I want to talk with you this week about teaching pastoral imagination. As we launch a new year of theological education in the US, I am hearing again: “pastors and ministers are not fully prepared for their work.” Recent studies of ministry preparation continue to replicate what studies now decades old warned: ministry preparation is inadequate.
More troubling, however, are the solutions offered by those studies, which are also inadequate. On first look, the remedies for ministry gaps seem obvious and helpful. But I believe it is worth taking a deeper look to explore how better responses might be possible.
One solution I recommend is to teach and foster the embodied, relational, emotional, spiritual, and integrative capacity called pastoral imagination. Fifteen years of studying how this capacity is learned and cultivated in practice helps me to help you reverse engineer significant ways of teaching for ministry preparation.
In this six-minute video I introduce ways to incorporate the concept and the research about pastoral imagination into your teaching.
Order your own exam copy of Pastoral Imagination: Bringing the Practice of Ministry to Life from Fortress Press (click the image below to visit Fortress and order your exam copy today).
Research
Many studies report on how ministers are not prepared for their work. I have conducted such studies, including the #PandemicPastoring Report published in 2022. The studies name skills pastors need, but do not have. They describe problems that arise, which clergy are not sure how to handle. They warn that ministers are on the verge of burnout. Like my own research, other studies name how the problems changed and amplified the challenges of ministry since 2020.
This is important information. It is research which uncovers significant gaps and needs.
One recent study conducted by the Lewis Center for Ministry Leadership interviewed 41 pastors from the Washington D.C area and found five big preparation gaps. The pastors reported feeling under-equipped in the following areas:
- Administration and management (including finances)
- Technology
- Soft skills for leadership
- Counseling and pastoral care
- Facilities management
These findings resonate with the interviews we’ve concluded in the Learning Pastoral Imagination Project for over 15 years. They also resonate with the findings of the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) which regularly studies seminary graduates.
What Causes These Gaps?
So we might wonder. Is the problem with the learners (seminary students becoming ministers)? The teachers? The schools? The churches? The denominations? Or the wider culture?
Yes.
There is culpability everywhere. The gaps in preparation constitute a complex problem in the ecology of ministry. We cannot hang the inadequacies on any one group.
This leads to another reality. Offering singular answers for these problems is insufficient to close the gaps.
Insufficient Solutions
Let’s consider a few of the typical solutions and their shortcomings. While we are exploring, we should keep in mind that an insufficient solution may a response to an incomplete understanding of the problem.
[1] The Denominational Solution
One solution studies offer consistently is to insist denominational bodies get involved in educating clergy.
For centuries denominational groups have been interested and invested in educating their own leaders. The oldest seminaries and divinity schools in the U.S. were born out of the vision of denominations and groups of churches who wanted to educate clergy.
For some new groups of Baptists and other free-church denominations, one of the main purposes in forming a denomination was to share in theological education. Because ministry education needs collective support and funding. And because educating clergy is something that churches on their own are less able to sustain. Higher liturgy churches like Catholics, Episcopalians, and Orthodox church traditions have a longer history of monasteries with a union of study and service adjacent to congregations. Certain kinds of Catholic education retain this model which resists over-professionalizing ministry to a degree.
Some Historical Factors
Ironically, the rise and popularizing of higher education among Protestant groups, which are the largest collection of churches and theological schools in the US, is a product of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. This kind of theological education is built on a belief that discrete knowledge is essential to learning or mastering any subject. That approach was at the same time a rejection of apprenticeship as a mode of teaching the practical wisdom required for ministry. The split from embodied, practical knowledge and narrow emphasis on cognition, logic and reasoning is embedded in most Protestant theological education in the US (and North America and western Europe).
Asking Protestant denominations to “get more involved” is in opposition to the historical division of labor between education and other denominational functions like lay education, missions, and administering the group’s polity and finances. This ask is also contrary to the late twentieth-century defunding by many US denominations of their theological schools.
While we can hope and ask that denominations become more involved in the education and support of clergy, and ask them to pay more careful attention to the skill-gaps and missing points of training, this is largely a wish for the past. The Lilly Endowment has been working to fund programs along these lines, but more seminary grants engage in the work than denominational grants. Of course, we see significant exceptions to this rule.
[2] The Seminary Solution
Another solution some studies suggest is for seminaries to offer more, better, and different courses.
This request comes at a time when seminaries are already shrinking the hours and courses required for a seminary degree. Fewer students are starting the basic ministry degree, the Master of Divinity. More students are opting for the briefer one- or two-year masters degrees.
