Facing the upcoming wave of pastors retiring as well as the ongoing concern of pastoral and leader burnout will take more than a new program or even the resources of the Pacific Northwest Conference. Project Director Dr. Hauna Ondrey shares how One Covenant Community is a coordinated effort across the denomination to identify and equip upcoming leaders while sustaining current leaders for an impact that will last for generations.
To find out more about this exciting project head to the One Covenant Community website. You can also reach out to Dawn Taloyo, Associate Superintendent of the PacNWC, dawn@pacnwc.org, for more information and to get involved.
Transcript:
Lynette Sanchez: Hello, Pacific Northwest Conference. This is Lynette Sanchez, your communications assistant, and I'm really excited to be joined today by Dr. Hauna Ondrey. She is the Academic Dean for North Park Theological Seminary and also the Project Director for the One Covenant Community, which she's going to share with us about today. So, welcome, Hauna.
Dr. Hauna Ondrey: Thank you, Lynette. Lovely to be with you and all of the Pacific Northwest Conference folks.
Lynette Sanchez: Yeah. And I was just wondering to get started, could you share a quick summary or give us a little intro to what the One Covenant Community is?
Dr. Hauna Ondrey: Absolutely. We are so excited about the One Covenant Community initiative, which is a five-year initiative funded by the Lilly Endowment. It's a collaborative initiative designed overall to strengthen pastoral leadership across the Evangelical Covenant Church.
This project brings together all of the covenant entities that touch the life of pastoral leaders from the identification of pastoral leaders all the way to the training and ongoing support of those leaders. It brings together North Park Seminary and University, the Covenant regional conferences (including the Pacific Northwest Conference), Covenant camps, other educational affiliates (like CHET, Minnehaha, and Alaska Christian College), denominational leaders, and clergy serving locally.
Together, we're tackling shared challenges for shared solutions to support and strengthen the full pathway of formation, identification, equipping, and ongoing support of congregational leaders, aiming to build healthy congregations by equipping healthy pastors.
Lynette Sanchez: Wonderful. Thank you. Is there one pressing issue or problem that this project is seeking to address, and could you share a little bit about how it's seeking to address that problem?
Dr. Hauna Ondrey: Absolutely. It's a big project, so it addresses multiple interrelated challenges all related to pastoral and congregational leadership. Some of the challenges we identified with denominational and conference partners during the planning phase include:
One, Fewer young people considering vocational ministry. There is a decline in young people pursuing vocational ministry as a pathway, and for those who do identify a call, there are barriers to seeking seminary education—both financial barriers and modality barriers (since many seminary students cannot relocate).
There is an increased rate of pastoral burnout and an elevated number of individuals leaving ministry, especially since COVID-19. The challenge is figuring out how to care for and equip those in ministry to persist in health.
As individual congregations, conferences, the denomination, and the school wrestle with a common cluster of challenges, we tend to replicate solutions and build silos rather than addressing them together and stewarding limited resources wisely for the benefit of the whole denomination.
To address these challenges, we are pursuing a coordinated, covenant-wide response. A working group (with Dawn representing the Pacific Northwest Conference) brings together camps, conferences, and university personnel to draw on local churches and youth groups to identify young people called to ministry. Often, the community can identify gifts or a call before the individual can. We are also building shared mentorship and educational resources (at both undergrad and graduate levels) to walk with individuals.
Similar to the old resource center, this hub will be accessible to all conferences and congregations to find support for church chairs, children's pastors, volunteers, and church board governance. It will offer continuing education and formation to increase longevity, health, and excellence among leaders.
Ultimately, at the end of this project, a congregation will benefit from having resources to mentor young people toward vocations in ministry, accessible seminary pathways (both financially and geographically), and clear resources for lay leaders and pastors to maintain healthy, lifelong vocations collaboratively.
Lynette Sanchez: This is wonderful. A couple of things that stick out to me are avoiding silos so we can collaborate and share resources rather than every church creating its own, and focusing on our younger generation to lift up future pastors and equip kids for servant leadership at the church level.
Dr. Hauna Ondrey: Yes! The larger initiative focuses on congregational leadership, which includes paid staff and the whole church. We want to elevate everybody to be a leader for the health of the church, helping combat pastoral burnout by equipping congregational leaders intergenerationally.
After our working groups met in August, a superintendent noted that this feels like generational work. It's not just a five-year project with an infusion of experimental funding that ends when the period expires. We are using these funds to build something collaboratively that will persist and impact the church for thirty years and one hundred years from now.
Giving to the endowment fund is an immediate opportunity to get involved, such as tripling funds to support seminarians, like those in Ignite, making seminary as affordable as possible. You can find a link on the project site to contribute, and you can connect with your conference staff to share what matters to your congregation and stay informed by following project stories on the website.
Lynette Sanchez: That's wonderful, and I really appreciate you taking the time to share. Understanding that this has a plan for generational impact lifts my eyes up to see the big things happening that we get to be a part of. Hauna, thank you so much for sharing. We're going to link the website and info on how to get in touch with Dawn to get more details.
Dr. Hauna Ondrey: Thank you for the conversation, and sorry for the 360-degree view of your office as you dodged the sun on this sunny day! Thank you, Lynette!