Helping Pastors Thrive creates opportunities for enhancing pastoral identity and leadership through peer and mentor-based learning. Funded by the Lilly Endowment, Helping Pastors Thrive is a ministry of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina.
Supporting Pastors, Strengthening Ministry
The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina’s Helping Pastors Thrive Program provides pastors and ministers opportunities and environments for relational learning, spiritual formation, and professional development in the practices of Christian ministry across the vocational life span.
Helping Pastors Thrive and its three program initiatives are designed to nurture peer and mentor interaction for professional development, enhance vocational identity and spiritual well-being among congregational ministers. Pastors who thrive will inevitably contribute to congregational health and the vitality of their congregation’s ministries in the communities they seek to serve.
Helping Pastors Thrive is funded by a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment’s Thriving in Ministry Initiative.
In September of 2018, CBF of North Carolina was awarded a Thriving in Ministry grant from the Lilly Endowment to support the efforts and goals of Helping Pastors Thrive. A five-year grant that will support three distinct CBFNC programs for ministers. The primary aim of grant is to help pastors thrive in congregational leadership and, in doing so, enhance the vitality of the congregations they serve.
ABOUT THE LILLY ENDOWMENT
Lilly Endowment, Inc. is an Indianapolis-based, private philanthropic foundation created in 1937 by three members of the Lilly family – J.K. Sr. and sons Eli and J.K. Jr. – through gifts of stock in their pharmaceutical business, Eli Lilly and Company. The gifts of stock remain a financial bedrock of the Endowment. The Endowment, however, is a separate entity from the company, with a distinct governing board, staff and location.
In keeping with the founders’ wishes, the Endowment supports the causes of community development, education and religion. The Endowment affords special emphasis to projects that benefit young people and that strengthen financial self-sufficiency in the charitable sector.
The Endowment funds programs throughout the United States, especially in the field of religion. A key priority of its founders, however, was to help the people of their city and state build better lives. Accordingly, the Endowment maintains a special commitment to its hometown, Indianapolis, and home state, Indiana.