For the Rev. Dr. Almeda M. Wright, the notion of radical listening changed her ministry and her research into the spiritual lives of young people as a professor at Yale Divinity School. In her conversation with "Can These Bones" co-host Laura Everett, this engineer-turned-pastor-turned-professor talks about how a youth program influenced her as a young African-American woman, how spoken-word poetry is a spiritual practice, and what it means to employ radical improvisational pedagogy. She also reflects on how the learnings from her book on youth spirituality can be employed immediately in many contexts.
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| | IDEAS THAT IMPACT: YOUTH MINISTRY |
What does it take for a church to be attractive to a younger adult? In this article from the Alban archive, we are introduced to First Congregational Church - Cambridge, a church that shows us how to be (1) flexible while honoring the importance of commitment, (2) welcoming but not desperate-sounding, and (3) overt about theology while making room for doubt.
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What kind of church will we hand over to our children and grandchildren? The answer will largely depend upon the kind of leaders we train for the church in our time. And chief among those leaders are the pastors who will serve and guide our churches.
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Youth ministry is ministry with people who are searching for something, for someone, "to die for," to use Erik Erikson's haunting phrase. They are looking for a troth worthy of their suffering, a love worthy of a lifetime and not just a Sunday night. Helping them find it is our responsibility.
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Preparing the Pastors We Need: Reclaiming the Congregation's Role in Training Clergy by George Mason
Amid the widespread discussion about 'the future of the church,' an important point is sometimes overlooked: tomorrow's church will depend to a great extent on the new pastors of today who will serve and guide our churches in the years ahead.
George Mason's Preparing the Pastors We Need: Reclaiming the Congregation's Role in Training Clergy makes a timely intervention, asking us to redefine pastoral leadership by analyzing how, in fact, pastors are made in the first place. The book highlights an exciting development in the training of pastors: pastoral residency programs and mentoring. Mason demonstrates that these programs work best when the congregations themselves, not just leadership or staff, are an active participant in the training. In this way, churches begin to reclaim their rightful role in the formation of the ministers that will serve them. And, at the same time, they become healthier and more effective churches.
Mason gives us the analogy of physician training. Medical school produces graduates with extensive knowledge of the body, but a practicing doctor will require several more years of internship and residency. Similarly, our seminaries and divinity schools produce men and women with good biblical knowledge, but they might not prepare a graduate for the task of helping a bereaved parishioner cope with the sudden loss of a loved one. Moreover, such areas as finances, budgets, personnel management, and vocational identity are also not well suited to seminary study. Mason shows that congregation-based mentoring and residency are excellent ways to bridge this gap.
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