SPE Program Spotlight:
For Lott Carey Pastors, Path to Excellence Leads Overseas
A packed revival in a school house, on a rainy night along the Pameroon River, deep in the small South African nation of Guyana.
A church-sponsored wood-working shop in rural Jamaica, where young people learn carpentry and other skills.
An orphanage in economically depressed Zimbabwe, filled with children who have lost their parents to the HIV/AIDS epidemic that is devastating Africa.
For participants in the Lott Carey Pastoral Excellence Program, these aren’t scenes from a Discovery Channel travelogue, but way stations on the long road to excellence in ministry. They are stops on a journey—both physical and spiritual--that is reinvigorating and transforming the lives and ministry of a select group of African American pastors.
Worship in Guyana.
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To the staff at the Lott Carey organization, it’s only natural that the road to pastoral excellence leads overseas. Founded in 1897 by African American Baptists, Lott Carey—more precisely, the Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Mission Convention—is an agency that provides ministry, education, and health programs and services around the world.
Lott Carey officials learned long ago that foreign missions have the power to transform not only the residents of other countries but also those who go on the mission trips. When Lilly Endowment Inc. created the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence program, Lott Carey’s director, Dr. David E. Goatley, saw an opportunity to use his agency’s expertise in foreign missions to help African American pastors in the pursuit of pastoral excellence.
The program Goatley designed—the Lott Carey Pastoral Excellence Program-- is aimed primarily at one of the greatest problems clergy in the U.S. face today--isolation.
Much of that isolation is not just physical or emotional but also cultural and even ecclesial, says the Rev. Brenda Harewood, the program’s director.
“It’s not just a sense of clergy feeling isolated in their own congregation or their local community,” she says. “In the U.S., we tend to believe we are the world.”
By networking with other pastors and being immersed in missions to Guyana, Jamaica, and Zimbabwe, the Lott Carey participants see a whole different concept of church. They begin to experience “the Church universal.”
“You can’t do this program and think the church is something limited to Alabama or New Jersey,” says Harewood. “You can’t do this and come back and believe God is an American.”
Lott Carey pastors traveling on the Pameroon River in Guyana.
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In the Lott Carey initiative, six groups of 20 African American pastors commit to a three-year program that includes both foreign mission experiences and peer-to-peer mentoring. Over the course of the program, the pastor teams go on one mission trip a year, initially to Guyana, then Jamaica, and finally Zimbabwe. On each trip, the pastors spend two weeks living and working with local church pastors in those countries, fully sharing in ministry.
“They go with the understanding that they’re not experts, but colleagues in ministry,” says Harewood. While “in country,” the pastors participate in every aspect of ministry in their assigned church, helping for example with worship, hospital and home visitation, and other matters.
In addition, each team becomes its own peer group, with members working to support each other, before, during and after the mission trips. At the close of the three-year period, each team gathers for a commencement conference, in which participants share what they’ve learned and, hopefully, covenant to continue nurturing one another and their new, expanded visions of ministry.
Currently, the first two teams are nearing the end of the program and will hold their commencement conferences next spring. The program is taking applications for its second cycle, which will begin next year with four new teams.
While the Lott Carey participants travel many thousand miles, their real journey is an interior one, a roundabout trip of the soul, says Harewood. In designing the program, Goatley drew theologically upon Walter Brueggemann’s book, The Message of the Psalms, and its typology of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation.
As Brueggemann points out, both in the Psalms and in all of life, people—both individually and in community--go through periods of orientation, disorientation, and back to reorientation, says Harewood. It’s a concept that Lott Carey has found particularly useful in shaping pastoral excellence.
“When we’re oriented, we know where we are and we’re certain about our world,” she says. “But when disorientation occurs, people come face to face with the fact that life isn’t a neat predictable package.”
But with God’s help, an open mind and the support of other Christians, Harewood says, people can move beyond the challenges of disorientation and into the new beginning that comes with reorientation.
Harewood says few experiences are as disorienting as traveling to a foreign country, particularly in the developing world, living in basic accommodations, and experiencing a different culture, language and food.
“We make clear that this isn’t a Lilly funded vacation, but an opportunity for very challenging, life-changing work,” she says. “Typically, when we take these pastors out of their usual context, they start off thinking they know all about being a pastor. Then suddenly, after a few days on a mission trip, they’re wondering if they know anything at all.”
On the mission trips, Harewood says she sees the orientation-disorientation-reorientation cycles happening virtually every day.
“One day, a pastor will be feeling worn out and frustrated and say he can’t make it another day,” she says. “Then, the next day, they get some new insight, and the world is okay.”
In turn, as they go through these almost constant cycles of orientation-disorientation-reorientation, the program pastors begin to think about pastoral excellence in new ways.
“The pastors tell us that it has helped them realize that excellence isn’t synonymous with perfection,” says Harewood. “Rather, it’s something we achieve through our willingness to learn from our brokenness and the brokenness of others.”
A moment of prayer in Jamaica.
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A vivid example of how the Lott Carey pastors are finding new insights in the midst of disorientation occurred one night in Guyana, says Harewood. The team members had split up to accompany their local partners to various church services in communities up and down the Pameroon River. One pastor, who was traveling to a revival service at the furthest point on the river, was caught in a tropical downpour.
Wet and miserable, convinced that no one would be attending the service, the pastor repeatedly asked the boat’s captain to turn around. “What’s the use?” he thought. “No one will be there on a night like this. We’re wasting our time.”
The captain pressed on, however, and when they finally pulled ashore, they found a huge fleet of small boats anchored along the riverbank. Ablaze with light, the schoolhouse where the service was being held overflowed with townspeople and others from surrounding communities who had journeyed through the storm.
“He was stunned that people had that kind of commitment,” Harewood says. “It convinced him that he could go back to his congregation and get their commitment to do much more than they’re doing now.”
One of only a few SPE programs targeted at African American pastors, the Lott Carey program intentionally selected mission trips to countries that, like the U.S., are linked to the African diaspora, says Harewood.
“For African Americans, there is always this sense of being disconnected from your roots, a sense that we didn’t come willingly to this country,” she says.
In their travels to Guyana and Jamaica—which were also prominent destinations for the slave trade—the pastors get to see how others experienced the diaspora and how it shaped their culture. Many realize for the first time that it wasn’t just the British colonies in North America where the slave trade flourished.
For many of the pastors, though, the trip to Zimbabwe is particularly moving.
“It’s the first time that many of them have ever been to Africa, and they deal with this sense of ‘going home,’” she says.
The program’s first commencement conferences—the final stage of the program—won’t be held until next spring. But Harewood has seen enough to know that the program is having a real impact on pastors, overcoming their isolation and connecting them to a broader church.
“Our hope is that they embrace the church universal and realize that God has called the whole church, and that we all have a responsibility to each other,” she says. “If Christians are to help each other, if the church is to be the church universal, we need to connect Christ across the borders that the powers-that-be have created.”
For more information, visit the Lott Carey Web site at http://www.lottcarey.org/thuis.htm
