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Nurturing the health of the Body of
Christ through caring for its pastors.
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Visit our Website
to learn more about PPCN and our 9th Annual
Gathering
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Join these Judicatories
in Supporting PPCN
Mission
Salem
Savannah
Mid-Kentucky
Central Florida
Synod of Atlantic
Greater Atlanta
Philadelphia
Cherokee
Flint River
Northeast Georgia
Central Florida
Chicago
Check the
Website
for details on how to join.
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PPCN
Officers:
President:
Ken Waddell
Cherokee
Vice
President: Julie Johnson
Palo
Duro
Secretary:
Lou Snead
Mission
Treasurer:
Alan Baroody
Savannah
Editor:
Steve McCutchan
Salem
Members
At Large:
Carol
Allen, Chicago
Dan
Corll, Pittsburgh
Dave
Garnett, Tampa
Bay
Molly
Garnett, Tampa
Bay
Brenda
Jarvis, Detroit
Joe
Sandifer,Greater Atlanta
Denominational
Advisors:
Marcia Meyers,
Helen
Locklear
Board of Pensions
Barbara Kranendonk,
Career
& Personal Counseling Center,
FLorida
Tom
and Beth Bledsoe
Cherokee Presbytery
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Crisis As
Opportunity
You have read the statistics. You know that
the Board of Pension's study reports that
between 2002 and 2005, there have been 1,360
ordinations with an average of 340 per year.
The same study reports that in the same time
frame, over 402 ministers left the ministry,
which is over 100 per year. Whether pastoral
care is your official responsibility or
whether you just love the church, you feel
the tragedy of the fact that around 30% of
those being ordained leave the ministry
within the first five years. There are no
statistics about how many clergy feel a
sense of despair even as they continue to
serve their churches. Can this crisis also
be an opportunity?
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What
Presbyteries Can Do
The primary energy devoted to pastoral care
by the presbytery, of necessity, is expended
on the pastor in crisis. The hard-working
and productive pastors in our presbytery are
often left on their own. The result is that
many of our most successful leaders within
our churches feel a disconnect with the
presbytery.
Last year I had the
opportunity to visit a number of pastors as
a representative of Salem Presbytery. I did
not go to recruit them for some project or
because I knew that they were in crisis. We
had the opportunity to just talk over an
extended lunch.
Several things
stand out as I think about the conversations
that I had. The first is that there is a lot
of significant and meaningful ministry
taking place in our churches. I was
impressed with both its vitality and its
variety. It did not matter whether the
church saw themselves as liberal or
conservative.
The second
impression was the strong sense of
appreciation expressed by these pastors that
someone from presbytery wanted to hear about
their ministry. There was a hunger that many
of these pastors felt to be able to tell
their story to someone who appreciated the
challenges of ministry. Having someone
listen to your hopes and dreams can have an
energizing and healing effect on one's
spirit.
A simple strategy
for a presbytery staff would be to have each
member of the staff commit to making one
visit and three phone calls each week. While
such visits or calls should certainly be
open to hearing about the problems of
ministry, a major thrust of the
conversations would be to invite the clergy
to share one or two experiences that were
meaningful in the past couple of weeks and
perhaps a hope or dream for the future.
If the presbytery
staff deliberately chose to coordinate their
visits and calls to cover a representative
sample of the churches, they would discover
that by sharing with each other what they
had heard, every few weeks they would have a
fairly good picture of the significant
ministry that is taking place in the
presbytery. If examples of these positive
accomplishments were lifted up occasionally
in a presbytery meeting, the strong
leadership of the presbytery would be
affirmed
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9th
Annual National Gathering
October
13-16, 2008
Helping
Presbyteries Care for Clergy:
"Shifting
from Crisis Management to Prevention"
Presenters:
Ernesto Badillo
Barry Jackson
Marcia Myers
Pittsburgh
Theological Seminary
616 North Highland
Avenue
Pittsburgh
Pennsylvania
Online
Registration is available on our
website.
