Pastoral Imagination

Bringing the Practice of Ministry to Life

Eileen R. Campbell-Reed

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781506470061
• eBook ISBN: 9781506470085
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

In Pastoral Imagination: Bringing the Practice of Ministry to Life, Eileen R. Campbell-Reed informs and inspires the practice of ministry through slices of "on the ground" learning experienced by seminarians, pastors, activists, and chaplains and gathered from qualitative studies of ministry. Each of the fifty chapters explores a single concept through story, reflection, and provocative open-ended questions designed to spark conversation between ministers and mentors, among ministry peers, or for personal journal reflections. The book provides a framework for understanding ministry as an embodied, relational, integrative, and spiritual practice.

Pastoral Imagination is closely integrated with the author's Three Minute Ministry Mentor web resource, which introduces the topics in the book through brief video presentations. The book serves as a coaching guide and a ministry mentor in its own right by expanding on these topics through the author's reflections, observations, and questions. Addressing the importance of the practice of ministry, Campbell-Reed states: "Ministry itself, like most professions and complex practices, is dogged and driven by a rush to achieve. Yet to focus on achievement can be disastrous, especially if we skip over the steps for learning. To learn the practice of ministry--a multifaceted professional and spiritual practice--takes time and preparation, risk and responsibility, support and feedback."

The book can be used by individuals for personal growth; with groups in new-pastor retreats, CPE training programs, ministry peer groups, or supervision settings such as internship or field education; for devotional inspiration at staff meetings; and in seminary classrooms that prioritize teaching ministry as a practice.

50 Ministry Topics

1

Ministry as a Practice

Ministry is a verb: it is something people do. We can understand ministry as a practice that is social and communal, expressed within a historical tradition, embodied, relational, spiritual, and professional.

—Kathleen Cahalan, Introducing the Practice of Ministry

Stepping into that first hospital room as a CPE student. Getting that first call in the middle of the night to show up for a family whose father just died. Standing up to preach my first public sermon to fewer than a dozen people with a video camera at the back of the chapel broadcasting the service to patient rooms all over the hospital. Having to lead the hymns myself. Ugh.

Three years later. Sitting surrounded by boxes and to-do lists and Sunday coming at me like a freight train. Realizing there is a whole big thing the search committee forgot to tell me about my new ministry job: I need to design and direct a children’s camp for six churches next summer. Feeling the crush of exhausted volunteers who want my support and others who wish I would just take over their jobs. The unfilled roles in the church nursery. The policies that must be reevaluated. The children’s time, the newsletter article, and the pastoral prayer, all to be written over the next three days.

Seven years later. Prepping to preach on the first night as youth-camp pastor. Feeling the weight of expectation. Wondering if I can bring my best self to the hundreds of young people and their leaders. Doubting myself. Sitting in silence cross-legged on the dorm-style bed, hands resting on my knees, trying to let everything go into the vast presence of the holy. Breathing deeply to take in God’s mercy.

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Three beginning moments in ministry at three different seasons of my life: each one is fraught with expectation, a mix of anxiety and trust, the newness that is simultaneously exhilarating and overwhelming. In each of these moments, I was embarking on a new ministry, and while I could draw on past experiences, I was in every way a beginner each time.

Ministry itself, like most professions and complex practices, is dogged and driven by a rush to achieve. Yet to focus on achievement can be disastrous, especially if we skip over the steps for learning. To learn the practice of ministry—a multifaceted professional and spiritual practice—takes time and preparation, risk and responsibility, support and feedback.

When we build on prior experience to take on a new aspect of ministry, the practice as a whole expands and deepens. However, we cannot really avoid the beginner phase of learning something new.

Wherever you are on the journey of learning the practice of ministry—at the beginning, somewhere in the middle, or near the end—it can serve you well to pause and consider your own ministry as a practice learned over time and enter into a conversation with yourself and your colleagues, your peers and mentors, about how your learning is unfolding.

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Eventually, I stepped with confidence into the rooms of hospital patients and preached with less trepidation and more of a sense of delight. Over time, I managed the daily life of ministry with volunteers and projects, camps, fundraisers, and weekly worship. I grew and changed and matured. But I did not have the language to describe what was happening or how it worked. I did not really know what conditions would help me best grow or learn effectively.

Like many ministers in our time, I simply went to seminary, pressed hard to learn everything put in front of me, and hoped I would be ready for the work when it finally came. Like many women in the last fifty years, I had a clear calling and gifts but not a clear path to serve. After completing a unit of CPE, graduating from seminary, sending out stacks of résumés and letters, and interviewing with a dozen different churches and agencies, I received a call.

