3 Minute Ministry Mentor

Mentoring for pastoral wisdom or imagination is important and complex work. It may look simple on the surface, but handing on the skills and knowledge of ministry takes time, insight and awareness. Remember there is always more than meets the eye in each ministry moment. Perhaps you are wondering: what should I look for when recruiting a mentor? How can I make the most of my potential mentoring relationships? Read more here about these questions.

Want to see more episodes of the Three Minute Ministry Mentor? You are invited to visit the 3MMM page and get caught up any time! If you want them delivered to your inbox each week, why not sign up today?

One of my favorite early feminist theologians, Nell Morton, is best known for her idea of “hearing to speech.” She writes about the power of listening deeply and really hearing each other in her book, The Journey is Home.

Morton says, “Hearing of this sort is equivalent to empowerment. We empower one another by hearing the other to speech. We empower the disinherited, the outsider, as we are able to hear them name in their own way their own oppression and suffering. In turn, we are empowered as we can put ourselves in a position to be heard by the disinherited (in this case other women) to speaking our own feeling of being caught and trapped. Hearing in this sense can break through political and social structures and image a new system. A great ear at the heart of the universe – at the heart of our common life — hearing human beings to speech — to our own speech.”

This week’s episode of the Three Minute Ministry Mentor is about listening. The story comes from two women who went from being mentor and mentee to creating a “circle of sisterhood.” At the heart of that transition was the empowering experience of listening, asking good questions, and building trust. #3MMM

There is so much to learn about the practice of ministry in courses like these, that mis-steps, stumbles and even more overt failure are unavoidable. And although failures large and small are inevitable, does not mean they are the end. In fact they can be the beginning of something very important!

This week’s episode of 3MMM turns our attention to how we might fail creatively on the way to learning the complex practice of ministry.

The resource I recommend in this week’s episode comes from author and art curator Sarah Lewis. In one of my favorite books of the last five years, The Rise, she explores how failure is an essential weigh station on the path to discovery, invention, and mastery of any complex, meaningful production.

I hope you will take time this week to do these things: 1) thank a field education professor or supervisor who has helped you along your pathway of learning; 2) consider how to reframe the failures you’ve experienced as creative opportunities for growth and discovery.

Have you missed an episode of the Three Minute Ministry Mentor lately? You are invited to visit the 3MMM page and get caught up any time!

This weekend a dear person in my life died unexpectedly. Louise and I have been part of the same faith community for 18 years. She was a member of that community for decades before I arrived. Lou and I shared many different seasons in our relationship, and we had more connecting points that I can count.

I’m sharing this loss with you today, not because I want to eulogize Lou. Our faith community will do that beautifully in the days and weeks ahead. And I am capturing my own memories as they come up for me. What I want to do, however, is to praise the beauty of the relational character of shared ministry.

I’m fortunate to be part of the community of faith that meets at Glendale Baptist Church. In that community I know the joy of being in relationships over time that grow and change shape. Dozens of people at Glendale, including Lou, helped me to survive graduate school, and the long and sorrowful journey to parenthood, and the birth of my daughter, and many job changes and vocational shifts. I’m a better person, and parent and minister for all the support and belonging they have lavished on me.

My life is also richer for the many ways I have been a part of their lives as well:  the walking together and the praying, the welcoming new life and grieving lives lost, the cooking and caring, the navigation of conflict and change, and the work of serving people who are hungry, aspiring to more justice, and re-creating life together. Through all these many processes my family has a place of belonging at Glendale. And  together these relationships give shape to an authentic shared community....

#3MMM

To be a church leader in our time requires not only a clear calling but also courage. If you hope and desire that your faith community will be part of the change for justice and equality rather than one of the obstacles to it, then you need knowledge, commitment and willingness to to risk something big for the sake of something better for all people.

No simple path to change is available. The complexity of how the systems of inequality are maintained is a part of their power. Their hiddenness contributes to keeping the status quo.

Let me make an example of the entangled, complex and hidden aspects of powers of sexism and racism in my own life. My identity as a woman is entangled with my identity as a white person. I both suffer the social exclusions of society and church as a woman, and I benefit from the privileges of society and church as a white-identifed person. At the same time...

Read more of this excerpt at: Equity in Ministry in Episode 8. 

#3MMM.

All this talk of thinking, reflecting and asking questions… yet the practice of ministry is so much more than thinking and talking. It is an embodied, relational, and spiritual practice. So this week’s podcast presents a story that begins with ministry to a new family with an infant and stretches out into all the ways ministry is embodied. #3MMM