CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter
When I finished years of campus ministry plus doctoral work, it had been a long time since I had pastored a congregation. I knew a lot had changed in the church since I was serving student appointments during college and seminary. I knew I needed help in making the transition back to the pastorate. The Academy of Parish Clergy was brand new, and it sounded like just what I needed. It was.
Granger Westberg founded the APC as a continuing education community for pastors, in which we would learn from one another by “sharing the practice.”
I was preaching at Orion, on the IL side of the Quad Cities area [Davenport and Bettendorf in IA, Moline and Rock Island in IL], and I was so enthusiastic about APC that I formed a colleague group, with about a dozen members from most Protestant denominations and at least one Roman Catholic. One member was Bob, pastor of a large Baptist church in Moline. He was an enthusiastic member of the group. Bright, young but not new in ministry, personable, good-looking, well dressed.
We met on Tuesday mornings to do case studies and then went to lunch. One Tuesday Bob came in looking bedraggled, a way he never looked, and very sleepy. He said, “Sunday, after church, we had a regular board meeting. Somebody made a motion to fire me, and it failed by only one vote, my wife’s. I had no idea anything was wrong. I haven’t slept since.”
I was so pleased that he had that group. We’d been meeting long enough that we cared about one another personally, not just professionally. We went into “how can we help” mode. We decided to offer our services, meaning me [after all, I had just done a doctorate in theological communication], to the congregation, for learning a better process for congregation and pastor to communicate and work on problems. I actually did that, and it helped. They created a whole new pastor-parish format. [1]
The APC was “an idea whose time has come,” but its time wasn’t very long. Soon after it was founded, seminaries began to offer continuing education, too. Most congregations don’t like for their pastor to go far afield, even to get better at the job, but they understand if you want to go back to seminary for a conference once in a while. They certainly think it’s a waste of time for him/her to be hanging around with preachers from other denominations, though, and even synagogues and mosques, the way we did in APC. You got no pastoral points for APC.
But I mourn the demise of the APC. It had the brightest and most committed pastors I have ever known, and we really were able to be better pastors, and make the church better, by “sharing the practice.”
Actually, I started this as a letter to my old APC colleague, Fred Skaggs, just reminiscing, but a writer hates to get only one use out of his/her scribbles, so I’ll come up with a principle to justify making you read it, too: all church sub-groups and side-groups have limited life. Women’s circles, prayer groups, men’s breakfast groups, Bible study groups, mission organizations. That’s okay. It’s the nature of social life. But it’s okay to celebrate those groups that have given us a clearer identity within the sometimes vague reality of the church in general. [Same goes if you’re not a church person. No matter how often you sing “I love this bar,” it won’t last forever.]
John Robert McFarland
1] Bob and his wife were
an excellent singing duo and did a special concert for my congregation as a
thank-you to me.
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