The Vocation of First Call Congregations Project

In 2005, Lilly Endowment Inc. awarded the ELCA's Vocation & Education unit $525,000 for a four year research and implementation project, "The Vocation of First Call Congregations." The intent is to study congregations identified as "exemplary" in how they support and help form First Call pastors starting their public ministry. This project emerged from a five year Lilly grant where we studied the preparation and early months of transition from seminary to congregation of FC pastors and lay rostered leaders. From a range of data collection and analysis tools, we produced a "best practices" booklet that informs seminaries, synods, candidacy committees and continuing education centers who have a stake in this preparation and support for FC leaders.
What we didn't know was the receiving end of the preparation/support process – the congregations to which they are called. We decided that it would be most appropriate to mount an in-depth case study effort with congregations, focusing on those nominated by their synods as doing an "exemplary" job with FC pastors. Lilly accepted our grant proposal, in part because they liked what we accomplished in the first grant, but also since they wanted to know more about these kinds of congregations.

From previous surveys with FC leaders and reports from our 65 synods that receive FC candidates, we had some descriptors of what synod staff look for as an appropriate context for receiving one of these new pastors. These "indicators" of exemplary congregations were sent to 24 synods in Regions 4, 5, 6, providing some common understandings of what was meant by "exemplary." From about 25 nominations, we chose thirteen congregations to study.

Seven persons with extensive backgrounds in congregational consulting were chosen as researchers. With the help of Dr. Robert Stake, the "grandfather" of case study research in education, we provided a crash course in case study methodology and developed common issues and questions to probe these issues.

We posed two basic research questions: (1) How did these selected congregations support, challenge and help form FC pastors? Underneath this question is a query about the teaching role of the congregation; and (2) How do the congregations manifest a sense of vocation – their sense of call and connection to the larger church and its mission? Underneath this is a query about whether a sense of serving the larger church by doing a good job with these novice pastors contributes in a fundamental way to being successful FC congregations.

An overall purpose for this study is to see if there are any common themes of practices, values, attitudes that emerge from cross-case analysis that might be useful in preparing more congregations to be healthy, life-giving contexts for these FC leaders. Dr. Chris Coble, Lilly Endowment, said it this way: "Instead of doing a broad blanket approach to discover some general pattern that Lutheran congregations exhibit, we are looking for more specific practices and cultural dimensions that seem to help congregations do a good job with First Call pastors."