3 Minute Ministry Mentor

What is the role of prayer and meditation in #ministrylife? This week’s episode of #3MMM is about one pastor’s experience of connecting prayer and preaching. Rev. Bonita describes her journey through learning to preach in different styles. As a ribbon through the topical, expository and lectionary preaching, runs Rev. Bonita’s commitment to the prayerful following of the Spirit for guidance in her...

Stories give contour and texture to our identities. Beyond the stories from only the past, ministers must consider how future stories help us narrate both our past experiences and the future hopes, plans, and dreams we live into every day. Eileen Campbell-Reed teaches about the value of using future stories. This week’s episode of Three Minute Ministry Mentor considers future stories in the contex...

Examen is a form of spiritual exercise. It invites the exploration of  scriptures and any portion of one’s life through guided questions. In this way, examen is a tried and proven pathway for discernment. It allows us to look back to times and events of our everyday lives and ask questions that help us notice the presence and guidance of God’s spirit. Knowing what brings consolation or desolation...

Discernment. Vocation. Purpose. Life. Unpacking one’s purpose for life is no small thing. For many people it takes most of a lifetime to say fully what they believe their purpose to be. And for others purpose changes over time and through the seasons of life. For me a sense of purpose in life emerged early but the pathways of work and family life that were available to me for embracing that purpos...

This week’s episode of Three Minute Ministry Mentor shares with you a story told to us by Marcus, a white pastor who is part of the  Learning Pastoral Imagination Project . Several years ago, Marcus spent a summer leading his congregation to think more deeply about leadership. For his own spiritual well-being he gave more attention to the practice of Sabbath that summer. Here is his story . #3MMM...

“What is liberty without liberation?” How can we know genuine freedom in Christ, when injustice and bondage continue to constrain our wellbeing and divide us from each other? What does ministry look like when we face the injustices and seek God’s transformation of ourselves and our communities? In today’s 3MMM episode, James, a participant in the Learning Pastoral Imagination study, tells us about...

Easter season, or Eastertide lasts for six more Sundays. The season of Pentecost begins on June 9, and it continues for close to six months. We also celebrate a little Easter every Sunday of the year. And being a follower of Jesus invites us to  practice resurrection on every day of our lives. This week’s Three Minute Ministry Mentor episode is about practicing resurrection .   #3MMM

Place matters . In so many ways it matters. Where you observe Holy Week. Where you go home at night. Where you were raised. Where you work and live and play. Each of these places matter, and they give shape to who you are. This week’s episode of Three Minute Ministry Mentor is about place and identity. The day we made this episode was cold and windy and miserable. Hints of spring, yet winter was s...

What do brick walls, American Idol and ministry have to do with each other? Read on . . . Lately, I’ve been watching American Idol. Now, in truth since my daughter was born, I nearly gave up television altogether. The TV in our living room (only the second one we’ve owned in all our married lives), goes months and months without coming on. The World Series, the Grammy’s, the Emmy’s. A game or two...

I felt enthralled and overwhelmed by the sculpture of Mary holding Jesus (pictured above) when I stepped into the foyer at  Belle Meade United Methodist Church  to film this week’s episode of Three Minute Ministry Mentor. And the name of the sculptor grabbed my attention immediately. Kahlil Gibran, author of  The Prophet , is among  my favorite poets . Yet it turns out the poet and sculptor are no...

So many kinds of moments deserve this word! When conducting interviews with 50 seminarians-on-the-way-to-ministry and 25 seasoned pastors and priests, we asked them all to tell us about and “aha moment” of learning in ministry. The  Learning Pastoral Imagination  data is thus filled with wonderful, surprising, and profound moments of learning in practice. Rarely did we hear stories of classroom le...

This past weekend I took some of my seminary students to the  “Beating Guns”  tour where Shane Claiborne and Michael Martin led us in a powerful liturgy filled with statistics and singing, rap music and poetry, Scripture, stories, images, and fire. One of the aims of the worship event is to transcend the gun debate in America. One side says, “guns are the problem, and we must reduce the number of...

