"We Are In This Together" by Andrew Kort
When I was a solo pastor I learned to understand the "solo" aspect of that title. There were many times I was literally solo or alone-in the office, in ministry, and in worship or strategic planning. As someone with introverted leanings, I was often just fine with that solitude.
However, I quickly realized, and I still continue to realize, that no one in ministry is a lone ranger. We all need others in life, yes, but in ministry too. After all, didn't God create saying that it was not good for Adam to be alone? Didn't Jesus send the disciples out two by two?
My wife, Mihee, and I wrote in our book Yoked: Stories of a Clergy Couple in Marriage, Family, and Ministry about being "yoked" together. Among other things, for us being yoked together lightens the load as we share burdens. It binds us to each other and it keeps us together even in those moments when we are the last person the other wants to see. As the hymn proclaims, "Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love."
Of course, as we share in the book, being yoked is not always easy or fun. As someone once said, "If you want to learn about self-sacrifice, don't try asceticism. Try living with other people." We'd add try being in ministry with other people, too. But we believe that it is ultimately worth it.
In my current call, I have seen this played out as Mihee and I, and also my congregation, share in ministry with other faith communities in our city. We've learned that we need not all be redundant in our programing, but as the psalmist says, it is good and pleasant when brothers and sisters come together in unity.
So we've begun to share our spiritual meditation offerings with the other downtown congregations, and they in turn have shared theirs with us. Instead of all of us limping along with small turnout and worn out volunteers just so we can offer a Vacation Bible School too, we have joined together to create one that we share with our communities. Our campus ministry group serves a lunch for the homeless as a part of the Episcopal Church's ministry. In fact, our campus ministry is a shared venture with another Presbyterian Church in town. Our youth group occasionally meets with another one from down the street. Together we have brought in speakers and held workshops for the community with various congregations supporting the event is some way. Recently, we have been yoked together in a joint effort to work with the city to figure out the conundrum in our community that is downtown parking. Resources and energy seem to go a lot further when they are shared; at least, it often seems that way.
These are all ministries and programs that we could have done on our own, as a lone ranger sent out into the Wild West of our community to work for good and justice. But even the Lone Ranger did not go alone. Besides, we have found these ministries are done better and bear more good fruit when done together, yoked in ministry. These other congregations in town are not our competition with whom we fight over members and try to outdo each other with bigger and better packaged programming. Rather they are our ministry partners.
Read more »Andrew Kort: Yoked — We are in this together
When I was a solo pastor I learned to understand the “solo” aspect of that title. There were many times I was literally solo or alone—in the office, in ministry, and in worship or strategic planning. As someone with introverted leanings, I was often just fine with that solitude.
However, I quickly realized, and I still continue to realize, that no one in ministry is a lone ranger. We all need others in life, yes, but in ministry too. After all, didn’t God create saying that it was not good for Adam to be alone? Didn’t Jesus send the disciples out two by two?
My wife, Mihee, and I wrote in our book Yoked: Stories of a Clergy Couple in Marriage, Family, and Ministry about being “yoked” together. Among other things, for us being yoked together lightens the load as we share burdens. It binds us to each other and it keeps us together even in those moments when we are the last person the other wants to see. As the hymn proclaims, “Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love.”
Of course, as we share in the book, being yoked is not always easy or fun. As someone once said, “If you want to learn about self-sacrifice, don’t try asceticism. Try living with other people.” We’d add try being in ministry with other people, too. But we believe that it is ultimately worth it.
In my current call, I have seen this played out as Mihee and I, and also my congregation, share in ministry with other faith communities in our city. We’ve learned that we need not all be redundant in our programing, but as the psalmist says, it is good and pleasant when brothers and sisters come together in unity.
So we’ve begun to share our spiritual meditation offerings with the other downtown congregations, and they in turn have shared theirs with us. Instead of all of us limping along with small turnout and worn out volunteers just so we can offer a Vacation Bible School too, we have joined together to create one that we share with our communities. Our campus ministry group serves a lunch for the homeless as a part of the Episcopal Church’s ministry. In fact, our campus ministry is a shared venture with another Presbyterian Church in town. Our youth group occasionally meets with another one from down the street. Together we have brought in speakers and held workshops for the community with various congregations supporting the event is some way. Recently, we have been yoked together in a joint effort to work with the city to figure out the conundrum in our community that is downtown parking. Resources and energy seem to go a lot further when they are shared; at least, it often seems that way.
These are all ministries and programs that we could have done on our own, as a lone ranger sent out into the Wild West of our community to work for good and justice. But even the Lone Ranger did not go alone. Besides, we have found these ministries are done better and bear more good fruit when done together, yoked in ministry. These other congregations in town are not our competition with whom we fight over members and try to outdo each other with bigger and better packaged programming. Rather they are our ministry partners.
Sure, there are some faith communities that we would rather not partner with, and I’m sure they would not be overjoyed to partner with us. Sure, we all want to do things a little bit differently from one another. That is what gives us our own identity.
Sure, we know it can get messy and frustrating because in being yoked with another you do not always get to do it your way, which is also known as “the right way.” Sure, it means a few more meetings and intentionality. But it also means some of the burdens are shared, the load often is lighter, resources are pooled, we help one another, and we all remember that we are all in this together.
As we are yoked together, we can also recall that we are yoked to God. And that can only be good.
In Yoked, we conclude each chapter with a series of questions that we hope will help the reader connect the chapter to their life and ministry. In that spirit, we’ve included some questions to help connect with this article as well.
- Working in ministry is wonderful, but also challenging. Who have you linked-up with for support and encouragement or to share ideas? How often do you see or talk with them?
- How often do you consider connecting with others beyond your congregation for ministry? What are some potential benefits and potential risks involved? What do you find encourages you to do it? What do you find discourages you from doing it? Why?
- How do you identify the gifts and skills of another?
- How do you make room for them in your ministry or life?
- How do you navigate and negotiate the tricky task of collaboration with others?
- How do you encourage others to make space for the gifts you have? What are those gifts?