I was ready, right? But immediately upon arriving at the North Georgia church and starting to unpack, I saw how unready I was.

The problems were several. I did not know what I did not know. I had lots of ideas and the beginnings of a sense of my identity as a pastoral presence. I said to all who asked me why I did not stay in school for another graduate degree, “I want to know what I’ve learned in seminary all the way down.” I did not know for sure what knowing “all the way down” might look like or how it would come to pass. But I did have an inkling that it would take me out of my head full of ideas and into some kind of embodied and emotionally rich kind of knowing.

Perhaps what I lacked most in those years of CPE, congregational ministry, and even the summer of being a camp pastor was a framework that helped me see myself as learning a practice that would unfold and blossom over years. Long after these experiences, and in retrospect, I came to see how my ministry was indeed a practice and something I learned gradually with more and more experiences.

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After five and a half years of serving the congregation in North Georgia, with more learning than I could name or fully process, I returned to graduate school. While I was in the doctoral program at Vanderbilt, I learned about the “novice to expert” continuum of adult learning from the literature of pedagogy and psychology. However, it was not until I began my first academic job that I learned more fully about how this framework could be useful for understanding one’s growth in ministry practice.

Just a few months into my first full-time academic job, I found myself sitting in a large conference hall in Indianapolis. The room was filled with round tables. At each table sat groups of ministers from the newest and brightest to the wisest and most seasoned. We were meeting together to think about the transition from seminary into ministry.

The plenary session was led by senior nursing scholar Patricia Benner and my new research partner and practical theologian, Chris Scharen. They shared stories about becoming a nurse and becoming a pastor, respectively. Step by step, Benner and Scharen sketched out an arc of learning that moved from novice, through advanced beginner, to competency and proficiency, and finally to wise expert.1

As I witnessed the presentation, it welled up in me with clarity that until that moment, I had no such vision of ministry as a practice. Nor could I see how learning ministry might unfold over a time beyond seminary. The really stunning moment landed with a thud: my early years of ministry lacked any strong sense of support for this kind of learning in my congregation.

Don’t get me wrong—as far as first assignments for Baptist clergywomen in the South go, my call to North Georgia was a good one. And in those early years of ministry, I learned about reflecting theologically in the moment and on the fly. I witnessed my own gifts blooming, and I found some of my limits and those of others. I learned about leading people of all ages, recovering after letdowns, attending to grief, proclaiming good news, and navigating conflict.

All this was more than I could possibly have imagined on that first day of CPE or the day I stepped out of my car and surveyed the brick church surrounded by a Georgia cotton field three years later. It was more that I could have ever imagined sitting on the college dorm bed getting ready to preach to campers seven years after that. But when the thud of realization finally sounded fifteen years later, a lot of pieces of learning a practice began to fall together.

Nevertheless, I surely do wish that somewhere along the way someone might have suggested that each of these beginnings were truly beginnings and the learning was still yet to come. I wish someone might have shared a book like Kathleen Cahalan’s Introducing the Practice of Ministry. But it did not exist yet.

Fortunately, it does now, and the book brings to life many aspects of how ministry is indeed a practice, starting with a biblical framework for ministry rooted in the stories, actions, and words of Jesus. Cahalan articulates a theological foundation and vision for ministry as a gift coming from the “two hands of God,” one hand being the life of Jesus, the other hand being the charisms (gifts) of the Spirit.2 And she also draws on the novice-to-expert developmental framework as a process and pathway of learning ministry over time.3

Not only does Cahalan introduce ministry as a form of discipleship and leadership. She also develops multiple important aspects of Christian ministry. She says ministry as a practice is

• • made of intentional actions (but not all actions are practices) with human goods as the aim;
• • shaped in communities with shared traditions, meanings, and purposes;
• • expressed through identity, embodiment, knowledge, and convictions;
• • open to corruption, brokenness, and sin; and
• • expressed as a spiritual exercise, attending to God’s presence.4

Ministry as a practice is a complex and rich way to see your own beginnings, midpoints, and ends of learning and vocation. The framework and the many facets of practice are also an invitation for you to explore and understand your work in ministry.

Questions for Reflection and Conversation

Consider the following to guide your journaling or spark conversation with mentors and friends:

• • How can I see ministry not only as a matter of skills and knowledge or identity? How can I also see ministry as a practice?
• • How have my experiences so far changed how I understand and practice ministry?
• • What is still out on the horizon to be learned about bringing ministry to life?

Three Minute Ministry Mentor

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Christian Scharen
• Introduction
• 50 Ministry Topics
• Appendix: Questions for Redemptive Change
• Gratitude
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index