Retreat

The Together in Ministry format is enhanced by a retreat experience. Ours was held at a local Benedictine monastery earlier this week, guided by a Catholic sister who led us through a time of introspection and silence. She encouraged us to go to a deeper level of intimacy with each other and with God. Her guiding thought was that Christ dwells in the heart, and that it takes focus to get in touch with what the heart has to say.

Here are some of the challenges I encounter when I try to find that focus. If you're a group leader or facilitator, especially for a religious group, you might be able to connect with them.

• I identify with Siler's comment: "Few professions are so tempted as the pastorate is by excessive attention, from adulation to censure, plus all the responses in between. The applause is as lethal as the criticism, maybe more so. How quickly we can become full of ourselves. Like all public leaders focused on outward presentation, we run the increased risk of an impoverished inner life." [1] While an inward focus calls me to step back from public evaluation, it isn't that easy. The voices of congregation, friends and family play a looping tape in my head. Filtering out the applause and the criticism in order to hear God speak takes work.

• Intimate moments in a group can be difficult to attend to. For me there is a temptation to back away from revealing deeper emotions or hearing those of others. Group members, myself included, will often look for safety in humorous remarks or self-effacing comments. Maybe that's why having a capable facilitator is a good thing. He or she can restore my attention to what matters.

• The same challenge comes when I try to "hear the intimate voice of the heart." My mind wants to go to the things I have done before, the things I "have" to do today, tomorrow, next week - anywhere to get out of hearing what God has to say within.

• Another distraction is the temptation to force the experience of introspection into a psychological frame. Freud and his followers have had a marked impact on how I view the world. Making a transition from that perspective to one of faith is an ongoing challenge. From a psychological perspective I try to explain away the validity of listening for God's voice. "It's your (subconscious) (imagination) - you fill in the blank. I'm also a child of my information-age culture. Surely there are immediate explanations for everything! Faith perspective is seen through the lens of what is hoped for, but is often inexplicable. I so want everything to be explained right away.

• Finally, there is the difficulty of sorting out my true identity: Who am I in Christ? Siler goes on to say, "The soul question is one of identity:Who am I, really? Am I my egoic (sic) thoughts and feelings? Am I my ministry? Am I more than my thoughts and feelings? Do I have deeper wisdom? [2] I really have to work in order to identify who and what defines me. Who and what determines my words, actions, and thoughts. The greatest pressure comes in not letting the people I truly care about - their needs and emotions - dictate who I am. God's voice is easily drowned out. I hear it with great difficulty. Maybe it's that way for you.

[1] Siler, Mahan. Anam Cara: Collegial Clergy Communities. Raleigh, North Carolina: Publications Unltd, 2008, p. 24.
[2] Ibid

TIM

Over a year ago I joined a "Together in Ministry" group. Six pastors and a facilitator received support from the American Baptist Churches USA and the Lilly Foundation. I continue to be interested in what keeps the group going. I think part of it is a mutual need for support.

"Together in Ministry" groups were initiated by our denomination four or five years ago due to concerns about ministerial isolation and ineffectiveness. A 2005 study by the United Church of Canada concluded "that, at any given time, most ministry personnel feel satisfied and well-supported in their role. They also likely see their call to ministry as an integral part of their identity. The glass would appear more than two-thirds full. Nevertheless, the results also suggest that many ministry personnel feel overwhelmed with their work and have little time to reflect on their ministerial role. A large number of ministry personnel have trouble finding people they can trust and confide in, and feel powerless to influence change within the United Church. From this perspective, the glass seems half empty. What likely keeps the glass 'topped up' forr many ministers is a commitment to their call, the choice to focus their energy on their pastoral charges, and individual abilities to cope with the role." [1]

For me the glass stays "topped up" for the above reasons, but also because I've found a peer support system. One of the guides for developing Together in Ministry groups has been a book by Mahan Siler called Anam Cara [2] In it Siler defines "Anam Cara," or "soul friend, as "a network of small collegial circles ... who meet regularly to offer mutual support, collaboration, and accountability in their practices of theological reflection, leadership and Spirit awareness." [3] Siler makes a distinction between isolation and "aloneness." He says isolation comes with the pastoral territory, but aloneness can be overcome.

• Support has to do with a mutual commitment to growth as a person and a minister
• Collaboration entails accessing the wisdom of colleagues
• Accountability is the glue of the group. It calls for an honest and gracious review of our commitment to each other.

In our Together in Ministry group, this seems to work.

[1] The Warren Sheppel Research Group: "Study of Isolation in Ministry for the United Church of Canada," 2005.

[2] Siler, Mahan. Anam Cara: Collegial Clergy Communities. Raleigh, North Carolina: Publications Unltd, 2008.

[3] Ibid, p. 9

Connections

Some years ago James Ashbrook wrote a book that explored community.[1] The book was presented in a way that would visually challenge even the most focused reader. (A first impression suggests a typesetter doused in LSD.) But it was also, I believe, a different way of looking at what it means to be together in the world. Ashbrook wrote in the midst of radically changing values - what he saw as:

• a move to being and becoming, instead of merely doing,
• immediacy, instead of the past or the future,
• other-directedness, versus inner-directedness.
• a prizing of some kinds of tolerance and diversity and
• a "drift toward an equalization of the roles of men and women." (16)

Whether his impressions about values were accurate or not, he correctly anticipated a new social reality: "Nothing stays put. Everything swings." And in the midst of that he asks, "How are connections re-established?"

