CURRENT STATE OF PASTORAL MINISTRY
Sustaining pastoral excellence begins [in seminary] because of the noticeable number of seminary graduates who state "seminary did not adequately prepare me for ministry." The first challenge in sustaining pastoral excellence is creating the basic educational paradigm to establish it. We believe that, for Asbury Theological Seminary, the Wesleyan doctrine of holiness of heart and life provides a holistic paradigm for sustaining pastoral excellence through commitments to spiritual formation, professional competence in relation to the church and culture, life in community, and missional service in the world.

As a partial response to some of the needs indicated throughout this analysis, Asbury Theological Seminary has recently redesigned its curriculum in relation to the overall theme of vocation. This change grounds our theological education squarely in the student’s discernment of God’s call, and it arranges the resources of the seminary to help that call develop and mature. The curriculum allows room to address both the older and newer dynamics that threaten to erode pastoral excellence and enables the development of excellence in students to be nurtured in the context of an intentional, transformational community rooted in worship and scriptural practices.



PROGRAM DEFINITION | Seminarius (during the years of seminary)
In the most recent school year, Asbury Seminary was awarded a grant from the Lily Foundation’s Sustaining Pastoral Excellence initiative. Our project, Pastoral Seasons as Life and Ministry (P.S.A.L.M.), proposes to engage and equip pastoral leaders at key points in the journey of life and ministry. A significant portion of P.S.A.L.M., Seminarius, engages seminary students, recognizing seminary itself as a foundational season in the journey. Seminary is not the Christian life, but it is, for those who choose this form of intensified preparation for service, a significant formation path on the Christian journey.

Seminarius envisions the season of seminary as a transformational learning journey where
• sound learning and vital piety are conjoined in holy union;
• where the pursuit of knowledge and the practice of spiritual formation live in thoughtful integration;
• where Christian disciples participate in intentional community,
-sharing a lifestyle of worship and prayer and
-shaping life patterns of health and wholeness
in preparation to the end of being sent forth as a well-trained, sanctified, Spirit-filled, evangelistic ministry to spread Scriptural holiness throughout the World.

Called to a Journey
The notion of ‘journey’ is core to historic Christian spirituality. Jesus alludes to the step-by-step nature of the believer’s experience when he urged them to “Follow me.” He framed his own centrality to their experience by using journey imagery with: “I am the Way. . . .” Our first picture of disciples are fraught with images of people leaving, picking up, wandering together in mission throughout ancient Palestinian towns and countryside.

Classical Christian writers on the Christian experience repeatedly refer to “Pilgrim’s Progress” in John Bunyan’s case and “Pilgrim’s Regress” in the case of C.S. Lewis. He invited followers to consider their ultimate destinies in Him by declaring: “I go to prepare a place for you,” suggesting that we will, in time, find our journey’s fulfillment in a celestial paradise of a New Heaven and a New Earth.

Though the ultimate destination of Christian journey transcends the temporal realm of this life so do the possibilities of eternal life break-in on the temporal order. At the core of Christian prayer is the constant petition, on earth as it is in heaven. The journey’s constant purpose and declared end is as follows:

Christian formation, growth toward wholeness in the image of Christ, is becoming a person radically abandoned to God in love, manifesting in cruciform availability to God for others.

Formal Curriculum.
Seminarius, through the formal curriculum, provides targeted opportunities through the core formational courses: Kingdom Church and World and Vocation of Ministry. Within each course is a semester long required small group component designed to equip in the areas of covenantal community, spiritual formation and missional service. Through faculty guidance, they will learn to reflect together theologically on shared missional experiences. (KCW/VOM team to add more detail here)

Cocurriculum.
Seminarius aims to help translate the short season of seminary into authentic transformation in the image of Christ. Seminarius offers students two interrelated opportunities for Christian formation.

