The Methodist Church - Leeds (North East) Circuit

Preacher Development

Growing Preachers

This section is designed to help anyone wanting to devise and facilitate an in-service training programme for preachers.

It aims to provide advice on devising programmes tailor made for specific groups. Essentially, it is a “bottom up” approach because the groups decide what training they need and organise it themselves. However, such programmes could include sessions led by others as long as the content fits into the overall programme.

Preachers will usually be responsible for organising their own training programmes but non-preachers with understanding and knowledge of preaching would be equally effective.

The following guidelines and aids are addressed directly to anyone who wishes to promote or lead or facilitate this kind of training programme through working with a local group of preachers, for preacher development enablers or facilitators or trainers. Preachers or anyone sympathetic to the preaching ministry in Christian churches and acceptable to the preachers concerned can act as facilitators, enablers or trainers. Whilst facilitators who are preachers themselves have certain advantages, those who are not preachers can be equally effective if they are appropriately equipped with an understanding of the art of preaching and conducting worship, of contemporary approaches to it and of relevant biblical and theological issues and literature.

Except where otherwise stated, the term “preachers” includes lay and ordained preachers. Experience has shown that there are great advantages if they train together.

The preachers in the Leeds North East Circuit devised their own programme which is described in Leeds NE CLPD. It included study days led by experts in their fields which the preachers themselves had decided they needed to know more about.

TOWARDS DEVELOPING LOCAL SELF-HELP IN-SERVICE TRAINING PROGRAMMES FOR PREACHERS

by George Lovell

(Copyright © George Lovell, 2008.
P
ermission is not required to download sections if they are used with due acknowledgement for local training purposes. 
Permission must be sought for other uses
)

1. Start Where You Are

Orientate yourself to starting with the group of preachers where they are and not with assumptions of training needs and prescribed programmes no matter how attractive they may seem. Clarifying their position enables you and the preachers to start from ground level and to connect directly with their needs. Establishing this base line with any degree of accuracy requires careful thought about needs with respect to purposes and situation and anything that should be avoided. A sequence of exercises and stages, which can help to do this is set out below in the chart, A Guide to Establishing and Meeting Preachers’ Development Needs. Stages 2-4 in the top half of the chart could help you to get the preachers to articulate their felt needs. They could be used privately by preachers to prepare for a group discussion and/or as successive stages in a group discussion. You, the facilitator, may have needs that are important to you that the preachers have not specified. Your needs should be shared for critical consideration along with those of others. Getting at real needs, and therefore at appropriate programmes, involves scanning all ideas and felt needs, articulating them accurately and examining them in depth along with any thoughts you and the preachers might have about them.

2. What are your training needs?

Now we move to exercise 5 on the chart below ("Pool, edit, prune and decide what is key"). Rigorous thought at this stage will pay dividends. Compare and contrast each and all the needs expressed in relation to purpose, interests and situation. Are you and the preachers missing anything out? What, for instance do others say or imply in standard training programmes about preachers’ needs? Is anything they say relevant to you? (After the preachers had articulated their felt needs at the beginning of the Leeds NE CLPD Programme, for instance, the facilitators suggested that a prior requirement or need was a shared understanding of some fundamentals about preaching. The preachers had not mentioned that suggestion but they readily accepted it. Considering some fundamentals took a year but gave a firm basis for tackling the felt needs.) Reflect on it all yourself and with the group of preachers. Look at one need in relation to another. Test them out. Do they point to deeper needs or significant common denominators? When this kind of rumination has run its course you and the preachers are in a position to decide what is key in relation to their purposes and situation and what needs to be avoided. What needs tackling first? What requires long-term attention? As a facilitator, you have two main tasks: to help the preachers to do these things as thoroughly as they can; to feed into the processes for critical appraisal any ideas or relevant information you may have, which are not otherwise available to the preachers.

A GUIDE TO ESTABLISHING AND MEETING PREACHERS’ DEVELOPMENT NEEDS

1. Starting with your felt need to be a more effective preacher and worship leader

2. Reflect on your calling ‘to preach’. Articulate what you believe about preaching and leading worship and your purposes and assumptions

3. What is prodding and motivating you to do things better: problems? frustrations?

4. What do you want to be able to do better, to know, to understand?

5. Pool, edit, prune and decide what is key in relation to purpose and situation and anything to be avoided

6. This could lead to several training, study, research, personal development needs

The need to develop your ability

  • to preach
  • to lead worship
  • to address young people and children

The need for human and spiritual relational skills in formal and informal groups

The need for personal faith and spiritual development

The need for more knowledge and understanding of

  • the Bible
  • Christianity and its history
  • theology
  • other faiths
  • the contemporary world and philosophy
  • current affairs
  • etc

The need for technical skills re. use of equipment

The need for information

Appropriate ways and means of meeting these needs
Instruction, study, discussion, reflective practice, guidance Study, spiritual direction, counselling Instruction, study, discussion, essay writing, research, courses Instruction and practice

 

3. Developing a Training Programme

Using what has emerged from the previous exercise, get the preachers to draw up what I call a “development agenda”. This involves determining just what the preachers themselves need to do to pursue the implications of their examination of their developmental needs. This is a brooding mood stage, a standing back before going forward. The objective is to find a manageable in-service training agenda, which will meet the identified needs. Get the preachers to: mull over the list of needs that have been established: mark those which are substantive; look for links between them; group them. One way of doing this is outlined in the lower half of the chart which correlates needs with appropriate ways and means of meeting them. You and the preachers could try to fit them into such a framework and read off the implications. Encourage the preachers to stay with these processes until they have put their needs into an order and shape that makes you and them feel that together you can and want to work at them. The following questions could help you, and through your facilitative assistance the preachers to turn the classified needs into a training programme.

