In a previous post, I made the distinction between credentialing and ministry formation. Formation has to do with "spiritual and personal development. It is gaining the skills, personal habits, and awareness necessary to be a reflective practitioner of ministry."
A reflective practitioner is one of the defining characteristics of a professional. To reflect on one's experience is think about one's experience doing worship. providing pastoral care, administrating with a vision, witnessing justice and all the other practices of a minister. It is to think about that experience in the light of one's theological understandings, and one's knowledge of the history of religious movements. It is to think about that experience with understanding about how it is impacting the people of faith community and the larger community as well.
Thus formation that involves becoming a reflective practitioner requires experience in actually doing ministry. In the 1960s, Unitarian Universalists began to experiment with internships as a way to gain some experience before graduation and actually taking up a post as a professional minister. Another immersion in practice is known as Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), which involves working in a hospital, prison, family court, or other setting where people are in crisis and providing pastoral care under supervision and reflecting on these experiences in a peer group. By the 1970s both CPE and internship were required by the Ministerial Fellowship Committee before a candidate was could apply for an interview. Internship and CPE are designed to help a candidate become a reflective practitioner.
But the experience of actually being a minister is radically different from being a trainee, whether in a clinical setting or in an internship. The expectations that are projected unto a minister and the conflicts that arise in congregations in which the minister is the symbolic center are much more intense than the supervised practice ministries of internships and clinical experiences. The number of ministers who experience crisis and leave the ministry in the first few years has become an area of concern, and that concern is reflected in the greater attention to the period between awarding preliminary fellowship and the granting of final fellowship after three years of successful settlement.
Many of the ideas that we learned in CPE and internship have been extended to some ideas for continuing formation during the first years of professional ministry. We now require mentorship during these critical years, hoping that some of the experience with internship supervision can help continue the process of reflective process as the new minister experiences their initial settlement. Some ministers voluntarily form support groups with colleagues and engage in peer group reflection on the problems that arise in ministry.
I am convinced that continuing education, and continuing reflection with colleagues is a key to ongoing growth in ministry. Formation in ministry does not end with theological school, the certification of preliminary fellowship is just the beginning of becoming a reflective practitioner of a very complex profession.
The New Generations: September 2005 Archives
In a previous post, I began this series of essays on ministerial formation and credentialing. These essays are in response to a post by Joey Lyons at Radical Hapa where he raises some profound questions about our process of ministry formation. In my previous post, I made the distinction between formation for ministry, and meeting the requirements for fellowship with the Ministerial Fellowship Committee. I also indicated that our credentialing process was designed to establish uniform standards for ministry, and so while the individuals who are involved in administering the process may be very supportive of individual students, the system is intended to screen out unsuitable applicants, rather than support formation.
There is an old maxim: Many are called, but few are chosen. Individuals, either by divine inspiration, by a quiet voice within, or by rational calculation of how best to use their assorted talents find themselves "called" to ministry. But to be a minister is to be in service to a particular faith community and that faith community must choose who will be and who will not be a minister.
Each particular faith community has a process for choosing among the many who feel called. Many faith communities select who and who will not go to seminary, there is considerable individual counseling, and clerical supervision of this process. The seminarians are supported financially and supervised throughout the process of their preparation. Other faith communities, including our own allow those who feel called to begin the process and then engage the selection process after the aspirant has had some education and experience. Bishops do not select our theological students, our students self select to go to school, with the understanding that the UUA will grant them candidate status only after they have completed the following requirements:
1. Career assessment program at a career center approved by the Ministerial Fellowship Committee. (MFC)
2. Candidacy status granted by a Regional Sub Committee on Candidacy.(RSCC)
3. Sponsorship by a UU Congregation.
4. a year of theological school.
This means student must make a considerable investment before they reach the first stage of qualification, meanwhile our students observe their fellow students from a presbyterian, or episcopal polities to be "in care" in their more supportive but more controlling denominations.
Our Regional Sub Committees are recent innovation, before they were instituted students had no denominational feed back about their prospects before their interview with the MFC. The student could have a M.Div. and complete internship and be surprised that they were rejected.
Once upon a time, which wasn't so long ago, almost all Unitarian Universalist theological students went to a Unitarian Universalist theological school. The faculty and administration were Unitarian Universalist ministers, and the school was committed to forming liberal ministers. Most of the students were known and supported by their home congregations, and in relationship to the minister in their home church. Informal and formal mentoring and support for ministry formation came from the schools and the congregational ministers. Students were adopted into the ministers association by friendly gatekeepers who would spot a promising young man and invite them in. (The sociological name of this informal system is called an "old boys network.")