For Ashbrook being connected depends on self-disclosure, which he more or less links to a holy "in-spiriting," Pentecost-like drive from within that lets others know where we are, what matters, what we intend and want. "When in-spiriting awakens humanizing and establishes communications, we do not stop with simply getting through. Invariably, we continue being together. We are joined to communing community. That is, we find ourselves in a pattern of relationships that support, strengthen, challenge, chasten, restore." (52) Ashbrook and those like him helped set the stage for what are now called Together in Ministry groups.

[1] Ashbrook, James B. Be/Come Community. Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1971.

Speaking of Groups...

My first experience with small group dynamics was in seminary (yeah, a long time ago) when as part of the psychology curriculum, the class was expected to participate in an "encounter group." There were about 15 of us involved. As I think back the intent of this exercise, which took part over the better part of a weekend, was to break down the barriers that existed between participants, encourage us to open up to each other, and allow us to get to the real heart of who we were.

It was, from my standpoint, pretty much a disaster. Sleep wasn't part of the agenda, and tired people are likely to say just about anything. As the process wore on the group members became increasingly insistent that each person reveal his or her private self. The more exhausted we became the more freely we shared personal sins, weaknesses, misgivings, and animosities, and many of the latter were directed at other members of the group. While there may have been an attempt to debrief the experience at its close, I have no memory of it. I only know that I promised myself I would never go through anything like that again.

But the best intentions pave the way to, well, you know. In my first church call I thought it would be a great idea to form a small, intimate group of young adults. We would study the Bible, read a book or two together, keep confidentiality, and speak from the heart. The group was a great success - initially. We had much in common: young children, the tension of being in a church made up largely of older people, parental interference. We became, as you would say, tight. Then in the early part of the third year of the group's existence my wife and I went on vacation and two of the other couples in the group went camping. They found it expedient to switch partners, resulting in two divorces, one remarriage, and the suspicion on the part of some church leaders that I had engineered the whole thing.

Not a bad conclusion, actually, considering that one of the divorcees was the daughter of the church moderator.

I share this experience because group identity is important. Who we perceive ourselves to be, as congregations, Together in Ministry Groups, Communities of Practice, or Pool Players Anonymous, impacts not just the group members themselves but also the wider Christian Community. As I said earlier, defining group identity is a critical matter. And it isn't that easy.

Defining Ourselves

I'm a pastor, and how we define ourselves is a question I struggle with. By "ourselves" I mean the groups of which we are a part. For me those groups are pretty much church-centered. And frankly, my membership in them tends to be dictated by my job description.

I’m fairly introverted; my idea of relaxation isn’t to join another group. So most of my joint ventures come with the pastoral territory. For me there’s a central group, our congregation, with all of its sub-clusters: ministry teams, leadership groups, task teams – we can find more ways to sort 350 people than you can imagine. Youth, adults, shut-ins, musicians, teachers, children - the list is endless.

The congregation connects with a number of other groups: in the community (local mission efforts, a downtown pastor’s group), our American Baptist “region” that’s made up of churches from Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and (I think) part of Utah, and national and international mission efforts. It’s a web of relationships.

I do have some personal interests outside the church. I have a family. I belong to an Institutional Review Board at the local hospital that's responsible for tracking research protocols. In past lives I was a member of a national association of police chaplains and belonged to a watercolor society. I also do some scuba diving once in awhile, but that isn’t really a group thing. That’s vacation.

Another core group I belong to is the executive committee for our regional Ministers Council. I've tried to convince the powers that be to make "Ministers" possessive, but they'll have none of it. It's with this group that the issue of "defining ourselves" arises.

The Ministers Council is a voluntary group of pastoral leaders that is partly about fellowship - encouraging one another in our personal and communal spiritual lives, and partly about skill development. A recent workshop sponsored by the Lilly Foundation was held in Denver recently to enhance both of those focal points, and it challenged my thinking about group identity. The workshop was entitled Communities of Practice. It was led by Dr. Joe Kutter, Acting Director of the American Baptist Ministers Council. The assumption behind the workshop is that knowledge, and therefore learning, is a social process best discovered, shared, learned and applied in community.

It draws on the works of Etienne Wenger, and Cultivating Communities of Practice - A Guide to Managing Knowledge (Wenger, E., McDermott, R. and Snyder, W., Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002) was the textbook for the workshop. The academic forerunner for this book, Communities of Practice - Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Wenger, E., New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998) was published earlier as part of the Learning in Doing-Social, Cognitive, and Computational Perspectives series. Wenger takes a social constructionist approach which says in effect that social reality is constructed in relationships. His focus is also on business models, so it takes some translating to move his thoughts into the religious arena.

A precursor to Communities of Practice is the Together in Ministry group approach, also fostered by the Lilly Foundation. Together in Ministry lays a foundation for groups that focuses on relationships and trust-building. Communities of Practice takes Together in Ministry a step further, encouraging participants to come together to share expertise as well as common interests. Over the course of the Denver workshop a group of 14 pastor-types, me included, narrowed its common interest to two areas: self-care and reaching out to the community. Those seemed to be the topics that captured the needs not only of the workshop participants, but also defined what we thought were the concerns of our colleagues in ministry in the region.

We were encouraged to focus on those two themes in the days ahead, building a "community of practice" that would allow us to share knowledge and expertise with each other and the broader family of church leaders. During a subsequent meeting I found that defining our group identity was a critical step in the process. And it isn't that easy.