Message from the Coordination Office
A Glimpse of Excellence: The Annual Reports
Like many of you who manage a variety of projects, I can always tell what time of year it is based on the types of phone calls and email messages I receive. In recent weeks I have been hearing from the 190 pastors who will spend the month of July with us at Duke Divinity School. In a few weeks, I will hear from participants in our leadership program wondering about the strange pre-work that we have assigned them. And just a few weeks ago, I heard from some of you, asking about guidelines for your annual report to Lilly Endowment Inc.
With the March 31 deadline long past, my phone doesn’t ring as much with your calls any more, but you are still very present in my life. Copies of your program reports fill two file boxes neatly displayed under my desk, an ever present reminder of your amazing work! As I read the reports and hear from our peer group facilitators who are doing the same, I am encouraged by your stories of transformation and the ways you have witnessed God at work through your projects. Excellence, we all know, is an elusive target, and yet, in narrative and number, your reports give us a glimpse of this shy idea.
Future editions of this Web site will continue to feature writing from project leaders and participants, as well as stories gleaned from your reports. Please be in touch with us if you have an idea for a story or a publication from your project that we might highlight.
For now, I want to draw attention to the data you submitted in Appendix One of your reports. According to your testimony, by December 31, 2004, the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence projects had over 5,000 pastors and nearly 6,000 lay persons involved in 626 peer learning communities. You have reached an additional 8,300 pastors and 4,750 laity in 578 other learning and training events. All told, you have reached over 4,000 congregations through peer learning projects and over 5,000 congregations in other events.
Because of the variety in your projects, it is difficult to describe an average peer learning group. Perhaps it is sufficient to say that 626 groups of deeply committed Christians are gathering together many times each year for many days in order to strengthen their ability to serve the One who calls them apart. Some take time for Sabbath renewal, others learn about being effective new church or rural church pastors, others wonder together how to be effective congregational leaders and all of them struggle with what it means to live out God’s more excellent way. In aggregate, what you are doing is astonishing. While all of us are deeply aware of how much more we need to do and how much more could be done, it is good to pause for a minute and rest in the spectacle of what is being done.
In the calendar section of our Web site, you will find a long list of some of the events your projects are conducting over the next few months. This is more evidence of the multiplicity of ways you are at work building excellence for the church. I invite you to periodically review the calendar. Pray for your colleagues across the country who are in the midst of events with their participants. Pray for the congregations and communities that will be affected by these events. Recollect for yourself the hope and expectation that undergirds all the projects.
It is impossible to calculate how many days you and your colleagues have spent over the last two years focused on sustaining pastoral excellence. It could easily be 10,000 or more days devoted to imagining God’s call to excellence and fashioning our faithful response. 10,000 days. 13,000 pastors. 10,000 laity. Numbers never tell the whole story, yet I find myself curiously grateful to be associated with these numbers you are generating. Thank you for your reports and the time you put into them. Thank you for your stories of success and struggle. Most of all, thank you for the ways you are being attentive to nurturing and sustaining pastoral excellence in the midst of your work.
Janice A. Virtue is Associate Dean for Continuing Education and Strategic Planning at Duke Divinity School and a member of the SPE Coordination Team.
