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Minister and President’s Message
Every congregation will share the benefits of Lilly grant
November, 2002
By Nancy S. Taylor
In her lead article in this section of UCNews editor Tiffany Vail reports on the $1.5 million grant recently awarded to the Massachusetts Conference by the Lilly Endowment for our new project Developing and Sustaining Pastoral Excellence.
This grant belongs to all of us…. to all of you: to the 100,000 members and 430 congregations of the Massachusetts Conference. This grant is the fruit of years of faithful, hopeful Christian discernment and discipleship. Over the past 5-8 years, in very concentrated ways, through numerous forums the clergy and laity of the Conference have talked, prayed, listened, experimented, conferred, reflected together and learned a great many things. We have dreamed aloud about how to shape and hone the ministries of the Conference in order to better serve our clergy and congregations to equip them to live, preach, and embody the Gospel in this bruised and battered world. The message we have heard over and over again, delivered in a variety of settings, spoken in a multitude of voices, is that our clergy desire more consultation and support. And, they deserve it.
Pastoral ministry is a rewarding, but also a demanding, complex, and difficult vocation. Through this project, we intend to surround and support our pastors with an array of opportunities for education, peer consultation, strategies, case studies, spiritual disciplines, best practices, and curricula to enable them to be excellent pastors, teachers, and community leaders. Developing and Sustaining Pastoral Excellence is designed to create a church culture committed to pursuing and supporting excellence in pastoral ministry. I believe this is an essential component of the overall ministry of the Massachusetts Conference. We haven’t been doing this job as well as we believe we should. The grant money will help us translate our good thinking and our Christian hopefulness into practical strategies aimed at creating an entire church culture committed to pastoral excellence.
Links
> Executive Summary of proposal
(Size: 13 KB. This is a PDF document. If you can't access it, click here for help.)Conference gets $1.5 million grant (United Church News, Nov., 2002)
> Lilly Endowment: Sustaining Pastoral Excellence
But what will this new culture committed to excellence look like? Let me quote directly from the proposal:
“One of the best expressions of our increasing excellence will be the deepened faith, the enhanced effectiveness, and the growth in vocational satisfaction of our pastoral ministers. Our clergy will know each other better, be engaged with one another in stimulating and creative theological reflection, work more collaboratively and share resources more readily. They will encourage, enjoy, and learn from one another.
“The excellence of our pastors will also be evident in the greater vitality of our congregations. Our churches will be engaged in mission in new and exciting ways. Our members will grow in faith and live out that faith more fully in the world. They will take their Christian stewardship more seriously and give more generously. There will be a heightened sense that the Holy Spirit is alive in us. At the end of five years, we expect to have many inspiring stories to tell about revitalized congregations and transformed lives.”
In other words, the results of this program will be felt in every congregation whose pastor(s) develop their pastoral ministry and share these benefits with church members.
But, and it is a big but, this grant is for this specific new program. It cannot be applied to our ongoing operating budget. The Lilly Endowment felt confident in awarding us a grant of this size because we have the infrastructure (due to the financial support of our churches) to enable us to realize the full potential of this extraordinary gift. Thank you, friends, for your continued support of Our Church’s Wider Mission and Fellowship Dues.