This collection of true stories is written by Mihee Kim-Kort and Andy Kort, a married clergy couple who met while they were in seminary. They share their unique perspective on the joys and challenges of ministry in alternating segments, forming a collective narrative that illuminates the inner workings of a clergy marriage, even as it inspires with heartfelt tales of life in ministry.
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Enhance Your Leadership: Learning with Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
Denominational Leadership
November 3-6, 2015 | Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Denominational Leadership is a four-day educational event designed to help you examine your practice of leadership and gain the tools and strategies you need to navigate the complexities and changing landscape of denominational life today.
People of all denominations who are transitioning into executive-level positions within denominational governing bodies or who have been in their roles for fewer than three years are welcome to apply for this selective program. The application deadline is September 4, 2015.
Learn more and apply »
Ideas that Impact: The Relationship between Clergy and Laity
"Porching, Friendship, and Ministry" by Kyle Childress
In the pastor's study at church, it's 'counseling,' but on the pastor's front porch, it's just two friends visiting. And it's all called 'ministry,' says a Texas pastor.
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CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP, VOCATION
Kyle Childress: Porching, friendship and ministry
In the pastor's study at church, it's 'counseling,' but on the pastor's front porch, it's just two friends visiting. And it's all called 'ministry,' says a Texas pastor.
MONDAY, AUGUST 11, 2014
A few years ago, when Jane and the girls and I were away all summer on sabbatical, members of our church decided to build us a porch. They knew I loved porch sitting, and since our house did not have a porch, they thought it was a great idea to give us one. We agreed.
Since then, our porch has become the major gathering place for any social occasion at our house, none more so than the churchwide Easter potluck, with kids and adults everywhere, food, laughter, a slamming screen door (“You kids make up your minds -- either in or out!”), and lots of conversation and stories among everyone lazily rocking back and forth in the rocking chairs and swing.
We all love the porch.
From time to time, I’ll get a phone call from someone saying, “Are you going to be on your porch this evening?” To which I’ll reply, “Yeah, I’ll be there. Probably be out about 7.”
Sure enough, around 7 the caller will come walking up and join me on the porch. We’ll visit, catch up on news, likely I’ll tell a story or two, and eventually the visitor will get to whatever it is that’s bothering him or her. We’re not in a hurry; it is porching, after all.
What I’ve learned is that conversation on the porch is important ministry. If the caller comes to my study at the church for an appointment, it is called “counseling.” But if someone drops by my porch and we sit in the rocking chairs, it is just two friends having a conversation. We’re visiting.
Both counseling and visiting are significant ministries, but they are different. Part of the difference is need -- sometimes the formality of the church building is more appropriate. But sometimes the difference has to do with different visions of the church and the role of the pastor.
The standard and dominant view is that the office of pastor has clearly defined boundaries and roles. For example, I was trained both in seminary and in college that the pastor should never make friends within the congregation. Having friends, in this view, is fraught with peril at every turn: the dangers of showing favoritism or having cliques within the church, the temptation to break confidences, the undermining of pastoral authority and so on.
I was taught that the pastor’s friendship is with God -- and the rest of the church is on their own. I was taught that relationships of mutuality are different from those of service as a pastor, and that ordination creates a holy distance between the pastor and the people.
Maybe so. But maybe not.
What if the church is understood to be a community of friends? And what if the pastor is one of those friends? What if the hierarchy of the church is not as pronounced and formal as we might think? Perhaps the church is more like the body of Christ, with the different members connected to one another in Christ, but with each member having certain spiritual gifts, pastoring being one of those gifts.
I realize that I’m talking about two versions of the role of the pastor and models of the church in church teaching: Reformed and Anabaptist. But my Baptist polity has long mixed those two contrasting perspectives.
In practice, a new pastor has to earn her or his pastoral credibility within the first year or so. A congregation wants to see whether the pastor visits and cares and shows up. Do you listen to the people, and are you accessible?
They’ll know whether you can lead worship and preach from the day they voted to call you. But will you be their pastor? That’s a question that is answered over time. Beneath the issues of how well you visit and do pastoral care is the question of spiritual gifts. Are you a member of the body of Christ with the gift of being a pastor or not? In that first year, the congregation is discerning your calling and gifts.
But what does all that have to do with friendship and porches? In John 15:12-17(link is external), Jesus calls the church a community of friends who love one another. To me, the primary responsibility of a pastor is the nurturing and growing of such a community of mutual love. And that includes the pastor. We’re in it, too. We’re not separate or distanced from this community of friends. We’re immersed in it; we participate in it. I believe we call it incarnation.
The pastor’s authority comes out of this mutual love and friendship, not in spite of it. Over time, the members of the congregation come to know the pastor as a friend -- a friend who prays for them, loves them, cares for them, shows up and works alongside them, and listens to them, while also being a friend who is immersed in God.
When Sunday morning rolls around, the 20 minutes of preaching comes out of this mutual friendship, of listening to the people and to God. My authority comes from being a friend who sometimes shares a strong word of challenge, and other times, a word of comfort in the midst of heartbreaking grief. They listen, not because I hold an office, but because we love one another and they recognize the gift and work of the Spirit in and through me. That’s why they come and visit on my porch.
Cultural critic and writer bell hooks says, “In the days of my girlhood, when everyone sat on their porches, usually on their swings, it was the way we all became acquainted with one another, the way we created community.”
She goes on: “A perfect porch is a place where the soul can rest.”
That sounds right to me. Sitting on my porch among friends, our souls can rest.
"Asking More of Laypeople" by L. Gregory Jones
Influential laypeople yearn for deep relationships with Christian institutional leaders. We can nurture those relationships by entering the worlds where laypeople live, think and work -- not seeing them primarily as church volunteers and funders.
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LAITY, WORK LIVES, CLERGY/LAY RELATIONSHIP
L. Gregory Jones: Asking more of laypeople
Influential laypeople yearn for deep relationships with Christian institutional leaders. We can nurture those relationships by entering the worlds where laypeople live, think and work -- not seeing them primarily as church volunteers and funders.
