By Richard L. van Houten
(First appeared in the December 2003 issue of The Reformed
Ecumenical Council Focus.)
As I travel for my work for the Reformed Ecumenical Council, I
have been trying to observe what it means to be a pastor in our
thirty-nine member denominations. I do this as an outsider, since
I am not a pastor myself, nor do I get a very intensive look at
any one place. Still, over the last 16 years, I have met and listened
to pastors in many different situations.
Even the official leaders of the REC member churches are mostly
pastors whom their peers have recognized.
The challenges these pastors face are many. When I observe my
own pastor, I see that he continues to preach, teach, visit the
sick and counsel the troubled. So, one could say his work is the
same as it was a decade ago. Yet, a decade ago, he was a pastor
with two part-time, unordained assistants. Today, he has to supervise
a staff of eight persons, four full-time and four part-time, one
ordained. Multiple new programs run by the members of the church
require some attention or awareness. We probably have more than
30 small group efforts at both nurturing ministries and outreach
ministries. Three new full-time interns or residents are working
with us under a special grant. I am sure our pastor never imagined
these might be his responsibilities when he started his seminary
training.
It is obvious to everyone that change is a feature of modern life.
In modern corporations, for example, analysts suggest that the corporation
has to reorganize or restructure every 18 months to stay competitive.
The jobs we have in the modern world change, so that about 25% of
the work we do every year is new work. In our world, we must be
adaptable, learning new situations and tasks continually.
That is a description of American society, and it probably true
of several regions and cultures where our members are found. What
about the other places where our members are found? I usually describe
the REC today as having 70% of our member churches in the Third
World. Of the ten million believers who worship in our member denominations,
80% of those are in the Third World. Does change happen as fast
there? Are the pastoral challenges different?
On one level, they certainly are different. When I visit our members,
I like to ask local pastors what their greatest pastoral challenge
is. In the third-world churches, the most frequent answer has been
"Poverty." Pastors have a challenge dealing with the daily
struggles for survival among their members. In my 16 years with
the REC, the outlook has not improved much in many places, and in
a few it has become worse. In some places, HIV/AIDS has made poverty
worse. Not only do families have to deal with illness, they have
to deal with the loss of income, and with a surge in orphans. Pastors'
families are affected, too. It is more frequent now that I meet
a pastor's family and am introduced to his (or her) children, plus
a few more children who are living in the household. In Africa that
is not a new tradition, but it may be more common now than a decade
ago.
On the other hand, all of our third-world members are at least
on the fringes--and some fully in the middle--of modernization.
That is, their societies are changing from traditional agricultural
subsistence societies to ones characterized by greater social mobility,
greater variety of jobs, goods and services, and above all, greater
choice. So, where I least expect it, the answer to my question about
the greatest pastoral challenge frequently is "drugs"
or youth conduct. In my visit to Nigeria a few months ago, church
leaders were identifying urbanization as an issue. When youth moved
to the city and experienced the choices of living alone, finding
a job, and getting their own food, they would no longer listen to
their parents. "Well, welcome to the modern world," I
thought. Along with telephones, television and automobiles comes
fragmentation of community life. I do not think modernization is
bad. It will bring some improvement in quality of life, but it is
a mixed blessing.
This challenge is one reason the REC has become involved in leadership
development. We do not have well-developed programs yet, but we
have made a start toward encouraging each other to think together
about how we can meet the challenge of leadership. This short essay
is part of our process of thinking together.
I have seen pastors who have done some creative and innovative
responses to the changes. In the same visit to Nigeria that I just
mentioned, I spent some time with a local pastor who clearly identified
his community as one in transition. From an outlying town, it had
become a stopover point for internal migration of rural people to
the cities. Having identified that, he was working hard to build
a team of leaders in his church who understood that, who could help
people on arrival and on departure.
There is another response that I think is less helpful. Many have
nurtured a hope that more theological education is the answer for
them. I get frequent letters from pastors in the middle of their
career who want to get a Master's degree. Could I help them, they
ask? The right kind of theological education is important, and theological
education should be equipping pastors in every church with the capacity
to adapt and change. But it is an impossible dream to think that
every pastor in our struggling churches could take a year or two
or three in midcareer to go back to school. Morever, the theological
education these hopeful applicants often have in mind is something
abstract. They are searching for a new course, a way out of the
confusing or seemingly hopeless situation they feel stuck with.
