Community Ministry Program

  

Taking Seminaries Out of the Box

Judson Memorial Church, located in Greenwich Village in New York City, has trained 37 seminary students as public ministers over the last five years. As the senior minister at Judson and the developer of this program, I thought I would be teaching the public ministers. The opposite is true. The chief learning so far in five years of community ministry is that we had more to learn than to teach.

Public ministry contrasts to parochial ministry in attending the community first and the parish second. While the goal of parochial ministry is spiritual nurture, the goal of public ministry is social justice. The dividing line between sacred and secular is given a good shake in this mix.

The seminary students who apply to participate in this program want to “do something.” In this program, they get involved in doing many things. The public ministers help community members, many of whom are in troubled situations. While helping the community members address problems, the community members help the ministers understand the complexities of worlds that they inhabit.

The public ministers accompany undocumented immigrants to their appointments and check-ins with ICE – U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Some public ministers have engaged in campaigns of civil disobedience. A half dozen of them were arrested outside of the former Varick Street detention center to “Free Jean,” an undocumented Haitian who was almost deported the day before the Haitian earthquake. Indeed he was set free, by a combination of their efforts and the horror of the earthquake.

Others set up short-term housing for gay youth with nowhere to turn. The public ministers work with members of our congregation, and their task is to activate and energize them, politically and socially. They clean out the apartments of senior citizens who are about to be evicted because of the smells in their apartment or accompany immigrants to their ICE check-ins. They get hands-on experience with difficult situations.

The interns also had an impact on our church and our congregation. They moved our church into the 21st century and became the driving force for our congregational mission. The students gave us a racial diversity we did not have by opening us to younger experience as well as bringing in, through their outreach, people whom we might otherwise never have met. A good example is the group of undocumented immigrants with HIV who now attend Judson regularly.

As a result, Judson began to look at its own racism, which we saw intimately by always wanting to be the host to our new guests and not recognizing that our guests were also hosting us with and to new experience. Judson is now a majority under 35 congregation. Before the community ministry program, we were a majority over 60 years of age congregation.

I also saw the absolute hunger ministry students have for the things that they don’t teach in seminary. This includes the effects of wide ranging injustice, as well as how to organize, do social analysis, engage victims in the tough issues they face and to survive political defeat.

A parochialized seminary curriculum narrows the views of ministry students, and timid and parochialized congregations and misinterpreters of the Bible magnify these views. Our experiential education involves an action-reflection curriculum, one that privileges experience over book learning, without dismissing book learning. This curriculum places the experience of social justice at its center. This fills a great gap in the typical seminary education. Paolo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed often informs our methodology. It assumes that the privileged have as much to learn and receive from the under privileged or differently privileged as they have to teach or give.

One of the foundational ideas of community ministry is connecting the sources of social injustice. For example, we acknowledge that the same impulse that results in the harassment of women also results in harassment of GLBTQ people as well as people of color. It is a spiritual and intellectual immaturity. In one word, the source is fear. Our interns, joined by our congregation, work at the addressing roots of violence against women, gays, immigrants and poor people. They addressed these roots by staying close to the people others call victims.

The public ministers meet as a group once a week for three hours in a session that is part therapy group, part salon, and part consciousness raising. Lay people often sit in as observers. The goal of these sessions is to understand how to sustain social action over a career and to meet the resistance to it, internally and externally. The topics may be as large as political despair or as small as how to get a senior to properly dispose of her diapers.

Because of the contributions of these 29 community ministers, Judson has attracted dozens of new members. We have learned to enjoy and not just paternalize intergenerational experience. The critical mass of the community ministers and their welcome encouraged this tipping to happen. Most importantly, both our students and our members feel like they are “doing something” to aid their community and world and in increasingly deft ways. We have learned that action breeds more action, that concern for the community expands our community, that engagement beyond the parochial brings new insights and breathes new hope and life into our world.


The Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper is the Senior Minister of Judson Memorial church and the author of 30 books, most recently SACRED CHOW: HOLY WAYS TO EAT.

  

Details about the Community Minister Program

Judson's " Training Center for Progressive Public Ministry from a Congregational Base" (commonly referred to as the "Community Ministry" program) has now completed four academic years and plans are being made for a fifth year, to start in September, 2010.

This program provides part-time employment for selected future leaders of progressive congregations, to give them on-the-job training in the dual skills of parish ministry and effective social-change work, under the overall direction of the Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper , Senior Minister of Judson Memorial Church and founder of this program. For the first three years, all the trainees were assigned to Judson Church. In the fourth year, the program expanded to place trainees in additional parishes in New York City as well as at Judson, and this expanded version is expected to continue in future years (always dependent on funding - which to date has been primarily provided by generous grants from the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, plus contributions from participating parishes).

The program's underlying theory comes from the theological and experience-based understandings:

(a) that “public ministry” is the proper work of the Church – to serve the world’s needs – and

(b) that successful public ministry requires leaders who can motivate church members to become involved in such ‘external’ ministries, and

(c) that such motivation will require the leader to be able to nurture the members adequately so they are able to look beyond their own needs.

Thus, to be successful, “public ministers” must have both sets of skills – parish and social change – and know how to integrate them in practice. Standard theological seminary training does not provide this type of training, nor is it currently being provided in this form by any other training program in the United States of which we are aware.

The Judson program’s model assigns the students to work at least 15 hours a week in a parish, doing both standard pastoral tasks (which can include aspects of worship leadership, education, pastoral care, and administration) and also external ministry tasks appropriate to that congregation. (Parishes selected to participate in this program have some history of willingness and ability to do work that serves those outside their own walls.)

Also included in the 15 hours a week are a three-hour seminar on Fridays at Judson Church, a half-hour of personal supervision by the supervising pastor for each trainee on alternate weeks, and an hour’s conversation with a lay mentor once a month.

 
55 Washington Square South New York, NY 10012 | phone: 212-477-0351 | fax: 212-995-0844