Recipe for a Wesleyan Minister 1

Russ Gunsalus, Dave Higle, and Joel Liechty did an amazing feat. They went around the Wesleyan Church asking everyone they could find what the competencies of a minister were. What is the knowledge, what are the skills, what are the dispositions that go into training a minister?

That listening tour generated a list of some 7400 outcomes, which over time they pruned down to 91. With their permission, I'd like to share in three posts the 91 competencies of a minister. Here are the first two domains

Be able to:

The Person of a Pastor

1. Maintain a healthy balance between ministry, family, friends and self, and holistically care for oneself and family.
2. Exhibit Christ-like character, such as humility, transparency, authenticity, and morality, including the ability to keep confidences, foster trust, practice financial integrity, and maintain a teachable spirit.
3. Develop a healthy and maturing walk with God, including identifying and practicing personal spiritual disciplines.
4. Recognize and develop pastoral virtues such as relational skills, servanthood, humility, empathetic listening, discerning the needs of others, genuine love and compassion for all people, and other pastoral care skills.
5. Demonstrate respect for the leadership of others, embrace leadership responsibility and share leadership with others.
6. Recognize the importance of tending to the health of one’s family and marriage, their families relationship to church life and expectations.
7. Identify differing personalities, spiritual gifts and the dynamics of basic human psychology.
8. Interact with and relate well to others, including skills of listening and managing interpersonal conflict.
9. Demonstrate a genuine love of others and the graces of ministry.
10. Demonstrate a basic awareness of one’s own self, including one’s personality, strengths, and weaknesses, in relation to one’s environment.
11. Manage oneself, including the use of time, accountability and personal support systems.
12. Demonstrate evidence of a trajectory of lifelong learning both in areas related to ministry and in one’s knowledge of the world.
13. Demonstrate evidence of an authentic call from God for vocational ministry and a strong sense of one’s ultimate identity grounded in Christ rather than a position or performance.

Culture and Context

1. Demonstrate love, sensitivity and respect for the cultures of one’s church, community and other groups.
2. Recognize key aspects of local/global culture, history, worldviews, and any other aspects of context necessary for effective pastoral ministry.
3. Develop a method of ministry in relation to varying ministry contexts, including ministry to persons of different generations, ethnicities, genders and cultures.
4. Ability to distinguish between genuine Christian beliefs and the various ways in which they often play out in specific cultures and contexts.
5. Design and communicate a contextual strategy for outreach that engages the local culture and cultivates relationships with various people in the community.