MONDAY, JANUARY 2, 2012
The billionaire businessman, a devout Christian, told the denominational executive that the denomination’s leaders needed to be more visible and bold. They needed, the businessman said, to ask more of laypeople like him.
The executive, unsure, hesitantly asked, “How would you like to be more involved in the church?”
But the businessman had already “done his time” serving on church committees to fill a slot rather than accomplish a purpose.
The businessman was imploring the denomination’s leaders to demand more about how he lived his discipleship in the world -- and not by prophetically criticizing the wealth he had accumulated while regularly turning to him to support capital campaigns or building maintenance (a common experience among the wealthy).
When I witnessed this exchange, I interpreted the word “ask” as a request.
The businessman wanted church leaders to make a claim on him to help him live more faithfully as a disciple of Jesus Christ in his daily life. Church leaders could be more thoughtful in seeing laypeople as disciples who yearn to connect more explicitly their faith with the ideas, insights and imagination they have developed in their vocations.
More recently, I have become aware of a deeper interpretation of the businessman’s plea: we can discover what is in laypeople’s imaginations only if we focus on what it means to “ask” in the sense of inquiry. The businessman was seeking holy conversations with church leaders, hoping that church leaders would ask more of him by asking more about him.
What are the issues he is wrestling with as a business leader? How might his faith inform his responses to management challenges and his thinking about leadership? How should his faith help him decide how to schedule his time? Nurture his personal and professional relationships?
Inquiry is a central activity for Christian institutional leaders in cultivating teams and discovering innovative possibilities for an organization.
It is also crucially important for developing deep, personal relationships with people on their own terms rather than just fitting them into “our” contexts. Christian institutional leaders often engage with empathy when laypeople come to us for spiritual direction or in crisis -- but we often forget the importance of inquiry in our day-to-day leadership of Christian institutions.
Why do Christian institutional leaders forget to practice inquiry?
Perhaps we believe that our role is to provide expertise, to offer answers to life’s questions. Or maybe we feel insecure around people who have been better trained, and have more experience, at leading and managing organizations. So we become defensive and assert that our work is different and somehow better, more pure, because we run not-for-profit organizations.
Or perhaps we believe and act, unwittingly and sometimes wittingly, as though the church and its institutions were the only arenas in which Christian discipleship can be faithfully lived. Rather than recognizing, rightly, that the church and its institutions are central contexts for worship and the formation of Christian identity, we turn them into idols where they are our exclusive focus.
Our forgetfulness typically involves a combination of these dynamics.
Their cumulative impact results in Christian institutional leaders assuming that border crossing goes only one way. We will welcome others to cross from the secular world to the church world, but we don’t choose to leave our comfortable perches to venture in the other direction. That can alienate the laypeople the church needs to bear faithful witness to God’s kingdom.
Through genuine, mutual inquiry -- not just asking what you can do for me or I for you -- Christian institutional leaders will experience the vocations and contexts of laypeople.
Our efforts ought not to be limited to those already involved in church but should extend also to those who might be outside or even marginalized by our institutions. Christian renewal movements, such as the Wesleyan revival of the 18th century, have typically been led by pastors and other Christian leaders who were adept at crossing multiple borders to inquire after people.
In so doing, we will need to cultivate the trait of interpretive charity, which requires us to listen to the perspectives of others with the most charitable perspective we can imagine. This does not necessarily mean agreeing with the others, but it does involve patiently listening to what is said and why it is being said.
Early in my service as dean of Duke Divinity School, I was invited to meet with a wealthy business leader.
I was tempted to focus on what he could do for me, namely, make a large gift to the Divinity School’s capital campaign. I was also aware of my biases about wealth and greed, but I knew I likely wouldn’t get what I needed either by challenging him to give his wealth away in general or by asking him directly for a gift.
We didn’t have a relationship, so I asked him how he had gotten into his business.
He told me that he had considered going into ordained ministry but ultimately had decided that his calling was to business. He then described how he had learned to practice his business as a lay ministry. He described how his vision had helped articulate his company’s mission and its relationship with employees and customers.
As I asked him about how he expressed his faith through his leadership, I was humbled to learn that his company has often undertaken education and health initiatives, because the company believes it is important to support its employees and the people in the wider community. He was more attentive to the community’s ministry needs than are many congregations and Christian institutions.
Our conversation turned out to be the beginning of a long-standing mutual relationship in which we each ask much of and give much to the other.
We have discovered that as our border-crossing Christian relationship has developed and deepened, we will often challenge and even critique each other. But because the borders have been crossed in more than one direction, my challenges and critiques of him, and his of me, are typically life-giving rather than polarizing.
Christian institutions have been started and sustained, renewed and transformed over the centuries through remarkable partnerships among leaders of Christian institutions and Christian leaders of other kinds of institutions. We need to ask more of each other, in the first instance by learning to ask -- to inquire -- in fresh ways.
"Flourishing in Ministry - An Interview with Matt Bloom"
Pastoral ministry is hard and challenging, but God wants clergy -- and everyone -- to experience meaning in work, says a management professor who studies well-being and work.
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Matt Bloom: Flourishing in ministry
Pastoral ministry is hard and challenging, but God wants clergy -- and everyone -- to experience meaning in work, says a management professor who studies well-being and work.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2011
Despite the many challenges of pastoral ministry, pastors are right to expect meaning and even joy in their work, said Matt Bloom, associate professor of management at Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.
“What pastors struggle with and what I’d like to help them with is that ministry is and should be rewarding -- that it's good and important to be happy in your work, that the marker of a successful ministry isn’t toil,” Bloom said. “It can be hard and challenging work, but I really believe that God wants all of us, particularly pastors, to experience meaning in work.
“I think the ones that I’m beginning to see who are flourishing have in their own minds been able to draw the line between this sense of really giving it their best but then also being able to say, 'I don’t know all the answers, and I’ll rest easy knowing that God will fill in the rest.'”
