While many pastors continue to report deep vocational fulfillment, rising pressures are eroding pastoral well-being on many fronts. The church's population is aging, directly heightening the needs for intensive personal pastoral care. Church rolls are shrinking, and along with them financial resources for ministry, while worship needs remain constant. Professionalization of ministry, due in large measure to a dramatic shrinkage in the pool of laypeople with time available to serve the church, has shifted much programmatic church work from lay to pastoral hands. As the stress facing pastors rises, fewer seminary graduates are entering parish ministry, the median age of pastors is increasing, and vocational attrition is on the rise. Recent figures from the Board of Pensions suggest that of those being ordained into ministry in installed parish pastoral positions, approximately 40% leave parish ministry in the six years following ordination.

With professional demands mounting, and the supply of available pastors being depleted by rising rates of attrition, our pastors more acutely than ever need the support of rich resources to nourish vocational excellence and satisfaction. The Office of Theology and Worship has sought to address this urgent need with a variety of initiatives designed to encourage and equip pastors for faithful, fruitful, and fulfilling parish ministry.

Company of Pastors

Following John Calvin's pattern in Geneva, the Office of Theology and Worship several years ago launched the Company of Pastors, in which participants adopt a covenant of thinking and praying the faith daily, in company with vocational colleagues. The Company now includes some 600 pastors in its rolls.

The Company of Pastors assumes that pastors are able to give sound spiritual leadership to congregations only to the extent that their own faith is well nurtured in its own right. Toward that end, Company members covenant to read the Bible daily following the Daily Lectionary, to pray with and for colleagues in ministry, to read through the Book of Confessions in assigned increments (imagine: using the Book of Confessions not to prepare for exams or to win an argument, but to deepen our engagement with our common faith!), to read three Company-selected books each year, and to meet with colleagues for study, prayer, and mutual encouragement and admonition.

In 2004 the Offices of Theology and Worship and Spiritual Formation will initiate a parallel covenant group for elders, the Order of Elders. We believe that particular congregations will benefit significantly from having pastor and elders commit together to vocational disciplines of prayer and study. Covenants of daily reading for the Order of Elders will focus on the Lord's Day lectionary texts for the coming Sunday, rather than on the Daily Lectionary which pastors follow. Resources will be produced to help sessions adapt Order of Elders disciplines to the work of Officer training, as well as to monthly session devotionals. Details of the Order of Elders will be published on this website in coming weeks.

Pastor-Theologian Program

Over the past ten years, Theology and Worship's Pastor-Theologian Program has gathered nearly 500 pastors for intensive three-day consultations, during which they think through pressing theological concerns, while observing together the daily prayer "offices" at morning, midday, evening, and close of day. Discussion topics have focused on theological and pastoral issues ranging from "The Resurrection of the Body" to "Contemporary Worship." Pastors who would like to participate in these consultations should follow guidelines for application posted on the Pastor-Theologian Program page.

Many participants report that pastor-theologian consultations have returned them to practices that had fallen into some disrepair. Often it is their first time in a long while to read rigorous theology, or to write a theological paper, or to participate in an intensive theological discussion. Consultations have proven to be occasions that, for many, rekindle old passions that had been lying dormant.

The mission to reinvigorate the pastoral vocation is surely well served by rekindling old passions. But, as joyous as they may be over this rediscovery, many participants return home after attending a pastor-theologian consultation only to fall back into the same regimens that permitted these flames to die down in the first place. Unless the disciplines that nourish the pastoral vocation are established early in vocational practice, it appears highly unlikely that pastors will maintain them for the long haul. The vocational habits established during a pastor's seminary training and first call typically set the trajectory for the remainder of the pastor's ministry career.

Unlike some similar programs, Theology and Worship does not import theological "experts" to lead pastor-theologian consultations. Pastors themselves are the primary presenters and interlocutors, and not just passive absorbers of others' wisdom. Participants find this approach both stretching and deeply rewarding. For everyone to be actively involved, it has proven best to keep consultation groups small, ideally no more than twelve.

As consultation participants, pastors prepare for gathering both by reading and writing. Writing a theological paper for submission to a consultation is more than an opportunity to display expertise — it is an invitation to attend so closely to the church's faith that it might more fully become their own. Writing is often the threshold to discovery, rather than simply its consequence.

