Excellence and Being:
Positive Core of Excellence in Ministry Is Emerging
Defining and describing excellence in ministry is a formidable challenge. Describing what excellence is not is more difficult that defining what it is. Yet, 63 Lilly Endowment funded projects across the country are devoted to “sustaining pastoral excellence.” As one project participant asked, “How can we expect to sustain something if we don’t know what it is?”
At last month’s SPE Peer Learning Gatherings, held August 8-12 in Indianapolis, peer group members invested extended time identifying and naming the characteristics or traits that make up the “positive core of excellence.” The responses from the 12 peer groups represent a helpful beginning of a portrait of excellence. The components identified by the various peer groups seem to cluster in the following areas, listed in random order:
- Passion for the Christian gospel and the present and coming reign of the Triune God.
- Integrity and self-awareness grounded in grace.
- Collaborative relationships and partnerships lived in community.
- Commitment to spiritual formation and disciplined life that includes Sabbath and acts of piety, worship, justice, and service.
- Life-long inquiry, unending curiosity, continuing discovery, and lively imagination.
- Hospitality and generosity of spirit that embraces diversity and receives the gifts of others, including “the least of these.”
- Humility before God and one another.
- Agility and balance in responding to the demands of ministry.
- Holistic health, in mind, body and spirit.
Several things strike me about these components. One is that they clearly root excellence in something other than skills, institutional management and maintenance, and quantifiable professional characteristics. Though excellent ministry requires personal skills, organizational proficiency, and professional competency, without passion for the gospel and a vision of God’s reign there is no excellence in ministry. Ministry is about sharing in God’s excellence incarnate in Jesus Christ.
Excellence is about being! Just as passion for the gospel is foundational to the acts of ministry, a life shaped by the gospel is the prerequisite for excellence. Integrity, authenticity, self-awareness, humility, generosity, hospitality grow from deep experience of grace and practices that form and shape us toward the image of Christ. Practicing the individual and corporate spiritual disciplines in a community of mutual support and accountability are means of being and becoming individuals and communities that reflect the gospel.
The reports from peer groups across the 63 SPE projects testify to the importance of community in the forming and sustaining of excellence in ministry. While the emphasis in the discussions in Indianapolis was on the positive core of pastoral excellence, the positive core of sustaining pastoral excellence remains at the heart of the SPE projects. What are the essentials for sustaining excellence? We can affirm at this stage in the projects that peer learning and support is a core component. Work remains to determine the content, structure, and dynamics of the peer process that most effectively sustain excellence. But we are learning!
Let us continue to identify, define, and clarify the positive core of excellence in ministry and what sustains it. Please share your thoughts, insights, and questions with us and your colleagues involved in the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence initiative.
Kenneth L. Carder is director of Pulpit & Pew: The Duke Center for Excellence in Ministry and professor of the practice of pastoral formation at Duke Divinity School. He was bishop of the Mississippi Area of the United Methodist Church from 2000 to 2004 and the Nashville Area of the UMC from 1992 to 2000.