Bloom studies wellbeing and work, with a focus on intrinsic motivation, happiness and meaning. He also teaches and studies innovation. Last year, he launched an in-depth study of wellbeing in ministry, Flourishing in Ministry, part of a broader research project, Wellbeing at Work(link is external), funded by Lilly Endowment Inc. His interest in pastoral wellbeing is both professional and personal: his wife, the Rev. Kim Bloom, is a United Methodist pastor.
He spoke with Faith & Leadership about meaning and work, flourishing in ministry and innovation. The video clip is an excerpt from the following edited transcript.
Q: Your research focuses on “the improvement of the human condition at work,” particularly regarding meaning at work. What are you discovering?
We’re finding that meaningful work is work that is closely aligned with a person's core values, and one of the challenges for many people is to learn how they can live out their core values in a work context that often seems hostile. People who have a deep sense of identity in their work -- their work feels like something they were destined to do -- are the ones who find work most fulfilling.
Early on, I realized that there is nothing about a particular position in itself that makes it more meaningful. I had thought, for example, that being a pastor would inherently be more meaningful, but that alone is not necessarily the case. Whatever the job, it's something about the integration of a person’s sense of self -- their gifts, graces, personal values and personality -- and how that is reflected in their work that may be the most important determinants of meaning in work.
Q: Within your broader research on work, you’re studying clergy and have a research project, Flourishing in Ministry. Tell us about that.
The traditional business model says you get people to perform well by giving them the right rewards and aligning those with what you expect them to do. Our premise, however, is that if you create environments in which people find work meaningful, then high performance is just a natural byproduct.
The underlying theory is that if you’re called to something, you want to do well. You have this deep internal desire to do your best. But if you’re in a context in which you're stressed or frustrated and burnout is high or life just begins to beat you down, no matter how strong your internal drive, you can’t be at your best.
This idea of flourishing in ministry looks at people who find ministry a life-enriching experience and who are also highly effective. What does wellbeing look like in ministry? What are the conditions that sustain or impede it over a lifetime?
Q: You don’t have the answers yet, but what do you think those conditions might be?
Early in ministry, people probably focus more on outcomes, on things that are measurable like, “Did I preach well?” “Are the pews full?” “Are people putting money in the offering plate?” But later, I think, it will be a deep internal sense that you understand God’s call on your life and you see it manifested in your work over time. It will be much more a sense of the unfolding of your career, seeing your ministry as living out God’s work, seeing your work produce fruits of many different kinds over many years.
Q: What difference does it make when, as with pastors, you see your work as a calling from God? How do pastors work through that?
For many years, beginning with Luther, work at its best was this image of work as a calling. We held up the idea that if you are called to something, if it’s what you were born to do, then that was work at its best. I actually agree with that, but there's a dark side to work as a calling. Because a calling is so much a part of your sense of identity, when things don’t go well, the implications are far greater than a paycheck. I might lose my paycheck, but even more, I might lose my sense of identity.
So a call from God to pastoral ministry has the potential for huge rewards and huge costs. The rewards are this profound experience of contributing to God and building God’s kingdom. The risks are if you fail, you’ve not just failed yourself or your family or your church. You’ve failed God, and that’s a failure of deep and profound importance.
What pastors struggle with and what I’d like to help them with is that ministry is and should be rewarding -- that it’s good and important to be happy in your work, that the marker of a successful ministry isn’t toil. It can be hard and challenging work, but I really believe that God wants all of us, particularly pastors, to experience meaning in work.
I think the ones that I’m beginning to see who are flourishing have in their own minds been able to draw the line between this sense of really giving it their best but then also being able to say, “I don't know all the answers, and I’ll rest easy knowing that God will fill in the rest.”
Q: Have you been able to identify specific factors that contribute to flourishing in ministry?
We’re able to identify some, and we have a lot more to learn. One thing that many pastors have long thought mattered is good, strong relationships -- having friends who are pastors, having a high-quality married life or a life partner. We're trying to understand, what does a good relationship look like? What does a good pastoral friendship look like? What does a really positive marriage for ministry look like?
We know that pastors who have a clear sense of their own personal theology are more likely to flourish. So what does it mean to have a personal theology, and why does that matter? We know that pastors who have a sense that their gifts and graces map onto the needs of their church are more likely to flourish.
Our early data suggests that relationships with denominational leaders tend to be neutral at best and harmful at worst. In other words, a pastor’s relationship with denominational leaders matters, but it tends to do harm rather than good.
Q: Can you elaborate on that?
In general, when we measure the effect of relationships with denominational leaders on a pastor’s wellbeing, what we have not found yet is that there are positive effects. We have not found that good relationships with denominational leaders help pastors have a higher level of wellbeing. But we have found that negative relationships with denominational leaders are highly detrimental to pastors’ wellbeing.
At best, pastors’ relationships with denominational leaders have no effect on their wellbeing. That’s the best we can hope for. At worst, it's detrimental. Bishops and district superintendents are deeply committed to helping pastors flourish, so we need to understand why that’s the case.
Relationships with congregations tend to be much the same. At best they’re neutral, and at worst they’re detrimental. Of course, there are always exceptions. Some pastors have great relationships with their congregations that clearly help them to have high levels of wellbeing. But in general, clergy relationships with congregations are neutral at best, but they tend to be negative. Rarely are they positive in terms of their effect on pastors’ wellbeing.
Q: Explain that.
The simple answer is that congregations by and large don’t help pastors flourish, but they can hinder pastors from flourishing. We need to understand, what is the mechanism there? One of our hypotheses is that congregations that are antagonistic or complain a lot undermine a pastor’s sense of call. Rather than a pastor telling the congregation, “You've just got some concerns that I can’t or won’t meet,” pastors tend to then doubt their ability and the efficacy of their call.
A second explanation might be -- and this is probably true for people in many jobs -- if most of your interactions with the people you’re trying to serve are negative, that has a wearing effect over time. It’s one negative interaction after another, one complaint after another, so rather than work being a positive experience, it just might wear you down.
