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L90 in the Workers Manual requires all pastors employed in the North American Division of SDA’s to maintain a regular accomplishment of professional development at the rate of 2 Continuing Education Units (CEU’s) per year. That is 20 hours of training and development every year that a pastor should engage in either through conferences, reading, presenting, or on the Adventist Learning Community (among other methods).
The Adventist Learning Community (ALC) has been created by the North American Division (NAD) to serve multiple functions in regard to Pastoral Professional Development (PPD). First it provides resources and courses that pastors can interact with in order to acquire credits to fulfill their 2.0 CEU requirements. Second, it provides a portfolio that records all of a pastor’s CEU’s online. This portfolio can be shared or downloaded and certificates can also be printed from courses taken on the ALC. A pastor fills in a self-reflection form at the completion of any training that is not a course on the ALC, and that form is submitted electronically to their conference’s Ministerial Director for review.
Ministerial Directors oversee the approval process and CEU attribution for pastors in their conference. Each Ministerial Director is given special access to see all of the pastoral accounts in their care, oversee the review of CEU reporting forms submitted by their pastors, and the transfer of pastors in and out of their conference.
The process for each duty of the Ministerial Director is as follows:
Access Pastors List and Review Portfolios
To access the pastors list, the ministerial director must:
1.Login to the account to which the pastors for your conference have been assigned.
a.This access needs to be set up with the ALC every time there is a transition of ministerial directors for a conference.
2.Once logged in, a ministerial director will navigate to their dashboard.
a.The dashboard is found by clicking on your name at the banner on top of the site. A dropdown menu will appear and the first option will be “My Dashboard”.
3.On the left side of their screen there is a section header that reads “pCertification”.
4.Under the “pCertification” header there is a sub header that reads “Pastors” (this is your pastors list).
a.This is where all of the pastors can be seen with an indication of how many CEU’s a pastor has left to complete.
5.An individual pastor’s portfolio can be seen by clicking on that pastor and looking under the sections “Approved”, “Conditionally Rejected”, and “Pending”.
Oversee the CEU Review Process
To review CEU’s, the ministerial director must:
1.Login to the ALC and access their dashboard.
2.On the left side of the screen under the header “pCertification” a subheader “CEU Requests” must be clicked.
a.There will be displayed a list of submissions by pastors that are ready for review.
3.The ministerial director must click the review button and then they can see the self-reporting form that the pastor filled in.
a.There are links to assess the amount of CEU’s a ministerial director must apply to the form. They are labeled as “Activities List” and “Standardized Values” and can be found on the right side of the form under the “CEU Value” box.
4.After the ministerial director has determined a CEU value, they must input that value in the “CEU Value” box and then click approve.
5.If the pastor has not given sufficient information to determine the appropriate CEU Value, then the ministerial director can comment and conditionally reject the application.
a.This will send the application back to the pastor for review and correction.
6.If they ministerial director determines that the content is not worth continuing education credit, then they can reject the form.
Transferring Pastors
Outgoing:
It is the obligation of the ministerial director to transfer their pastors in and out of their conference. When a pastor transitions to another conference, the ministerial director must:
1.Login to the ALC and find that pastor on their pastor’s list under the “pCertification” header.
2.They must then click that pastor and change the “Assigned Ministerial Director” to the new one based on the conference that they are transferring into.
3.Then they click the “Reassign” button and click “ok” to submit the transfer.
4.Whenever a pastor is retiring, terminated, leaving the ministry, or has passed away the ministerial director must transfer that person to the Associate Director for Pastoral Professional Development at the ALC and send an email indicating which of those things has taken place.
Incoming:
The ministerial director is also involved in receiving pastors that are transferred into their conference. After a pastor has been transferred out of a conference they will remain on that ministerial director’s pastors list with the label “Transfer to: (Conference) Ministerial Director Name”. The ministerial director at the incoming conference should receive an email alerting them that a transfer is being requested to be made from another conference. The ministerial director who is receiving the new pastor must:
1.Login to their account on the ALC and visit their pastors list.
2.When they scroll to the bottom of the list there will be a heading that reads “Transfer Requests”.
3.Here is where they will “approve” or “reject” the transfer.
a.Rejecting will only occur if there is an accidental transfer. Most likely a phone call between ministerial directors can be helpful in this circumstance.