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Experience the support of the judicatory.
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Enter the Supportive framework of a colleague group
composed of a colleague leader and three or more other
persons during their period of adjustment to new roles
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Discover the value of colleague group interaction as part
of a continuing support system.
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Develop early the practical knowledge that preparation for
ministry is a continuing process.
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Receive help in identifying and dealing with a
changed role in the church from member or student to
salaried leader.
Rationale for the Colleague
Program
Most persons assuming new roles in
ministry enter their first call or assignment and acquit
themselves faithfully and creditably in that ministry.
Nevertheless, most such leaders can recall, from their own
early days in ministry, things it would have been helpful
to know, difficulties they might have avoided, and ways of
handling matters that could have made their transition
into ministry more effective and less stressful.
According to two ecumenical agencies
concerned with ministry, much of the stress of the early
years of ministry arises from lack of clarity about one’s
role. Coming to a clear understanding of their role is one
of the chief tasks of persons new in ministry. Role
confusion in ministry arises from three main sources: role
ambiguity, role conflict, and role overload.
Role ambiguity
An unavoidable feature of the early
years of ministry, role ambiguity has to do with
confusion within the new minister's own perception of the
role he or she should be filling in ministry. The mental
picture probably mixes experience of ministry as a child
with that of a growing young person, adding college and
seminary experiences and stories of what others have seen
in ministry-all of these models competing for place in
that person's image of ministry.
Further, the role depends in part on
the setting in which ministry is offered. None of the
competing models exactly matches the setting into which
this person is now entering. Yet there persists the
unexamined assumption that one should achieve the same
results as others, no matter how different the
circumstances.
Role conflict
When all of the competing
expectations of parishioners become clear, role
conflict occurs. Every parishioner has a different set
of priorities for the pastor or other salaried church
worker. This confusion of expectations from the outside
thus is added to the conflicting pressures already
embedded in the new minister's mind.
Role overload
The result of these competing models
of ministry impinging on the church professional who not
only wants to do it all, but wants to modify it to fit his
or her current assignment, as well, is role overload.
Clearly, no one person can do all that this combination of
internal and external urgings demands.
It is probably unfair to expect
those who prepare persons for ministry to prevent
ministers from feeling this kind of stress. It is
virtually impossible to learn how to manage the
ministerial role in an academic setting. Seminary or
graduate education offer an intellectual framework and an
understanding of why role confusion occurs, but one cannot
truly learn how to manage time and energy until one is
already in the role, trying to balance the avalanche of
immediate demands and expectations.
Help in managing new roles
Preparing for ministry has something
in common with learning to swim. In a classroom setting
one can learn some things about the principles of
breathing and the variety of strokes, but one does not
learn to swim until one is personally and fully immersed
in the water, facing the desperate task of simultaneously
staying up and making headway in that chilly, wet
environment.
Similarly, certain things about
ministry can be learned only after the weight of that
authority has settled on one's shoulders. Internship or
field work provides an introduction to the experience, but
Alban Institute's Boundary Study found, working with newly
ordained clergy, that there was a quantum leap between
seminary internship and ordained pastor. Second-career
students, too, reported that all their years as a lay
volunteer in the church did not adequately prepare them
for the situation they faced following ordination.
Although many clergy and laity make
the unexamined assumption that at ordination (or its
professional equivalent) persons are now prepared for
ministry, in actual fact they have completed only the
academic portion of their work. What is now required is a
readiness to discover how to manage themselves in a
complex and demanding role. One of the most effective ways
of discovering that role is through disciplined
reflection, together with others in ministry, on their day
to day experiences, perplexities, and questions.
The Colleague Program is designed
for use by judicatories to supply that setting for
disciplined reflection as persons new in public ministry
search for greater clarity about their roles. It presents
an opportunity to achieve this clarity by entering into a
covenant with a group of others to embark on this
essential voyage of discovery in their continuing,
lifelong preparation for ministry.
Order from
ELCA Distribution Service -
Augsburg Fortress Publishers
426 South Fifth Street,
P.O. Box 1209,
Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209
(800) 328-4648 |
- Colleague
1 Ecumenical Program - Leader's Manual
Product Code: 69-2305
Colleague
1 Ecumenical Program - Administrator's Handbook
Product Code: 69-2306
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