Clergy Competence
The Professional Ministries Team that is convened by the Office of the General Secretary have developed resources for clergy health and maintenance. Click the links to view The Great Resignation Impacts the ABC and Red Flags of Emotional Exhaustion.
What makes clergy effective in their role? What competencies are critical to clergy effectiveness? These are questions which the Ministers Council and other entities in the ABC Family are attempting to address. When the question is posed, so many potential competencies are cited. The Professional Ministries Team of leaders across ABC, USA are endeavoring to respond to these questions of competencies in qualitative and quantitative ways. Specifically, an approach that we will use over the next several months is as follows:
- Our team members who direct or Centers for Career Development in Ministry will develop open-ended questions to solicit competencies using an approach that asks participants to share best (or better) practices and identify tasks of which they are most proud. The hope is that this approach will yield a wide set of attributes that contribute to clergy effectiveness.
- Then we will share that set with our networks and constituencies to have them rate those attributes in terms of the value or importance to that individual. From this, we hope to realize a subset of most important attributes that contribute to clergy effectiveness.
- Then we hope to be able to perform additional detailed, quantitative analysis on the resulting characteristics so that we might draw further correlation.
In addition, information on clergy competencies that have been cited by other traditions or in research are being gathered. A sample of those materials is as follows:
Competency List from the Midwest Ministry Development Service
Competency List from the Disciples of Christ
Clergy Effectiveness: National Survey Results Summary (United Methodist Church)
