Yale SPE Fosters “Faith as a Way of Life”
As our group milled about in the enormous marble atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building , we couldn't help but feel a sense of awe. In just a few minutes, we would go upstairs, half to meet with a prominent senior senator and half with a senior fellow from a major Washington D. C. think tank. Why were we having these conversations? Were we seeking to understand the major political challenges facing our nation? Were we lobbying for a particular faith-based agenda? No. Instead, we wanted to talk to political leaders about the impact of pastoral leadership on faith and public life. In particular, we wanted to hear how pastors have helped (or often not helped) these government and public policy leaders to engage the depth of their faith with the challenges of political leadership. We wanted to hear about other values that pressed for their time and allegiance. In sobering conversations, we heard how much they want support from their clergy and congregations—and how rarely they receive it.
Our trip to D.C. was a dramatic but not atypical moment in our Sustaining Pastoral Excellence project, Faith as a Way of Life, based at the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale University Divinity School . Pointedly examining the problems and promise of pastoral leadership in relation to the challenges of faithful living today, Faith as a Way of Life might seem an awkward fit with the core focus of the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence Initiative as a whole. Explaining the many ways in which it does — and does not — fit that overall focus both gives a sense of our project's distinctiveness and helps point towards the ways our project's findings can contribute to the overall conversation on pastoral excellence.
In the November 2005 Sustaining Pastoral Excellence e-newsletter, John Wimmer reflected on what Lilly Endowment is learning from the 63 projects that make up this initiative. He began by noting how the most basic and significant insight is quite simple: many excellent pastors are hungry for genuine experiences of community and friendship. This basic assumption driving the SPE initiative has been overwhelmingly affirmed both through the remarkable number of project applications and the thousands of pastors who have been involved in each of the projects. Wimmer can rightly say that Lilly has hit the nail on the head. Pastors want and need community and friendship. To sustain the high caliber of pastoral leadership nationwide, Lilly has funded projects that typically help ministers create environments for ongoing biblical study, theological reflection and spiritual renewal, and develop sustained friendships and opportunities for mutual support. In doing so, especially when pastors can have significant influence on the shape of the environments they inhabit, Lilly hopes such sustaining work will be done.
Faith as a Way of Life both fits and doesn't fit such an understanding of the needs of clergy in sustaining excellence in practice. On one hand, as illustrated by our visit to Washington , we are right on target with our plan to gather pastors and others for theological reflection and spiritual renewal, to develop friendships and offer mutual support. It was genuinely provocative for us to have such intense conversation, both in session with political leaders and afterwards as we reflected together about what we had heard. On the other hand, our project has at its heart some assumptions about the difficulties pastors face in embodying excellent pastoral practice. Unless we tend to these difficulties directly, we've argued, we will not effectively address the heart of excellent ministry.
So, what are our assumptions about the difficulties pastors face? They are several and they are subtle, but many pastors feel their weight. First, we assume that many pastors struggle to grasp faith “as a whole” and to have it “at hand” as a coherent vision of a whole way of life. In part, we blame the fragmented nature of theological education, which gives prospective pastors the humpty-dumpty fragments of bible, theology, church history, and ministry arts and then asks them, largely on their own, to assemble the pieces into a workable whole. Second, and as a consequence, pastors may revert to other powerful languages for orienting their work, covering it with a veneer of faith language.
Especially powerful for clergy are the languages of the emotion-driven therapeutic mode and the results-driven managerial mode. Caring deeply about how people feel and pressing for effective results are highly rewarded skills among clergy. Yet, when these skills dominate the practice of ministry, faith becomes a weak sister, doing little work as a community enacts its faith in daily life. However, we find that excellent clergy somehow still understand the overwhelming power of other moral languages in our culture. They long to grow in their ability to model and mediate a strong and substantive vision of Christian faith, and they know that little in their ministry matters more than this. Our efforts to engage these questions focus on both identifying these problems and identifying ways to overcome them in an effort to embody excellent ministry practice.
The Faith as a Way of Life project is designed to respond to these difficulties in two distinct ways. First, we focus attention on faculty in theological education. In brief, we offer creativity awards and collaborative workshops for faculty who propose integrative, practical courses that “teach future church leaders ways of living faith in all spheres of life.” Second, we focus on clergy—but also include lay members to whom they direct their work and theologians from whom they gain resources for their work. Under this initiative, a National Working Group of 25 congregational leaders from all regions of the country and many Christian traditions have met in a series of reflective retreats that seek to uncover both the problems and possibilities for pastoral leadership that models and mediates faith as a way of life. We first met in New Haven in October 2003 to sort out how well people of faith—especially church leaders—do in this core task of living faith in daily life. In our second meeting in April 2004, we asked each person to reflect on the problems they face in their own local context as they try to live faith as a way of life. In a move that proved crucial for the unfolding of the process, participants at that second meeting divided into smaller groups that focused on particular spheres of life: family, work, citizenship, arts and culture, and education. Since then, we have spent our biannual meetings focused on these spheres of life, each time focusing on one sphere.
