“Breaking Open our Experiences”: Communicating about Excellence
When pastoral excellence happens, what does it look like? When a fading call to ministry suddenly reignites, burning again with new life and passion, what goes through a pastor’s mind and heart? When a small group of pastors forge deep and abiding friendships, finding in one another new strength for ministry, how exactly do they do it?
Over the past four years, thousands of pastors and lay leaders across the United States have been working to cultivate, nurture and sustain excellent ministry. In a variety of programs sponsored by 63 different Sustaining Pastoral excellence projects, they have gathered in peer groups, studied theology, gone on sabbatical, learned new habits of health and wellness, and walked in pilgrimage together.
Virtually every SPE project and every pastor who has been in an SPE peer group or otherwise participated in those projects has a story to tell. About the struggles of pastoral ministry. About lessons learned. About excellence sought and excellence achieved. And sometimes even about failure.
Communications and the sharing of stories is a critical part of pastoral excellence. Indeed, in some ways, storytelling may be the final, necessary act of excellence. Without it, it’s almost as though excellence never happened. Unless the stories are told, excellence is just a tree falling in the forest.
Writing about pastoral excellence can be tremendously rewarding, say contributors to the SPE Web site. Whether published on the SPE Web site or in denominational publications or local newspapers, articles and essays about ministry have very real benefits, from the most practical and mundane to the deeply transcendent and spiritual. Stories about excellent ministry can help enlighten laypeople. They can move a donor to provide new sources of support for ongoing programs. And they can bring great benefit to those who write the articles.
For Rev. Betty Lynn Schwab, a United Church pastor in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, writing about the Women Touched by Grace program gave her a chance to collect her thoughts, think through what she had learned in her SPE experience, and share it with others.
“It was a very good experience as it gave me a reason to sit back and put it all in a tidy perspective for me personally,” she says. “To permit readers a little glimpse into the program felt like a plus as well.”
Isolation is a real fact of life in pastoral ministry, Schwab says. Telling her story and reading the stories of others who are involved in the same struggles of ministry is a genuine comfort.
“To imagine a whole group of readers interested in and committed to pastoral excellence strengthens my own efforts as a pastor,” she says.
Excellence in ministry is to some extent always a quest, something sought and never fully and finally accomplished, but writing about it is a way to celebrate the milestones along the way, says Don McCrabb, director of administration for the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., and project coordinator for Sustaining Excellent Pastors - Promoting Pastoral Excellence. It is essentially a spiritual discipline and a form of accountability, of sharing what we have learned.
“Writing about our SPE program helped us to see how God had been moving among us, even through some difficult times,” says McCrabb. “By putting out there what we have found, then our reflections can be considered by others. It can feed them, and in their acceptance as well as their feedback, we are strengthened.”
McCrabb has published two articles on the SPE Website about his project’s work: “Eleven Characteristics of Excellent Pastors”and “Pastoral Vision.”
In sharing stories, in putting reflections “out there” for others to consider, new connections are made, new networks forged. With the internet, articles are read by people across the country and around the world. A day after McCrabb’s article on the Characteristics of Pastoral Excellence was posted on the SPE Website, another Catholic diocese asked to reprint it in a mailing to pastors.
“I was elated,” says McCrabb. “Someone had read the article and valued it enough to share it with others. It was a tremendous affirmation of the work we had done. We had created something of value.”
In sharing stories with each other, we feed others and we, in turn, are fed, says McCrabb.
“Breaking open our experiences for one another is an act of love,” he says. “Slowly, it begins to build links, pathways if you will, among us. These pathways can serve the unity of faith and action that Jesus calls us to as his followers.”
To already busy pastors, of course, writing about excellent ministry can seem like one more task on the to-do list, one that’s easily pushed to the bottom. But sometimes, what starts off as a task can unfold into deeper meanings, says Carole Cotton Winn, director of the Academy for Spiritual Leadership, a ministry of the Louisiana Conference of the United Methodist Church.
For Winn, the process of writing an article for the SPE Website on ministry in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (“Turn My Mourning into Joy: Ministry After the Storms”) was an exercise in healing, a search for meaning in the midst of uncertainty and chaos.
As she wrote the article, she realized that, after Katrina, the whole notion of “sustaining” pastoral excellence had been transformed from the realm of administration to “the gift of the sacramental.”
“I learned that the moment of reflection is itself a means of grace,” she says. “It confirmed for me the power of allowing the story to capture both the events and the learnings from what we are experiencing.”
Writing about ministry isn't just one more task to consume us, says Winn.
“When you need to get in touch again with the passion that sent you searching for a grant to sustain pastoral excellence, then start with a blank page and let the story flow from within you,” she says. “I promise it will be good for your soul.”
Have an article you want to send us or story idea you want to discuss? E-mail us at spe@div.duke.edu. For more information on editorial guidelines, visit the “Contact us” page.
