The young woman told the story of her first call, as the associate pastor at a mid-sized church. She was learning a lot, starting to hit her stride, beginning to earn respect from the congregation. That’s about when the senior pastor started showing — sometimes in not-so-subtle ways — that he didn’t much appreciate her being in the limelight.
She began to wonder, “Is this really where God has called me to be?”
That experience, which the woman shared during a workshop recently, may not be all that unusual — first calls often bring some jolts, some rough roads along with the thrills and adventures.
And now some serious work is being done to help first-call pastors deal with the bumps — to put them in networks with mentors seasoned in the ministry and with peers who are also starting out; to give them a sounding board to figure out what’s typical and what can’t be tolerated; to help them develop spiritual disciplines that can last a lifetime.
Over the past half-dozen years, the Lilly Foundation has poured about $30 million into a range of transition-into-ministry programs, said David J. Wood, coordinator of such programs for The Fund for Theological Education. There are about 30 different programs, some based in congregations, some at seminaries, some a hybrid of approaches.
Without such transition programs, first-call pastors often feel isolated and become discouraged. Some leave the ministry within the first three to five years, or “become tainted by the experience for the rest of their ministry,” Wood said. So Lilly is funding such efforts to see what difference they can make.
“It’s a bet, if you will,” Wood said, “that if we support these young pastors in very appropriate and generous ways, the payoff for the church is going to be huge.”
Karen Chakoian, who’s pastor of First Church in Granville, Ohio, and has helped lead one of the groups, said: “I could see the usefulness of it right away. I wish I could have had something like this when I started out.”
In the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the major transition into ministry program is called the Company of New Pastors, which over the past several years has served about 220 students graduating from seminary and entering pastoral ministry in the denomination, and has received about $1.75 million in Lilly funding. Starting their last year in seminary, selected students are placed in groups, usually led by a professor. The groups meet regularly to pray and worship together, to study the meaning of the ordination vows and to consider how or where God may be calling them to serve.
When they graduate, the students stay in the program, but are placed into new groups — with each having 8 to 10 new pastors and being led by two experienced pastors, usually a man and a woman. The groups are intentionally mixed — with the new pastors serving in different parts of the country, coming from different seminaries, holding a range of theological views.
Spiritual practices play an important role in the program. The participants promise — no matter how busy they get — to pray for each other regularly and to daily study the same Scripture texts. They select certain books on theology to read, with each assigned to write a paper based on the readings. Twice a year they gather in person, worshiping morning, noon and night.
The purpose of such disciplines “is simply to sustain the soul,” says Sheldon Sorge, an associate with the PC(USA)’s Office of Theology and Worship who oversees the Company of New Pastors program.
“Good ministry is sustained among other things, but necessarily sustained, by a regular practice of personal prayer and engagement with Scripture,” Sorge said. “The dirty little secret of a lot of pastors is that the majority of their time with Scripture is spent in preparing sermons,” and most of their prayer is done in exercising pastoral care, not in nourishing their own spiritual lives.
Whit Malone is pastor of Springdale Church in Louisville and a mentor in the program, and he tries to pass on to his younger colleagues some of what he has learned in ministry. “If you’re not continuously in the Scriptures and you’re not continuously in prayer, you’re going to eventually get to a place where you don’t have anything to say” in sermons on Sunday, Malone said.
Chakoian said that when she follows a regular rhythm of prayer and Scripture reading she finds, “I use Scripture less, and I let Scripture use me . . . I’m not using the Scriptures to make my point. I’m in relationship with God through the Word, and it’s that relationship that shows up in my preaching.”
Sense of community
Another important component of the Company of New Pastors is the sense of community it builds — the chance it gives new pastors to bounce ideas off of one another in an atmosphere that is honest, respects confidentiality, and is removed from the congregation. Often first-call pastors feel isolated and disconnected; they need a support system as they struggle to fit in with other staff members and to grasp the culture of a particular church.
Sorge calls it “the renegotiation of that sense of call,” after the realities of life in a particular setting start to sink in — the kinds of things that make a pastor ask, God, is this where I’m supposed to be?
Sometimes, those spasms of uncertainty are just natural adjustments to something new; other times, they can be warning signs that something is seriously wrong.
The Company of New Pastors provides what some participants call “safe space” to sort it all out.
If a new pastor is having trouble, “an awful lot of folk don’t want to go to the presbytery,” Sorge said. “They don’t want to be perceived as being insecure … so they’re kind of left to themselves and their families to figure out. Do I really belong in this vocation? Are the problems that I’ve got here an indicator that something’s wrong with this church? Should I run away and find a better place? If I run away, am I running from something that I’m going to run into again? Is this something that I need to leave before its toxicity kills me? Or is this something I need to hang in with so that I can learn the necessary lessons?”
While most pastors report fairly high job satisfaction overall, some do leave parish ministry after their first call — frustrated and feeling burned out. Some from the Company of New Pastors credit that program with giving them the encouragement they needed to stick it out.
“It’s just so stressful,” said Wonjae Choi, a 2002 graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary and pastor of First Church in Clarks Summit, Pa. “Without having the support group, I’m not sure all of us would have survived it.”
It’s difficult because “these seminary students come out and they believe with all their hearts that God has called them to a certain church,” Malone said. “Then it blows up in their face. … That’s a crisis of faith.”
Despite differences in their theological views, the members walked with each other through job changes, joys and frustrations, mistakes and achievements, the births of children and other life changes. “Our relationships,” Malone said, “deepened every time” they met.
What can the church learn?
Inevitably, however, at some point the grant money runs out — a particular group comes to an end.
Many of the groups from Company of New Pastors stick together, even after their program has formally ended. Some stay in touch by phone and e-mail; some try to meet in person at least once every year or two as funds and time permit.
And some who’ve been involved with the program contend the broader church can learn lessons from this program about what pastors need to sustain their work. They would encourage congregations to understand the importance of giving pastors time and space (and even money) to meet regularly with a network of other pastors and to spend time in spiritual formation.
Jennifer Kemp, a solo pastor of a small congregation in Washington, Ill., said she’s learned from experience the importance of having regular contact with a group of peers in ministry who know her well, who hold her accountable, who pray for her and let her vent. As a student at Fuller seminary in California, she intentionally chose to live in community — sharing living arrangements with a small group committed to Christian ministry — to have that kind of support.
Now, in her first call, she meets periodically with that group from Fuller, with some close Christian women friends from college, and also with a group of pastors who are new to Great Rivers Presbytery. “There are always people outside of the congregation who know who I am, who know where I’m headed and where I need to be headed,” who can “listen for God’s call with me,” Kemp said.
Malone said he’d like to see presbyteries organize regional groups of pastors who would gather regularly for Bible study, prayer and theological reflection. “New pastors would find mentors there,” he said. “There would be a rhythm, a pattern.”
And Chakoian said her own ministry has been helped by the give-and-take with younger pastors — by being exposed to more styles of worship, by learning about new resources in marriage counseling, and especially by the support the group provided “during a very difficult time in our church. We lost an associate pastor to cancer,” fresh out of seminary, within the first six months of his call.
At a time of real pain, when she needed to be strong for her congregation, she deeply appreciated having a place where she could come, could be honest about the difficulties in her ministry, could feel God’s peace and strength shining into the darkness through the prayers of others.
