Part 10 of 21...
Dr. Weems asks:
Can we shift our attention from a few ineffective clergy to the many faithful pastors who desperately need help in becoming fruitful?
Dr. Weems asks this in the backdrop of two bodies of research. The State of the Church Report on pages 10 and 11 reflects that those participating in the study, both laity and clergy, are not completely confident that clergy have received excellent training, or that they are appointed appropriately, or that they are well supervised. If you add the "agree somewhat" stats to the "strongly agree" the picture looks a little better, bringing the percentages between 51 and 78 depending on who is being asked which question (laity or clergy).
But Dr. Weems rightly notes that these are not very helpful questions to ask if what we're really concerned about is effective clergy leadership. For Weems, his own research had driven him to ask Wesley's historical questions: 1) Is there faith? 2) Are there gifts? and [especially] 3) Are there fruits? And from there, what he really hopes we may focus on is supporting fruitful clergy leadership.
If what we are hoping for is a UM Missional Future, what sort of fruits would we expect to see from effective clergy leadership?
The State of the Church study surveyed the following questions and received the following responses (combining strongly agree and somewhat agree responses):
Clergy
† 57 percent agree at least somewhat with the
statement “pastors demonstrate excellence
in teaching core United Methodist beliefs
and practices.”
† 62 percent believe strongly or somewhat
clergy lead vibrant and inspiring worship.
† 59 percent believe they demonstrate excellence
in equipping lay leaders to help with
spirituality of the church.
† 59 percent believe they demonstrate excellence
in helping the congregation to define
its primary task.
† 68 percent believe they demonstrate excellence
in recruiting/engaging lay volunteers.
† 71 percent believe they demonstrate excellence
in organizing/managing the work of
the church.
Laity
† 61 percent agree at least somewhat with the
statement “pastors demonstrate excellence
in teaching core United Methodist beliefs
and practices.”
† 68 percent believe strongly or somewhat that
pastors lead vibrant and inspiring worship.
† 64 percent believe pastors demonstrate
excellence in equipping lay leaders to help
with spirituality of the church.
† 62 percent believe pastors demonstrate
excellence in helping the congregation to
define its primary task.
† 69 percent believe pastors demonstrate excellence
in recruiting/engaging lay volunteers.
† 65 percent believe pastors demonstrate
excellence in organizing/managing the
work of the church.
So what was being measured for signs of fruit?
Teaching core UM beliefs and practices, leading vibrant and inspiring worship, equipping lay leaders to help with spirituality of the church (whatever that means!), helping the congregation define its primary task, recruiting volunteers, and organizational management.
Uh, any of those missional up there? Per se, at least?
MAYBE teaching core UM beliefs and practices IF those core practices include something like basic missional units (small groups) where people function in accountability to something like the General Rules.
But does it take clergy to lead worship?
Is it the sole role of clergy or even a primary one to equip laity to help out? Isn't that sort of begging the question of where the ministry lies?
Are the clergy the only or even the primary vision keepers if a congregation is missional in its DNA?
Is missional pastoral effectiveness measured by how many people you can get out for the rummage sale? Or how well the investment portfolio is managed this year?
If that's the fruit we're looking for, and that's the fruit we're training and supervising for, well, the survey says we're more or less getting that at about a D- average level (on a generous grading scale with a curve).
Maybe the questions are the problem. Except for one thing-- these questions really DO represent how both laity and clergy are expecting clergy to provide pastoral leadership, and we really do train and supervise to get these outcomes.
We need a very different paradigm for a UM Missional Future.
Let's start by admitting the idea that any one person can do all of these things well-- even these things-- is rather more than reasonable to expect. Alan Hirsch notes in his book The Forgotten Ways (and on his blog of the same name) that there are biblically at least five major different gifts for leadership, and that these gifts are not usually all present in one person, or even two or three. His sense is you may need five or more people to form the core leadership structure of a congregation to live this out fully. He labels them as Apostleship, Prophecy, Evangelism, Shepherding and Teaching. I commend the book and the blog, and that if you haven't explored the APEST model he describes, you give it some serious thought and prayer.
I've noted in an earlier post on this blog, Methodism and the Mistake of the Solo Pastor, how early Methodism, to which John Wesley was referring with his questions about faith, gifts, and fruit, did not fall into this trap of training leaders or shepherds for small groups or whatever to be omni-gurus of all forms of Christian leadership, because in fact every Methodist would have had in effect at least three or four pastors-- the leader of the class meeting, the leader of the society of which the class meeting was part, perhaps the leader of a band (if one chose to join such a group), and one's local parish pastor/vicar/priest or staff of pastors or priests, depending on where one was. Each of these "pastors" had a different role in leadership for the people called Methodist, and none was really trying to do what the others did.
The point: We do know in our history, our spiritual DNA, as it were, how to structure and evaluate pastoral ministry differently than we are doing right now, which is far more based on current business models (pastor as CEO), university models (pastor as theological expert), and motivational models (pastor as winning worship leader)-- but all in one (which NONE of these models tries to pull off in the secular world!)-- as well as more attractional and institutional rather than missional models of what Christian discipleship and community life can be organized to do and be.
And another point: As one of the participants in emergingumc: a gathering noted, if we actually begin to live clergy life this way, it's not so clear that we could expect or be given the kinds of institutional supports we currently enjoy.
If we take these inputs seriously-- the non-missional criteria by which we currently form and evaluate pastors, what Wesleyan missional metrics look like (spiritual impression and community impact), the kind of gift-based approach suggested by Alan Hirsch and others in the emerging missional church, and if we take seriously that the basic missional unit is NOT a local congregation, but rather that the congregation represents a NETWORKING of those basic missional units, which are something rather more like class meetings (to follow the early Methodist model)-- where might we go instead?
I think... to a substantially messier, but much more missional future.
What do you think?
Peace and all good this Christmastide...
Taylor Burton-Edwards