Overview

This report seeks to call attention to a promising set of new experiments that share a common purpose and have the potential to make a collective impact on the way people enter pastoral ministry in the 21st century. In distinctive ways, more than 30 program teams drew hundreds of new seminary graduates, a variety of denominational and judicatory leaders, a large number of congregations, several seminaries, and thousands of congregation members into a shared effort to change the experience of pastors at the thresholds of their ministries. This report will identify some of the motivating concerns that gave rise to this effort and it will highlight significant discoveries that can lay the groundwork for longterm, systemic change in the way people are prepared for practical pastoral leadership.¹

The name for this collective endeavor is Transition into Ministry (TiM), an initiative of Lilly Endowment Inc. participated in by a total of more than 800 beginning pastors. At its core this initiative seeks to reshape the preparation of Protestant pastors by supplementing the seminary training received in the M.Div. program with a focused apprenticeship in a “community of practice.” Based on the assumption that pastors will be better prepared to lead congregations when they have had the opportunity to become reflective participants in a local community of practice, these programs seek to counter a twocenturies-long trend of viewing pastoral preparation as something that is largely completed upon graduating from seminary.

This report has three parts. We begin with an introduction on the special challenge of the transition into ministry, which provides a context for viewing the 34 programs in this initiative (see page 24). Then we turn to the programs themselves, describing their salient features and taking a closer look at a few. Finally, we conclude with a reflection on some of the significant observations and discoveries from this initiative, which together form a foundation on which to build yet more new approaches to the work of preparing a new generation of pastoral leaders.