Journey meets need for training

"God extends calls to people that you would expect and you wouldn't expect," Chuck Swan said. He and Anne Munley, members of the pastoral team of North Suburban Mennonite Church, Libertyville, Ill., are the newest participants in Journey: A Conference-based Leadership Development Program.

Read more about Journey.

The church needs training options for people who are called to be pastors from within the congregation, Virgil Vogt, interim associate conference minister for Illinois Mennonite Conference, says.

Anne Munley and Chuck Swan of North Suburban Mennonite Church, Libertyville, Ill., are an example, Virgil says. “They are both very gifted and very committed to ministry, but are not able to leave their situations to attend seminary the way people did earlier”

Journey: A Conference-based Leadership Development Program is the answer they have found. Journey is coordinated by Indiana-Michigan and Central District Conferences along with the Church Leadership Center at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary. Munley and Swan are the first participants in the program from outside the two sponsoring conferences.

This program took shape in 2003, growing out of earlier Indiana-Michigan conference programs that developed lay leadership in congregations. It uses the five-unit curriculum of Pastoral Studies Distance Education, an undergraduate, distance-education program. To this, which already includes working with a mentor and instructor, Journey adds semi-annual weekend learning events in which all participants gather for focused study of a specific area of ministry.

Indiana-Michigan and Central District conference leaders along with staff at AMBS direct the program. In fall 2005, this oversight group made a decision to open the program to all conferences across the U.S. and Canada. This makes the benefits of the Journey available to everyone else without other conferences needing to be involved in administering it, Rafael Barahona, AMBS director of leadership programs, explained.

Although beginners usually enter the program in fall, Munley and Swan began recently, entering midway between the 2006 and 2007 years. That demonstrates some of the flexibility built into the program design.

“It’s completely tailorable for the direction we want to go, to the gifts we have and the way we learn,” Munley said. “The appeal is the independent learning and learning that is individualized, added to working with a mentor in actual ministry in a congregation.”

Munley and Swan were called to team leadership of North Suburban Mennonite Church along with Mark Vincent, who is a more experienced and trained pastor. Together the three share a less-than-full-time pastoral role, so they are challenged to work creatively at the varied leadership tasks in the congregation.

Munley has a master’s degree in cross-cultural communication and works in the public school, but felt called to ministry. Swan had considered ministry early in his life, but earned an associate’s degree and pursued other business-related work and until joining the Mennonite congregation in 2001. For the last five years has had a home-based woodworking business.

“Anne and I discovered we had similar faith backgrounds,” Swan said, “and we both had continuing, annoying nudges about ministry. We both felt inadequate to the task.”

When the congregation called them into the team ministry arrangement, they asked that both Munley and Swan pursue ministry training. Together they commuted to AMBS on four weekends in fall 2005 to take one seminary course. Although they appreciated that experience, they found the demands of commuting too difficult.

“Journey is a model that works with the way we minister now,” Munley says.

Swan also says, “The educational material has an instant application in our congregation.”

Vincent, who serves as the mentor to the two Journey students, has long been committed to this model of calling people to leadership within the congregation. He assisted the Indiana-Michigan conference in setting up the precursors to Journey and sees significant benefits in the Journey approach to preparing pastors.

“We can prepare people for ministry without losing them to the congregation,” Vincent says. “They are doing ministry while they are learning about it.”

AMBS sees the Journey program as an enhancement of its distance offerings. Previous to 2002, Conference-Based Theological Education programs were active in several regions of the U.S. and Canada. These have been replaced by accredited extension sites in Kansas, Iowa and Winnipeg, Manitoba. A Spanish-language program, Seminario Bíblico Anabautista, has begun in Dallas, Texas. However, these programs offer graduate-level seminary courses.

Journey, in contrast, provides undergraduate ministry training for people who have not completed a bachelor’s degree, people who are beginning to explore ministry, or—as in Munley’s case—people who are looking for ministry preparation that allows them to continue their current ministries and vocations.

“Congregations have every bit as much responsibility to develop leaders as the seminary does,” Vincent believes.

Two times a year, all Journey students and mentors gather for a weekend learning event. In March, the focus was on biblical interpretation with Loren L. Johns, AMBS academic dean, as resource person. Other weekend events have focused on spiritual formation and Anabaptist history and theology.

Find out more on the Journey web site.