ATLANTA (ABP) — A $1 million grant is funding a new center at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology that aims to create a new paradigm for transitioning new ministers from the academic setting into the realities of local-church ministry.
The five-year grant from the Lilly Endowment builds on an earlier ministerial-transition grant to the Atlanta-based Baptist seminary and will fund the establishment of a new McAfee Center for Teaching Churches.
McAfee Dean Alan Culpepper. (Mercer photo)
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“With the Center for Teaching Churches, the McAfee School of Theology is breaking new ground,” said Alan Culpepper, the school’s dean. “This center will provide a network of support for both graduates and churches while bringing new voices from the church into the process of nurturing young ministers.”
According to Dock Hollingsworth, a McAfee assistant dean and professor who will serve as the center’s director, it is needed in Baptist life and other congregationally oriented denominational traditions. The center — and other seminary-based schools like it — can help create a support structure for new ministers and their churches in navigating the sometimes-tough transition from divinity school to local-church ministry.
“Among the things we have documented as difficult parts of that transition are moving from an academic world of just solitary pursuit to working in community,” he said. “Part of that is inspiring and motivating other people to do your work, but part of it is being judged — in many ways for the first time — on relational and emotional giftedness, which is not a part of the academic pursuit.
"Part of it is the transition around pastoral identity — what it means to move from being somebody whose primary identity is a graduate student with a backpack to somebody who is now seen as the ‘holy person’ in a community.”
Hollingsworth said McAfee’s program is “unique in that we are the first seminary in the free-church tradition to begin this kind of partnership. There are some other models that are a also Lilly-funded, but they are residency models that work in other [denominational] systems because every two years a bishop can pick [a minister] up and put them somewhere else.”
Center Director Dock Hollingsworth. (Mercer photo)
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Hollingsworth said McAfee is “designing a transition-into-ministry model that is built on the first placement and supports with intentionality the first two years of a placement that may become a 10-year placement. So, if this becomes an effective transition-into-ministry model, it can be replicated with other free-church seminaries and their partner churches.”
The way it will work is that, when a McAfee student graduates and is called by a local church, center officials will ask the church if they want to participate as a teaching congregation in the first two years of the minister's service with them. The center will ask for a $2,000 annual gift from the church to participate in the program. In exchange, McAfee will provide several resources for the new minister and will train a group of church members as what Hollingsworth called a “lay-reflection committee” to help the minister work through issues surrounding his or her transition.
By virtue of its participation, the church becomes part of a fellowship of teaching churches, and representatives from participating churches will attend ministry-transition events sponsored by McAfee and share best practices that they have learned from their experiences with new ministers.
“So, you’ll be informed about the larger issues of ministerial transition, and then we’ll learn from you more about what helps this transition, and you’ll be a part of this larger network of churches,” Hollingsworth said.
He also noted the program will help ministers and churches deal with the smaller, more practical issues surrounding a new minister’s transition into local-church ministry.
“Students are used to living their world out in 15-week time blocks. They’re having to adjust to larger systems of calendaring,” Hollingsworth said. “How to move their own ideas into actions is a big one. Traditional students have been given a syllabus and told what to do and when it’s due and have not learned the capacity yet to deal with their own agency — you know, ‘How do I take my ideas about what this ministry ought to look like and calendar it and make it happen?’
“So the biggest issues in this transition are issues of leadership and relationship, because the kind of hard skills that are needed — what they need to know in terms of theology and church history and Old Testament and New Testament — they are doing extraordinarily well in those areas. But leadership and relationship are the ways that they are struggling the most and that we need to nurture the transition [in] the most.”
In announcing the center’s launch Dec. 15, Mercer officials noted they are searching for a second full-time staff person to assist Hollingsworth in directing the program.
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Robert Marus is managing editor and Washington bureau chief for Associated Baptist Press.