1. Covenant Friends. At the core of an abiding relationship with Jesus Christ lies the art of friendship as a spiritual practice and discipline. We do not envision friendship as primarily an instrumental means of grace designed to aid in one’s personal growth. Rather, we imagine friendship as the goal itself. To be created in the image of a Trinitarian God means life is best known and lived in the milieu of holy relationships. Despite this, we repeatedly discover that pastors and ministry leaders are among the loneliest people on Earth. Isolation most often surfaces as one of the chief reasons/ predictors for burnout and vocational failure in ministry.

Seminary offers a unique opportunity to learn and cultivate the practice of covenant friendship. Seminarius provides a simply structured, highly nurtured and resourced community (or society to use a term from our Wesleyan heritage) of sustained covenant friendship groups. Because honestly and vulnerability are the fruit of longevity in relationships, we aim for these groups to be sustained a minimum of one year and hopefully through two or three years. The groups will be self-selecting, though we will help place persons in groups as desired.

Each spring Covenant Friends groups will gather for a formative retreat designed to form and establish new groups as well as to further equip ongoing groups. The first retreat will be held in early 2005 (date and location tba)

2. Practice and Grow provides experiential cocurricular opportunities for students to engage in spiritual formation and grow in Christian wholeness through the following integrated avenues: opportunities to learn the streams of Christian tradition and practice the means of grace, formative retreat experiences, primer courses designed to supplement the formal curriculum, and creative opportunities to engage spiritual practices in worship and other corporate experiences. A personal formation cocurriculum will be designed to address the growth of wholeness in persons preparing for ministry. Efforts will be made to target assessment of personal growth, with diagnostic and prescriptive guidance offered throughout the seminary years. Preparation for the long haul must include reformation and transformation of brokenness and de-formation, without which ministry in Jesus’ name will be ineffective.

While the Covenant Friends and Practice and Grow initiatives might operate independently of one another they are designed for interaction and integration. Covenant Friendship groups benefit maximally through engaging the opportunities provided through the Practice and Grow cocurriculum. Whether in a group or not, all students will have access to the Practice and Grow formative opportunities and experiences. Students will understand access the Practice and Grow cocurriculum by means of a Map. (Under Construction)

Why a Map?
The Map image, more than any other in the journey metaphor is so useful to us because of how it allows our community to be together in journey in a special way. Consider these possibilities suggested within the metaphor of the map:

• Maps Reflect Well-Trodden Paths. Maps imply cartographers “have gone before us” leaving a framework for our journeys. While there is much room for trailblazing, exploration, discovery, maps can relieve pilgrims of wasted effort that detours, dead-ends and wastelands can consume.

• Maps are Tools for Navigating the Terrain. Maps provide the clarity that links origins and destinations with well-trodden pathways. They let us know what is ahead, to know which paths may or may not work for our purposes. They also acknowledge we occasionally become disoriented. With a map, these disorientations can be briefer and fewer.

• Maps Facilitate Different Places, Different Paces. Maps acknowledge journey-makers, in all their God-given diversity, have different visions, paces and stages of progress. Some may travel together, while others may walk alone for a while. Maps allow pilgrims, not cartographers, to choose the pathways that best facilitating these multiple destinations.

• Maps are Maps, Not the Journey. Maps are merely tools. To get the best from them, they have to be used. In some respects, they only portray potential possibilities; they are not reality themselves. Having a map does not guarantee that journey-makers will not get lost or sidetracked. Neither does it restrict some from blazing new trails, or discovering havens of adventure and rest that do not appear on the map’s grid. The important thing is this: pilgrims have to experience the territory for themselves. The map offers a context for this experience.

The intended outcome of these initiatives will be the meaningful linkage of personal and social holiness in practical ways rooted in authentic spiritual friendships. Nurturing these relationships through the seminary season will provide the essential foundation for long-term sustainability in ministry as well as a reproducible model for future practice. In doing so, our preparing ministers will be well established on the pathway to live-giving wholeness in Christ. In these ways, pastoral integrity will be sustained as pastors learn to do the work of God in the church in ways compatible with the work of God within them. Formed well, many of these friendships will continue long beyond the seminary years, navigating the seasons of ministry with skilled grace.

• CONTACT: email: psalm@asburyseminary.edu

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