What have we learned so far about the problems of and possibilities for pastoral leadership? One key finding, as indicated above, is the power of our culture's therapeutic and managerial languages in framing action. Alasdair Macintyre laid this out two decades ago in After Virtue , and Robert Bellah and his colleagues made clear how pervasive it is in our culture in Habits of the Heart . When we convened our National Working Group, we brought together a group of thoughtful pastors and lay leaders who know how to think and speak with theological language front and center. But in our meetings, even these people often spoke in these cultural languages, which predictably devolved into assertions of “feeling” and “personal experience” set along side claims of “what works.” The pressure in ministry to be effective and emotionally resonant is enormous, and pastors often are rewarded much more for these traits than for the ability to articulate faith as a way of life in deep and compelling ways.
As a result, we have repeatedly returned to thinking theologically about everything from pre-marital advice to tough workplace issues to our relationships with local elected officials. This is, we believe, crucial to a full understanding of pastoral excellence. While we have not explicitly focused on “theological convictions about excellence,” we do think that if we foster theological convictions in context, in the practice of ministry, then that will foster excellence. So in order to do this as we move forward, we created a reflective “thinking theologically in context” exercise, which we use in preparation for our working group meetings.
We hope that as a result of our efforts together, pastors will see their ministry differently, and an overarching purpose will emerge: living faith as a way of life . By encouraging the practical skill of thinking theologically about everyday matters, we intend to aid pastors—and those to whom they minister—in finding a way faithfully in the world. One senior pastor has been sparked by her involvement in the group to start a weekly Sunday Adult Forum called “Hot off the Press.” In this forum, people bring together their morning newspaper and their Bible. For an hour, they reflect theologically about the news of the day, first analyzing the value assumptions of a particular article and then reflecting on theological resources that can be brought to bear in thinking about the issues raised. Wonderful! Practicing thinking about faith in all parts of life fosters the assumption that faith matters in all parts of life. Such practice also trains people in how to see and act with eyes and legs of faith rather than by the many other orienting forces in our lives.
A second very important finding connects to the need for retreat and stimulation. For pastors, time to go away and reflect together about issues of common concern is essential to spark creative thinking. In our National Working Group, pastors draw on materials from our work together that subsequently impact their whole framing of ministry at home. Nearly every meeting has challenged some pastors' unreflective assumptions and then provided them with the space, theological resources, and conversation partners to work out a response. This was especially true when we began meeting with workers, political leaders, and artists. In this sense the project simply and powerfully provides a space for renewal, a spark of imagination, and a framework for how the faith holds together and gets traction in people's lives. Each time we come together, we've done the hard work reading theological materials as leaven for intellectual stimulation, grounding our conversations in the wisdom of Scripture and tradition. Worship, good food, and social time play a key role as well. It is important that people feel their time was well spent and that they return home energized to work on these things in their own communities.
Congregations can also be creatively engaged by staking out space to reflect on how we live faith as a way of life. Such efforts amount to doing what our working group meetings do so well—create a break in the normal ebb and flow of the week that shocks us into reflective consideration of “who we are and what we're doing here.” To force that same kind of reflection in her own congregation, one senior pastor in the group took a roll of yellow plastic “work site” tape, printed with the words “God at Work,” and strung it around the pews in her church's sanctuary. This “work site” framed a Lenten series that highlighted a two-fold message: God is at work in the lives of this gathered people, and God is at work through the lives of this people as they scatter to their workplaces, homes, and elsewhere. It was a dramatic effort to help a congregation understand its life together as gift from God and, therefore, as also a task from God to join in God's work.
While our project now moves towards its conclusion, it is in another sense just beginning. We've learned some important lessons about what it takes to sustain pastoral excellence, and our work now is to refine our analysis even as we seek ways and means to “equip the theological imagination” of others in positions of pastoral leadership. As we do, both through the publication of books (the first, Miroslav Volf's Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace , Zondervan 2005, is a wonderfully rich example) and through a capstone national conference in May 2007, we invite your input and insight.
May God prosper the work of our hands (Psalm 90:17).The Rev. Dr. Christian Scharen is director of Faith as a Way of Life, a Sustaining Pastoral Excellence Project sponsored by the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School.
