Finding Support
IJ describes the care taken in developing a policy that is intended to be helpful, and the resources quoted above indicate the way the MDR positions itself as part of the way that the Methodist Conference seeks to support its ministers (Miller, Anderson et al. 2011). That support is needed to cope with the complexities and challenges of ministry is evident throughout.
Interviewees were asked in various ways where they got support. The answers were shaped by why they thought they were trying to do, and what they understood as they role or identity. A minister with a clear sense of working with others responded with, ‘My Circuit Leadership Team (KL). However, there was a clear sense that this quite secular response, was modified by a deep understanding of what ministry was about,
‘I have an administrator who understands all the various nuances because her Dad was a minister and her husband is a minister, so she understands (QR).
I found this an interesting response; the acceptance of support in a way that perhaps any one working in a complex role might seek, but the recognition of ‘all the various nuances’; a need for those that accompany to understand the specific issues of ministry was underlined by another,
‘I have a group of people that I got ordained with, and we keep in touch by phone and Internet with each other, and we also meet up quite regularly (WX).
For those who did not resist MDR specifically or the idea of engaging in more secular views, there was still the clear idea that ministry was different and inside knowledge mattered. To some extent then, there was a caution about the outside providing the support that all recognised they needed. The outside implied not only outside the Church, but perhaps even from the national church itself; thus the desire for individual choice even in a Connexional policy.
I think people have to be able to choose their own supporters, in a sense (ST).
While acceptance of MDR emerges as a consistent theme, there is also a sense that the whole might be located more helpfully within either a more spiritual framework, or specifically a more Methodist framework.
How would he improve it? I think he would spend a great deal of time focusing on the individual minister’s walk with God in that you remember the meeting… the class meeting questions which were very searching in terms of your own personal walk with God (MN).
Asking the question, ‘If you didn’t do MDR, what would you do; this answer indicates a broad understanding of what kind of support, professional or otherwise, the Church might offer which would represent a much more general answer?
That would depend on the topic. I have a spiritual director anyway, so I talk to her, but that’s different, somehow, because MDR is more about professional development (EF).