Risking Excellence
After three years standing on the side, watching 63 projects do all they can to nurture and sustain pastoral excellence, I am convinced of one thing: When Lilly Endowment Inc. courageously sent out their request for proposals for sustaining pastoral excellence, they started a debate and a movement. Both, I have learned, are needed to turn us ever more profoundly toward God’s more excellent way.
Admittedly, I have sometimes rolled my eyes when I hear one more person ask whether “excellence” is a theological term. Many of you have argued, with good reason and passion, that “fruitful” or “faithful” or simply “good” are sufficient and better words to describe the nature of Christian ministry in a success-driven world. And while I understand the importance of getting language right, I also understand that our words are always an approximation, especially when their aim is a description of our life together in the Triune God. Sometimes I wonder if our debates over language are really just a way for us to stall the necessary change we must make in our own lives. If we can only keep searching for some word that is more comfortable than “excellent” or “perfect,” then maybe we can put off having to change. Better yet, maybe we can find a way to meet our new standard without having to change at all.
For the past several years, the Rev. Jim Harnish, pastor of Hyde Park United Methodist Church in Tampa, Fla., has met with a group of pastors in a leadership development program that Russ Moxley and I lead. Jim tells the story about how his church forged a new vision, one that would allow it to reclaim the excellence of its past and grow to meet the future needs of the community. It was a painful process. As the church grew clearer about its identity and mission, it also became clear that some members would not be able to embrace the new vision and would leave the church. As long as the vision stayed unfocused, fundamentally different groups in the church could find a way to get along. But when the vision and its call upon the congregation became plain to see, it was no longer possible for everyone to live under the same roof.
Getting clear about excellence, naming it and defining it as an aspiration—especially an excellence rooted in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus—isn’t comfortable. Nor is it supposed to be. More than just mere words, the language we use sets our sights, names our direction, and compels our obedience. Across the country, I hear more and more people talking about “excellence” in ministry. I see the call to excellence show up in places far beyond our SPE projects. I hear an aspiration throughout the church to be more than we have been. I hear a deep desire to be God’s agents in a world torn by war, injustice and indifference. Whatever our debate about the usefulness of “excellence,” I know that this word is working at us, calling us forward, inviting us to reconsider the nature of our work in the name of God. In the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence project, Lilly Endowment started a great debate, and that debate itself is raising expectations and hope.
Even in the midst of the debate, however, many of you have set aside your wonder and your questions about the exact nature of pastoral excellence and have instead simply gotten busy trying to make excellence happen. Emily Dickinson is oft quoted as saying, “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.” In your Sustaining Pastoral Excellence projects, in the movement being carried out by 63 projects engaging more than 15,000 church leaders, the truth about pastoral excellence is emerging. What is that truth? What is the slant that is emerging from your annual reports?
First, your projects report over and over again that sustained, covenant community is vitally important for church leaders. Whether you call them “peer groups,” “support groups,” or “communities of practice,” whether they have “facilitators” or “coaches,” or no formal leadership at all, whether they have a set agenda or are virtually improvisational, these covenant communities have the following results in common:
- Increased trust among clergy that is manifested in friendship, collaboration and laughter;
- Reduced isolation and loneliness;
- Invigorated practices for effective ministry, from prayer to preaching to leading;
- Hope for the future; and
- Renewed commitment by the church leaders to the One who calls them to ministry and to the institutions that employ them.
Second, participants, project teams and their institutions are developing a holy imagination. During the recent SPE gatherings in Indianapolis, each peer group facilitator reported that each peer group talked about how their institutions were being changed by this work. Judicatory leaders, seminary faculty and staff, and organizational leaders have begun to reorient the work of their whole institution based on the truths emerging from these projects. A new imagination for life together is emerging, resulting in new partnerships, new institutions, and new ways of doing business. Here in North Carolina, the Triangle Pastoral Counseling Center helps pastors use narrative to imagine and see new alternatives in their ministry, especially where they feel stuck or in conflict. Similarly, your projects report that participants and project leaders are imagining anew how to be God’s effective servants in the world, even in the places where they have felt the most hopeless.
Third, SPE participants are developing an increased capacity to love their neighbors and to love themselves. When the SPE project began, I think we all hypothesized that gathering clergy and congregational leaders together for ongoing support and challenge would at least raise the morale, if not the excellence, of the participants. By your reports, your participants are better able to love themselves, even in the midst of their particular blessings and bedevilments. Perhaps more surprising, they are also increasing their capacity to love their neighbors. Many of you report that diversity is a vitally important aspect of your project. You are finding that denominational diversity increases trust and helps explode the myths of denominationalism. Ethnic diversity helps participants reach beyond the invisible walls that separate communities. One project leader described their peer groups as “mini” truth and reconciliation committees, testifying to the power of engaging diverse people in the practices of a communal life.
Finally, several projects tell us that the combination of holy imagination and support from good colleagues has given participants the courage to take risks and try new projects in their church communities. Experiences that destabilize the normative life of their participants—disrupting pastors’ routines and getting them “out of the box”—are invaluable in reorienting pastors toward excellent ministry, project leaders say. Sitting in silence for a day, traveling to another country, or talking honestly about the deepest fears that plague one’s ministry can be powerful instruments of transformation. These are truly “en-couraging” experiences that embolden clergy and congregational leaders for new work they could never otherwise have imagined.
A perfect example of this new-found courage to take risks was offered up by the Rural Pastors Institute, a project sponsored by the Center for New Community. A pastor in their program shared with her peer group her frustration that her Anglo rural church was declining, even as the community was growing rapidly with a large Hmong population. Before, she could never see a way that her old, “set-in-its way” congregation would ever embrace these newcomers. But with a new imagination, new skills and good support, this pastor has organized her church and several other churches to interview the community’s newcomers to find out how the churches can more faithfully serve them. Where once there was resignation and even despair, now there is hope.
From where I sit, it is easy to see that both a debate and a movement have begun. I am learning yet again that both our words and our actions matter. Call it what you will. It looks like excellence to me.
Janice A. Virtue is associate dean for continuing education and strategic planning at Duke Divinity School and a member of the SPE coordination team.
