Part I: A Special Challenge

There are many paths into pastoral ministry, and many steps along each path. For the majority of those who follow these paths, however, there is one shared step, one challenge that all face in common. It is the time when each individual steps across a threshold from a season of preparation to a life of leadership. A mantle of responsibility is put on, a role is assumed, a different status or identity is conferred.

Throughout the history of the church, this special time of transition has been prepared for in different ways, recognized through different rituals, and supported by different organizational patterns. Each generation takes its turn leading individuals up to and across the pastoral threshold. In each journey great things are at stake: the vocational future of an individual leader, the communal future of a congregation of believers, and the handing on of the faith from one generation to the next. These transitions happen so many times that we can easily take them for granted. They are hard to observe since they involve so many human transactions, so many conscious and unconscious moments, so many personal, social, historical, and spiritual dynamics. Yet, if we look closely, we find that each threshold crossing, each transition into ministry, is filled with numerous actors, many subplots, sharp twists and slow turns, beginnings and endings, accidents and inevitabilities, moments of sin and grace.

Occasionally, pastors who have made this transition reflect back on it in written form, giving us autobiographical glimpses of their journeys. In the earliest days of the church, the Apostle Paul shared some of his experience in his letters. The tradition of pastoral reflection that he started continues to the present day. Occasionally, interested observers who watched others make these transitions—like St. Luke in the book of Acts—chart the trials and errors, the joys and sorrows of those who dare to make the transit. But for most of us inside or outside of the church, the individual stories and the greater collective narrative about the adventure of pastoral ministry remain hidden or, at best, barely visible.

Why Should We Care?

What happens to people as they cross this threshold has great consequences. For the individuals who step into pastoral ministry as their personal vocation, everything is at stake. Some new ministers fall in love with the ministry, find a life’s work that gives them great satisfaction, and construct a way of life and a web of relationships of the greatest personal meaning and value. Others never find the joy in ministry and experience their early years as an ordeal that leads to depression, breakdown, even resignation. Many, if not most, clergy live in between the two poles, experiencing an oscillating mixture of high and low moments and emotions. In all cases, characters are set, expectations met or dashed, career paths determined, habits of pastoral practice established, family lives patterned, and worldviews and life stances confirmed in this liminal period of moving into a role and an environment not of one’s own making.

For those in congregations who call these newcomers into positions of leadership and responsibil ity, the stakes are equally high. Will this new pastor be someone I can trust and relate to? Will she respond creatively, competently, and faithfully to the crises, challenges, and opportunities present in the life of the congregation as a community and in the individual lives of those who live and move within it? Will this person incarnate the Gospel and mediate grace? Will he be a spiritual companion and friend able to help a congregation discern its calling and fulfill its mission in the world? Or will this pastor crush hope, fail to connect, flounder in confusion, and hold the congregation back? Given the enormous energies, time, and resources that go into most “call” processes or appointments of new pastors, these are questions that impact the health and hope of congregations and denominations at many levels.

For those in the wider world around these congregations—who may be oblivious to these pastoral comings and goings—there is a great deal at stake as well. Will these pastors flourish and build congregations of people that love the neighbor, practice compassion, contend for justice, and contribute to the healing of the world? Or will these pastors struggle, lose heart, and fail to call forth all that their congregations have to give to their neighborhoods, communities, and the wider world? More concretely, will there be meals available for the hungry, clothing and jobs for the poor, shelter for the homeless, and other tangible acts of mercy and justice offered to the community and wider world, or not?

Paying Attention to the Transition

With so much at stake in this transition, it is important first to understand why it has become so difficult in the past half century, and then to search for the best ways to help new pastors negotiate it successfully. For many reasons, the transition into ministry has become more complex and, for many, more lonely. The experiments we report on here offer specific examples of ways to provide missing infrastructures of support and practical education (which we call communities of practice) which demonstrate that it is possible to change some of the dynamics of the contemporary transition experience.

