Imagine your graduation — a stirring rendition of Canon Joseph Kucharski’s “Seminary Hymn,” a lector announces “Descendit alumni,” and suddenly the reality sinks in. Three years of preparation, term papers famous for the “Holtzen hermeneutic of Turabian criticism,” and a real-world call awaits. Scary indeed since residential “curacies” or hands-on apprenticeships are now mostly a thing of the past. Or are they? So much has evolved from bricks and mortar to virtual. And the church, which has endured COVID-19 and survived, is finding its presence — stronger than ever and now, curiously, with more offerings online.

Raising the next generation of ordained church leaders poses a challenge in every generation. The rapid changes in our culture, coupled with the decline in numbers and financial resources of the average parish have compounded this problem. In the past, the church offered a curacy system, whereby recent seminary graduates could gain on-the-ground experience while serving as a junior assistant. This equipped them for ministry as a rector of their own parish. Those days are largely a thing of memory. Mentoring, however, is never a thing of the past. Now, the model is different.

Curacies are famously understood as phenomenal growth opportunities, but the accompanying financial packages are often enough to starve a family, especially with the burden of student loans. The scarcity of parishes with finances robust enough to host a second priest on staff for typical two-year curacy are minimal. Precious few dioceses exist any more with formal curacy programs strong enough to undergird that financial burden even for a single curate, while multitudes of small family-sized parishes are begging for clergy they can actually afford. These are the ideal settings for Curates-in-Charge.  It seems curacy, and therefore clergy mentoring, is undergoing a massive change form Curate-in-Residence to Curate-in-Charge.

Born of his own experience, Fr. Robert Lewis composed a mentoring program in his work, Curacy Express. The central program offered in the book published by Wipf and Stock consists of 33 self-paced units designed to be completed by a Curate-in-Charge with a mentor in another parish via Zoom, Facetime, or Skype. This program was tested in three different dioceses as part of Fr. Lewis’ 2015 Doctor of Ministry Project at the House. Fr. Lewis’ journey began after graduation in 2007, when he was called to a mission outside Peoria, Illinois. Significant effort had been exerted to gather support for a priest, but that was limited to two years because of tight finances. His then-bishop, Peter H. Beckwith, indicated that this situation was a sink-or-swim initiative. Without a successful mentoring relationship, it would have been a fool’s errand to place someone with no actual parish experience with so much at stake. Yet, the small congregation grew from 23 on a typical Sunday to 45 — a phenomenal blessing and future for two years’ effort. Fr. Lewis kept meticulous notes on his mentoring sessions and embellished those experiences with those of his Nashotah graduate colleagues. This seeded the start of the curriculum. Without the wisdom of Fr. Brian Kellington, his mentor, both the future of the mission and the success of the mentoring would have failed to bear fruit.

"Using a covenantal process between curate, supervisor, and mentor, Lewis provides a guide that uses theoretical perspective, practical context, and actual examples of the practice of ministry,” said Kevin E. Martin, congregational consultant and retired Dean of St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas. “Curacy Express provides a great tool for both the newly ordained and any judicatory concerned with the future of the church and its leadership."

The units include a variety of subjects: a balanced work week, weddings from start to finish, leadership flaws and how to redeem them, ecumenical work, problematic parishioners and stewardship programs. One curate who used the program referred to the work as “a textbook, caulk to seal up the cracks of what one might forget from seminary — a go-to manual.”

 Seminary is geared to intellectual knowledge the same way that curacy is geared to practical knowledge. Every seminarian is cognizant of how very much he or she does not know. Seminary is only the first portion of the journey. Without mentoring, the first few years of ministry can be incredibly daunting. It has been said that the Evil One’s principal strategy is discouragement. Without the sounding board of an experienced voice, the priest placed in a sink-or-swim situation is bound to lack the practical skills needed to navigate their first cure. 

The Diocese of Nebraska began a program called the “Bishop’s Society for Clergy Excellence.” This is a new way of envisioning the curacy process into a step-down model. The curate begins their ministry as an associate in an Omaha- or Lincoln-area parish and then finishes their curacy as a Curate-in-Charge of a mission in Western Nebraska. These learning centers were given Curacy Express as a tool to facilitate their formation. The remote learning has proved effective in situations where it may be a hundred-mile drive between parishes. Sadly, most dioceses do not have a curacy program. In many cases, dioceses are willing and happy to send people who are discerning a call to ministry off to seminary but without financial resources and often only to “plant churches” when they finish, without promise of guaranteed income for their family.

Fortunately, the coupling of a seminary formation with a mentoring relationship has proven to form priests who are able to grow their parishes. While the twenty-first-century church is changing dramatically, the one thing that remains the same is the need for good mentors to pass on practical knowledge necessary for providing pastoral care. Mentoring relationships will always be needed within the church. Sure, curacies are changing, but that first-call mentorship will always be one of the pivotal keys to successful ministry.

The Rev. Dr. Robert M. Lewis is a two-time graduate of Nashotah House (M.Div., 2007, D.Min. 2015). He has served parishes in Illinois, Florida, and Nebraska. He is currently the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Yuma, Arizona, in the Diocese of San Diego. For more information about Dr. Lewis’s book Curacy Express, please visit this link.

The preceding article was originally printed in Nashotah House’s Spring 2021 Missioner magazine, volume 35, number 1, pages 32-33.