We know that for most people generally, for every one negative interaction, you need three positive experiences just to maintain your level of wellbeing. It might be that pastors’ lives have a ratio the other way, with three or four negative experiences for every neutral experience, so that overwhelming flood of negative experiences might just wear on their wellbeing.
Q: How pervasive is that scenario you describe of pastors having this negative relationship with their congregations?
Our early data suggests that more than half of our pastors experience their congregations mainly in a negative way. As we continue to do surveys, we’ll be able to confirm if that is right. Maybe this was an anomaly in our early studies.
One reason this is interesting is that pastors will tell you that things are great with their congregations, and I think that’s because they want them to be and they strive hard for them to be. Spouses will be a little more honest and say, “No, this is a very challenging appointment.”
Once we’ve worked with pastors awhile, we begin to learn that there are many challenges in ministries. Pastors are great people. They tend not to blame their congregations, but when you hear their stories about life in ministry, what you take away is a story of one problem after another, one complaint after another, one challenge after another.
So it isn’t necessarily that pastors are saying that their relationship with their congregations is bad. It’s a matter of hearing them explain what life in ministry is like, then looking at their explanations and seeing that it’s mostly full of complaints and challenges and criticisms rather than rewarding, positive experiences with the people that they’re trying so hard to serve.
Q: It’s a tough job.
It is a tough job. I think it may be that many churches have a consumer mentality: “I’m here for you, the pastor, to delight me. And when you don’t delight me, I’m going to let you know about it.”
But what the pastor needs to tell you in order to preach the word of God may not be delightful. What I hear in my interviews with pastors and what we’re seeing in the survey data is that trying to do the work of God requires leading people to change their lives in dramatic ways. And people don’t want to change. So if they are saying, “You better delight me, or I’m going to complain,” that’s a recipe for a difficult work environment.
Q: In addition to your research on work, you teach and conduct research on innovation. Tell us about that.
Innovation is about thinking about the things we do daily in a very different way so that we can radically change what we’re doing. Innovation is about thinking differently about those very things we know well that are deeply habitual in our lives and then dramatically changing them.
So part of innovation begins with a caveat. Innovation leads to radical change. Do we want to make radical change? If not, then let’s just improve things.
Innovation at its best takes the perspective of the individual whose experience you want to change -- seeing the world through their eyes so you can understand it in a richer, more nuanced way. Now you have the platform for imagining how to make that experience better.
And then you have to be willing to take the risk of trying out something new in hopes that it will lead to this radical positive change. If it doesn’t work, it’s not a failure. It’s one more step on the path to this radical positive change. But it’s really hard for people to do. It’s hard for them to think differently.
Q: What are the challenges for leadership in that?
Many organizations that say they want innovation, what I’d like to say is, “You really don’t. You want improvement. You hope to have radical change, but you really aren’t ready to embrace this idea of thinking differently and taking big risks that are the only way to achieve this huge positive leap forward. So you’re better off just trying to improve what you’ve got.”
It’s hard for leaders. They have been successful because they’ve thought about things in one particular way that led to success. To set that aside can be difficult. It’s setting aside the very thing that made you successful. In some ways, the thing that you own and made -- are you willing to set that aside and say, “There's a better way than my way”?
Q: Do you think the church really wants innovation?
Well, it’s an interesting conversation to think about: “Does the church want innovation?” I’m not a theologian, but my understanding as I read the New Testament is it’s full of innovators. I mean, Jesus was an extraordinary innovator. Paul was an innovator. There's story after story of these people who were innovators and who literally changed the world. Does the modern church want to innovate? I don't know.
My sense is that it needs to innovate to continue to build God’s kingdom, but what we know of other organizations, and it’s probably true of religious organizations, is that it’s very hard for them to innovate because they have built systems and structures that led to success but now are deeply embedded.
And innovation, this radical change, may require setting aside some of those traditional structures that were good that may no longer be good.
Q: Is there a link between innovation and meaning in work?
I think so. True innovation arises out of this deep internal desire to make things better. So people who find meaning in work are going to have the highest capacity for innovation. They find profound importance in what they do. They want to do it as well as they can. They aspire to do great things, and they’re in a perfect position to be innovative, because they’re deeply committed to the organization and its mission.
Q: There’s a huge lesson there for institutional leaders.
Oh, there is. If you want people to be innovative, their reason for working has to be more than a paycheck. You've got to create a context in which people really believe in what you’re doing. Then you can help them think differently. You can encourage them to take the big risks that will lead to true innovation.
Q: You’re a business professor teaching innovation, and you’re engaged with Christian leaders and clergy about their work. Where do you see potential intersections and synergies between these worlds?
One of my dreams is to foster a conversation between people of faith, people in the business world and people in the research world. There is a lot they can learn from each other. People yearn to live out their faith in their work, whether in the for-profit or not-for-profit world. They struggle with knowing how they can do that. They’re tired of being limited to things like, “Be a nice person” and, “Be an honest person.” They know that faith is much more than that, and yet they find it difficult to understand how their faith can inform their work at this deep level.
They need profound theological reflection on work. When you invest 40 to 100 hours in something, it is going to mean something to you. It is going to be important to you, and so the need for that experience to be meaningful is really high. There is no other place to turn but faith to understand how to do that. The business world doesn’t tell you that. They tell you it’s about making money, and most people know there’s a lot more out there. So there is a lot that religion can offer. It is the bridge to meaning at work.
Q: What are the distinctive challenges and opportunities that Christian institutional leaders have in engaging innovation?
The challenge for leaders of religious organizations in encouraging innovation is to disentangle those things that must not change from those things that can change. How do we understand those core practices, doctrines and beliefs that must endure throughout time from those that really can change?
Sometimes it’s difficult to disentangle the two. Sometimes a practice can change but the underlying belief or doctrine that the practice upholds should not, and it’s sometimes hard to disentangle what is that underlying principle that the practice is enacting. So it's a difference between tradition that inspires and encourages and creates that enduring, important mission from tradition that anchors or impedes.