This report focuses on one coordinated effort to pay attention to this pivotal season in the life of a pastor. In the pages that follow, we report on the experience of more than 800 new pastors, a corresponding number of congregations, many pastoral staff members and teams of resource providers from at least 11 Protestant denominations, thousands of individual congregational members, as well as several seminaries, judicatories, and educational agencies, who together have focused new energy and attention on the process of threshold crossing from seminary to first call. Working in a variety of ways, these individuals and institutions are part of a shared initiative supported by Lilly Endowment Inc. Begun in 1999, the initiative is titled simply “Transition into Ministry.” Through this initiative, Lilly Endowment brought a range of participants, denominations, and strategies into a shared endeavor to improve the way that graduating seminarians make these pivotal transitions. Taken together, this collection of programs can be seen as a significant new approach to the formation of pastoral leaders for American Protestant congregations. While it is too early to measure the full impact of this effort, and while there is much important future work yet to be mounted, there are significant early discoveries in these programs that merit consideration by those who care about the future of the church’s ministry.

What Is the Transition Like?

As mentioned above, the history of the church carries within it considerable evidence about how clergy from various ages crossed the threshold into pastoral leadership.2 Our age is no exception. For example, in 2001 Richard Lischer published Open Secrets: A Spiritual Journey through a Country Church (Doubleday), an autobiographical account of his first call experience at New Cana Lutheran Church in southern Illinois. Writing 30 years after he left that congregation, Lischer recalled clearly his first impressions. As he drove up to the church for the first time, “I felt something flop in my stomach. Then a crushing sense of disappointment. So this is what has been prepared for me.”² With eight years of high-quality ministerial preparation behind him (and a Ph.D. from the University of London to ice the cake!) the newly ordained minister beheld a tattered church and a rundown parsonage in the middle of nowhere. He “bitterly resented the bureaucrats who had misfiled my gifts, misjudged my obvious promise, and were about to place me in rural confinement. Whoever they were, they hadn’t even bothered to get to know me.”³ Open Secrets is a moving and beautifully written account of how Lischer moved from this moment of letdown and anger to a season of discovery about the people of this rural congregation and himself. But the discoveries were not easy. First came a shock of recognition: “eight years of theological education had rendered us [Lischer and his classmates] uncertain of our identity and, like our professors, unemployable in the real world. After years of grooming, we were no longer sure what it meant to be a pastor or if we wanted to be one.”⁴

Lischer’s account of pastoral transition in the 1970s sounds themes that transcend his own experience. The sense of disappointment, feelings of anger, inability to see any “fit” between self and new situation, doubts about the adequacy of all the years of preparation, and deep confusion about role and identity that he articulates echo in countless other stories of ministerial transition, then and now. As the mere existence of his book vividly demonstrates, the formative power of those first three years in this first call expressed itself long after he left New Cana for future ministry as a pastor of a larger church in Virginia and then as professor of homiletics at Duke Divinity School. That the book has been so widely read and discussed by pastors over the past seven years suggests that he touched a reality that others had experienced as well.

A similar kind of book by another Lutheran pastor, Heidi Neumark, appeared two years later. Breathing Space: A Spiritual Journey in the South Bronx (Beacon Press, 2003) is an autobiographical account of 20 years of ministry in a small, urban congregation very different from the three-year first call that Lischer described. The Transfiguration Lutheran Church that Neumark encountered in 1984 was a predominately Puerto Rican congregation struggling to stay alive in a part of the Bronx that served, as one newspaper editorial put it, as “the ity’s [New York’s] toilet.”⁵ Murders on the street, drug dealers, crushing poverty, and hopelessness were the raw material of this first call. Although Neumark had intentionally prepared for this kind of ministry in other urban ministry settings and by a cultural immersion in South America, she described her time of transition as malabarriga, or ecclesiastical morning sickness. As she faced the many challenges and instant changes that took place in her congregation, she recounted moments when one parishioner would say to her, “Now, Pastor, please don’t cry,” how another would correct her Spanish grammar for sermons and interpret during pastoral conversations with those who could not understand either her Spanish or English, and how still another would tell her that she was being prayed for. Feelings of insecurity and anxiety left her “ready to fall apart at a moment’s notice.”⁶

Neumark’s moving account goes on to tell a story of a remarkable ministry in a remarkable congregation. At one point she provides an iconic image for the challenge of the transition into ministry. She recalls a visit to Hamburg, Germany, where she came across a statue of Archbishop Ansgar, who brought Christianity to that city in the ninth century. The statue portrays Ansgar as standing with a church building in his arms. For Neumark the statue “served as a reminder of an arrogant ecclesial model that assumes we carry a prefabricated, everything- 11 included, unquestionably correct model church around in our arms to plop down wherever we find ourselves.” Her ministry required learning to work in a new way—her existence depended upon it. “Claiming to come in knowing everything, possessing the complete package, would be particularly dangerous for a white pastor in the South Bronx. I keep the photo I took of Ansgar as a reminder of what I don’t want to do or to be.”⁷