I doubt that more study alone will increase their pastoral effectiveness.
So we search continually for alternatives--something shorter, something
stimulating, something useful.
Recently, I came across something going on in my own denomination,
the Christian Reformed Church in North America, a program called
Sustaining Pastoral Excellence, which I thought might be adaptable
for other places. At first, I thought it was too American to be
helpful. It is a funded program based on a grant from the Lilly
Endowment. Pastors in the CRCNA may apply to the denomination for
money to run a project as described by the program. However, as
I dug a little deeper, I found a couple of things that I thought
could be done without funding. The ideas could spark adaptations
in other places. So I thought I would share them here.
The CRCNA described the motivation for its program by asking whether
its pastors can sustain a healthy spiritual life, one "that
includes a deep, authentic relationship with God--one marked by
prayer, humility, godliness, and the fruits of the Spirit . . ."
The program description noted the challenges of greater demands
on a pastor's time, changing technology, an increasing focus on
managerial activities, so that spiritual health might be lost. It
also noted that pastors face growing isolation "as congregations
become less denominationally and regionally focused and more congregationally
oriented. As a result, their relationships with other pastors are
weaker, and they lose one natural system of spiritual support and
nurture--their fellow pastors."
I see these challenges in the life of my own congregation, although
they are not the same around the world. Technology, for example,
is not a problem yet for the Nigerian pastor I mentioned, and I
suspect that congregationalism is not a very large problem for him--yet!
However, urban churches, as they grow and become wealthier than
their rural counterparts, fall more quickly into this condition.
Pastoral Intelligence
The people who want more theological education to meet pastoral
challenges often do so because they think intelligence is academic
or intellectual in nature. Our societies reinforce that assessment,
and academic degrees often give us greater social status and recognition.
At the same time, we recognize that there are other skills in life.
For example, we all recognize that some persons have high mechanical
aptitude. Some people learn quickly how machines work. Based on
a combination of experience, training and intuition, they can quickly
diagnose and repair a malfunctioning engine. We also recognize high
organization abilities and clerical skills in people who can make
order out of a paperwork nightmare, or make a group of people into
a team working well together. We know others have artistic capacities
that make someone like me feel deaf and dumb. However, we have not
traditionally used the word intelligence to describe these capacities.
Instead, intelligence usually means our capacity to distinguish
differences theoretically (analysis) and create meaningful theoretical
models, plans, and groupings (synthesis).
In 1997, Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence caused a stir
by arguing that our emotional life needs the same kind of attention
as our intellectual life. We can measure, analyze, and improve the
way we deal with life emotionally. Besides IQ, our intelligence
quotient, Goleman proposed an EQ, an emotional quotient. Everyone
struggles with emotions and drives that are sometimes at odds with
our rational assessments. So, it is worth our time to figure out
how we are constructed emotionally, and to give value to people
who have a high EQ.
The CRCNA program built on this concept by identifying "pastoral
intelligence" as an added quality in the area of emotional
intelligence. Here is how they described it:
Today more than ever, pastors need emotional and interpersonal
intelligence. This includes managing their own emotions, motivating
themselves, recognizing emotions in others and responding appropriately,
handling relationships, controlling impulses, demonstrating empathy,
listening actively, and dealing constructively with conflict . .
.
In addition to emotional intelligence and relational skills, pastoral
intelligence includes a well-integrated pastoral identity manifested
in humility, honesty, a servant attitude, boldness to proclaim the
truth combined with graciousness in proclaiming that truth, and
an ability to communicate sensitively while moving people to spiritual
growth. This pastoral intelligence also manifests itself in pastors
understanding how congregational systems work and in realizing how
the pastor and others can give creative and effective leadership.
The CRCNA project identified four areas that they believed will
help the development of pastoral intelligence--leadership models,
accountability and mentoring.