Which needs, if any, are we, preachers and facilitators, going to tackle?
(All the members of the group could decide to work on some things whilst sub-groups worked on others and shared their findings.)

Is there a natural order in which we should approach these needs and if so what is it?
(It may be best to tackle some needs in sequence and others in parallel and cross-reference them.)

What kinds of in-service training are appropriate to each of these needs?
(See the “appropriate ways and means of meeting these needs” at the bottom of the Chart.)

Can we do it ourselves?

If so, in what ways?

If not what specific help do we need?
(It may be decided to get others to facilitate some sessions or to give talks or lectures or to instruct. The work done on needs can be variously used: to check out whether people you approach can be of help; to discover whether they see “needs within the needs”; to give precise briefings to anyone invited to help. Doing these things can save everyone’s time and minimize the risk of frustration and disappointment.)

Clarify with the preachers the training programme that is emerging and test it out for viability and acceptability by asking questions such as:

What do you think and feel about this proposed programme?
Is it acceptable to you/us?
Is it manageable, will we, preachers and facilitators, be able and committed to make time for it?
Is it a programme to which we can commit ourselves?

Hopefully, the outcome will be a viable development training programme agenda, which the preachers and the facilitators own as theirs and are able, committed and eager to get on with!

4. Disposition, Knowledge and Skills Required of Facilitators

A particular kind of disposition and a cluster of skills are required to facilitate stages 1-3, outlined above and training sessions in which preachers examine analytically, critically and reflectively their vocations, issues, disaffections and problems they are facing and contemporary socio-religious and theological challenges. A facilitative disposition and stance is crucial. Such a disposition clearly must include a belief in preaching, an empathy with preachers and a conviction about the need for in-service training and enthusiasm for self-help programmes. Accompanying these characteristics must be a deep desire to get preachers, individually and collectively, thinking rigorously and actively engaged in promoting their own development as preachers. This perspective and stance is central to a way of working with people in contradistinction to working for them. It is known as the non-directive approach to promoting holistic human and spiritual development. Being non-directive is the antithesis of being directive, authoritarian and didactic. But it is not to be confused with being laissez-faire or permissive. By definition these attitudes lead to avoiding and withdrawing from situations not approaching them as occurs in both the directive and non-directive approaches. Operating the non-directive approach in these programmes involves robust, energetic leadership directed towards stimulating and enabling preachers to engage in thoughtful action through which they are primary instruments of their own development and that of each other. The worked example shows what it is like in operation; this part of the website describes in some detail how it is applied to the development of self-help training programmes.

5. Abilities and Skills Required of Facilitators

This section highlights interrelated characteristic abilities and skills which equip people to be facilitators. Listing them in this way disguises and distorts the fact that they form an interrelated cluster variously integrated in good praxis.

Basically the skills required are those necessary to working non-directively with individuals and groups. These are well documented. Those that were used in the worked example are described in bullet form in Section II: 3. Here I draw out four key aspects of the underlying praxis.

Key aspect one: the ability to engage in non-directive "talking work" is a must.

A particular form of "talking work" is a core activity in preacher development in-service training which differs significantly from that of preaching and lecturing but is complementary to them. This form of "talking work" generates qualitative verbal interaction between preachers engaging in unrehearsed conversations and discussions in small or large groups and the accompanying inner dialogues in the participants. Achieving this involves putting words and language to work for human and spiritual development openly and freely whilst being focussed, disciplined, courteous, structured and purposeful. It aims to give a voice and say to all participants and to take all contributions seriously. Ephesians 4:29 as translated in The Divine Office: The Liturgy of the Hours According to the Roman Rite III, is apposite:

Do not use harmful words in talking. Use only helpful words, the kind that build up and provide what is needed, so that what you say will do good to those who hear you. (Collins, Dwyer and Talbot, 1974), p [114].

To promote this kind of interaction facilitators have to

Used in this way, words, the tools of thought and communication, are the instruments of reflective discourse of the kind described above. “Our ability to reflect on our experience”, says David Smail, “is only as good as the linguistic tools available to us to do so”.