Like Lischer’s account, Neumark’s sounds themes that resonate far beyond her particular situation. In her case she described the crises of urban, multicultural ministry. Yet the immediate life-and-death challenges, the institutional pain and discomfort that begin as soon as things start to change, the limits of competence, and the great insecurity and anxiety that come with the responsibility of leadership are realities met as anyone crosses the pastoral threshold.

The new pastors who are participating in the TiM initiative are not writing books yet, but they are meeting these kinds of challenges. In a recent special issue of Alban’s magazine, Congregations, several young clergy wrote about their early experiences.⁸ Brian Dixon, for example, wrote of the letdown he experienced when he drove up to his San Francisco congregation. Expecting a big reception, he found no one waiting to welcome him. A brief tour of the church building revealed that his office had a leaking ceiling and that neither the phone nor the computer worked. The one member who showed him around said, “Well, I’m glad you are here” and walked away. “I was left there, standing alone on the steps,” Dixon wrote. “There would be no great welcome, no reception, no celebratory lunch. I felt isolated. I felt discouraged. I felt disappointed.”⁹ Another participant, Sarah Griffith, wrote of the invaluable support system that the TiM programs had provided her. But then she described the experience of a friend who was not in the program: “She quickly began to experience hazardous conditions, unsafe boundary violations, and rapid exposure to the diseases of the church. She lacked significant support from clergy colleagues, she felt overwhelmed and isolated. Her situation-induced depression consumed her, and the work became unbearable. Phone conversations revealed a person in a spiritual, mental, and physical crisis.”¹⁰ That friend left the ministry after a year.

Still another new pastor recounts a surprising discovery that transformed her transition experience. Christina Grace Kukuk tells of the feelings of mismatch that so many clergy experience in this transition: “This congregation often felt like an alien people to me. Roughly 67 percent of the regular attendees held graduate degrees of some sort. Ordained ministers numbered no fewer than 10, sometimes more. In contrast, neither of my parents had completed a bachelor’s degree, and my siblings and I were the first among our many cousins to try college before pregnancy or marriage. Starker still were the differences in faith experiences and language about faith, differences not entirely unrelated to class identity.” Yet she found herself “noticing within, and yet coming from somewhere beyond me, a genuine love for a people I found strange and hard to understand.”¹¹ These pastors and their other colleagues in the TiM initiative met all the challenges—ranging from preparing a sermon with five minutes notice to conducting a funeral for the first time to dealing with resistance from lay leaders—that make the transition so challenging.

Why Is It So Hard?

Much of the challenge in this threshold-crossing process is of a personal nature. In any human transition there are developmental challenges that are made complex by personal histories, personality dynamics, temperaments, maturity, life circumstances, and other factors. For many pastors the personal work of transition into ministry is sizable. Often the transition is a first encounter with the full reality of adulthood, as the new minister leaves behind old patterns of student life and dependence on parents or others for financial support and takes on all the responsibilities of independence. Part of the change is usually a physical relocation, with all that moving entails. New work schedules and stresses often collide with attempts to shape a lifestyle of ongoing spiritual growth, exercise, and self-care. There are economic dimensions, ranging from salary negotiations to debt management to health care and pension benefits to learning how to structure a new lifestyle. There are complex and shifting family and relationship dynamics to be attended to: marriages, births, the careers of spouses and partners, and increased time away from the family.

These predictable coming-of-age challenges sit in a larger cultural context of identity formation processes that make personal life transitions much more complex. For more than a half century a sizable phalanx of social scientists have sought to clarify the difference in identity formation between simpler premodern times, when identity options were fewer and more distinct, and modern and postmodern contexts, in which personal identities are no longer givens but have become complex personal and social constructions, assembled through a dizzying variety of social, cultural, economic, vocational, and lifestyle choices. As the seminary graduate moves into a first call, she or he is very much a work in progress, an identity that is still under construction.