Now most Unitarian Universalist aspirants and candidates for ministry are enrolled in non-Unitarian Universalist schools, and located in geographical areas where there are only a few Unitarian Universalist congregations and ministers. The result is that these students have no formal support for Unitarian Universalist ministerial formation and experience themselves as isolated and neglected. In many of our non-UU theological schools the students have formed a UU students support group and UU ministers have been invited to be 'advisors' and teach polity courses, UU theology courses, etc. The UUA has limited funds available to support courses at non-UU schools, but has provided grants to support such efforts. While these efforts can not provide the same support as a UU theological school, they do provide some support.
Is a limit to the number of theological schools that we can support? I will be so bold as suggest that at best a UUMA chapter can provide support to two schools, because of geographical dispersion some of our chapters would not be able to do that much. If we are going to try to build a system of support for ministry formation, we must select which schools we can provide support services to, and which we can't. Students should know before they apply, what we can do, and what we can't.
There are other possibilities, such as retreats and special on line classes which we can explore. I think the UUA and the UUMA need to organize a consultation with some representative students to explore some of these non traditional possibilities.
I think it is time to embark on a whole new approach to theological education, ministerial credentialing and ministry formation. But that is the subject for a different essay.
Joey Lyons of Radical Hapa reflects that his Ministerial Formation and in an earlier entry he laments the number of his fellow students that drop out of the process of becoming UU ministers. He writes that he has been intentional "about developing my ministerial skills and theology from a community based accountability, but honestly, I recognize that this is purely because I've chosen to do so. Ultimately I am primary in shaping and negotiating my ministerial formation, almost to the point that I'm uncomfortable and a bit surprised at the level of individual responsibility necessary to achieve each level of UU Ministerial Credentialing."
I think a lot about the formation of ministers, and the Unitarian Universalist community of ministers As a member of the Executive of the Unitarian Universalist Minister's Association (UUMA), I have a small role in shaping policy relative to formation, and collegial community. In our polity, no one individual has a determining role, the UUA Board of Trustees, the UUA staff, the Ministerial Fellowship Committee (MFC) members, the theological school boards and faculty, the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education, the search committees, the internship congregations, the colleagues who mentor students, the UUMA chapters and the UUMA executive all participate in shaping policy and helping to oversee the process. But it is the students in formation who determine the success or failure of all of those efforts.
Joey Lyons alludes to our reality, our polity is associative, rather than hierarchal. Our Association of Congregations has established requirements for credentialing, but we don't direct the process of ministerial formation. In this essay, and in several to follow I will analyze this reality, examine the necessary limitations of institutional guidance, and propose some ideas that might contribute to a more supportive, community based ministerial formation in the future.
There is a distinction to be made between formation and the process of credentialing. As I understand that term, formation is spiritual and personal development. It is gaining the skills, personal habits, and awareness necessary to be a reflective practitioner of ministry. For example, if we think of a minister as a spiritual leader, we might ask what is this candidates spiritual practice? How is this candidate engaged in deepening the quality of personal relationships to self, cosmos, spirit and other creatures? What disciplines of self care and spiritual nurture does this candidate practice? Credentialing on the other hand has to do with an institution certifying competence.
Ideally we would meet with each candidate for ministry and discern what skills, knowledge, experience, spiritual and personal qualities that candidate would need to acquire in order to function and thrive as a minister. One candidate might need to develop a sense of humor, another might need to develop more discretion when it comes to sharing their visions, another might need to cultivate their inner boldness. But alas, the institution needs to make judgments based on uniform standards, so the MFC proposes standards and the UUMA has decisive input, and UU theological schools make contingency plans, and the non UU theological schools ignore the process, and the UUA Board of Trustees adopts the standards and the students adjust to the new requirements. Over the last four decades, the requirements have changed significantly and there are plans and discussions to change them again.
The basic requirements for UU ministry are:
1. Career assessment program at a career center approved by the Ministerial Fellowship Committee
2. Candidacy status granted by an RSCC
3. Sponsorship by a UU Congregation
4. Master of Divinity degree or its equivalent;
5. Approved internship;
6. Basic unit of Clinical Pastoral Education;
7. Completion of the Reading List;
8. Interview with the Ministerial Fellowship Committee.
We might question the efficacy of any and all of these requirements towards actually forming a minister. Channing read with the minister in Lancaster, Massachusetts while he taught school, there was no Divinity School to attend. Couldn't our students just read with a tutor? Do a little apprenticeship with a wise old cleric, and when ready for prime time, do some circuit preaching? One of the little churches on the circuit would grab the aspirant up, ordain and install their find and a pastor would be formed. That is the way it was, it gave us great ministers.