Through the papers they write for consultations, pastor-theologians benefit the wider church significantly. Theology and Worship publishes many of their papers in its journals — The Register of the Company of Pastors and Call to Worship (formerly Reformed Liturgy and Music) — as well as online. Most of the writers of Theology and Worship's book series "Foundations of the Christian Faith" came from the ranks of its pastor-theologian consultations. These books are being used widely in the church as group study guides, and have garnered appreciative praise from pastors and laypersons alike.

Pastor-theologian consultations naturally include a component of mutual mentoring. After they've been together a couple of times, participants spontaneously engage in acts of deep spiritual friendship — hearing each other's confessions, praying for each other's needs, admonishing each other in theological dialogue. Dozens of pastor-theologian participants have taken initiative to convene similar gatherings in their own regions.

Having had opportunity to experience the benefits of sustained reflection on the faith with other pastors, pastor-theologians often seek ways to enjoy these benefits in their regular vocational practices. This leads many of them to join the Company of Pastors. Members of the Company adopt a covenant of daily prayer, scripture reading, and theological reflection upon classic and contemporary texts. Daily readings in The Book of Confessions afford engagement with these foundational treasures for reasons far richer than to win an argument, to teach a class, or to pass an ordination exam. While these disciplines are beneficial even when undertaken individually, their full value is realized only in company with other members. This requires a critical mass of Company members that is yet to be achieved in most regions.

One of the unique benefits of pastor-theologian consultations is that they bring pastors together from all places on the church's spectrum. This diversity has immeasurably enriched everyone. Most pastors pay lip service to the notion that we learn more from people who are less like us, yet most gatherings of pastors are theologically, demographically, or professionally homogeneous. Theology and Worship gatherings have proven to be one of the rare few places in the life of our church where pastors form close, ongoing collegial friendships with pastors outside their natural affinity groups. Caricatures break down, mutual respect grows, and the sinews that bind the larger church together as the one Body of Christ are strengthened. In small but significant ways, these gatherings provide a forum for embodying the church's catholicity.

Excellence From the Start

Three years ago, the Office of Theology and Worship launched its most comprehensive program yet for pastors, Excellence From the Start. This vocational formation program integrates seminarians and first-call pastors into a web of ongoing relationships with friends and mentors. In Excellence From the Start, men and women entering parish ministry adopt the Company of Pastors covenants of daily prayer, devotional reading, and study. Additionally, participants gather periodically in small-group consultations modeled on Theology and Worship's Pastor-Theologian Program, under the mentoring guidance of seminary professors and veteran pastors.

Excellence From the Start is distinctive among entrance into ministry programs, in that it begins during seminary, and continues through the call process and into the first call. Excellence From the Start walks with participants as a constant companion through the gauntlet of disparate stakeholders in the preparation and ordination process: the session sponsoring their candidacy, the presbytery of candidacy, the ordination exams, the seminary, the pastor nominating committees, the presbytery of call, and the session of the calling church.

Nearly twenty percent of the pastors ordained in 2001 and 2002 are part of Excellence From the Start. Group gatherings have focused upon the theological issues at stake in ministerial ordination vows, as well as the theological underpinnings of the various elements in the Service for the Lord's Day. Both participants and mentoring leaders consistently report deep gratitude for the rich benefits these relationships and gatherings afford. The Office of Theology and Worship is fortunate to have secured significant grant funding to help launch Excellence From the Start. Participants have found it so profitable that many are seeking funding to enable them to continue to gather once the grant has expired. Efforts are now underway to establish a follow-up initiative that will offer the benefits of a similar program to future graduates of all our seminaries.

While the Office of Theology and Worship is engaged in many ongoing efforts to help the church think and pray the faith with integrity, its efforts to engage pastors directly with initiatives such as The Company of Pastors, its Pastor-Theologian Program, and Excellence From the Start may well prove to have a singularly salutary impact in the life of the church. Whatever other initiatives it may yet undertake, the commitment to encourage pastors to implement sound habits of vocational nurture will remain at the heart of the Office of Theology and Worship's mission.