In the midst of these personal and cultural transition issues that each new minister must address, however, lies an especially important and not yet fully understood identity transformation that is more than personal or cultural. One moves from the status of seminarian to that of pastor. Each of those two words contains layers of meaning. Fundamentally, a seminarian is a student, someone who is preparing for a future role of congregational leadership. As a student, each seminarian is introduced to an enormous range of knowledge from biblical, historical, theological, cultural, and practical fields. In a variety of ways, the seminaries of America lead their students through an ever expanding maze of knowledge that some have called a theological encyclopedia.¹² Over the centuries, and especially in the era following the Enlightenment and the invention of the modern university, this theological encyclopedia has become so large, so complex, so specialized and technical, and so multidimensional—covering more than a dozen fields from traditional disciplines of bible, history, and theology to modern disciplines of psychology, education, and the social sciences—that the old goal of mastery now seems naïve or quaint. At best, perhaps, seminaries today lay the foundation of the various disciplines, which pastors may then engage in further reflection, study, and growth that is more attuned to their practice setting.

But seminaries do more than download huge bodies of knowledge into new generations of students. As Educating Clergy,¹³ an important recent study of professional theological education, demonstrates, seminaries also form students spiritually, train them to perform an ensemble of pastoral tasks, and expose them to a variety of ministry contexts. In each of these different educational dimensions, the seminarian assumes the posture of a novice, an explorer, a trainee, or a student. As she or he matriculates, a wide range of knowledge and experience is gained, along with varying levels of competency in pastoral arts. But all of this work—including even the “practical” courses of field work, clinical training, and internship—is anticipatory and preparatory.¹⁴ The knowledge, skills, and identity norms of being “trained as a pastor” have not yet been tried, tested, and confirmed by a community that shares in this ministry and looks to the seminary graduate as its pastoral leader.

At the time of ordination or installation into pastoral ministry, the seminary graduate suddenly experiences a shift in self-perception. The shift has two sides to it. The first shift is external, as the world begins to see the seminary graduate differently. The congregation that calls her, the denomination that places his name on a clergy roster, the seminary that now sends “Dear alumni” letters, and the larger society no longer see the seminarian as a student or novice. Instead, they regard these newcomers as biblical and theological resources, as institutional managers, as spiritual and moral guides, as pastoral leaders. At the same time that the external environment shifts its perspective, the person crossing the threshold into pastoral ministry must negotiate the second shift, a parallel internal change in perspective that meshes with those external expectations even as it seeks to differentiate the individual from the role. New clergy ask things like, “Do I have specialized knowledge and skills that can help them? Can I live up to their expectations? Will I find fellow sojourners here for my own spiritual journey? Can I actually lead these people?” The new minister begins to perceive her- or himself in new ways in relation to this community.

Part of these role negotiations and shifts in identity relate to adjusting to a congregational culture after a period of schooling. Seminaries have different community norms and expectations for “leadership” than do local churches. Being a self-starter, taking initiative, and carrying out individual projects are all rewarded in the theological school. But congregations expect more collaborative leaders: someone who consults with others, listens carefully to a range of views, and invites others to share in a project’s design and implementation. Shifting roles from the community of scholarship to the community of ministry practice requires significant shifts in one’s personal style of initiative taking, collaboration, and decision making. Thus, an unresolved question remains for most seminaries: how to teach students to become the local leader of a community.

The Transition into Ministry Is a Special Challenge Today

In contemporary America, a particular set of social and cultural challenges has shaped the transition into ministry in powerful ways. Both the time of preparing for the ministry and the actual transition environment have changed in ways that pose significant challenges. While the Corinth of Paul’s time or the London of Wesley’s era experienced their own forms of cosmopolitanism and change, the environments of the early 21st century make the forming of ministers an especially daunting task. The story of the changing nature of the transition into ministry in the past half century is far too complex to recount fully here. In the section that follows we will identify only some of the most salient factors in that story and point to a net result.

