The challenges and pain of COVID led the parish I serve to a year-long conversation in which God redeemed our struggles and turned them into blessings. We asked, “What is the heart of St. Paul’s? What charisms has God given us? What can St. Paul’s uniquely do to bless our community? And with what resources—spiritual, relational, intellectual, physical, and financial—has God blessed us?”
Out of these conversations emerged a new sense of mission: we are forming people into the body of Christ. We believe God has called to us through St. Paul’s words to the Ephesians:
Speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love (4:15-16).
As we prayed into our mission, we realized that forming people into the body of Christ requires intentionally forming leaders. Leaders don’t just happen. At first for us, building up people into the full stature of Christ seemed like a new direction. For example, one story that gets told at St. Paul’s is about land and buildings. We tell the story that, over 50 years, St. Paul’s acquired properties that neighbor our original chapel, to build the beautiful campus that serves both our congregation and our community.
But as we prayed about our mission and this new vision to grow as a teaching parish, we realized that forming leaders is also a longstanding charism of St. Paul’s. Those who have gone before us have been raising up and sending lay and clergy leaders for a very long time. We realized that our past has gifts for our present and our future.
A teaching parish is like a teaching hospital. Just as teaching hospitals equip and send the next generation of doctors, teaching parishes equip and send the next generation of lay and clergy leaders.
The parish I serve discerned a vision to grow into a teaching parish some time ago. Consequently, we developed new initiatives building on decades of forming disciples in this community. In tangible terms, this vision has manifested in three ways. First, Alpha, familiar to many on both sides of the Atlantic, calls a new generation of lay leaders to evangelism and discipleship. Second, “Meat and Potatoes” is a three-year theological lay-education course. Last year, it welcomed its fourth cohort. Third, we have begun a pastoral residency, conceived to train and send the next generation of rectors and diocesan leaders.
The three-year pastoral residency provides new clergy an opportunity to minister in a thriving church while developing tools to teach, preach, and lead God’s people across all the ministries of our parish. The goal is that the participants will benefit from hands-on experience with guidance from healthy lay and clergy leaders.
We call it a residency to highlight the intentionality of the experience. Residents receive mentorship through our clergy team’s rhythm of daily Morning Prayer and Lectio Divina, regular supervisory times with the rector, associate rector, and St. Paul’s experienced lay mentoring team, and participation in a national residency cohort.
This summer we hired our first resident who, God willing, will be ordained in November. We are thrilled by God’s faithfulness in bringing us such a gifted, faithful candidate for Holy Orders. After three years, we will send him and his family out, encouraging them as they continue the work of ministry in new contexts.
God’s call to help people grow into the full stature of Christ is in fact a call to a long obedience in the same direction. Our story is just one of many about God’s regard for and redemption of the past for the sake of the present and future. You have stories to share, too. Your parish is no different and your mission is the same: to form disciples.
The Rev. Kristine Blaess, DMin, is rector at St. Paul’s Church, Murfreesboro, Tennessee. She spent her first decade of ordained ministry in rural Idaho serving congregations in majority LDS communities. Her doctoral work emerged from her desire to help congregations flourish as their leaders grow ever deeper as disciples and disciplers of Jesus Christ.
