SPE Program Spotlight
For Minnesota Methodists, it’s Ministry Together
The Rev. Michelle Hargrave was just pulling off her mukluks, getting ready to go to bed that cold night last January in Duluth, Minn., when the telephone rang. It was 20 degrees below zero outside—the real 20 below, no wind chill—and she had been looking forward to putting on some warm clothes and crawling under the covers.
It was another United Methodist pastor on the phone, from Hibbing, about an hour-and-a-half drive north in good weather. A member of her Gateways pastor peer group, he said a teen-ager from his church had been injured playing in a youth hockey tournament on the north shore of Lake Superior and was now in an ambulance en route to the hospital in Duluth with a broken neck.
It would take hours for the Hibbing pastor to make the trip to Duluth in such treacherous weather. Could Hargrave go to the hospital and be with the boy and his family?
Of course, Hargrave replied, already pulling the mukluks back on. After adding the hat, heavy coat, muffler, gloves and other accoutrements of mid-winter Minnesota fashion, Hargrave headed out into the night and to the hospital.
“I’ve wondered ever since if that would have happened before we had the peer groups,” Hargrave says. “Would he have called me?”
As United Methodist pastors, she and the pastor in Hibbing might have called each other for help, but maybe not, she says. Especially if they didn’t know each other—which they didn’t before their peer group experience.
“But Jack and I knew each other from being in the peer group together, and that made a difference for both of us when he called,” says Hargrave. “And it made a difference when I got to the hospital because I could sit with that boy’s family and say, ‘I know your pastor. He’s taught me a lot. I know how he goes about ministry, and he’s somebody I know and respect.’”
That frozen, late-night hospital visit is one sign of a major cultural shift taking place in the Minnesota Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church, Hargrave and others say. Slowly, over the last eight years, United Methodist pastoral ministry in Minnesota has been changing from what was essentially a “solo practice” to a shared ministry, carried out in cooperation with others.
“It really is changing our pastors from feeling like they’re out there all alone,” says the Rev. Bill Mate, director of the conference’s Gateways program, a Sustaining Pastoral Excellence project funded by Lilly Endowment Inc. “Through the relationships made in our peer groups, they’re all learning that their problems are not unique, and that there are other pastors just down the road who can help.”
While isolation is often an inescapable fact of life for many pastors across the U.S. regardless of denomination, it had for many years been a particularly salient aspect of UMC ministry in Minnesota, says Mate. As you might have picked up listening to Prairie Home Companion, not a whole lot of Methodists live in Lake Wobegon. In a state where the religious landscape is overwhelmingly Lutheran and Catholic, being a Methodist pastor can be lonely, particularly in the state’s many small towns. Except in Minneapolis-St. Paul and a few other cities, Methodist churches are sparsely scattered across the state.
Back a generation or more ago, United Methodist pastors in Minnesota were truly on their own, rarely seeing each other or their district superintendents, says Mate. As recently as the early 1990s, many UMC pastors in the state strongly opposed a “clergy covenant” the bishop’s cabinet was proposing to help connect the conference’s pastors more closely.
“They said they didn’t want to be part of any covenant with other Methodist clergy and were interested only in serving their own congregations,” recalls the Rev. Duane Gebhardt, a retired UMC pastor and former district superintendent. “They said any vow to be in ministry together had been broken long ago. It broke my heart, quite frankly.”
But eight years ago, the conference began slowly chipping away at the problem when then-Bishop John Hopkins and his cabinet launched the Gateway peer groups and required all the state’s UMC pastors to participate. Though some progress was made, many pastors resented the groups, which they perceived as being “imposed from above,” says Mate. Requirements to track and report a variety of statistical information also undermined the group’s reception with many pastors.
Four years ago, however, the Gateway groups gained new life and momentum when the conference received an SPE grant from Lilly.
“We realized that the only way this was going to succeed was to change the Gateway program so that clergy were in control of their own groups and it would no longer be imposed from the top,” says Mate. “And that’s what we did. We dropped the data-reporting requirements and empowered clergy to be responsible for their own group and for deciding what they wanted to do.”
Under the program, the conference’s 372 pastors are organized in 36 Gateway groups, which each meet periodically throughout the year and in a three-day group retreat in the fall for worship and mutual learning. Originally organized by congregational size and location, the groups recently reorganized, self-selecting into one of three broad areas: holistic ministries (focusing on health and wholeness; professional development (focused on particular competencies and skills of ministry); or contextual ministry (focused on particular shared contexts, such as rural, urban, new churches, ethnic congregations or other contexts).
While not every pastor has as dramatic a story to share as Hargrave’s account of her late-night trip to the hospital, genuine change is taking place in the conference culture in ways large and small, Mate and others say. Even in the most isolated regions of the state, the far north woods along the Canadian border, UMC pastors and their congregations are rethinking and appreciating anew the connection that binds them together as United Methodists.
For example, says Mate, seven widely scattered churches in that northernmost region joined together and bought a large, beautiful worship candle, which they now rotate among the individual churches. For two weeks, the candle sits on the altar of one of the churches as a vivid reminder of the other six UMC congregations. Then, after two weeks, the pastor and a lay person drive to the next town, have lunch with the next pastor and a layperson from that church, and hand off the candle for the next two weeks, so on and so on.
“These are seven churches that have never done anything together, but in doing things as simple as sharing a candle, they are building relationships with each other and changing the way we do ministry,” says Mate.
Such cooperation is essential in pastoral ministry today, says the Rev. Judy Zabel, pastor of Advent UMC in Eagan, Minn., a suburb of St. Paul.
“Ministry is really hard at this time,” she says, “We’re all in a post-Christendom place and time and we’re all in uncharted waters. The stuff that worked 50 years ago isn’t working well now, and we’re all trying to figure out what the church needs to be for the 21st century.”
Being a pastor under such conditions, says Zabel, is enormously stressful and requires the support of other pastors
“I have seen real change taking place,” she says. “This has improved clergy morale and it has given pastors and laity hope. Now, we can learn from one another and find out together how to do ministry in new and creative ways.”
For the Rev. Jim Beard, pastor of Delano UMC in Delano, Minn., this new, more collaborative culture in United Methodist ministry in Minnesota is all he has ever known. Now in his eighth year as a pastor, he began in ministry just as the original Gateway groups were getting underway. The infusion of the Lilly grant, he said, pushed the program to a new level, allowing pastors to imagine whole new possibilities for working together.
He’s heard stories from older pastors about the days before the Gateway groups and the isolation and competitiveness that prevailed among UMC pastors and finds it all very foreign.
“Having never experienced that, it’s very hard for me to imagine,” he says. “I’m used to the connectedness of the system now. I came up in ministry with that sense of it being a shared journey, so I’m really surprised when I hear how it used to be.”
Even with all that the Gateways program has accomplished so far, much more could still be done, Beard says.
“For me, the dream is to take it a step further so that it’s not just collegial sharing and learning but sharing ministry, of actually pooling resources and doing ministry together,” he says “That’s my vision for what this could grow into.”
“I don’t want to be competing against you to build God’s Kingdom,” says Beard. “I want to work with you to build it. And I’ve found that to be the reality, here at least, in Minnesota, in the United Methodist Church connection.”