We begin with the recognition of the complex mix of social, religious, cultural, educational, and economic changes that have converged to create a situation that some might call a “double bind.” On the one hand, explosions in knowledge, the emergence of American pluralism, a powerful consumer economy, and many other of the classic elements of modernity have exponentially increased what a pastor needs to know to minister effectively in our time. A variety of kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing are now demanded of the entering minister. One side of the double bind, then, is that every entering pastor is being pressured to learn more and integrate more different kinds of knowledge than ever before. At the very same time, the once thick religious subcultures that naturally passed on traditions of ministry and pastoral practice and supported new clergy as they assumed their roles lost a great deal of their formative power as the 20th century progressed. So the other side of the double bind is that the new minister has fewer sources of practical wisdom to draw upon. At the same time that their transition from seminary to first call demands that they learn how to practice ministry in a world of greater complexity and diversity, the communities of practice that their predecessors could count on have disappeared. Increasingly, they are on their own.

In America’s history, various Christian traditions formed denominational “feeder systems” for ministerial leadership. These distinct ministerial pathways shaped fledgling pastors from cradle to ordination to lifelong service in that denomination. Parsonages were primary incubators where pastors’ sons and other apprentices carefully observed a minister’s practice and absorbed the clerical way of life, both in the study and at the dinner table. In America’s open spaces, new communities of faith found the space and eventual religious freedom to build their own congregations and develop their own ethnic and religious subcultures, which shaped rising generations of new leaders. Over time, denominations built their own systems of preparatory schools, colleges, and seminaries where scripture, confessions, and theology could be studied and particular denominational cultures transmitted and offered as contributions to American society.

In the 20th century, the changes of modernity disrupted these relatively homogenous feeder systems. America became an urban nation, the frontier closed, and powerful social processes like higher education, social mobility, suburbanization, immigration, affluence, the media, and modern transportation blurred the subcultural lines that previous generations had drawn. Over the course of the century, the ethnic, class, and cultural substructures that supported much of American denominational life gave way. Ideological divides between small town conservatives and cosmopolitan liberals further weakened denominational identity and stability. People came into ministry from a variety of contexts, such as parachurch and student ministries, not just one approved denominational path. Denominations tried to adjust by becoming more diverse and ecumenical, but this only widened the pathways into ministry and the various forms that ministry could take.

Local congregations increasingly reflected the pluralism of the land, ceasing to be places where everyone believed and practiced the same things. More and more often, congregations took on the individualistic ethos of America and developed their own distinct identities and cultures, often quite at odds with the official denominational traditions or structures of the past. As their members experienced the blessings of higher education, mobility, and multiple lifestyle and job choices, they formed new 15 expectations of their pastoral leaders, turning some into managers of complex programs, structures, and staffs. Seminaries and denominations could no longer assume that “one size fits all.”

Seminaries experienced their own dramatic changes. At the dawn of the 20th century, these once simple institutions became increasingly complex, incorporating new disciplines and knowledge from powerful universities. Specialized forms of “practical” training, such as pastoral care and counseling, religious education, and field and clinical education, struggled for curricular space with a growing number of auxiliary disciplines—sociology of religion, comparative religions, anthropology, psychology of religion, ethics, etc.—in addition to the established curriculum of Bible, theology, history, and preaching. Seminary faculty evolved from being primarily made up of seasoned pastor-scholars to consisting almost entirely of professors trained in academic specialties, often with little or no firsthand experience as a pastor of a local congregation. Larger seminaries took on the dual mission of preparing local pastors and future professors, groups with sometimes different educational needs.

In the second half of the 20th century, student bodies became increasingly diverse as women and minority candidates came from a variety of preseminary pathways to campus. They came with different backgrounds, learning styles, and visions of future ministry. Increasingly it became more difficult—but perhaps also more interesting and creative—to teach and learn an intact tradition on our seminary campuses.

Economic realities also changed. More and more, seminarians came to school with larger amounts of debt—and with greater family obligations. Specialized faculty, larger plants and libraries, and more complex programs increased the costs of theological education exponentially at the same time that denominations began to experience major “restructuring shifts” due to cultural disestablishment, multiculturalism, and decline in membership and resources. These economic developments changed seminaries in many ways, as presidents and boards took on new roles, as development offices proliferated, and as students scrambled to support themselves with offcampus jobs, larger debt loads, and the help of working spouses. Student life, once viewed as peaceful withdrawal from the world for a time of disciplined theological education and spiritual formation, had now become another version of modern life, complete with multitasking, compartmentalization, and piecemeal experiences of community, education, and formation.

