Towards a Practice-Oriented Model of Formation of the Indwelling of the Holy Spirit: Shaping Local Pastors for Ministry in the United Methodist Church

This thesis is about the formation of licensed local pastors in the Course of Study of the United Methodist Church. It incorporates an empirical qualitative study involving 46 licensed local pastors in the United Methodist Church across the United States over a 6-month period: 40 participated in 13 online focus or sharing groups, and 46 completed a questionnaire. The aim of the sharing groups was to explore how local pastors may have encountered the Holy Spirit during their formation in the Course of Study, and to investigate what these encounters may entail for their shaping and preparation for ministry. The questionnaire was used to gain demographic information. The research question was: How does foregrounding the Holy Spirit impact the formation and education of local pastors? The argument is that foregrounding the Holy Spirit raises new questions for theological education and shapes the preparation of local pastors for ministry. The thesis explores how, by foregrounding the Spirit, a total process of formation comes into view in the lived and ordinary, formally and informally, beginning from the call into the ministry and moving through participation in the Course of Study. Other questions are also emerging about the very purpose of a licensed local pastor within the polity of the United Methodist Church, especially regarding the UMC's theology of ministry and ecumenical commitments. In addition, practices such as worship, friendship, and pedagogy take on a new relevancy in formation as local pastors learn ministry by doing it: local pastors learn to share in these practices as they are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, supporting each other vocationally through a maze of denominational demands and educational requirements, and stewarding their economic resources. The image that surfaced in this research for the proposed model is that of a Methodist Meeting House of Formation. Through the practices of Lectio Divina and Visio Divina, this image resonated with the learning of ministry as a spiritual practice, as well as with how local pastors expressed their experiences of the Spirit’s presence, the images they chose, and the testimonies they shared. It was also an image that spoke to new possibilities for re-scripting the Course of Study that could offer a way to move beyond broader academic or encyclopedic paradigms and ‘paideutic’ frames of reference in theological education: a practice-oriented model that seeks to transcend the binary between the academic and ‘paideutic,’ being indwelt by the Spirit and expanding the ways people know, learn, and engage in ministry. A strong communal ethos accompanies the model, which is enriched by the ‘pneumatological scaffolding’ in the Gospel of John and the First Letter of John, and further strengthened by John Wesley’s turn to praxis in his ‘house of religion.’ The image of the Methodist Meeting House of Formation, then, serves as both a guiding image and a physical venue for formation, and is also theologically located within the ecumenical witness of the UMC and the Wesleyan impulse to grow in holiness. A consequence of this intervening pneumatologically is that curriculum and pedagogies are understood more contextually, and the organization and polity of the United Methodist Church are questioned for failing to recognize local pastors. The role of worship is set within this context to reclaim the ministerial ‘order’ of local elders in the annual conference, to invoke the Holy Spirit’s blessings, and to reimagine the Course of Study not simply as an educational program for academic credit but as a community-oriented approach to gaining pastoral wisdom or know-how. The Course of Study becomes oriented toward learning the practices of ministry, embodied relationally and indwelt by the Spirit.