Bishop Debbie Wallace-Padgett visited the campus of Memphis Theological Seminary last month to share the story of her leadership in the North Alabama Conference of the UMC with our students. While she was here, Bishop Wallace-Padgett and other officials from her annual conference were also able to learn more about the ongoing work of the Methodist House of Studies at MTS.

The North Alabama Conference sends a lot of students to MTS. So we were glad to have Bishop Wallace-Padgett on campus to show her how the Methodist House is working to become a vital resource for the church, both in our training of men and women for pastoral ministry and in our outreach to congregations. It was also just exciting for our students to have a UM bishop on campus. Her address at our Methodist House luncheon gave the students a chance to engage her in conversation in an intimate setting.

Bishop Wallace-Padgett speaking with MTS students on February 3, 2015

Bishop Wallace-Padgett’s message was focused on sharing the Ministry Action Plan of the North Alabama Conference. While that plan has a comprehensive set of commitments regarding the vision, mission, and values of the annual conference, what I found most intriguing was the bishop’s comments about her personal views on leadership. Here are a few of them:

• On a personal connection with Christ: “For me, I could not do what I do if I did not have a daily experience with Jesus Christ.”
• On ongoing spiritual formation: “Whatever your leadership role, it is critical that the spiritual part of you is healthy and growing. Spiritual formation is key.”
• On the renewal of leaders: “For an annual conference to be renewed, it is crucial that the conference’s leaders are experiencing renewal on a daily basis.”
• On ministry with a holy urgency: “We live in a world where it is urgent that we share the good news of Jesus Christ at every opportunity.”
• In answer to a student’s question about how we can get people in our churches to take the Holy Spirit seriously: “A starting point is acknowledging that without the Holy Spirit breathing life into us, we are dead in the water. We must have a sense of absolute reliance on the person and power of the Holy Spirit.”

In many ways, Bishop Wallace-Padgett exhibits the very best in United Methodist episcopal leadership. She is clearly focused on a mission only oriented future for her annual conference, yet she is spiritually grounded enough to be aware of the nuances and complexities of people and situations around her. I had had the good fortune to work with Bishop Wallace-Padgett last year in organizing the Aldersgate Covenant Gathering in Kansas City, Missouri. I got to see her at the Methodist House luncheon in a different light — sharing her vision for the church that she leads, and interacting as a true shepherd in a conversation with up-and-coming pastoral leaders who were eager to engage one of the UMC’s episcopal leaders.

Events of this type are exactly what we want to do more of in the Methodist House of Studies. After all, not all formation for ministry happens around the seminar table in a classroom. Breaking bread together, engaging in conversation about matters of real importance, and shared fellowship are all vital aspects of how best to train men and women for pastoral leadership in the church.

For other posts about the Methodist House of Studies at Memphis Theological Seminary, click here.

Dr. Johnny Jeffords joined us at Memphis Theological Seminary this week to discuss the journey towards ordained ministry in the United Methodist Church. The luncheon was part of the Methodist House of Studies‘ ongoing series of fellowship gatherings designed to build community and provide opportunities for Methodist students at MTS to draw on the wisdom of ministry practitioners.

In addition to serving as senior pastor of St. John’s United Methodist Church in Memphis, Dr. Jeffords is also the chair of the Board of Ordained Ministry for the Memphis Conference. That means he has a unique insight into how ordination candidacy works for those seeking to become deacons or elders in the UMC.

One of the real highlights of our lunchtime conversation was in getting to hear Dr. Jeffords speak about how he sees the candidacy process both from the annual conference-side of things and from the candidate’s perspective . Here are some of the things he mentioned:

• We need to clearly understand the relationships between the local church, the District Committee on Ministry (or DCOM), and the Conference Board of Ordained Ministry (or BOM). Local churches should only put forward candidates for ministry that they would want to have serve as their own pastors. (That’s a pretty good criterion to go by, if you ask me.) The DCOM also needs—for practical reasons—to understand itself as the primary body to discern which candidates will ultimately be ordained or not. That’s not to deflect the responsibilities of the BOM; it is rather a reality about how much time a given body will spend with a candidate and how workload is distributed.

• Formal training for both DCOM and BOM members is essential for these bodies to understand their roles and perform them well. That has to be matched by a personal commitment of each DCOM or BOM member to undertake his or her work with seriousness, intentionality, and prayer.

• Candidates themselves need to know that the church will be more discerning in the future about who needs to be a pastor in the United Methodist connection. Knowing and embracing our Wesleyan doctrinal distinctives is necessary. Understanding and agreeing with our polity and form of ministry—also necessary. It isn’t up to a DCOM or a BOM to determine who is called to ministry; it’s just up to them to determine who is called into ministry in a particular annual conference of the UMC. The church is in a stage where it has got to be more robust about how it goes about identifying and preparing its future leaders. And this is ultimately a good thing.

• In preparing for both written and oral responses to doctrinal questions, a candidate should be able to articulate answers in a couple of ways: 1. Knowledge and agreement with our core doctrines with reference to Scripture and the Wesleyan tradition. 2. How our core doctrines relate to ministry and the living of the Christian life. You can be too academically sterile on one extreme, and you can be too mushy/personal on the other. So the balance would be in having the ability to respond with theological rigor and integrity while also being able to speak meaningfully about how our understanding of the triune God, the Lordship of Christ, the sacraments and other means of grace, justification & sanctification, etc., make a different in ministry and discipleship.

These are just a few of the highlights. There was much more, and it was all great. (All the summaries above are, of course, from my own notes and are not a transcript of what Dr. Jeffords said.)

I’ve been counseling students for years who are working through ordination candidacy while they’re also going through seminary. I’ve never found that they have an issue with candidacy being a demanding, even rigorous process. The objections they tend to raise have to do with the seeming opaqueness or confusing aspects of the process. Usually that is due to poor communication of one sort or another, and sometimes it is due to the inherently “institutional feel” that candidacy processes have taken on in the contemporary church.

The good news is that these challenges can all be fixed. The bad news, if that’s the right word for it, is that the work of fixing our problems is dependent on intentional, focused work by those in the relevant leadership positions in each annual conference. The Memphis Conference at least is fortunate in having a leader the caliber of Johnny Jeffords as it moves forward with the work of its own Board of Ordained Ministry.

For other posts about the Methodist House of Studies at Memphis Theological Seminary, click here.