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LAITY, WORK LIVES, CLERGY/LAY RELATIONSHIP
L. Gregory Jones: Asking more of laypeople
Influential laypeople yearn for deep relationships with Christian institutional leaders. We can nurture those relationships by entering the worlds where laypeople live, think and work -- not seeing them primarily as church volunteers and funders.
MONDAY, JANUARY 2, 2012
The billionaire businessman, a devout Christian, told the denominational executive that the denomination’s leaders needed to be more visible and bold. They needed, the businessman said, to ask more of laypeople like him.
The executive, unsure, hesitantly asked, “How would you like to be more involved in the church?”
But the businessman had already “done his time” serving on church committees to fill a slot rather than accomplish a purpose.
The businessman was imploring the denomination’s leaders to demand more about how he lived his discipleship in the world -- and not by prophetically criticizing the wealth he had accumulated while regularly turning to him to support capital campaigns or building maintenance (a common experience among the wealthy).
When I witnessed this exchange, I interpreted the word “ask” as a request.
The businessman wanted church leaders to make a claim on him to help him live more faithfully as a disciple of Jesus Christ in his daily life. Church leaders could be more thoughtful in seeing laypeople as disciples who yearn to connect more explicitly their faith with the ideas, insights and imagination they have developed in their vocations.
More recently, I have become aware of a deeper interpretation of the businessman’s plea: we can discover what is in laypeople’s imaginations only if we focus on what it means to “ask” in the sense of inquiry. The businessman was seeking holy conversations with church leaders, hoping that church leaders would ask more of him by asking more about him.
What are the issues he is wrestling with as a business leader? How might his faith inform his responses to management challenges and his thinking about leadership? How should his faith help him decide how to schedule his time? Nurture his personal and professional relationships?
Inquiry is a central activity for Christian institutional leaders in cultivating teams and discovering innovative possibilities for an organization.
It is also crucially important for developing deep, personal relationships with people on their own terms rather than just fitting them into “our” contexts. Christian institutional leaders often engage with empathy when laypeople come to us for spiritual direction or in crisis -- but we often forget the importance of inquiry in our day-to-day leadership of Christian institutions.
Why do Christian institutional leaders forget to practice inquiry?
Perhaps we believe that our role is to provide expertise, to offer answers to life’s questions. Or maybe we feel insecure around people who have been better trained, and have more experience, at leading and managing organizations. So we become defensive and assert that our work is different and somehow better, more pure, because we run not-for-profit organizations.
Or perhaps we believe and act, unwittingly and sometimes wittingly, as though the church and its institutions were the only arenas in which Christian discipleship can be faithfully lived. Rather than recognizing, rightly, that the church and its institutions are central contexts for worship and the formation of Christian identity, we turn them into idols where they are our exclusive focus.
Our forgetfulness typically involves a combination of these dynamics.
Their cumulative impact results in Christian institutional leaders assuming that border crossing goes only one way. We will welcome others to cross from the secular world to the church world, but we don’t choose to leave our comfortable perches to venture in the other direction. That can alienate the laypeople the church needs to bear faithful witness to God’s kingdom.
Through genuine, mutual inquiry -- not just asking what you can do for me or I for you -- Christian institutional leaders will experience the vocations and contexts of laypeople.
Our efforts ought not to be limited to those already involved in church but should extend also to those who might be outside or even marginalized by our institutions. Christian renewal movements, such as the Wesleyan revival of the 18th century, have typically been led by pastors and other Christian leaders who were adept at crossing multiple borders to inquire after people.
In so doing, we will need to cultivate the trait of interpretive charity, which requires us to listen to the perspectives of others with the most charitable perspective we can imagine. This does not necessarily mean agreeing with the others, but it does involve patiently listening to what is said and why it is being said.
Early in my service as dean of Duke Divinity School, I was invited to meet with a wealthy business leader.
I was tempted to focus on what he could do for me, namely, make a large gift to the Divinity School’s capital campaign. I was also aware of my biases about wealth and greed, but I knew I likely wouldn’t get what I needed either by challenging him to give his wealth away in general or by asking him directly for a gift.
We didn’t have a relationship, so I asked him how he had gotten into his business.
He told me that he had considered going into ordained ministry but ultimately had decided that his calling was to business. He then described how he had learned to practice his business as a lay ministry. He described how his vision had helped articulate his company’s mission and its relationship with employees and customers.
As I asked him about how he expressed his faith through his leadership, I was humbled to learn that his company has often undertaken education and health initiatives, because the company believes it is important to support its employees and the people in the wider community. He was more attentive to the community’s ministry needs than are many congregations and Christian institutions.
Our conversation turned out to be the beginning of a long-standing mutual relationship in which we each ask much of and give much to the other.
We have discovered that as our border-crossing Christian relationship has developed and deepened, we will often challenge and even critique each other. But because the borders have been crossed in more than one direction, my challenges and critiques of him, and his of me, are typically life-giving rather than polarizing.
Christian institutions have been started and sustained, renewed and transformed over the centuries through remarkable partnerships among leaders of Christian institutions and Christian leaders of other kinds of institutions. We need to ask more of each other, in the first instance by learning to ask -- to inquire -- in fresh ways.
"Flourishing in Ministry - An Interview with Matt Bloom"
Pastoral ministry is hard and challenging, but God wants clergy -- and everyone -- to experience meaning in work, says a management professor who studies well-being and work.
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Matt Bloom: Flourishing in ministry
Pastoral ministry is hard and challenging, but God wants clergy -- and everyone -- to experience meaning in work, says a management professor who studies well-being and work.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2011
“What pastors struggle with and what I’d like to help them with is that ministry is and should be rewarding -- that it's good and important to be happy in your work, that the marker of a successful ministry isn’t toil,” Bloom said. “It can be hard and challenging work, but I really believe that God wants all of us, particularly pastors, to experience meaning in work.
“I think the ones that I’m beginning to see who are flourishing have in their own minds been able to draw the line between this sense of really giving it their best but then also being able to say, 'I don’t know all the answers, and I’ll rest easy knowing that God will fill in the rest.'”