Leadership models vary widely with culture, and we all usually
adopt leadership models from our own cultures. I remember a conversation
a decade ago with a Malawian pastor who described his role as an
alternate village chief, whereas in the CRCNA, our pastors sometimes
look and behave like chief executive officers. Still, I think it
is a universal value in all our cultures that pastors are called
to be servants--that is the meaning of minister. And all must learn
to deal with change. The CRCNA project described the adaptive leader
and the servant leader this way:
Churches today need pastors who can provide leadership that adapts
to constantly changing realities and the values that are attached
to those changes. Pastors must learn how to be adaptive leaders----how
to deal with conditions in which competing values exist and how
to create a holding environment in which the congregation can be
led to do the work of reconciling its values with current reality.
Pastors must be servant leaders. However, this does not mean servants
who are weak or passive, or those who do the work of the congregation
for it. Pastors must be strong enough to discern and implement needed
changes by giving the congregation space to make the changes, and
by shepherding and guiding them through the change process.
Accountability has been built into Reformed church structures.
In theory, at least, our pastors are under the supervision of our
local church councils. The elders in a Reformed church must protect
the integrity of the ministry of Word and Sacrament.
In addition, the CRCNA project suggested there should be accountability
between pastors from different congregations and in the denomination
as a whole. The system of classes and synods, or presbyteries and
assemblies, carries this role formally. These bodies supervise training
and examine the candidates for the ministry. However, they can also
acquire the feel of "policing" bodies, and not real bodies
of support. Accountability can come to mean only punishment and
not encouragement. Perhaps, the program suggested, "new models
must be created to facilitate the formation of accountability groups
and mentoring pairs."
Mentoring and Lifelong learning are the last two components of
the CRCNA project analysis. In the CRCNA there has already been
a mentoring system for new pastors, and this project expanded it.
It is well known, they said, that the first three years of a pastor's
working life are crucial to his or her formation. Not everything
can be taught in a seminary. Some of our skills are instead "caught"
by walking alongside an experienced pastor.
The core of the CRCNA project is based on a beautiful description
of the pastor's work: "humility, honesty, a servant attitude,
boldness to proclaim the truth combined with graciousness in proclaiming
that truth, and an ability to communicate sensitively while moving
people to spiritual growth." Of course, our pastors need theological
background. They assume that in this description. However, the additional
skills or capacities described here are also indispensable. A pastor
cannot work without them. Now, if a pastor falls short in some of
these areas, how can he or she improve? What happens if the seminary
or Bible school that trained the pastor never dealt with these questions?
Where can a pastor go for help?
The Program
The program for Sustaining Pastoral Excellence eventually developed
three specific tools to foster pastoral intelligence. They decided
to focus on enhancing the mentoring system, develop peer learning
groups, and creating special events for continuing education.
Can other churches learn from some of these discoveries? Can they
do it without the special funding? I think they could usefully adapt
elements from the program for other contexts.
First, in many places encouraging peer learning groups would not
be difficult. It likely occurs already in some informal ways, but
regional church bodies could form local groups that could meet regularly.
Such groups could choose their own focus. It could involve spiritual
deepening through prayer and worship. It might involve deeper awareness
of inter-ethnic or inter-tribal differences, or perhaps common work
on understanding social changes and trends.
I think we should not underestimate the collective wisdom in our
church's pastors. Of course, we know individual pastors who seem
to have more skills than others. But group dynamics often create
ideas that no one person could come up with. I suspect almost everyone
has been in a group discussion and suddenly come up with an idea
that we had never thought of before. We would not have thought of
it if we stayed at home. It is something stimulated by the group
interaction. Peer learning groups will uncover hidden qualities
in each member, and groups will do more together than they could
accomplish working alone.
Peer learning groups also can be accountability groups. If a group
agrees, for example, to try some new practice to increase stewardship
or to increase the effectiveness of youth ministries, reporting
to each other will make them accountable. Even the following of
a story that produced a prayer request will raise the pastoral care
accountability for the people in the group.
Second, every church can identify some way for mentoring. Those
individual pastors with greater skills can be used. It does not
take great funding if a church can match pastors who are not at
a great distance from one another. I am sure this occurs already
informally, but making clear arrangements in which a learning pastor
and a mentor must be accountable to each other could be helpful.
Calvin Theological Seminary will be developing a course on Sustaining
Pastoral Excellence, according the Kathleen Smith, Director of Continuing
Education. She recommended one other resource in this field, Pastor:
The Theology and Practice of Ordained Ministry, by William Willimon
(Abingdon Press, 2002), which the seminary will use for its course
textbook.
