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.
Cohorts For New Pastors: Learning in Communities of Practice
The first years of pastoral ministry provide a rich context for what James Wind and David Wood describe as “reflective immersion,” that is, learning through reflection with peers and mentors on the actual practice of ministry. The Cohort model provides new pastors the space and interaction essential to adaptive learning, while overcoming pastoral isolation, building and sustaining professional friendships, and engaging mentors who contribute to pastoral formation and identity.
The Cohort for New Pastors is a two-year program that utilizes a small group model involving 6 - 8 new pastors and 2 - 3 pastoral mentors. The two-year cohort meets at regular intervals during the two-year program and includes four two night retreats at Saint Francis Springs Prayer Center in Stoneville, NC. Participants share the unique challenges from their own settings, explore the relationship between identity and practice, and delve into important topics with peers and mentors that inform effective leadership practices and enhance the arts of ministry.
Cohort mentors, participants and resource leaders establish outcomes and learning goals, as well as share in the selection of readings and other resources appropriate to themes and topics that emerge from the interactions in the gatherings. Participants learn to tract personal progress and learning with their mentors, and cultivate an approach to self-assessment and evaluation.
Well trained and wise mentors are central to the success of the cohort model. Together with participants, they will create a learning community, build sustainable professional friendships and enact habits of reflection through sustained interaction between members over time. The first cohort began in the Fall of 2019 and will conclude in the Spring of 2021. A second cohort is scheduled to begin in the Fall or Winter of 2020 with additional cohorts added each year.
*Wind, James P. and Wood, David. J. (2008). Becoming a Pastor. Reflections on the Transition into Ministry. Alban Institute.
Cohorts meet in retreat four times over the course of the two-year program. New Pastors Cohort gatherings are held at the Saint Francis Springs Prayer Center in Stoneville, North Carolina. Retreat housing, food, materials and travel expenses are covered by the Helping Pastors Thrive program.