Key Lessons from SPE
The following is adapted from the first part of a two-part presentation made by the Rev. Dr. John R. Wimmer at the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence Forum, August 7, 2007, in Indianapolis, Ind.
Before I summarize some of the important lessons that can be drawn from our collective work in Sustaining Pastoral Excellence, I want to give you a sense of the scope of this effort so far. So let me present some data that comes from your most recent program reports. In other words, I want to show you some results of your projects, as we’ve encouraged you to think and write about your work on evaluation.
Sustaining Pastoral Excellence Projects: The Numbers
As you know, the SPE program consists of 63 grantee organizations. They are located in 30 states and represent at least 25 organized denominational traditions – that is, if you want to call some of your denominations organized! Because many of your projects are working with significant partners, almost 100 other organizations that did not receive grant funds directly are working alongside you in this effort – so, in fact, more than 160 organizations are working together in this program.
Now some results that I find quite exciting:
- Since 2002, your projects have started more than 1,300 pastoral peer learning groups nationwide. [graph]
- Well over 12,000 pastoral leaders have thus far been involved in these peer learning groups. [graph]
- When all SPE programming beyond clergy peer groups is taken into consideration, more than 46,000 clergy and lay congregational leaders have taken part in an SPE program. By the way, if we tried to gather all those pastors and church leaders here, they would fill this auditorium more than 170 times. [graph]
- Also, almost 28,000 congregations have been directly linked to or otherwise affected by an SPE program. To place this in perspective: if sociologists are correct that 300,000 to 350,000 congregations are in existence nationwide, then SPE has now touched almost 10 percent of the Christian churches in our nation. [graph]
- I must say to all of you that Lilly Endowment is exceedingly proud of these results! So please accept the profound gratitude of the Endowment for your own excellence in this effort to promote excellence in ministry. [graph]
SPE: Lessons We Are Learning
So what have we been learning from this experiment to Sustain Pastoral Excellence? There is a growing literature about pastoral excellence that has already taught us much: the book, Resurrecting Excellence by Greg Jones and Kevin Armstrong; the coordination program’s Website, which is now stocked with dozens of very good articles that many of you have written about your particular projects; and the many other articles, books, resource and training materials that almost all of you have written to tell the story and stories of your project.
But I would like to focus this afternoon on our collective experience. If we are a learning community in Peter Senge’s sense of the term, then the collective lessons of our effort are a bit different than what each of our projects can learn alone. Certainly, these lessons overlap, but they also transcend the experience of our own particular group. I’d like to present five key lessons that I think we are learning. They are not an exhaustive list. Neither are they lessons that all of you necessarily are learning – our collection of projects is much too diverse for any such claims. Yet from several years of meeting together, thousands of conversations with project leaders and pastors about your programs and listening to your stories and theirs, through reading your reports and your resource materials, I’d like to distill all this and share these few key points about what I think we’re learning together.
1. Excellent ministry takes place in the context of a flourishing Christian way of life.
The book Resurrecting Excellence explains this theological and ecclesial principle well. Mine is the complementary claim that you all have been learning this lesson through your experience. Your projects are finding that any excellence in pastoral life is deeply rooted in the excellence of Christian life. You have helped participants experience that they are not pastors first and Christians second. Rather, through various means and in many ways, pastoral leaders are learning that participation in the practices that constitute a Christian way of life – keeping Sabbath, forgiveness, discernment, hospitality, and many others – is participation in the very life of God. Excellent ministry is life giving. But we cannot forget that excellent pastoral life is rooted in a Christian way of life – “the more excellent way” from I Corinthians 12 that so many of you speak about in your projects. It is grounded in the life-giving experience of God’s love, grace, justice, and peace. Jesus said, “I came that you might have life, and have it more abundantly.” (John 10:10) Excellence is grounded in this way of life that truly gives life.
I already hinted at the shadow side of this lesson. Pastors confess that ministerial life holds a seductive yet potentially destructive power. Ministry’s ironic temptation is that we can become so overwhelmed by genuinely good pastoral “things to do” that we can miss the point of God’s Reign altogether. In the words of a pastor in one of your programs:
My peer learning group helped me to realize that by trying so hard to save the souls of others I was actually losing my own soul …. I am not God. I am not Christ. And I decided that it would be much better for my church if I ‘let God be God’ and let Christ’s crucifixion be enough to redeem my people rather than acting as if my family and I were the atonement for their redemption….
