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There are several lifelong learning advantages unknown to clergy.
Completing a decade of service at the Center for Lifelong Learning allows one to pause, reflect, and take stock of work and accomplishments.
I’m fortunate to work in a context that highly values providing lifelong learning for clergy and laypersons.
Columbia Theological Seminary offers tangible and generous support for realizing lifelong learning as part of its educational mission to benefit hundreds of participants annually.
Providing quality, effective, and transformative lifelong learning is, as I put it, “protecting our investment” in the graduates we prepare for a life of ministry, helping mitigate in a small part the recidivism common in theological education (an estimated 50% of theological school graduates drop out of ministry in five years).
Recently, I was asked what lifelong learning needs to offer clergy and laypersons.
That’s a complex question.
Nevertheless, those needs are not difficult to identify for clergy and lay leaders in church and ministry.
The following items are what I think are the most pertinent lifelong learning advantages available to participants.
Finding joy in ministry amid its challenges is a critical sustaining orientation.
Ministry is hard and getting harder.
Yet, it remains one of the most fulfilling and meaningful of vocations.
One pastor said, “When it is good, it is very good. I would not want to do anything else.”
There’s one thing the practice of ministry can guarantee: failures along the way, from an unrealized vision, derailed plans, and forced terminations from a ministry.
However, failures are not evidence that one is not called to ministry. Nor should they long derail a faithful commitment to one’s calling, but to know that a network of support and encouragement is required.
Ministry leadership can be an isolating enterprise. Connecting with peers for mutual support, encouragement, challenge, accountability, and learning is a crucial resource for thriving in ministry. This is true throughout the vocational trajectory of one’s ministry.
Clergy leaders need a coherent set of principles or an overarching framework to make ethical decisions.
A theory of practice offers better ways of thinking about what they do, including reframing the problems they are trying to address.
With such a framework, seminary graduates can avoid going about their work and ministry in a fragmented, incohesive, trial-and-error manner.
A rigorous theory of practice goes beyond faddish, metaphorical, habitual, and uncritical ways of interpreting and addressing the challenges of ministry.
Own your agency: no one is more responsible for your growth, development, and response to God’s calling than you. This includes attention to one’s wholistic being:
Cultivating the capacity to understand and interpret the nature and functioning of the systems they minister.
“Our rule of thumb holds that EI [Emotional Intelligence] contributes 80 to 90 percent of the competencies that distinguish outstanding from average leaders—and sometimes more,” claimed Daniel Goleman in Primal Leadership (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002).
In addition to WHAT pastoral leaders need to learn, there is the important matter of HOW learning for the practice of ministry needs to be offered.
As I often say, “There’s the way we think people learn, then there’s the way people ACTUALLY learn.”
Here are some short insights for designing effective lifelong learning.
Israel Galindo is Associate Dean for Lifelong Learning at Columbia Theological Seminary.
