A wonderful evening

Yesterday evening, Emily and I had a few seminary students over to our home for an informal dinner conversation with Bishop Ken Carder about issues in ministry. Bishop Carder (pictured above with second year M.Div students Ben Johnson and Lynn Cross) previously served as bishop of the Tennessee and Mississippi Annual Conferences before his retirement from the active episcopacy. He is now the Ruth W. and A. Morris Williams Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry at Duke.

In everyday ministry, bishops are pretty inaccessible people. You might see them a few times a year, but rarely in a situation where you can sit down at dinner and just have informal table talk. Even in a seminary, you are most likely to engage a bishop-professor in a seminar or a structured advisory session. That made last night especially memorable, as we were able to just let the conversation flow where it wanted as we scarfed down great pizza from a local eatery.

What was most interesting about the conversation to me was the way that it centered mostly on the importance of peer and mentoring relationships once a new pastor arrives in his or her first appointment. Bishop Carder spoke firsthand about this, relating his experiences in discovering just how important it was to have relationships of support and accountability in his own time as a local church pastor and later as a bishop. He is a big advocate of Covenant Discipleship Groups, and he even participated in one as a bishop when he was in Nashville.

Bishop Carder said two things that particularly stuck out to me. One was that a pastor absolutely has to carve out the time and space for sustaining relationships himself. A congregation almost always wants to be supportive, but congregations also have endless needs and - as large bodies of people - are not suited to setting healthy boundaries for their pastors. So the pastor has to take the responsibility, and this is an absolutely necessary task if the pastor is going to remain physically, emotionally, and spiritually healthy.

The second thing that stuck out to me was in Bishop Carder's emphasis on friendships with exactly the kind of people Wesley would want us to seek out - those who are poor and on the margins of society. He described a friendship with a custodian in a church he served, who was poor but who would always point out to someone she thought was taking her for granted that she was a child of God and expected to be treated as such! He also described his close friendship with a man serving a life sentence in prison, with whom he has remained close despite moving around several times the past few years. Bishop Carder certainly stressed peer and mentoring relationships with other clergy, but he indicated that we can learn just as much, in different ways, from friendships with those who on the surface are not like us.

You can find an article on Bishop Carder's selection to his endowed professorship here.