Bloom studies wellbeing and work, with a focus on intrinsic motivation, happiness and meaning. He also teaches and studies innovation. Last year, he launched an in-depth study of wellbeing in ministry, Flourishing in Ministry, part of a broader research project, Wellbeing at Work(link is external), funded by Lilly Endowment Inc. His interest in pastoral wellbeing is both professional and personal: his wife, the Rev. Kim Bloom, is a United Methodist pastor.
He spoke with Faith & Leadership about meaning and work, flourishing in ministry and innovation. The video clip is an excerpt from the following edited transcript.
Q: Your research focuses on “the improvement of the human condition at work,” particularly regarding meaning at work. What are you discovering?
We’re finding that meaningful work is work that is closely aligned with a person's core values, and one of the challenges for many people is to learn how they can live out their core values in a work context that often seems hostile. People who have a deep sense of identity in their work -- their work feels like something they were destined to do -- are the ones who find work most fulfilling.
Early on, I realized that there is nothing about a particular position in itself that makes it more meaningful. I had thought, for example, that being a pastor would inherently be more meaningful, but that alone is not necessarily the case. Whatever the job, it's something about the integration of a person’s sense of self -- their gifts, graces, personal values and personality -- and how that is reflected in their work that may be the most important determinants of meaning in work.
Q: Within your broader research on work, you’re studying clergy and have a research project, Flourishing in Ministry. Tell us about that.
The traditional business model says you get people to perform well by giving them the right rewards and aligning those with what you expect them to do. Our premise, however, is that if you create environments in which people find work meaningful, then high performance is just a natural byproduct.
The underlying theory is that if you’re called to something, you want to do well. You have this deep internal desire to do your best. But if you’re in a context in which you're stressed or frustrated and burnout is high or life just begins to beat you down, no matter how strong your internal drive, you can’t be at your best.
This idea of flourishing in ministry looks at people who find ministry a life-enriching experience and who are also highly effective. What does wellbeing look like in ministry? What are the conditions that sustain or impede it over a lifetime?
Q: You don’t have the answers yet, but what do you think those conditions might be?
Early in ministry, people probably focus more on outcomes, on things that are measurable like, “Did I preach well?” “Are the pews full?” “Are people putting money in the offering plate?” But later, I think, it will be a deep internal sense that you understand God’s call on your life and you see it manifested in your work over time. It will be much more a sense of the unfolding of your career, seeing your ministry as living out God’s work, seeing your work produce fruits of many different kinds over many years.
Q: What difference does it make when, as with pastors, you see your work as a calling from God? How do pastors work through that?
For many years, beginning with Luther, work at its best was this image of work as a calling. We held up the idea that if you are called to something, if it’s what you were born to do, then that was work at its best. I actually agree with that, but there's a dark side to work as a calling. Because a calling is so much a part of your sense of identity, when things don’t go well, the implications are far greater than a paycheck. I might lose my paycheck, but even more, I might lose my sense of identity.
So a call from God to pastoral ministry has the potential for huge rewards and huge costs. The rewards are this profound experience of contributing to God and building God’s kingdom. The risks are if you fail, you’ve not just failed yourself or your family or your church. You’ve failed God, and that’s a failure of deep and profound importance.
What pastors struggle with and what I’d like to help them with is that ministry is and should be rewarding -- that it’s good and important to be happy in your work, that the marker of a successful ministry isn’t toil. It can be hard and challenging work, but I really believe that God wants all of us, particularly pastors, to experience meaning in work.
I think the ones that I’m beginning to see who are flourishing have in their own minds been able to draw the line between this sense of really giving it their best but then also being able to say, “I don't know all the answers, and I’ll rest easy knowing that God will fill in the rest.”
Q: Have you been able to identify specific factors that contribute to flourishing in ministry?
We’re able to identify some, and we have a lot more to learn. One thing that many pastors have long thought mattered is good, strong relationships -- having friends who are pastors, having a high-quality married life or a life partner. We're trying to understand, what does a good relationship look like? What does a good pastoral friendship look like? What does a really positive marriage for ministry look like?
We know that pastors who have a clear sense of their own personal theology are more likely to flourish. So what does it mean to have a personal theology, and why does that matter? We know that pastors who have a sense that their gifts and graces map onto the needs of their church are more likely to flourish.
Our early data suggests that relationships with denominational leaders tend to be neutral at best and harmful at worst. In other words, a pastor’s relationship with denominational leaders matters, but it tends to do harm rather than good.
Q: Can you elaborate on that?
In general, when we measure the effect of relationships with denominational leaders on a pastor’s wellbeing, what we have not found yet is that there are positive effects. We have not found that good relationships with denominational leaders help pastors have a higher level of wellbeing. But we have found that negative relationships with denominational leaders are highly detrimental to pastors’ wellbeing.
At best, pastors’ relationships with denominational leaders have no effect on their wellbeing. That’s the best we can hope for. At worst, it's detrimental. Bishops and district superintendents are deeply committed to helping pastors flourish, so we need to understand why that’s the case.
Relationships with congregations tend to be much the same. At best they’re neutral, and at worst they’re detrimental. Of course, there are always exceptions. Some pastors have great relationships with their congregations that clearly help them to have high levels of wellbeing. But in general, clergy relationships with congregations are neutral at best, but they tend to be negative. Rarely are they positive in terms of their effect on pastors’ wellbeing.
Q: Explain that.
The simple answer is that congregations by and large don’t help pastors flourish, but they can hinder pastors from flourishing. We need to understand, what is the mechanism there? One of our hypotheses is that congregations that are antagonistic or complain a lot undermine a pastor’s sense of call. Rather than a pastor telling the congregation, “You've just got some concerns that I can’t or won’t meet,” pastors tend to then doubt their ability and the efficacy of their call.
A second explanation might be -- and this is probably true for people in many jobs -- if most of your interactions with the people you’re trying to serve are negative, that has a wearing effect over time. It’s one negative interaction after another, one complaint after another, so rather than work being a positive experience, it just might wear you down.
