SPE Program Spotlight
PC(USA) Re-Forming Ministry by Recovering Shared Teaching Office
Put a seminary professor and a bunch of pastors in a room together and almost inevitably the scene soon begins to look and sound like a classroom, says the Rev. Barry Ensign-George. The professor talks, sharing his or her theological expertise in scripture, church history or some other field, and the pastors take notes, presumably hoping someday to apply the latest ideas from the academy in their congregations. Meanwhile, denominational officials typically aren’t even in the room, but are instead off somewhere performing the myriad administrative and other tasks that keep a large denomination functioning.
But in the Presbyterian Church (USA), pastors, seminary professors, and denominational leaders are turning that scenario on its head, gathering for the most unusual of reasons — to do theology together. Under the denomination’s Sustaining Pastoral Excellence program — Re-Forming Ministry: Recovering the Shared Teaching Office of the Church — members of these three very different groups are joining together to reflect deeply about some of the most critical problems facing the church and its ministry.
If you don’t think that’s rare, then you don’t know Presbyterians, and perhaps Mainline Protestantism in general, according to Ensign-George, the director of Re-Forming Ministry, an initiative of the denomination’s Office of Theology and Worship.
“In my experience, I’m not aware of any other group, certainly in the PC(USA), that regularly brings together pastors, governing body leaders and professors as equals in a shared theological task,” he says. Yes, members of these three groups do interact with each other often, but rarely as true colleagues in the exercise of pastoral ministry.
So far, Re-Forming Ministry has launched three such groups — a 21-member core group (11 pastors, five professors and five denomination officials) that began work two years ago and two 18-member groups (10 pastors, four professors and four denomination officials) that have been meeting for about a year-and-a-half. Three more 18-member groups will begin meeting next year.
The task for all these groups, at least for now, is focused on ecclesiology. They are thinking and reflecting theologically about the church, its nature, role, and ministry.
If that sounds very basic, it’s because it is, says Ensign-George. In many ways, Ensign-George contends, the church today — especially Presbyterians and other Mainline denominations — lacks a shared understanding of either the pastoral vocation or the nature of church itself. Revisiting and relearning the basics, reflecting on the nature of church and pastoral ministry is an essential prerequisite to pastoral excellence, he says.
“It’s not that we have no understanding of church and the pastoral vocation, but we don’t have a strong, shared and coherent understanding,” he says. As a result, pastors are pulled in a dozen directions, bombarded by an array of competing pastoral models, each purporting to be the ideal solution to the problems of pastoral ministry. Whether they are pushing church-growth, pastoral counseling, or great preaching, dozens of competing “experts” stand ready to tell pastors “If you just do this and be this particular sort of pastor, you'll get this result. You'll get success.”
The Re-Forming Ministry program, however, is premised on the deep conviction that the core of the pastoral vocation lies elsewhere, specifically in the theological.
“The pastor is the one person who is uniquely called and trained and formed to be reflective in deep, ongoing ways about the Christian faith as it is lived out by this particular group of people in this particular place at this particular time,” says Ensign-George.
Before heading the Re-Forming Ministry program, Ensign-George was a pastor in eastern Iowa for seven years. During that time, he says, he was always aware that others in the congregation could do some aspects of his job better than he could. A business owner, for example, might better understand a financial statement, or a lawyer might better organize and chair a committee meeting.
“But the one thing that I brought to that setting, presumably, was this ability to reflect deeply on the faith as it was being lived out by this group of people in this particular place and time,” says Ensign-George. Once pastors are firmly grounded in this theological core of ministry, they possess the tools to help congregations discern from all the competing voices which path or approach is best suited for their particular situation.
At the same time, however, pastors do not practice ministry in isolation. They are part of an entire pastoral-ecclesial system that also includes denominational officials and theological school professors.
“If the core of the pastoral vocation is engaged theological reflection, then certainly, professors and governing body leaders are vital elements of pastoral ministry,” says Ensign-George. Skilled theological reflection requires training and ongoing sustenance if it is to be done well. It requires gifted professors and a supportive and theologically grounded denominational leadership.
Collectively, Ensign-George says, pastors, professors, and denominational leaders perform the church’s “teaching office” — an essential function that is deeply embedded in the theological core of the pastoral vocation.
While pastors are the primary teachers of the faith, they share, or should share, responsibility for the church’s teaching office with professors and denominational leaders, according to Ensign-George. Hence the second half of the Re-Forming Ministry’s program’s name: Recovering the Shared Teaching Office of the Church.
All three — pastors, professors, and denominational leaders — are collectively responsible for articulating the faith that has been handed down to us and passing it on, says Ensign-George. Just as pastors cannot perform their teaching office in isolation from theology professors and governing body officials, neither can professors and governing body officials fully perform their teaching role isolated from pastors and each other.
Yet, the reality of church life today is that pastors, professors, and denominational leaders are pulled in different directions, says Ensign-George. Theological school professors can tend to see themselves accountable more to the world of the academy than the church. Denominational officials are often dismissed as bureaucrats or crisis intervention workers and are rarely seen as participants in the theological core of pastoral ministry.
But in fact, denominational officials can be gifted and skilled contributors to the theological core of ministry, and most want to be a part of that work, Ensign-George says. And the church must equip professors to understand that they too have a place in nurturing the well-being of the church.
Theology, Ensign-George says, is not an academic task confined to theological schools, but the vocation of the entire church.
As a result, the starting point for reflecting theologically on pastoral ministry is not the pastoral vocation per se, but the church. Or as the Rev. Dr. John P. Burgess, associate professor of systematic theology at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, put it in a paper he wrote for the Re-Forming Ministry core group:
“(N)o task is more important for the North American church today than learning to think theologically about the church.”
An ambitious undertaking, the Re-Forming Ministry program ultimately seeks to transform the Presbyterian denomination, changing the way its members think about and understand the meaning of church and pastoral ministry. But it is trying to do that, at least initially, with small groups of people — pastors, professors, and denominational officials — who are getting the conversation started. Studying together, reflecting and writing papers, they will slowly influence wider and wider circles of pastors, teachers and church officials. Together, they will live new patterns of shared ministry.
Over time, articles and other materials will be produced by the Re-Forming Ministry groups, and made available to wider publics through denominational publications and the Re-Forming Ministry Web site and other venues.
“We are hoping that what we communicate will generate discussion and conversation,” says Ensign-George. “That itself is the exercise of the teaching office. We're trying to be articulate about the faith that has been handed to us and to do it in a way that will have meaning for this particular people, living out the faith here, now.”
The end result won’t be a blue-ribbon report on how to fix the denomination — an approach that has been tried countless times before with varying degrees of success. Instead, Ensign-George envisions articles and other materials emerging from the project, engaging the PC(USA) in a sustained conversation that will reshape the denomination’s understanding of itself, its ministry and the practices that undergird excellent ministry.
“As these materials emerge, we hope people within the denomination will recognize and understand that this is theology being done in the church, by the church and for the church,” says Ensign-George. “And that is very different.”
To read more about Re-Forming Ministry: Recovering the Shared Teaching Office of the Church, visit the program Web site.
