Dear Colleague:

For more than half a century, the many individuals and institutions that help prepare clergy for their first calls have expressed growing concern about the ways in which new pastors experience the transition from seminary life to parish ministry. This report seeks to put fresh perspective on this pivotal moment in ministry, providing firsthand accounts of what this experience is like at the beginning of the 21st century as well as identifying some of the major factors that shape the transition into ministry today.

However, Becoming a Pastor does more than describe current experience. It also calls attention to a variety of promising efforts to turn these first few years into a time of real opportunity and growth for pastors, congregations, and for the church itself. What we report on here is an intentional experiment to provide a kind of practice-based pastoral education and formation that builds on and extends seminaries’ efforts to make explicit connections between the learning that takes place in the classroom and the experience that takes place in the thick of ministry. At the heart of this report is the conviction that this period of transition is rich with potential for new levels of collaboration between the domains of congregation, seminary, and denomination as they together become more intentional and skilled at the teaching and learning of ministry. The implicit challenge here is to congregations and their leaders to assume more responsibility for the teaching and learning of ministry.

In this report we offer imaginative examples of carefully shaped learning environments that help new pastors learn—like doctors do—from their peers, from mentors and supervisors, and from the people they serve. We also present evidence that, through this work, people in a variety of congregations, denominations, and seminaries became agents of change and new energy in their religious communities. We hope these examples will lead to wider ripples of shared engagement and bold experimentation. As more join in this effort, pastors, congregations, denominations, seminaries, and the ministry itself will become stronger, more authentic, more fully what they were created to be.

What we report on here is not the final or complete answer to the question of how one becomes a pastor. Instead, Becoming a Pastor is an invitation to very important work; some might say it is a sacred calling. As the programs we report on make clear, the work of making pastors is not just the work of the seminary, the denomination, or the candidates, but a collaborative effort. We therefore invite you to add your wisdom, resources, and best efforts to help create new conditions for the teaching and learning of ministry in our challenging times.

Given our own experience of collaboration in preparing this report, we are confident that taking up this enduring question of what it takes to become a pastor bears great promise for forging a new spirit of collaboration across the life of the church among those who care deeply about the formation of pastors. We look forward to your contribution to this promising work.

Best wishes,