We know that for most people generally, for every one negative interaction, you need three positive experiences just to maintain your level of wellbeing. It might be that pastors’ lives have a ratio the other way, with three or four negative experiences for every neutral experience, so that overwhelming flood of negative experiences might just wear on their wellbeing.
Q: How pervasive is that scenario you describe of pastors having this negative relationship with their congregations?
Our early data suggests that more than half of our pastors experience their congregations mainly in a negative way. As we continue to do surveys, we’ll be able to confirm if that is right. Maybe this was an anomaly in our early studies.
One reason this is interesting is that pastors will tell you that things are great with their congregations, and I think that’s because they want them to be and they strive hard for them to be. Spouses will be a little more honest and say, “No, this is a very challenging appointment.”
Once we’ve worked with pastors awhile, we begin to learn that there are many challenges in ministries. Pastors are great people. They tend not to blame their congregations, but when you hear their stories about life in ministry, what you take away is a story of one problem after another, one complaint after another, one challenge after another.
So it isn’t necessarily that pastors are saying that their relationship with their congregations is bad. It’s a matter of hearing them explain what life in ministry is like, then looking at their explanations and seeing that it’s mostly full of complaints and challenges and criticisms rather than rewarding, positive experiences with the people that they’re trying so hard to serve.
Q: It’s a tough job.
It is a tough job. I think it may be that many churches have a consumer mentality: “I’m here for you, the pastor, to delight me. And when you don’t delight me, I’m going to let you know about it.”
But what the pastor needs to tell you in order to preach the word of God may not be delightful. What I hear in my interviews with pastors and what we’re seeing in the survey data is that trying to do the work of God requires leading people to change their lives in dramatic ways. And people don’t want to change. So if they are saying, “You better delight me, or I’m going to complain,” that’s a recipe for a difficult work environment.
Q: In addition to your research on work, you teach and conduct research on innovation. Tell us about that.
Innovation is about thinking about the things we do daily in a very different way so that we can radically change what we’re doing. Innovation is about thinking differently about those very things we know well that are deeply habitual in our lives and then dramatically changing them.
So part of innovation begins with a caveat. Innovation leads to radical change. Do we want to make radical change? If not, then let’s just improve things.
Innovation at its best takes the perspective of the individual whose experience you want to change -- seeing the world through their eyes so you can understand it in a richer, more nuanced way. Now you have the platform for imagining how to make that experience better.
And then you have to be willing to take the risk of trying out something new in hopes that it will lead to this radical positive change. If it doesn’t work, it’s not a failure. It’s one more step on the path to this radical positive change. But it’s really hard for people to do. It’s hard for them to think differently.
Q: What are the challenges for leadership in that?
Many organizations that say they want innovation, what I’d like to say is, “You really don’t. You want improvement. You hope to have radical change, but you really aren’t ready to embrace this idea of thinking differently and taking big risks that are the only way to achieve this huge positive leap forward. So you’re better off just trying to improve what you’ve got.”
It’s hard for leaders. They have been successful because they’ve thought about things in one particular way that led to success. To set that aside can be difficult. It’s setting aside the very thing that made you successful. In some ways, the thing that you own and made -- are you willing to set that aside and say, “There's a better way than my way”?
Q: Do you think the church really wants innovation?
Well, it’s an interesting conversation to think about: “Does the church want innovation?” I’m not a theologian, but my understanding as I read the New Testament is it’s full of innovators. I mean, Jesus was an extraordinary innovator. Paul was an innovator. There's story after story of these people who were innovators and who literally changed the world. Does the modern church want to innovate? I don't know.
My sense is that it needs to innovate to continue to build God’s kingdom, but what we know of other organizations, and it’s probably true of religious organizations, is that it’s very hard for them to innovate because they have built systems and structures that led to success but now are deeply embedded.
And innovation, this radical change, may require setting aside some of those traditional structures that were good that may no longer be good.
Q: Is there a link between innovation and meaning in work?
I think so. True innovation arises out of this deep internal desire to make things better. So people who find meaning in work are going to have the highest capacity for innovation. They find profound importance in what they do. They want to do it as well as they can. They aspire to do great things, and they’re in a perfect position to be innovative, because they’re deeply committed to the organization and its mission.
Q: There’s a huge lesson there for institutional leaders.
Oh, there is. If you want people to be innovative, their reason for working has to be more than a paycheck. You've got to create a context in which people really believe in what you’re doing. Then you can help them think differently. You can encourage them to take the big risks that will lead to true innovation.
Q: You’re a business professor teaching innovation, and you’re engaged with Christian leaders and clergy about their work. Where do you see potential intersections and synergies between these worlds?
One of my dreams is to foster a conversation between people of faith, people in the business world and people in the research world. There is a lot they can learn from each other. People yearn to live out their faith in their work, whether in the for-profit or not-for-profit world. They struggle with knowing how they can do that. They’re tired of being limited to things like, “Be a nice person” and, “Be an honest person.” They know that faith is much more than that, and yet they find it difficult to understand how their faith can inform their work at this deep level.
They need profound theological reflection on work. When you invest 40 to 100 hours in something, it is going to mean something to you. It is going to be important to you, and so the need for that experience to be meaningful is really high. There is no other place to turn but faith to understand how to do that. The business world doesn’t tell you that. They tell you it’s about making money, and most people know there’s a lot more out there. So there is a lot that religion can offer. It is the bridge to meaning at work.
Q: What are the distinctive challenges and opportunities that Christian institutional leaders have in engaging innovation?
The challenge for leaders of religious organizations in encouraging innovation is to disentangle those things that must not change from those things that can change. How do we understand those core practices, doctrines and beliefs that must endure throughout time from those that really can change?
Sometimes it’s difficult to disentangle the two. Sometimes a practice can change but the underlying belief or doctrine that the practice upholds should not, and it’s sometimes hard to disentangle what is that underlying principle that the practice is enacting. So it's a difference between tradition that inspires and encourages and creates that enduring, important mission from tradition that anchors or impedes.
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