This pastor came to understand that excellent ministry is not rooted in our own efforts, but in practicing a Christian way of life that actually gives life. We are all first and foremost followers of God. Only by being followers of Christ can we ever hope to lead in Christ’s name.
Let us note that the place where this pastor made this realization was a pastoral peer group. This leads to our next important lesson:
2. Excellent ministry is collegial: It can only be done in the company of others, in community.
Various Pulpit & Pew studies gave substance to a suspicion held by us all – that pastoral leaders feel tremendous isolation. This isolation can be dispiriting, if not even destructive. Of course, this sense of aloneness has many causes: competition, denominational politics, the sometimes strait-jacketing character of the pastoral role, geographical remoteness – the list is long. And just as we had a shared, if inchoate, diagnosis that isolation is one of the obstacles to excellent ministry, we also had a collective sense that the antidote is true collegiality in ministry. This collegiality embodies what Greg and Kevin called “holy friendship.” This kind of friendship represents the radical notion that pastoral leaders, rather than competing with each other or seeking to hide their true selves, can discover in peer groups and other activities that they are not alone. Peer groups and shared practices of friendship and collegiality not only break down isolation, they also foster a pastoral and ecclesial imagination that simply can no longer conceive of “doing ministry” alone.
Listen to what a pastor from Texas wrote in an evaluation of one of your projects:
Theologically, I am coming to understand the function of Christian community. …None of us can become a Lone Ranger…. It is almost as though the picture of Christ alone in the Garden of Gethsemane is the model for ministers, rather than that of the community of Christ with the disciples or the Pauline picture of the first-century Church. I have experienced myself moving from an isolated, defensive, self-protecting individualist toward one with greater openness, willingness to risk and vulnerability…. I will make this bold statement…one cannot become excellent in any practice without the input of others in community. Thus, the body of Christ, in its intertwining of the physical body is a good example of how one might go about considering the needs of ministers for community and friendship…
The way this pastor thinks and writes about vulnerability and the intertwining nature of the body of Christ brings me to the third lesson:
3. Excellent ministry is embodied.
The Christian faith is incarnational. Christ is the embodiment of a Triune God, and from this theological conviction a number of ecclesiological affirmations follow. One is that the church, the Body of Christ, is embodied. Dietrich Bonhoeffer made this clear when he wrote in Life Together:
The physical presence of other Christians is a source of incomparable joy and strength to the believer… [Humans] are created a body, the Son of God appeared on earth in the body, he was raised in the body, in the sacrament the believer receives the Lord Christ in the body, and the resurrection of the dead will bring about the perfected fellowship of God’s spiritual-physical creatures. The believer therefore lauds the Creator, the Redeemer, God, Father and Holy Spirit, for the bodily presence of a brother [or sister].1
Time and again, Bonhoeffer emphasized that the visible, human congregation is embodied, incarnate in the world. True Christian community is flesh and bone, the body of Christ – human, but nevertheless Divine. A real congregation is not what Bonhoeffer called a “wish dream” – that is, some kind of disembodied, perfect spiritual fellowship where everybody always gets along and everything always runs smoothly. No, embodied churches are human and therefore imperfect; yet, they carry and harbor precious experiences with God. Congregations are thus “treasure in earthen vessels,” as in 2 Corinthians 4:1-12: afflicted, perplexed, persecuted – but blessed.
In the same way excellent pastoral ministers are embodied – that is, they inhabit human bodies. And if the Gospel itself is incarnate through Jesus Christ and the body of Christ, then an incarnate Gospel is simply not possible without the embodiment of ministers, just as it is not possible without embodied congregations. That means pastoral leaders share all the joys and limitations of embodiment. Pastors can flourish only when they have sufficient nutrition and rest. They feel the warmth of the sun and shiver at cold showers. They feel in their bodies the joy of human love and also feel in their bodies acute tension when relationships in their families or churches are strained.
Many of you have heard me say that I think we somehow seem to have disembodied ministers – that we practice a form of the ancient heresy of Docetism. (Please forgive me: I confess to be a recovering church historian. I am therefore about to commit church history in public. If you need to perform an intervention, I trust one of the trained pastoral counselors here will take charge.) As with Docetism, I think we sometimes believe wrongly that ministers only seem human in the way Gnostics believed Jesus only seemed to have a human body. In this prevalent but false way of thinking, ministers don’t need anything so human and worldly as a decent living wage, or to work reasonable hours and take vacations or sabbaticals, or posses the basic materials goods that are necessary for a well-lived human life.