Early Bird discount if registered by August
31.
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What
Congregations Can Do
Ministering
to the Minister's
Spiritual Health
At first this may seem strange to think that
you must help your spiritual leaders with
their spiritual health but consider the
nature of contemporary ministry. In
preaching, teaching, and attending to the
sick, clergy are expected to provide
spiritual nurture for others. In addition
they are asked to administrate an
organization, in multiple staff
congregations to attend to staff needs, and
to represent the church in numerous public
ways.
Most spiritual
leaders suggest that authentic spiritual
expression must come from the fire within,
but when you are always providing for
others, it is easy to neglect the necessity
of tending to the fire within. Or, to use a
different analogy, consider the ministry to
be like breathing. We ask our spiritual
leaders to breathe the breath of the spirit
into us. Consider what happens if a person
only breathes out. Unless you take time to
also breathe in, you eventually run out of
life renewing breath.
If clergy are to
avoid becoming cynical or even angry at the
disappointments of ministry and avoid the
dangers of egotism that comes from public
praise, it is important that they develop a
discipline for attending to their own
spiritual life. Because your church is
affected by the vitality of your clergy's
spiritual life, it is important that church
leadership both encourage and protect the
time necessary for clergy to be open to the
movement of God in their own life.
Time, space, resources, and recognition of
the value of attending to the clergy's
personal spiritual needs are rarely part of
a church's program. A valuable task of
congregational leadership would be to
creatively brainstorm ways in which a
congregation might intentionally support
your staff in attending to their personal
spiritual needs.
When you come up
with some innovative ideas, send them to the
editor so that we might share them with the
whole church.
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What
Pastors Can Do
The Call of God
The call to ministry is a mysterious thing.
Consider the call of Abram and Sarai. First,
it didn't come until late in life. Second,
it entailed leaving behind all the framework
of security that they had built up in the
world: "Go from your country, and your
kindred, and your father's house . . ."
Third, it was rather open ended: "Go to
a land that I will show you."
While there were
some promises attached to the call, the main
one was the same one that God gave to Moses
and Jesus promised his disciples: "And
remember, I am with you always, to the end
of the age." As I mentioned in the
previous newsletter, a critical component of
remaining healthy in the ministry is
discovering the ways that you can stay in
touch with the source of that call.
As happened to most
biblical figures, there will be many
experiences that will cause you to question
the validity of your call. Sometimes being
faithful and being successful do not always
go hand in hand. At the same time, there is
no special merit in being a failure.
There is a double
challenge for the pastor. If you experience
failure, are you able to permit God to speak
a redeeming word through that experience?
Equally challenging, if you are experiencing
success, can you avoid being seduced by that
experience and turning a deaf ear to the God
who has called you?
Recently the Willow
Creek ministry invested in an independent
study of the validity of their ministry over
the past several years. From any worldly
standard, one could hardly conclude that
they had not been successful. Yet, when the
study came back, it concluded that in the
critical area of deepening the spiritual
life of their members, their ministry had
been a failure. You can learn more about
this amazing story on the Web.
The pastor, Bill Hybel, not
only released the story but vowed to learn
from their failures to improve their ministry.
Regardless of what one thinks of the Willow
Creek model, this is an instructive approach
to what can be perceived as a failure in the
midst of a worldly praise for their successes.
If God in Christ is
with us always in our call, then it is
critical that we remain open to the one who
calls us in both the good and the bad times.
Let me conclude with
a poem that I recently wrote about our call.
The
Call of God
The call of God
Discover how to trust intuition
to touch and be touched in ways that affirm
The sun shines, at first in life giving
warmth
and then in death dealing dryness
The storm batters human constructs
The voices of complaint are stronger than
the voice of call
Hear what God is saying
The mystery of the universe gives you a
mission
Feel ennobled, have a sense of purpose
Discover how to trust the call of God
(by Stephen
McCutchan)
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