It’s the first Monday of Lent. How are your Lenten practices going? I am hoping and praying for mercy and grace to lead you along the way this season. I have three things to share with you today. First, today’s weekly post is about emotional intelligence. Certainly I have known pastors and ministers who don’t rank very high on their emotional intelligence quotient or EQ. Have you had that experien...

Prayer. What is the connection between the practice of prayer and the practice of ministry? The responses to this question could fill many pages of many books. (My own responses fill  many posts  in this blog.) The connections we make between prayer and ministry also depend on how we understand each practice. I grew up in a noisy, talkative tradition, where prayer was mostly words and communicatio...

In this week’s episode of the Three Minute Ministry Mentor, I share a story from my first call in ministry. I have preached about this moment when I missed the point, thinking the call was for someone else. In particular it was an experience when I missed what was at stake when someone called for a pastor. I was looking for someone else, but the phone call came for me. Fortunately that failure to...

Mentoring for pastoral wisdom or imagination is important and complex work. It may look simple on the surface, but handing on the skills and knowledge of ministry takes time, insight and awareness. Remember there is always more than meets the eye in each ministry moment. Perhaps you are wondering: what should I look for when recruiting a mentor? How can I make the most of my potential mentoring re...

One of my favorite early feminist theologians, Nell Morton, is best known for her idea of “hearing to speech.” She writes about the power of listening deeply and really hearing each other in her book,  The Journey is Home . Morton says, “Hearing of this sort is equivalent to empowerment. We empower one another by hearing the other to speech. We empower the disinherited, the outsider, as we are abl...

There is so much to learn about the practice of ministry in courses like these, that mis-steps, stumbles and even more overt failure are unavoidable. And although failures large and small are inevitable, does not mean they are the end. In fact they can be the beginning of something very important! This week’s episode of 3MMM turns our attention to how we might fail creatively on the way to learnin...

This weekend a dear person in my life died unexpectedly . Louise and I have been part of the same faith community for 18 years. She was a member of that community for decades before I arrived. Lou and I shared many different seasons in our relationship, and we had more connecting points that I can count. I’m sharing this loss with you today, not because I want to eulogize Lou. Our faith community...

To be a church leader in our time requires not only a clear calling but also courage. If you hope and desire that your faith community will be part of the change for justice and equality rather than one of the obstacles to it, then you need knowledge, commitment and willingness to to risk something big for the sake of something better for all people. No simple path to change is available. The comp...

All this talk of thinking, reflecting and asking questions… yet the practice of ministry is so much more than thinking and talking. It is an embodied, relational, and spiritual practice. So this week’s podcast presents a story that begins with ministry to a new family with an infant and stretches out into all the ways ministry is embodied. #3MMM

This week’s episode of the Three Minute Ministry Mentor is about you connecting with your friends as a support for your practice of ministry. Doing ministry is really not solo work, as we already considered in  Episode 4: Collaboration . Finding friends who are also living into a call to ministry can be life-giving to you and to them. 3MMM wants to add support to your peer relationships by helping...

The  Three Minute Ministry Mentor  is the fruit of many years of study, research and writing, but it is also the fruit of this year’s choice to own my deeply resonating purpose. This week’s Episode of #3MMM is about “ being there .” This is the essential idea for ministry that we bring ourselves fully into the lives of those we serve. Showing up, being there, is so important especially when those...

God’s collaboration with creation and especially with humanity, however, can go amiss. And in ministry we know it oh so well… when we start planning special holy-day services, depend on people for a great variety of tasks, or gather with families in crisis and grief. Then collaboration can seem anything but obvious. Missed communications, misunderstood meanings, a plethora of differing expectation...

I remember early in the planning stages of the  Learning Pastoral Imagination (LPI) Project  that Chris Scharen and I had several thoughtful conversations about whether or not  self-reflection  was essential for a robust pastoral imagination. My training in pastoral theology, care, and counseling, had me pretty convinced that it was a crucial, it not universal, component of pastoral practice.