Supporting pastors after the seminary
Pastors in rural and urban areas, in big churches and small ones, know all too well that this is a difficult time to be the church.
They yearn for the tools to fulfill their callings as both pastors and prophets – to nurture parishioners while also challenging our congregations to be faithful witnesses of Christ’s radically compassionate community.
Once pastors leave seminary, many experience both isolation and lower expectations. To have the courage to lead the church, our pastoral leaders need peers who are trustworthy and with whom they can share their own stories.
They are also hungry for ideas. They are hungry for what the pastor and writer Eugene Peterson calls “subversive imagination” to help them guide congregations through uncharted territory with theological depth and faithfulness.
To help today’s pastors, Memphis Theological Seminary has received a $1 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. to establish a Center for Pastoral Formation, Imagination and Leadership.
This center will better equip pastoral leaders in the field as well as students preparing for ministry to lead the church in the twenty first century.
The vision for the center sprang from meetings with over 70 pastoral leaders from a wide variety of ministry settings and denominations across the midsouth.
We asked what they need to thrive, not simply survive, in ministry. We asked what they need to lead the church to be the church – to be, in the words of Isaiah, “the repairers of the breech and the restorers of streets to live in.”
One of these pastors insisted that she needed ongoing Christian formation that “keeps the bar high.”
To the nodding heads of other pastoral leaders, she said that in many clergy covenant groups “we share the state of our souls” but don’t have a process for substantive theological reflection, nor for relating “our own narratives as disciples to our work in the parish.” She went on to say that most clergy support groups stay at the level of comfort unless something causes you “to invest more energy and expectation.”
MTS’s new Center for Pastoral Formation, Imagination, and Leadership will offer students at the seminary and pastoral leaders in the field the resources they need to thrive in ministry. We are committed to fostering an imagination and accountability for the challenges pastoral leaders are facing.
MTS has a long history of commitment to justice, including our history of being the first integrated institution of theological higher education in Memphis. With a student body that reflects racial, ethnic, geographic, and denominational diversity, the seminary models a church for the future that is inclusive, hospitable, and committed to a justice.
We are excited by the opportunities this Lilly Endowment grant affords us. It affirms the work we have been and are presently doing, while challenging us to do more – to reach beyond our walls to leaders in the field of ministry and to the congregations they are serving.
Rev. Billy Vaughan is faculty director of formation for ministry at Memphis Theological Seminary.