The human community has an urgent need for skilled pastoral leadership.

There may be no more complex and interpersonally treacherous job than pastoring a faith community.

You are invited to join a program which convenes a diverse group of clergy who meet routinely to mutually enrich our pastoral perspectives and abilities.

Following a training event [the One-Day Workshop], attendees enter a Practice Group which meets twice a month in a two-hour session.  The Practice Group defines the session content through the issues arising for the members in their ministry setting or any other area of their lives.  The Practice Group uses the process and philosophy defined and experienced in the training to address the issues.

Some fundamental assumptions

• The nature of reality is relationship. Relationship defines the human experience.  The nature of a faith community is expressed
  • through safe and satisfying relationships between individuals [fellowship],
  • through the identity formed by being a community in relationship with other communities [mission], and
  • through depth of knowing as Created in relationship with Creator [spirituality].
• Humans have the capacity to be intentional about how we construct our relationships. The relational spaces we create are boundaries. Within these boundaries we construct diverse forms of relationship having different qualities.  It is healthy for us to construct relationships which help everyone experience the qualities they need.
• While we long for deep and harmonious relationships, the chaotic nature of reality produces turmoil. When we can
  • observe that conflict with clarity,
  • address it with balance and equity, and
  • fully resolve it, at least for ourselves, then we move towards that depth and harmony.

But we struggle.  And we long to become more adept.

Challenges of the pastoral role

Pastoring a faith community invites tensions that don’t exist in other professions:

• Authority: have a steady hand giving sure guidance to the congregation… while matching members’ expectations.
• Intimacy: be fully present to members when they are at their most raw and vulnerable… while never looking to members to meet your needs.
• Self-care: make time for yourself, your family, and your friends… without missing a meeting or a pastoral visit.
• Accountability: remain keenly aware of your various responsibilities and the roles the members expect you to fulfill… while members drop the ball on tasks they have volunteered for.

A compelling need:  to have strong faith communities as islands of sanity

It has always been urgent that humans gather into communities that help express and mediate our relationship with the divine… and there are new reasons for the urgency.  These new perspectives include:

Theological language: The language of our faith arises from a cosmology which is starkly at odds with the New Science.  Quantum mechanics, dark matter and dark energy, self-organizing systems, non-locality, and emergence are aspects of what is real that our theology either recoils from or crashes into and shatters.  We are not in a geo-centric universe, we observe evolution as the nature of creation, and we are experiencing rapid climate change that we have caused.  We need a theology that makes meaning of the world that is.

Need for Community: The social needs that were once the primary draw to membership in a faith community are now better met by other institutions.  We find community and relationships through Meetup and Match.com.  We offer service to others through Habitat or The Mission Continues.  But there are things we need that only faith communities provide… support for our awareness of the divine and help for us to align with a deeper purpose.

Justice Imperative: While the Realm of God has never been fully revealed, it seems our society is becoming less civil, less ethical, less rooted in universal care and concern.  We long to repair and rebuild our social institutions.  We need islands of sanity.  We need a way of being that addresses and repairs the polarities that are ripping us apart.  We need to not just keep the peace, but to be peace makers.

Integral Support for Pastoral Excellence

Integral: holding in a single framework of theory and practice all of the best perspectives on the task before us.

Support: not simply training.  This program is not about being told how you ought to behave.  It is discovering through the support of peers how you might be and then being held up as you learn to be that person.

Pastoral Excellence: using the challenges of our profession to energize us to hone our skills and deepen our wisdom.