SPE Program Spotlight
CBF Peer Groups Ease Pastors’ Isolation
Once a month, every third Tuesday for the past three years, 14 to 20 moderate Baptist pastors from across the southeast portion of North Carolina—from Fayetteville on the west to Wilmington on the east—get in their cars and head off for a meeting that’s all but stamped on their calendars in indelible ink. Coming from all points of the compass, they drive up to an hour or more to the small Bladen County town of Elizabethtown, where about 10:30 a.m., they pull one after another into the parking lot of the Elizabethtown Baptist Church.
There, for the next four hours—with a quick lunch break at Melvin’s hamburgers in downtown Elizabethtown—they'll talk about their lives and ministries. They might discuss a book they've all read. Or debate the latest controversies in the church and the world. Pray for one another. Worship together. Vent their frustrations. Celebrate their joys. Share their deepest doubts and fears.
And then they get back in their cars and drive home, filled with encouragement for the hard work of pastoral ministry.
It might not look like much, a simple meeting in a small-town Baptist church in rural North Carolina. But it is a powerful gathering, members say, a place of deep and abiding friendships where the call to ministry is nurtured and sustained.
“It’s a four-hour Sabbath that comes every month,” says the Rev. Ed Beddingfield, pastor of First Baptist Church, Fayetteville, N.C. “It’s a place where I can get away for a few hours and get together with people who understand.”
The group in southeast North Carolina is one of 75 peer learning groups sponsored by the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a movement of moderate Baptist churches and individuals, with headquarters in Atlanta. Under the CBF’s Initiative for Ministerial Excellence, a Sustaining Pastoral Excellence project funded by Lilly Endowment Inc., more than 500 pastors from Maryland to Arizona are taking part in the peer groups.
Terry Hamrick, the CBF’s coordinator for leadership development, says the peer group program has exceeded all expectations. Initially, the CBF hoped to launch 30 to 40 groups, but after those filled almost immediately with virtually no advertising, they repeatedly expanded the program until it reached its current level. Three years after the program began, virtually all the peer groups are still meeting, with no drop in enthusiasm or membership.
Consistent with Baptist heritage and tradition, the peer groups are largely autonomous and self-directed. The Fellowship does provide training for each group’s convenor, but otherwise the groups are free to plot their own course. Most, like the Elizabethtown group, meet monthly, either studying a book together, holding a retreat, or simply spending time together or—as did a peer group in Atlanta—attending a baseball game with their spouses and children.
What the groups share in common is the goal of easing the isolation that is too often a part of pastoral ministry today, says Hamrick.
“We knew going in that other Lilly-funded projects such as Pulpit & Pew had found that loneliness and isolation are key issues facing pastors today,” he says. “But we also assumed that, in moderate Baptist life in the south, our pastors are even more isolated than the norm.”
In many ways, these pastors experience overlapping layers of isolation. They have the isolation that comes with all pastoral ministry, the sense of being “set apart” that ordination brings. They have the social isolation that can come with life in a rural community. And they have the theological isolation that can happen when kindred spirits are far away.
The Rev. David Elks, 40, pastor of Elizabethtown Baptist, was a teen-ager when the Baptist battles began a generation ago.
“For as long as I have known about church and Baptists, we have been fighting with one another,” he says. “I was raised in a culture of hostility within the church house and that has made us all very suspicious of one another. Especially for moderate Baptists, our friends in Baptist life are few and far between.”
But in his monthly peer group meeting, Elks has found a place of safety.
“It’s more than just fellowship or friendship, though the group does give us both of those,” he says. “It’s about coming alongside people who are on a similar journey and being able to sigh and take a breath and know that we are not on this road by ourselves. We’re reminded every month that we have a lot of people all around us who are on the same path, and that gives us a lot of encouragement.”
The Rev. Mike Queen, pastor of First Baptist Church, Wilmington, is the group’s convenor, essentially the group’s founder and facilitator. When the CBF approached him about starting a pastoral peer group, they suggested he invite 20 pastors to an informational meeting and hope that perhaps 10 might actually attend and join the group. Instead, of the 22 pastors he invited, all 22 came to the first meeting and continued to attend each month. With a few pastors being called to new churches, the group now has 17 members, with another four scheduled to join this fall.
At age 60, with 25 years in ministry—20 as pastor at First Wilmington—Queen is something of a “wise elder” for the group. Together, he and Beddingfield—age 55 with 27 years experience in ministry—are frequent sources of advice and counsel for Elks and other younger pastors. Regardless of age or experience, however, all the members are equal and serve each other as a sounding board.
“It’s a place for me to be myself without worrying about who might catch me,” says Beddingfield. “We can say what’s on our hearts. It’s a place where we can get together and talk about frustrations and disappointments with people who are willing to accept us and love us.”
For pastors in small towns and rural areas, that can be a particularly precious gift, says Elks.
“Living in a small town, I feel an expectation to be ‘on’ as a minister all the time,” he says. “The bulk of my pastoral listening happens in the grocery store aisle and the little league ball field. It’s amazing the number of times people see ‘the preacher' and want to start talking spiritual issues.”
While Elks welcomes and even treasures those occasions for ministry, he says he also needs time when he is “off.”
“I don’t have to be ‘on’ with this group and I don’t have to spin things with this group,” he says. “And the group works, because it is a safe place for all of us.”
That sense of safety springs from a deep sense of mutual trust among group members, says Queen. Early on, members discussed the need for trust and covenanted with each other to keep their discussions confidential.
“Of all the things that have happened in our group, the level of honesty and depth of trust is the most amazing,” says Queen.
What keeps that trust intact is a deep-seated desire among members not to disappoint one another, he says.
“I can’t imagine anybody violating something that was said in confidence,” he says. “I've had members tell me they could have a moral failure and face their wife and kids easier than they could face this group, because we have this common bond of ministry that we share.”
“These are my friends in ministry,” says Queen. “These are my colleagues in ministry. We all serve the same Lord.”
