Loren B. Mead
Morehouse Publishing, 144 pages
When I sat down to eat with Loren Mead several months ago, I excitedly told him that my dream in life was to grow up to do what he did at the Alban Institute. I was surprised at his chuckle and quick, knowing response: “Well, I would recommend that you don’t do that. At least not the way I did it.” He then handed me the story of how he began the modern congregational consulting movement and why.
“The Parish Is the Issue” reads like the weaving together of a spiritual memoir and a history book. Mead begins with his sense of call to ministry and the experience of pastoring rural and collegiate churches. Anyone who has served on a church’s governing board or attempted pastoral leadership can instantly relate to Mead’s story. Reflecting on a redesign and eventual failure for his church’s governance structure, he writes: “But the darned people didn’t want to work in the perfect structure I had developed. … I think it took me three years to realize it didn’t work.”
Mead’s humility provides the accessibility one needs to follow his story from his early days leading Project Test Pattern (an Episcopalian effort to train pastors at a conference and then send them back to create change in their parishes) to gathering the likes of Ed White from the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and Tilden Edwards of the Mid-Atlantic Ecumenical Training Institute to form the Alban Institute.
From start to finish, one theme is quite clear: Congregational consulting is not an easy way to make a living. Although Mead launched Project Test Pattern under the auspices of the Episcopalian bankroll, Alban constantly struggled to maintain a balanced budget. Eighteen days after he put up the first Institute sign, Alban was rejected for a grant by a foundation, was $3,000 in debt and felt ready to close their doors. At one particularly gripping moment in the narrative, Mead makes a call to a former consultant friend and Roman Catholic lay leader he calls Mac who was working for NASA in Houston. After hearing about Mead’s financial struggles, Mac sends him a check for $7,500, arguably making a lay scientist responsible for most of the ecclesial-organizational knowledge we possess today.
There are plenty of lessons here to be learned while witnessing the rise and fall of Alban (whose 2014 shutter is never mentioned but foreshadowed), including the need to break down denominational silos and the roots of interim ministry (never intended for the prolific use seen in our contemporary polity). Yet the book’s most enlightening revelation is the shift that started the whole consulting movement: It’s not about the pastors; it’s about the parish. Mead makes the transition “from ‘leadership development for mission’ to ‘organizational development for mission’” that we haven’t quite grasped in our pastor-as-savior practices. The sooner mainliners can focus our resources on training all inputs into the system, not just the pastors, the more quickly we’ll be able to address the monumental challenges we face.
For those consultants in line to take up the mantle of refining Mead’s “operational theology,” this book is required reading. For most ministry leaders, it’s a walking stick from a humble fellow sojourner to whom we owe a great debt of gratitude.
Eric Peltz is associate pastor of Chevy Chase Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C.