For me, a preacher by vocation, to become involved in this kind of talking work involved a conversion as shaking, painful and liberating as any I have experienced. It was from habitually using what verbal facilities I have for my purposes and often, to my shame, unfairly against those of others to a commitment to use them for others, to put them, such as they were, at the service of others and their well-being and development. This means, for instance, making sure that all suggestions, whatever you might think of them, are equally well articulated so that the quality of the description is not misrepresented by or confused with the quality of the idea. When this is done, people are more likely to select ideas on their merits; the better idea is not lost to another simply because it was badly expressed. This conversion took place in the late 1960’s and I have been working out its implications ever since! (There are, of course, occasions when it is right to use verbal facilities against others.)

Pieces prepared to open unrehearsed open discussions are extremely important in this kind of talking work. They must represent the essence, tone and feel of this approach - as must the responses to participants’ contributions, especially the initial ones.

I am convinced that the quality and effectiveness of preacher development training is directly proportional to the quality of the verbal exchanges that suffuse it. The adoption of the non-directive approach is an inevitable consequence of this conclusion.

But I am not under any illusion about the difficulties of promoting this kind of talking work and adopting a non-directive approach. It goes against so much of the common grain of verbal intercourse. In all walks of life, words and talking are widely used to sell, persuade, cajole, manipulate, threaten, impress, etc. Then again, those with the greatest facility with words in positions of authority may not have the deepest insights or the best ideas but they often have the will and the power to dominate and quash others; consequently more perceptive, less articulate people can be marginalized by less perceptive, more articulate and powerful ones.

The remainder of this section indicates various ways of engaging in this talking work.

Key aspect two: the ability to identify and use facilitative questions is needed.

Unloaded questions (e.g. What do you aim to achieve through this preacher development programme?”) are more likely to promote direct, open, honest exchanges then leading or loaded questions (e.g. “Do you agree/I am sure you will agree that the aim is to…?”) Unloaded questions require, stimulate and enable people to think personally and collectively. Leading questions are manipulative devices, which can lead to unreliable, superficial responses and relationships. However, formulating effective questions can be difficult but it pays dividends when you get it right. Other kinds of questions to be avoided are those which are “trick, multiple, marathon, ambiguous, rhetorical and discriminatory”.

Other distinctions between different kinds of questions can be helpful. Here are some ways in which that has been done:

Key aspect three: the ability to identify, design and use facilitating structures is required.

When questions (or tasks) are ordered so that one question (or task) follows another constructively they form what I call a “facilitating structure”. They break down the analysis of a problem or the examination of a topic into interlinked discreet and manageable parts. This helps individuals and groups to tackle a topic systematically and holistically stage by stage. A six basic question approach to examining problems is a good example of a “facilitating structure”.

1. What is the problem?
2. What has been tried so far?
3. What specific changes are required and why?
4. What are the causes and sources of the problem that we need to examine?
5. What are we/am I going to do about it?
6. What are we learning from our study of this problem?

These questions relate to five activities: definition; diagnosis; decision making; action; reflection. Questions 1 to 3 help to define but they also help to diagnose a problem; question 4 helps to diagnose it; question 2 and 5 are action questions, respectively about what will not and what will work. The order is not invariable: 2 and 3 for instance, are readily interchangeable. Answers to question 4, 5 and 6 may well lead to a redefinition of the problem (1) and new insights into what has been tried previously (2). What is being learnt (6) may lead to going through the sequence again!

Key aspect four: the ability to draw diagrams and to construct diagrammatic models and flow charts is generally an asset.

Diagrams, models and flow charts appear in the text of this website. They are generally found to be useful but not universally so. They help people to talk about things which are difficult to describe. They can help people to make points with verbal economy. They bring into play in our praxis the non-verbal side of our brains.

6. Further Help With Developing Your Praxis

Should you now wish to follow up this basic introduction to the approach one or two things could help you. One thing is to find someone who is also prepared to have a go with you at being a facilitator. To have a co-facilitator is enormously helpful. You can, for instance, mull over the approach together; plan how you are going to use it; share facilitative leadership; act as observers and note takers to each other in turn; reflect together on your performances.

A second thing is that you could reflect on how the facilitating team actually practised this approach over a period of several years in the Leeds NE CLPD Programme described in II:3 of this website. It overlaps slightly with this section but contains other material.

The headings indicate the content and scope:

The approach
Practising the approach
Various learning styles used
The different thinking moods and modes of reflexive praxis in play
A creative triangle: study, praxis and fellowship.

The approach is an original application to preacher development of the non-directive approach to church and community development, which has been fully researched, practised widely for over forty years and written up. Visit www.avecresources.org to see the books and papers available.

This leads to a third thing you could do, read further about this approach. Books which would enable you to build on this section are available through the Avec Resources website. They are:

The Non-Directive Approach by TR and M Batten (An Avec Publication, 1988)

Analysis and Design: A Handbook for Practitioners and Consultants in Church and Community Development by George Lovell (Burns and Oates, 1994) see particularly chapters 5,7 and 8.

Diagrammatic Modelling: An Aid to Theological Reflection in Church and Community Development Work by George Lovell (William Temple Foundation, 1980) see particularly sections IV and V.

 

Contact Us | ©2008 Leeds (North East) Circuit Local Preachers' Meeting