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.