The Ministry Collaborative Podcast: Highlights from Our First Year
For many congregations, the counting season has begun. Boards and committees are trying to determine the dollar amount of incoming pledges, gifts, and commitments for 2022. This has never been an exact or scientific process, and the past two pandemic years have stirred in huge...
Nearly fifty years ago, Studs Terkel published his landmark oral history Working, in which he observed: “Most of us, like the assembly line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for people.” Jobs are not big enough for...
During a conversation with a cohort of working pastors this week, we posed the following question: What makes it hard for you to go deeper with your leadership circle? What stands in the way of ‘digging a deeper well’ with these crucial leaders? What we heard in...
Is this your sign-up sheet before—or after—it has been circulated? If you quickly shouted “Both!” you are not alone. Churches live on sign-up sheets. We have sign-up sheets for ushering, for assisting in the nursery, for providing sanctuary flowers, for helping prepare communion, for helping serve communion,...
Peter Drucker, the pioneering twentieth-century management consultant, famously told organizations and their leaders to “face reality.” Close on the heels of that, he would say, in effect, “what got us to today will not necessarily get us to tomorrow.” And, perhaps less famously, he would...
If we feed people spiritually, all the true institutional needs of a congregation will be taken care of. Three years ago this month, this sentence opened the first post of what would become Digging a Deeper Well, a blog dedicated to helping church boards think and...
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kbTbg00AJU[/embed] A happy discovery for congregations of all shapes and sizes in the first year of the pandemic was that new people sought them out for online worship, book discussions, and other activities. These people joined in for any number of online offerings, yet they remain...
If you have been stranded on a desert island since March of 2020, this headline might be jarring. But for the rest of us who have been marinating in pandemic stress, uncertainty, and anxiety, the fact that a major airline had to remind its crews...
New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells recently posted an article titled “What People Missed Most About Restaurants. (It Wasn’t the Food.).” The article’s subtitle serves up his main point: “it’s clear that the magic ingredient was the random thrill of seeing other people.” As...
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I was the Facilitator for the first New York City cohort, and at the time, I was working in theological education on Christian leadership formation, so it seemed like a natural fit. What I discovered, though, was something quite different from my “day job.” While the content and topics of the curriculum was a crucial part of our gatherings, it was the community of mutual care and support that made the content relevant, not the other way around. And second, having three years of strong bonding created an extraordinarily resilient community that, in turn, was able to build up resilience in our leaders. I think every member of my cohort went through significant seasons of both joy and heartache, professionally and vocationally, during our time. And the cohort, in turn, lived out the exhortation of Romans 12:15, “rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep,” with a depth and integrity that I have rarely experienced, and often doing both in the same gathering. It was a privilege and a blessing to me and my own faith and ministry to be their facilitator, and I am eternally grateful to the Ministry Collaborative for calling me to that work!”
“It was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. It was unique to my particular situation. It was needed, appreciated and healing. It was affirming. Most valuable was the unspoken understanding of what we all were facing in our ministry context. There was a sense that we could finish each other’s sentences. Solidarity and empathy.”
Graduation Date:
May 23, 2021
“It was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. It was unique to my particular situation. It was needed, appreciated and healing. It was affirming. Most valuable was the unspoken understanding of what we all were facing in our ministry context. There was a sense that we could finish each other’s sentences. Solidarity and empathy.”
Graduation Date:
May 23, 2021
“I truly looked forward to this every week. The discussion topics, activities, and small group conversations were all very rich and meaningful. This experience gave me space to reflect on what’s happening right now in my congregation and community. It helped me to think about what might be next in my own ministry. It offered some very concrete ways I might work on equipping leaders in my congregation. I really enjoyed meeting colleagues from different places, denominations, and contexts–and learning from their experiences and reflections. I also appreciated hearing further conversation and reinforcement in the podcasts.”
Graduation Date:
July 14, 2021
“The experience was, in one word, enriching. It was timely as well. I was at a critical point in my own ministry and this literally breathed life back into me. The time went by so fast that I didn’t even realize two months had passed. To be able to share that type of camaraderie with other preachers, and realize that my struggles are not isolated, was liberating.”
Graduation Date:
March 18, 2021
“It was great to find confirmation and affirmation of my ministry through the voices of other pastors. I particularly enjoyed the focused time on talking about each of us as individuals and pastors, and not so much on what our churches look like.”
Graduation Date:
January 31st, 2020