The Journey Groups program is supported by a grant from the Lilly Endowment�s �Sustaining Pastoral Excellence� grant program. The very phrase �Sustaining Pastoral Excellence� begs important questions. What exactly is �excellent� in pastoral ministry? And how is that nourished and sustained? Journey Groups represent a distinct approach to the way excellence is envisioned and cultivated in pastoral ministry.
The following affirmations show the presuppositions and perspectives on which the Journey Groups are founded.
Affirmations about what excellence is.Western Theological Seminary believes that pastoral leadership is not first of all about being an entrepreneur. Leadership is not about personal charisma. It does not have to do with surgical, technological precision. Rather, it has to do with being on the leading edge of the missional church's response to the calling and sending of God. Nine qualities describing the kind of leaders we need provide an emerging sketch of pastoral character and action and a deep curriculum for the continued cultivation of leadership within congregations.[1] These qualities are not a fixed recipe for any particular kind of success. Rather, they attempt to give a portrait of leaders living in faithfulness to the gospel of Jesus Christ. We need...
1. Leaders who know what time it is. They will be people who possess a discerning historical memory and an expectant future perspective, people who discern the signs of the times. They will recognize what is true of the current era and moment in the history of both the human circumstance and the presence of the church, and they will be able to interpret what makes this time significant within the mission of God.
2. Leaders who own shared responsibility for the church's calling. A personal sense of call to ministry by itself will not be adequate. We will require pastoral leaders who know the church's calling, its missionary identity, and know that the calling includes them. The personal dimensions of their own calling will be oriented within that larger picture, and their calling will be pointed toward helping the church fulfill its own calling.
3. Leaders who read well. They will be people who can and do read what is around them, interpreting what is generally true for many people, and what is particularly true for the people of the most immediate concrete context in which they find themselves. Along with hermeneutical skills for reading texts (especially the biblical texts), and for reading traditions (their own particular Christian tradition as well as other traditions), they will be readers of culture (and cultures), of social systems, and of the human person.
4. Leaders with vision. They will size up where things are and where they are heading if left unattended. They will possess dreams for the future that will be infectious. They will be able to see paths from the present to the approximations of dreams that are possible under the Holy Spirit. They will be always working on the edges of transformation and change for persons, for the Christian community, and for the broader society. They will possess capacities to help churches to welcome, navigate, negotiate and redeem necessary change.
5. Leaders who envision. Whether in worship, where a world is cast and the Bible reshapes our corporate way of envisioning what "reality" is, or in evangelism, where the gospel is said again in the tones and hues by which it comes to vivid expression in the life-worlds of varieties of people in contemporary circumstances, they will be people ever seeing new opportunities to forge pictures of the alternate which the gospel poses in our cultural settings.
6. Leaders full of spirit. Grace, wisdom, knowledge and power. They will have a wide and generous spirit, with a far-ranging ecumenical urge for the unity of the church across confessional, structural, and cultural lines that work to divide. They will be deeply passionate for the peace, justice and joy of the reign of God. They will care without bounds for persons as made in God's image and for all the created world as made for God's joy.
7. Leaders with a deeply-rooted curriculum. Their vision for the essential ingredients of Christian growth and maturity will be pervasive influences on the personal "care of souls," the nurture of discipleship, the preaching and teaching of the scriptures, the style of administrative work, and the fashioning of the faithful community. Grand curricula such as Paul's "faith, love, and hope" or the covenantal structure of "dependence on God's care and loyalty to God's rule" will guide them.
8. Leaders who believe. They will believe God with, and sometimes for, the people of God. They will demonstrate and nurture the ability to believe within a secularized environment and nourish fresh ways of holding and commending belief in a pluralist social context. They will nourish faith into the warp and woof of daily life and vocation.
9. Leaders with humility. They will understand that God's intention is bigger than their vision�bigger than the church. They will know that the heart of the gospel is a mystery in which we are invited to participate, and that the church's role�and indeed their own role�in that mystery is a holy calling only partly available to our understanding. They will be well‑enough acquainted with sorrow and failure to have developed patience, and wise enough to listen to critics, skeptics, the tired, and the slow, even while pursuing the passion that grips their own ministry.
Affirmations about how excellence is sustained.The Center for the Continuing Education of the Church seeks to nourish and sustain such qualities as these among pastors and their congregations. In the center it is believed that this can best be done by using the pattern of Journey Groups. In part, that is because the Ivan Illich model on which they are based is uniquely suited to these images of the role of the �good pastor.� But also, they represent a connection between the pastor and the congregation that is frequently overlooked or ignored in learning designs for pastors. The Journey Group approach is grounded in several fundamental affirmations about what it takes to sustain excellence in pastoral ministry at a time when stress, malaise, and dis-ease so deeply affect pastors as well as congregations.
1. Sustaining energy and enthusiasm in pastoral ministry is related to doing work that has meaning. William Willimon makes this point forcefully in his small book Clergy and Laity Burnout (Abingdon). There he shows that burnout is not what is commonly imagined, i.e. that someone has worked so hard and expended so much energy that there is no more left. Rather, he asserts, burnout happens when what people are doing ceases to have meaning. This happens for ministers and laity alike. It happens to congregations as well. A program intending to nourish excellence in pastoral ministry must invest or re-invest the work of pastors with meaning significant enough to produce, not erode, energy and enthusiasm. Programs that focus on providing time and space for spiritual renewal, retreat, and personal refreshment miss the mark if they do not take this seriously.
2. The presence of meaning in a pastor's work is intimately tied to the journey of a congregation that finds meaning in its own work. In recent decades, congregations have exhibited an increasing sense of dis-ease, an ill-defined but definite malaise induced by changed circumstances in its larger social and cultural context. The recovery of meaning in the activities and practices of a congregation (over against its own burnout) is essential for sustaining energy and enthusiasm in clergy vocation. Dealing with the pastor/minister's identity and meaning as a professional person over against or outside of the community's identity issues misses the mark.
3. Meaningful work, for both the pastor and the congregation, is nourished by a journey of continuous learning. The congregation is not only a collection of individual learners ("disciples"), but its character is to be a learning community ("disciple community"), much in the sense described by Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline. Within such a learning community, a pastor is at the same time a learning companion and a learning mentor. To approach the educational needs of clergy as though they are mere technicians in need of enhanced skills and professional capacities misses the mark.
4. Learning, on the part of congregations and pastors alike, does not happen in isolation but in companionship. Clusters of congregations learn with and from and for each other, and pastors in collegial peer groupings do likewise. Peer learning brings together learners with common learning interests and goals.
Pastoral excellence, then, is best defined�when the goal is energy and enthusiasm�as success in the pursuit of ongoing learning that is related to work invested with meaning, related to the learning journey of one's community, done in peer relationship with co-learners, and mentored in active ways.
[1]This description of pastoral leadership is drawn from an article entitled �Leaders in the Missional Church� by George R. Hunsberger, published in The Gospel and Our Culture, Volume 10, Number 2, June 1998. Quality number 9 was added by Laurie Baron in a response published with the article.
