The Top Ten Lessons from SPE
What One Peer Group Learned in Three Years Together
At the conclusion of my pastor peer group experience this year, the staff at Memphis Theological Seminary’s SPE program—Sustaining Pastoral Excellence through Scholarship, Piety, and Justice—asked me to share how we celebrated pastoral excellence and what the experience meant to us. Rather than do this alone, I asked each of the ten pastors who participated in the group to write one sentence that I could share with the larger Memphis SPE group at our final conference, held in June at St. Simons Island, Georgia. The following are the top 10 learnings and celebrations of SPE from a group of pastors who have been in covenantal relationship with each other for the past three years.
10. Clergy who have support from other clergy serve churches better, and rested pastors are “more excellent” than tired ones!
9. SPE has given me the ability to face disappointment and discouragement and yet keep going, all the while finding new ways to renew personal energy.
8. SPE has given me new life, as well as great, new friends.
7. SPE has helped me to “fall in love” with ministry again.
6. SPE has given me a true sense of community and what the Body of Christ should be.
5. Sustaining Pastoral Excellence has encouraged me to finish strong—more faithful to living an undivided and honest life before God and others.
4. In my entire church experience, this group has been the most important factor in helping me to be self-critical.
3. Pastoral excellence includes not being afraid to confess pain and learning to be vulnerable to friends who can offer unconditional acceptance.
2. SPE apparently fosters an environment in which single women fall in love and get married! [Note: Three clergywomen were in our group. During the three years, two of the women were married and one became engaged (to men outside of the group)]
1. SPE helped me develop a base of support among other clergy whose stories of faith, struggle, and hope coincided with mine. Surely I am aware that I am not alone in my pursuit to serve the Lord.
As for me, I took a look at scripture and found that the term “excellent” is rarely used, and most of the time it is used to describe a person…. “most excellent Theophilus” in Luke. But Paul uses “excellence” at a rather surprising time. He is in the midst of a church conflict, not unlike those that we experience. The people in the church in Corinth are fighting and scrapping and hollering and complaining about all sorts of things. And so then, after using that wonderful image of the Body of Christ, he says “I will show you a still more excellent way.”
“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging symbol.” We know this text, especially when he gets to the part “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
And then it struck me. The excellence in SPE has enabled our group of ten pastors from diverse denominational traditions, of different races and genders, to endure virtually all things. The following are just some of the things members of our group have endured in our time together: deaths of loved ones, marriages, resignations, staff conflicts, poverty, racism, sexism, church conflicts, family tensions, financial pressures, vocational questioning, sending kids to college and other transitions, frustrations, and joys.
That’s a lot to endure. But through SPE, we endured virtually all things with our souls intact.
Thanks be to God for SPE.
Stephen R. Montgomery is senior pastor of Idlewild Presbyterian Church PC(USA), Memphis, Tenn., and served as a colleague group leader for Memphis Theological Seminary’s SPE program from 2004-2007.
