Candidacy and the Church
As I’ve read through some of the posting here at presbymergent, one thread that seems to weave into much of the discussion is the concern that we’re not adequately preparing our candidates for ministry to engage with a more dynamic church milieu. We’re preparing them for the church that was, and not the church that is coming.
Honestly, as I’ve engaged with self-described emergents and others, I’ve found my seminary experience (and my undergraduate religion degree) to be invaluable. The engagement with the texts that a seminary education provides really does permit a tremendous amount of purchase with people who are coming to expect a deeper, more informed, and prayerful dialog with scripture. Knowledge of the traditions doesn’t hurt either.
The challenge, of course, is being intentional about translating those learnings into terms that are comprehensible to the layperson…but that task falls to the creativity of a given pastor or candidate.
Where I see a greater challenge facing the church is in the structure of our own call system. I managed, with the good grace of folks on my committee, to engage with the process in a way that was profoundly constructive. However, I do worry that the process now is…quite frankly…somewhat duplicative of an academic model for assessing performance. Cranking through the Ords is all well and good, but developing a new generation of leaders who know how to take the information they’ve learned and make it relevant seems..well..outside the scope of our current process.
For those who’ve been through the process recently, or work on CPM’s, how well do you think we’re doing in preparing our Inquirers and Candidates for 21st century ministry? Are there CPMs that are thinking intentionally about responding to this concern?
Comment by Andy James on 25 May 2007:
After two years post-ordination and one year on CPM, I think that most CPMs are not able to do the kind of intentional reflection on the process that is really needed and that David is suggesting here. In my year on CPM, the biggest struggle I have seen is just to get people through the process — to make enough time to see everyone who needs to be seen and to get to know them even a little. On top of that, many presbyteries probably don’t even recognize that the preparation process needs to change dramatically to respond to the changing church!
That said, I think that the CPM process as conceptualized is actually pretty flexible and fluid (with a few minor changes, of course). However, the concept is rarely the reality. Most inquirers and candidates have multiple liaisons (if they have one at all!), so the kinds of relationships suggested by the process aren’t really developed. On top of that, all the hoops involved and the time it takes to go through them are no more helpful. We’re far too engrossed in checking things off the list (of over 50 independent steps!) that we miss the really important things in working with those preparing for ministry.
I’m not sure how we “fix” the problem… Maybe we just need to go back and re-read the rules, looking not so much at the letter of them but the spirit of them. Maybe we need to take the relationships in the process more seriously. Maybe we need to restructure the examination process to respond to the needs David mentioned. Do we need to start from scratch here? Absolutely not — we can learn from the collective wisdom of the centuries and maybe even from what we’re supposed to be doing now. However, there’s got to be a better way than the way things seem to happen nowadays.
Comment by mark hunt on 26 May 2007:
I have recently become chairman of CPM. For me, anyway, it is a big job just to keep up with all the folks under care and make sure they all get their “50 checks” as Andy put it. Developing meaningful relationships is a real challenge as our students are far flung at 7 seminaries and our committee personnel changes every year. There is little time for reflection. I’ll rotate off after another year…just about the time I’ll be getting this thing figured out…and that is frustrating to me and imho not a help to the big picture of preparing candidates well for the church.
Comment by Jan Edmiston on 26 May 2007:
I wonder if on-the-job-training is inevitable, that seminaries can’t train for “real life ministry.” Nevertheless, most seminarians seem to take more theology/Bible/history courses than practical ministry courses, and therefore miss out on some valuable training. (Or possibly, the practical ministry courses are so weak, as they were when I was in seminary, people don’t bother.)
People called into parish ministry need leadership/organizational management classes IMHO. They need to read Paul Borden, Easum/Bandy, etc. in order to focus all the other courses into a practical “how to do ministry with this information” course of action.
Most practical courses trained me to be a chaplain rather than a missional minister.
Comment by Mark on 26 May 2007:
Jan, based on my experience, I agree with everything you said!
Comment by Andy James on 28 May 2007:
Jan and mark, I definitely agree. Seminary classes can’t prepare you for the everyday challenges of ministry. Some of the most useful times I remember from my classes were the occasional moments when professors who had served churches spoke about their experiences or we had panel discussions with other ministers about how to handle particular situations. We also had a series of conversations with the seminary president (a former pastor) about how she had approached moments in ministry. Most of these conversations were exactly that — conversations where we could talk about the possibilities and perils of particular situations that might come up from time to time. There were no explicit roadmaps on how to handle things, just some ideas about how we might handle the situation faithfully.
When you get down to it, that’s exactly what should be happening with members of congregations, too — having conversations about how to be faithful every day. So how can that be a more integral part of the training/education we offer future ministers?
Comment by David Williams on 29 May 2007:
In my experience, a practicum or congregational internship was absolutely invaluable. If we emphasized such experiences in the same way that CPE is often emphasized, I think that might help.
A challenge, though, is that while internships with experienced pastors give an excellent grounding in the church as it is, they’re rather less well suited to missional work and the embrace/development of new congregational forms.
How, for instance, would we train someone to establish a church that existed as a new media driven and buildingless network of small groups?
Comment by bobpearson on 31 May 2007:
I am an Elder at First Church in Bend, Oregon. We have hired an intern, a graduate of a seminary, for the summer to specificallly challenge us on the merging church. The job description is open ended. The goals are very soft. The expectations are very limited.
This did not go through CPM, it did not go through Session, much. It is a divergent process led by a few people who came up with the funds and hired an intern. It may even be extended in the same manner. After it is all done we may ask for forgiveness, but there was no way to truly ask for permission.
We hope at the end of the summer to just know more and have some more specific goals to work toward. And just maybe God will bring some people to us that want to continue to explore this new emerging church that wants to be relevant, to be authentic, to be engaged in the community and to be manifesting the Kingdom in ways that make people look up and wonder if all Jesus said could all be posssible.
We will continue to update on our progress, when we figure out what it looks like. But there is no process in the Presbyterian Church that we know of to support what we are trying to do.
If we do not continue to employ this intern, I think he might make a great emerging church planter in another area.