Seminaries and divinity schools are increasingly asking faculty to take on administrative roles alongside their teaching. This means less time and energy for developing courses in management, finance, or pastoral care.
Asking institutions to change, solutions one and two, tends to ignore the multiple additional factors that are driving institutional decisions. Such drivers include the high cost of education, receding funds from denominations and churches, maxed-out human resources, and the academic guilds which retain outsized power to shape teachers and their teaching.
[3] The Pastor Solution
The third type of solution puts the onus on the students-becoming-ministers to get another degree (in business or counseling or finance) or to take on responsibility alone to learn what they need.
This adds more burden to already overwhelmed church leaders. Such a solution adds pressure to ministers to do this preparation on their own. However, demanding they learn an entire additional domain or simply ignoring any other possible solutions to the preparation gaps, are two extremes that don’t really help at all.
A Different Kind of Solution
Each of the common remedies – denomination, seminary, and pastor solutions – miss several significant facets of the practice of ministry itself. Let’s name them here. I have written about each one at length and I will point you to the places where you can read more, if you are curious. And I hope truly that you will take a deeper dive.
Pastoral Imagination
Most ministry preparation continues to lack a sufficiently complex understanding of how people learn, what sets them up for future learning, and how to support conditions that make that learning possible.
To state this in the positive, theological schools, churches, denominations, and students-becoming-ministers all benefit from a rich understanding of the embodied, relational, spiritual, knowledgeable, skillful, and integrated form of learning required for a complex practice like ministry. We call this rich improvisational capacity, pastoral imagination. It is a capacity only learned with time, mentors, feedback, missteps, everyday practice, and larger moments of crisis and clarity.
More than Skills
Focusing on skills alone will always leave a sense of deficit and failure because the complexity of a practice like ministry calls for a vast array of skills (more than a dozen major ones). Yet ironically skill alone will not suffice, and it leaves ministers searching for technical solutions to intractable human problems. In contrast, pastoral imagination invites a capacity for approaching new situations in an open-ended and flexible way.
More than Rules
Focusing on institutional responses tends to create solutions that are rule-based. They also try to solve all ministry gaps in a general way rather than using specific approaches. Yet pastors face situations which are unique and need to be approached on their own terms. Ministers need to learn to draw on everything they know. They also need to learn to call on mentors and peers for collaborative solutions. Pastors need to engender confidence and trust in the very people they lead to find shared, relational solutions. More rules cannot achieve this.
The institutional role of denominations and schools are better suited to focusing on creating conditions that allow for more learning of practical wisdom. Investing in peer groups and mentoring options are ways that denominations and schools can help close the gaps, recover apprenticeship, and foster communities of learners who borrow wisdom from each other.
More than Knowledge
Focusing on knowledge alone puts too much faith in cognition, logic, and rational solutions to human, emotional, and spiritual concerns. Knowledge acquisition without integrating knowledge use is hollow, and quickly forgotten. When we ask so what? How will this work? Where are the connections with God and each other? And why does this matter? What is the spiritual meaning? And how does this change us? Then our deep knowledge becomes integrated with life and faith and ministry.
Questions to Foster Pastoral Imagination
The five gaps found by the Lewis Center study look like technical problems in need of technical solutions, more knowledge, better skill, or more institutional resources. But seeing the problems on those terms, misses the ways that the gaps are also spiritual, relational, and emotional in character. To help us with the full range of the problems and wise solutions, we can ask ourselves some questions.
Did we teach those pastors…
- How to find what they need within their church or faith group?
- Where to focus and how to call people to their spiritual, shared, and holy purpose(s)?
- What collaboration with wider communities looks like?
- How prayer, discernment and rituals of worship are modes of pastoral leadership?
- How they might trust experience, time and the Spirit to shape them?
To be sure, more skill, knowledge, and resources will help close the gaps. However, when everyone in the ecology of ministry preparation focuses on teaching and nourishing the capacity of pastoral imagination, then we shift the paradigm to ministry as a spiritual practice rather than solely a professional one.
When we focus on teaching and learning pastoral imagination, we help churches, schools and denominations to major on creating conditions for learning. We help new ministers focus on integrating all aspects of what they know and can see in the situation to be part of their response.
Then the apparent gaps are not so much deficits as moments in a pastoral situation which call for more learning, engaging community, calling out gifts, and fostering a shared pastoral imagination in the communities who call us to lead.
More Ideas for Teaching Pastoral Imagination
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