We have established credentialing, and we have requirements. But our students do not have uniform experiences in meeting these requirements. Some schools that give Masters of Divinity degrees are part of major Universities, and some are smaller and intimate and deserve the name "seminary." One school provides its students with access to famous scholars, the other provides directed spiritual and ministerial formation. Some schools are UU friendly, some are not. Depending on the peer group and the supervisor, as well as the maturity of the student, Clinical Pastoral Education can be nurturing experience through which a student learns pastoral skills and awareness or it can be an traumatic and destructive experience. I have known students who dropped out of the process because of a personality conflict with one of the gatekeepers as they were moving along the process of credentialing. We might blame the victim if the student has repeated conflicts with authority figures, we might blame the gatekeeper if many students have found that functionary problematic, or we might write this students loss off to serendipity. My point is that the process has been created to make judgments of competence, based on uniform standards. It is a screening process. We are trying to institutionalize fairness, and encourage a qualified ministry. But these requirements do not help a student in the process of ministerial formation. That has been left to the schools, to the mentors, to the intern supervisors, and most of all to the students.
Coming soon my second reflection will ponder our system of "self selection" of aspirants. The UUA provides little or no support for students in the first year of theological school, and little guidance as they enter the process of credentialing. This weakness is built into our polity, and the history of our ministry. In order to make changes, we must begin by examining our polity.
There is no such thing as a traditional family pattern! How can there be traditional family value?
There are family patterns that have lasted a long time, but the ideal that is put forward Male Dominated, Female as Housekeeper children bearing the father's name, is a concept of the family that is less than four thousand years old and took root only among a minority of the worlds population.
More ancient than Patriarchy, there prevailed a more egalitarian form of family, some in which lineage was traced through the women, but all in which both men and women were equal in law and practice.
In English speaking colonial America, the male owned all property,and marriages were arranged by men, to facilitate property arrangements. That was a "traditional" family, for the male property holding European settlers in North America. The European who settled in North American brought their family pattern with them, but on this continent with lots of land to steal, and so the children were not as dependent on inheritance for land.
In the decades prior to the American Revolution, a radical change in family relations began to emerge. We see it in the church records of marriage and baptism. In Concord, Massachusetts in decade of the 1760s, more than half of the first born children baptized at the church, were born less than seven months after their parents were married! The diaries also indicate considerable concern, anxiety, "what is going on with the children, they are so defiant." Unlike their parents, they were choosing who they would marry, and defying the arrangements made between patriarchs.
With two generations beginning in New England, the old Patriarchal arranged marriage system collapsed in America, and a family formed on the basis romantic love and self initiated courtship emerged.
In the 1840s we begin to see another big change in the family, men going off to work.....for millennia in Europe and Asia, the patriarchal household had been the center of economic work. Silversmiths for example worked in their shops and their residence was attached. Bankers had offices in their residences, as did lawyers. Pastors lived in pastorates, next to the church. Farmers lived in a farm house on the farm, or walked out to their plot from a nearby village.
In the 1840s that pattern broke down, and males began to spend hours away from the residence, in offices, in shops, in factories and middle class women ecame the de facto head of the household, and child rearing The resident patriarch that had been the basis of the European traditional marriage was no longer resident.
The new division of roles for men and women began to become articulated. women as nurturers, men as bread winners. We do not find those ideas before, most women worked in their husbands trade in the centuries before, men had supervised children.
In the twentieth century a new pattern emerged, becoming significant in the middle decades of that century. We see middle class women going off to work, women pursuing careers children being cared for in the day time by institutions and service providers. Again a new pattern, a new way of being family.
I have not surveyed the change in Native American family patterns, the change in African American family patterns, or the changes in the family patterns of Europeans who became industrial workers. Each of these are significantly different from what was considered to be ideal by the dominant groups in American society both in the past and in the present. I have only surveyed the changes in what was considered "ideal" by the white people of property.
But even with those limitations, I believe we can see from this very brief trot through the family history that family patterns change, family dynamics change. There is no one way of being family in the United States today, no singular way of being family that is embraced by a majority, and none of the many ways of being family we see in the United States have sufficient antiquity to claim to be the traditional American family.
We arrived at the Woolworth's
and the picket line was already in motion.
The demonstrators Black, White, young and old,
were singing songs I had never heard before,
shooting slogans about Freedom,
holding signs accusing the five and dime chain of Jim Crow,
Segregation, Racism, Bigotry,
It was 1958
and I had come to believe
that Segregation was very, very wrong
so very wrong that I must act.
