Bivocational: Returning to the Roots of Ministry - Softcover

Edington, Mark D. W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0819233862 ISBN 13: 9780819233868

Verlag: Church Publishing, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Bivocational: Returning to the Roots of Ministry offers one answer to the pressing question of the future of congregational life in the mainline Protestant Church. The contention of the book is that the model of professional ministry we have received from the past century of congregational life is imposing unsustainable costs on most congregations and parishes. In consequence, these faith communities face stark choices for which there are no self-evident answers. Shall we close? Shall we merge with another congregation―a decision shaped by a primary value on maintaining a full-time professional in the role of ordained minister? Can we find someone who will do the job part-time? What will it mean for them―and for us?

Bivocational explores the impact on the ministry, on congregations, and on denominational polities of encouraging a way forward―one in which bivocational ordained professionals, ministers working simultaneously in the church and in secular life, come to leadership positions in the church. It explores the different sorts of gifts and preparation such ordained ministers need, and how a bivocational ethos looks when it characterizes not only the ordained minister, but all ministers of the congregation―lay and ordained alike.

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MARK D. W. EDINGTON is the bishop of the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe. He served as Epps Fellow and Chaplain to Harvard College, and Associate Minister and Director of Administration in The Memorial Church of Harvard University. He served as executive director of the Center for the Study of World Religions and as the inaugural executive director of the Harvard Decision Science Laboratory. He was also the founding director of the Amherst College Press. He lives in Paris, France.

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Bivocational

Returning To The Roots Of Ministry

By Mark D. W. Edington

Church Publishing Incorporated

Copyright © 2018 Mark D. W. Edington
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8192-3386-8

Contents

Introduction, 
1. The Bivocational Pastor, 
2. The Bivocational Congregation, 
3. The Bivocational Polity, 
4. The Church: A Bivocational Theology of Ministry, 
5. We Can Get There from Here, 
Acknowledgments, 
Further Reading, 

CHAPTER 1

The Bivocational Pastor

Mark Wastler gets up most mornings between 5:30 and 6:00. Before doing anything else, he pulls on his work clothes, heads out the kitchen door to the enclosed field behind his house, and checks on a flock of some seventy sheep. Wastler has lived on this farm for just under ten years. He tried a few ways to make it sustainable before settling on sheep farming. He can show you a spreadsheet in which he has carefully plotted out his costs for obtaining and feeding the lambs, the amount he projects the sheep will grow in weight, and the amount of profit he can expect to receive when the sheep go to market — assuming, that is, they all stay healthy and out of the clutches of the coyotes that range across his part of northwestern Virginia.

Sheep farming is a hard life. It makes for early mornings and, very often, late nights. When lambing season comes, sleep is a rare luxury. And notwithstanding the sweet image that most urban dwellers hold, sheep can be cantankerous, unpleasant, and clueless when it comes to keeping themselves out of danger. Come to think of it, that may be why for centuries the ordained leaders of congregations have been called pastors — a direct borrow of the Latin noun pastor, shepherd. People — at least people in the church — can be a lot like sheep.

In Wastler's case, the term turns out to be more than a little bit appropriate. Because he is also an ordained minister, and he serves as the rector — the senior (and in the case of his congregation, the only) ordained minister in an Episcopal church — in his parish. It's a parish seventy-three miles and two state boundaries away: Saint Paul's, in Sharpsburg, Maryland. It's a parish of some 170 or so members; on any given Sunday, about fifty-five of them are in church.

Mark Wastler is a bivocational pastor. So is Joseph Wilkes; he's the rector of Saint Andrew's in Methuen, Massachusetts, and an oral surgeon in Boston. So is Kate Harrigan; she's the rector of Saint Paul's Church and the chaplain at Saint Stephen's Episcopal School, both in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. And so, as it turns out, are an increasing number of pastors across the mainline Protestant traditions.

Many pastors are part-time. More often than not, their status, as a wise mentor of mine once quipped, would more accurately be summarized as "partially compensated." They provide ordained leadership in the increasing number of faith communities that can only afford an ordained minister on a part-time basis; but the seeming limits on the time they give the parish are rarely rigidly observed, and the paradigm shaping how ministry is structured and shared between ordained and lay members of the community is still strongly shaped by the ideas and expectations of the "Standard Model" of ministry that takes for granted the presence of a full-time, benefitted professional in the clerical role. The expectations of the community, often based on an understanding of ordained ministry formed by decades of that model, as well as the discomfort that deters many pastors from insisting on the limits to their presence when there is work to be done, often make the idea of "part time" more of a semantic construction than a reality shaping the structure of ministry in a community.

But for bivocational pastors, those limits are very real. They exert strong grip on the whole parish, because they make it necessary for all members of the community — not just the pastor — to find different ways of sharing the responsibilities of ministry. Said plainly, the clear and unavoidable limits around the availability of bivocational pastors, the plain result of the restrictions placed on all of us with jobs in the secular world, requires the whole community, and not just its ordained leader, to come to terms with some basic questions about what ministry is. The good news is that, in a moment of tremendous change in the circumstances of the church, this confrontation with the meaning and structure of ministry may just be about the best thing we could ask for.

It's no longer the case that pastors like Mark Wastler, Joseph Wilkes, and Kate Harrigan are anomalies. As we will see in later chapters, the institution of the church may not yet be fully aware of, or fully responsive to, this bivocational reality; nonetheless, the weaving together of a number of economic, cultural, and societal forces have made it an adaptive response to a fundamentally changed set of circumstances.

The idea of ordained ministers of the church also working in a job outside the church is by no means new. On the contrary, it is very old indeed — just about as old as the church itself. In the eighteenth chapter of Acts, we find the apostle Paul in the midst of his second missionary journey, arriving in Corinth after leaving Athens. He ends up staying there for a year and a half, with Aquila and Priscilla, a married Jewish couple recently exiled from Rome. As Luke reports, "because he was of the same trade, he stayed with them, and they worked together — they were tent-makers" (Acts 18:3).

For many years it has been a commonplace to refer to ordained ministers working outside the church as people in a "tentmaking ministry," using the imagery of Paul's example. It is a tradition that has been expressed, in various ways, from the founding days of the church. Over the centuries of Christian history, the form and social structure of ordained ministry has taken on a variety of forms, ranging from monks in religious orders cloistered away from the secular world to Mennonite deacons working at a trade while pastoring their church. Each of these expressions, and countless more besides, are equally valid as expressions of a response to God's call to ordained ministry. The question that each must answer has to do with the gifts of the individual, the needs of the community, and the working of the Holy Spirit in a particular set of circumstances and within a particular gathering of the faithful. The instinct to define in narrow terms what ordained ministry should be, and then to make dogmatic significance of those contingent choices, is another example of our well-developed tendency to confuse the human instinct for creating systems of disposing power with God's relentless purpose to reconcile and restore humanity.

* * *

You may be reading this book because you're a member of a faith community — or maybe the leader of a faith community — on the cusp of having to make some hard decisions about the future structure of the ministry you offer. Or you may be reading this book because you're an ordained pastor thinking about taking on a pastorate in which you'd be spending some of your time in a job outside your role in the church.

In either case, there's one overarching reality to grapple with up front: the successful implementation of a bivocational model of ministry is a work of the entire faith community, and not just the ordained member (or members) of that community. "Bivocational ministry" is much more than a shorthand description of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Church Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0819233862
• ISBN 13: 9780819233868
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 144
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar