloquium find that some practices trump others when it comes to resurrecting excellence in ministry? A. I think we found that hospitality emerges regularly as central to our Christian lives. And, of course, forgiveness. Both of these practices are at the heart of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Both are hard to live well. But it seems that all of the practices weave together and strengthen each other, and are necessary if we are truly to follow Jesus. For example, singing is a practice that is important for hospitality and for forgiveness. Maybe we don t give that a lot of thought, but it is true. Q. You talk about the need for lifelong learning and that seminaries and divinity schools need a more complex self-understanding of their role. Is this happening and what specific steps might indicate how it is happening? A. It is happening in a lot of ways. Take the Youth Institutes as an example these are a superb way of reaching younger people. Seminaries are expanding their lifelong learning programs and judicatories are doing this as well. We have an extensive program of lifelong learning at Duke Divinity School. Last year alone we had almost three thousand people involved in continuing education. In fact, in the nine years I have been here, our continuing education staff has grown from two to 12. Page 6 of 6
Q. You must have entered into the Colloquium experience with certain expectations. Were they met? A. I think we knew that if we were to bring a talented group of diverse people together they would articulate important ideas about Christian ministry. The conversations were so rich; we kept finding ourselves in deeper waters than we ever could have anticipated. Interestingly also, the fact that one of our meetings came just three weeks after the trauma of 9/11 helped to shape our conversations in deep ways. We began our meeting by sharing where each of us was on the first Sunday after 9/11 and how we all dealt with communal grief and the other emotions of that time. It was apparent that those congregations and pastors with deep reservoirs of Christian life were able to draw on those reservoirs, whereas other congregations and pastors were not able to do so. Reflecting on the differences, and our own griefs and yearnings and gratitude, moved our conversation about excellent ministry, in congregations and by pastors, into very important areas. Q. Were there any surprises during or after the Colloquium experience? A. It was definitely a surprise how people from different backgrounds and traditions could articulate common themes about pastoral ministry. There were people out of sacramental traditions and people out of free church traditions and the sharing was very rich. The Lutherans have a saying: adorning the Gospel. That was a new concept for some of us and it had a lot of meaning as we went along as a description of the calling of Christian ministry. We found a great deal of convergence in our thinking, even amidst different sensibilities among our participants. Q. What parts of the colloquium experience might groups of pastors or other church leaders in a local area replicate? A. Definitely the reading together and writing about what you are reading. Sharing stories. Developing relationships. Church leaders need to find places where they feel the freedom to explore issues and sustain conversation. They need places to focus on the big questions. To be willing and able to live with those big questions in conversation with others is sustaining. There are wonderful people lay and ordained alike who are committed to resurrecting excellence in Christian life and ministry. We need to support and sustain each other in those commitments, and find the space and time for conversation about the practices, commitments, and ideas that really matter. The aims and purposes of the conversations are important but sometimes we don t notice enough how important the conversations themselves are in nurturing relationships and keeping us connected to Page 7 of 7
God and one another. More than anything, Kevin and I hope our book will foster discussion and new ways of conversing about the awesome gift and task of Christian ministry. Page 8 of 8