SPE Program Spotlight:
MTS Recipe for Excellence: “Scholarship, Piety, Justice. . . and Health”
A few years ago, when Lee Ramsey and others at Memphis Theological Seminary began drafting the school’s proposal for a Sustaining Pastoral Excellence project, they didn’t have to look far for inspiration.
They found a good place to start virtually right in front of their faces, in three words from the school’s motto and mission statement: “Scholarship, Piety and Justice.” A seminary of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, Memphis Theological had long sought to prepare pastors who practiced and embodied those traits.
“When we first heard about SPE, it seemed to us to have our name written all over it,” said Ramsey, an MTS faculty member and the school’s SPE project director. “We thought a proposal was begging to be written out of our identification.”
But those three critically important words were only the beginning, merely starting points for the school’s pastoral excellence program. To that, they added an overarching component of health and wellness, both physical and spiritual, and at the same time, sought to reach out to include pastors’ families and congregations. And throughout the entire initiative, they made diversity a high priority, enrolling a wide range of pastors, black and white, male and female, from across 10 different denominations.
The result, Ramsey and others say, is an SPE program that takes a holistic approach to pastoral excellence, viewing and supporting pastors in the totality of their vocational and personal lives.
In the Memphis Theological SPE program, 68 pastors from throughout Memphis and the surrounding region meet in small colleague groups eight times a year, focusing around the themes of scholarship, piety and justice. Over the past year--the program’s first--the pastors read about and discussed Sabbath-keeping, read reflections on pastoring, and studied the lives and works of Dietrich Bonhoeffor and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
In addition, they all gathered in a retreat with family members and in quarterly worship, and the program held other meetings throughout the year for clergy spouses and for lay leaders from the pastors’ congregations. The pastors and their spouses also received health screenings and counseling, and many have taken advantage of free memberships in local fitness centers.
“It’s hard to wrap our hands around all that we’re trying to tackle,” says Cozette R. Garrett, who, as SPE program director, administers the day-to-day operations. “Pastors live and work in a complex web of relationships that includes their families and church members, but all too often, they feel isolated within that web. We’re trying to break down those barriers and help these become supportive networks that keep pastors going.”
The reason health and wellness play such a large role in the project, Ramsey and Garrett say, is because healthy pastors are part of healthy families and healthy congregations.
“We tried to base our program on a theology that looks at the whole person as part of the Body of Christ,” says Ramsey. “We have small groups of pastors who tend to Body, Mind, and Spirit, and at the same time, we try to touch their families in meaningful ways and be in conversation with congregations about providing resources and support that pastors need.”
Scholarship, piety and justice, however, remain the touchstones of the program because they are essential prerequisites for excellent pastoral ministry, Garrett says. Excellent pastors have to keep themselves mentally sharp, staying abreast of both past and current theological scholarship. They must have an active and fruitful devotional life, with sufficient time for reflection and prayer. And they must also not only read the Bible, but “live it and apply it.”
“If there is not movement of hands and feet to do the work, then there is no excellence,” she says. “And none of that is possible if pastors aren’t healthy. You can’t preach and teach without a body.”
After one year, the program is already having a positive impact on the health of participating pastors. Thanks to the program’s free physical examinations, conducted by partnering hospitals in Memphis, at least a dozen pastors discovered that they were in the early stages of chronic diseases, such as high blood pressure or diabetes. They and other pastors have since taken major steps to improve their health. The project grant has also enabled many pastors and their spouses to join local health spas and wellness centers.
The Rev. Steve Montgomery, pastor of Idlewild Presbyterian Church in Memphis, serves as a colleague group leader and says the project has helped him and other pastors take better care of themselves.
“Virtually everyone is taking self-care more seriously,” he says. “Several of us have made lifestyle changes that have resulted in better health.” As a result of regular exercise and a healthier diet, Montgomery has lost nine pounds and lowered his blood pressure enough that he has been able to quit taking medicine for hypertension.
Yet, perhaps the most powerful part of the program has been the opportunity for companionship with other pastors, says Montgomery, particularly across racial lines. A large, southern city where African Americans account for more than 61 percent of the population, Memphis has historically been a racially polarized city, says Montgomery.
In his five years in Memphis, Montgomery, who is white and a native of Atlanta, looked for ways to establish relationships with clergy and others in the black community through local pastor associations and other avenues, but had never met with success. But that has changed with his SPE group, which has five white pastors and five black pastors, three women and seven men, from six different denominations and from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds.
“The opportunity to build cross-cultural and cross-racial relationships of trust and sharing, where I hadn’t been able to find anything before, has been a real bonus,” he says.
In his own group, Montgomery says he was surprised how quickly the pastors bonded and opened up to one another.
“I thought it would take six months to get where we were by the second meeting,” he says. “It just gives me a sense that there is a real yearning among pastors to have other pastors they can trust and with whom they can share their feelings and experiences and struggles.”
The Rev. Gail Nelson, who serves as leader of another colleague group, agrees that the opportunity to forge friendships with other clergy in a safe environment has been a wonderful gift.
“It allows us a chance to express ourselves and talk about our ministry and just exhale,” says Nelson. “I can’t say enough about what it’s done for us to be with colleagues and to laugh with one another, even at our own expense.”
A Presbyterian who serves as pastor of Peace Lutheran Church in Memphis, Nelson praised the project’s efforts to involve family members. Her husband, the Rev. J. H. Nelson II, is pastor of Liberation Community Church in Memphis, so they both know the pressures that come with being either clergy or a clergy spouse. Their daughter, a “PK twice over,” particularly enjoyed the project’s opening conference, held last fall at a Tennessee state park and attended by the SPE pastors and their families.
“She was so excited about being with other preacher’s kids,” says Nelson. “She had been to youth conferences where she had met other Christian young people, but being with other PKs was a unique and wonderful experience. To be a preacher’s kid and be understood and laugh about what they deal with in the church, that’s a good thing.”
As the Memphis SPE project now enters its second year of programming, Ramsey and Garrett expect that the pastors will start to explore and wrestle with issues of race and justice much more deeply than before. Hopefully, they said, the first year was spent building up enough trust that the pastors can now begin to talk about and name the issues that divide blacks and whites in America and begin working toward reconciliation.
To help start the conversation, the pastors this year will read a new book by Tony Campolo and Michael Battle, The Church Enslaved: A Spirituality for Racial Reconciliation. According to the book’s publisher, Augsburg Fortress, the authors “expose the realities of racial division in the churches and then lift up a vision of a church without racism.”
“We’re trying to put the issue on the table, so we can begin to talk about black and white within the groups,” says Ramsey.
Nelson, who is African American, says her group had a few emotional and even passionate moments during the past year when members touched on race, and the pastors found common ground across racial lines.
“The more we talk and struggle together in our group, the more we have these moments where, ‘Aha!,’ the light goes off, and we agree on something,” says Nelson.
In yet another colleague group, two pastors and their churches—one black and Baptist, the other white and United Methodist-- joined together to house, feed, and clothe as many as 50 victims of Hurricane Katrina who had evacuated to a city near Memphis.
“Together, they bought beds and other supplies they needed to help their sisters and brothers in Christ,” says Garrett. “Cooperation across cultural and denominational lines was brought about through God and SPE. These pastors became friends in their SPE colleague group that only began meeting a year ago.”
For more information on the SPE program at Memphis Theological Seminary, visit their Web site at http://spe.memphisseminary.edu/default.asp
