3MMM | Best of 2025 and Anticipating 2026

Best of practice in 2025

This morning, on the fifth day of Christmas, we want to share some of our best from 2025 and anticipate 2026. So we are looking back to what landed most often with our readers last year. And you can also find out what to expect in the coming year.

Last year we brought you interviews and conversations to inform and inspire your practice of ministry. This is just what my team and I have been doing for seven years. I can hardly believe it! Feels like the blink of an eye.

How do you juggle all that ministry, teaching, or writing holds for you? Perhaps the practice of ministry takes the form of congregational leadership, preaching, and pastoral care. Or maybe it takes the form of writing and publishing books, articles, and blogs. Or possibly it takes the form of teaching, presenting, and mentoring. Whatever practice(s) you are devoted to, we thank you for following along with us and prioritizing your own learning and growth as part of the Three Minute Ministry Mentor community. Each of these practices – ministry, teaching, writing, and mentoring – take serious powers of juggling the many challenges and opportunities that come your way.

To meet you in the midst of your work, we have been creating and sharing more than 265 weekly episodes of 3MMM across seven years. We work to accompany, inspire, encourage, and inform your vocation and practice of ministry. I want what we share to be part of cultivating your pastoral imagination.

Research-Based Insights for Practice

Many of the insights and wisdom shared in 3MMM posts and newsletters come from my research in the Learning Pastoral Imagination Project (and related studies of ministry). With each episode I’ve tried to come alongside you, offer you questions to provoke your thinking, point to resources that can deepen your practice, and share ideas to help you make more of your spiritual practices of writing, ministry, teaching, and mentoring. It has been such a joy across seven years curating new material weekly to support your practice.

Seasons One through Six

In Season One (2018-19), I shared 50 dimensions of learning in practice. Each week a new topic included stories, resources and questions to help you reflect on your own practice. Those first 50 episodes became the corpus of my book Pastoral Imagination.

Season Two (2020) brought us into shutdowns demanded Covid-19 and related social pandemics took us all to places ministry had never really gone before. I interviewed ministers and practical theologians, grief specialists, and activists that year to build on the themes of the first season and deepen their meaning and purpose in the face of uncharted territory. We also began to support pastors and professors in very concrete ways including the launch of the Writing Table.

In Season Three (2021) I launched the book Pastoral Imagination, and I continued studying the effects of the pandemics on congregational ministers, chaplains, seminarians, and activists. In Season Four (2022) I shared the results of the new research on what it means to be a pastor or volunteer lay leader in a season of unprecedented change. On September first 2022, I shared the #PandemicPastoring Report, which identifies a new era of ministry characterized by massive unresolved grief, rapidly changing concepts of ministry, burnout and overwhelm among leaders, newly hybrid and multi-access points of ministry, and a greater need for ministry as a spiritual practice than ever before.

In Seasons Five (2023) and Six (2024) we continued deepening the network of related concepts and wisdom related to the spiritual practices of ministry, writing, teaching, and mentoring.

Season Seven (2025)

in Season Seven I announced yet another new direction to our work. I received grant funding to revise and expand The State of Clergywomen in the US: A Statistical Report (2018). It launched just two months before 3MMM began. Now we come full circle and turn our study, interviews, conversations, and support to the question of how women and lgbtiq ministers are faring in 2025-26.

Most Visited Blogs and Videos of 2025

When we compiled what you read, listened, and engaged most, we saw that posts from various years topped the list in 2025. We believe this points to the evergreen character of learning in practice. Even when the world is challenging beyond belief, when ministry enters a new era, when our personal lives are demanding, the possibility of learning continues.

Most Watched Videos in 2025

The 2018 State of Clergywomen Report continues to be a highly visited and referenced resource – each year since publication. We’re excited to update the report in 2026! Other top blogs from this year include remembrances of dear colleagues and friends, posts for special events and seasons, and a wide range of topics to support ministry, writing, grief, creativity, and vocation.

Our Top Blog Posts of 2025

Most Played Podcasts of 2025

Anticipating 2026: Monday Mornings

Monday morning emails are continuing to come your way. Every week we will offer inspiration and information aimed toward improving your spiritual practices of ministry, writing, teaching and mentoring. We will also give sustained weekly attention to what is happening with the emerging State of Clergy Report. That work holds a place front-and-center with my attention. And it is my intention in 2026 to complete the report and also to find a home for my next book. Many other writing projects are also underway, and I will be sharing those with you as they come to life.

Each week on Mondays I look forward to supporting and nurturing your growth in your spiritual practice. And we will continue to offer live events, such as the upcoming Mini Retreats, January 5 and February 6. Being together, even in digital and hybrid spaces, where we prioritize community and real time shared practice (across many time zones), is one of the more nurturing forms of support we have identified through these seven years. I hope we will continue finding ways to connect with each other. When pastors, professors, writers, and poets, join each other to improve our practice, the results feel nearly miraculous.

Just in case you need some concrete evidence of how it all works, visit our new Writing Table Gallery. More than 20 major books, articles, and writing projects, as well as hundreds of sermons, blogs, and journal entries, have been supported by 3MMM and the Writing Table in the last five years.

Posted by:Eileen Campbell-Reed

+ Visiting Associate Professor at Union Theological Seminary + Co-director of the Learning Pastoral Imagination Project + Founder and host of Three Minute Ministry Mentor + Author of Pastoral Imagination: Bringing the Practice of Ministry to Life