Learn or languish, clergy told

Ministers may soon have to commit to continuing education, or face the prospect of gaining no further settlements. The proposal from the ministerial education review task group calls for all ministers to “enter into five-year continuing education contracts with their presbytery or other appointing body”. Failure to do this would result in “no further settlement or appointment” being possible. The proposal has only the reluctant support of the task group’s convenor, Rev Dr Chris Budden.

“There are many other areas of life where people who deal with other human beings are expected to sustain a high quality of professional competence,” he said.

“However, I’m not totally happy about the idea that you might ask someone to stand down from ministry.

“But it seems to me that if after five years somebody is not willing to extend their professional competence through continuing education, there needs to be some way of enforcing that.”

Because no national curriculum is being suggested in the proposal, Dr Budden said individual programs should be negotiated.

“We believe there are three parties that ought to be involved in this process,” said Dr Budden.

“The person themselves should have some awareness about what they would like to do with their life and ministry.

“The presbytery in which the minister is at that stage needs be able to comment on where they think the person needs to serve the church. And the synod needs to be involved too.

“The only thing I want to stress is that the process should be kept flexible to allow for new courses and directions that might arise in that five year period.”

While ministers are being encouraged to pursue education, Dr Budden said the report calls for college staff to seek periods of parish experience. “We had a lot of support for the idea that people in colleges lose track of where ministry really is at,” Dr Budden said.

“I’ve just returned to parish ministry after 15 years.

“You try to keep in touch as close as you can but the reality is that over a period of time you do lose track of what it means to be in the day-by-day kind of stuff. My learning curve has been huge.

“The first thing a parish wants is somebody who is skilled in the daily operations of ministry — and unless you’ve actually been there you lose touch of that.

“We had a lot of support back from the church that says college staff have occasionally got to get in to that process.”

Chris said another key element of the report, the four phase framework for ministerial education, is designed to encourage all members of the church to discern a calling to ministry.

“The task group hopes the year, or period, of discernment outlined in the report, will be used by everybody in the church to explore their ministry,” he said.

“It’s actually saying to the church that anybody can do this who wants to work out where they should serve God.”

Deb Everist,

Uniting Church in Australia, NSW Synod.

PO Box A2178, Sydney South, 1235.

Email:

http://uca.org.au, http://nsw.uca.org.au, http://insights.uca.org.au

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