Yet ministers are embodied creatures – and so are their families. Therefore, like almost everyone else in their congregations, they need to attend to very human needs like caring for aging parents and putting their children through college; they need time to foster healthy relationships with the primary people in their lives: flesh and blood mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, children, brothers and sisters, partners and friends. They need access to good health care and they need to be able to afford it. They require material goods not so that they can compete with other professionals in a consumerist culture, but so that their humanness, the temple God has made in them, can live in well-being – in shalom – and thereby honor God. The Christian practice of honoring the body is itself part of a way of life that honors God. And excellent ministry means honoring our embodiment as pastoral leaders.
4. Excellence in ministry has its best chance of gaining sustenance when pastors have the appropriate balance of agency and accountability.
The Request for Proposals for the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence program made no secret that the Endowment was convinced that, in giving agency to pastors to design and implement their own programs, the more the better. This element of SPE – placing as much agency as possible in the hands of pastors to determine for themselves what they need to sustain excellence – has been a hallmark of this program’s success. Agency – the permission and freedom to act by one’s own inclinations and preferences – has been for ministers in this program a wonderful experience of God’s grace.
But this was not a program to Sustain Pastoral Agency. Agency without the accountability of excellence is of limited value.
We must be completely candid. This word – excellence – has unquestionably been the most contested element of this entire program. To this I have only one thing to say: Good!! In my estimation, the conversations, debates, disagreements and convergences that have taken place within your projects have been – well, excellent! Not that it has been easy. You know as well as I that the word “excellence” is loaded with so much cultural baggage that it can set off holy fireworks. As I sometimes say, misconceptions of excellent ministry can grate on our gospel nerves. If by excellence we mean the biggest, the most prestigious, the wealthiest, the most successful, then we are justified in rejecting the concept. But if by excellence we mean qualities that reflect the excellence of God’s glory as in 2 Peter 1:3, or the “more excellent way” of I Corinthians 13, or excellence as portrayed in Philippians, then we are certainly not promoting the false virtues of prestige and success. Rather, pastoral excellence as most of you try to describe it is about fidelity to the nature of God revealed in Jesus Christ. It is faithfulness to God’s justice and mercy, God’s grace and healing power. It is resurrecting excellence; but it is also cruciform, patterned after the life and death of Christ. It suffers, speaks and acts prophetically in contexts of injustice. It seeks reconciliation and healing, it sows love where there is hatred, understanding where there is conflict, joy where the people of Easter exude hope in a world that has a hard time finding either joy or hope. Excellent ministry is competent at practicing these gospel values and skills.
So, I believe we are learning that the freedom of pastoral agency must be balanced with accountability. Further, this accountability is rooted in our understanding of excellence. But pastoral excellence is not defined by the values of Tom Peters or the world of business; rather, pastoral excellence is defined by competently practicing the qualities of the Gospel we proclaim.
5. Excellent ministry must be properly resourced.
Just as pastors can be isolated from one another, so too can the organizations and institutions that seek to help them. The work of a middle judicatory can be severed from that of its denominational offices. Congregations can be isolated from church-related institutions that can help them, such as college, seminaries, hospitals, retreat centers, and others. Yet resources for pastoral leaders and congregations are necessary, and must be connected to one another in some sort of coherence if pastoral excellence is to be sustained over the long haul.
Part of the reason the Endowment has funded the SPE Coordination program at Duke, why they have provided peer groups meetings – why we are gathered here now – is to help break down this institutional isolation that contributes to the isolation of pastoral leaders. Conversely, by connecting resources and organizations and people, such as all of you represented here, a new ecology of institutions and leaders focused on pastoral leadership is growing organically. I know that your experience of peer group gatherings has helped you make connections that are bearing fruit.
I want to say this not simply organizationally, but theologically as well. All these new connections that we have made and are making with each other to provide resources for pastors, in a very real way, represent Resurrection. Did you know that we get the word resource from the same term in medieval English that was used for the Resurrection?
Re-Sourcing. Re-Turning to the Source of power. For Christians, the power of Resurrection. That’s the way I like to think of how your projects are providing resources for pastoral leaders. Every activity and peer group meeting, every program and written resource, every bit of it is unleashing the power of the Resurrection. Christ is Risen Indeed!
Excellent ministry must be properly resourced. And when it is, we experience Resurrecting Excellence!
John Wimmer is program director in the religion division of Lilly Endowment Inc
1Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: A Discussion of Christian Fellowship, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954. Translated and with an introduction by John W. Doberstein, pp. 19-20. (Inclusive language added.)