The net effect of the enormous social transformations of the 20th century, and their accompanying changes in congregational, seminary, and denominational life, was a complete transformation of every step in the transition process. America itself became more diverse and complex as a nation. Denominations had become different kinds of institutions than they had been in America’s formative years.¹⁵ Local congregations were made up of more complex and diverse people who acted in different ways than their predecessors had, leading many to wonder if America had entered a new era of “de facto congregationalism.”¹⁶ Seminaries taught a much larger array of subjects, used a range of teaching methods, and had a richer mix of teachers and students. And the new pastors they graduated had different backgrounds, lifestyles, needs, and gifts than previous generations.

One way to frame the difference between the way new clergy entered their pastoral ministries a century ago and the way that they do today is to see the transition into ministry as a story of the loss of natural communities of practice and repeated attempts to compensate for that loss. As the Protestant denominations have witnessed the decline of their clergy feeder systems, as they have experienced the weakening of the old ethnic and confessional subcultures that once provided their distinctive identities, and as they have participated in the cosmopolitan ecumenical theological movements of the 20th century, the established communities of pastoral practice have lost much of their salience. Meanwhile, theological education, influenced as strongly as it has been by the explosion of knowledge in the modern university and the strong currents of professionalism, specialization, and individualism that were the hallmarks of American modernity, has come to have less and less connection to the daily life of congregational practice. At the same time that new generations of pastors have received the increasing bounty of theological scholarship, they have less and less connection to the world of pastoral practice in which they will live out their ministries.

In the second half of the 20th century, a growing number of pastors, theological educators, and denominational leaders began to focus on this loss. They did not employ that language of community of practice that is current today. Instead, they spoke of a perceived “gap” between seminary and first call. A number of experimental programs were tried in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s to address a transition that had become increasingly difficult for the new ministers and increasingly serious for the congregations and denominations they served. The fact that so many participants are involved in this new effort—seminarians, pastors, congregation members, judicatory leaders, seminary faculty, denominational executives, foundation leaders, and others—is also evidence that this is not just a personal developmental challenge or a technical problem in the American clergy system. Instead, the transition into ministry process is an urgent task, a fundamental challenge in which everyone who belongs to a religious community, works in a religious institution, or lives in American society has both a stake and a responsibility.

As we turn to the description of the TiM initiative in the next section, this framework of viewing the transition into ministry as a move into a community of practice is crucial. All of the programs undertaken in this initiative participate in a shared effort to build new, intentional communities of practice where entering pastors have the chance to learn pastoral ministry by doing it and reflecting on it. These programs put the congregation at the center of the learning experience and return practicing clergy to a central teaching role, while making reflective practice rather than academic study the pivotal way of learning pastoral ministry. As they enter these communities of practice, the participants in these programs are challenging dominant trends in the preparation of American clergy. By insisting on a lengthy, collaborative, practice-based season of pastoral formation, they are seeking to rebalance the 20th-century emphasis on theological education that placed a premium on the individual’s acquisition of knowledge.

These programs could be misunderstood as attempts to roll back modernity and return to the “good old days” when pastors learned primarily by apprenticeship. While elements of apprenticeship are clearly present in these programs, the TiM programs seek to incorporate the gifts of modern theological education with the creation of new types of communities of practice that are suitable to our times and environments. As such, they seek to rebalance pastoral preparation in a way that closes the gap that has widened over the past century.

What Are Communities of Practice?

Communities of practice are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavor: a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression, a group of engineers working on similar problems, a clique of pupils defining their identity in the school, a network of surgeons exploring novel techniques, a gathering of first-time managers helping each other cope. In a nutshell:

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.

Not everything called a community is a community of practice. A neighborhood, for instance, is often called a community but is usually not a community of practice. Three characteristics are crucial:

1. THE DOMAIN: A community of practice is not merely a club of friends or a network of connections between people. It has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest. Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain, and thus a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people.
    
2. THE COMMUNITY: In pursuing their interest in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other. But members of a community of practice do not necessarily work together on a daily basis. The Impressionists, for instance, used to meet in cafés and studios to discuss the style of painting they were inventing together.
    
3. THE PRACTICE: A community of practice is not merely a community of interest—people who like certain kinds of movies, for instance. Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short, a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction.

It is the combination of these three elements that constitutes a community of practice. And it is by developing these three elements in parallel that one cultivates such a community.

From Etienne Wenger’s Web site: www.ewenger.com/theory/. Used by permission.