Continuing Education > CE for Yourself

Though you likely come into the Ministerial Director position from pastoral ministry and have proven yourself to be an excellent pastor with noticeable leadership ability, if you do not have a plan to grow right from the start, you'll find that your past experiences won't carry you as far as you might hope.

The fact is, you'll need to retool. You'll need to deliberately seek out new reading subject matter and look for a whole different range of training conferences and events that you needed as a pastor.

You'll need to brush up on leadership, spiritual growth and dynamics, conflict resolution, family systems theory, how different sized congregations function, what kinds of pastors fit best in the wide array of church types you have in your field, how to help pastors enter/leave a pastorate, pastoral burnout or longevity, how to find resources to help pastors in conflict or crisis, and much more.

While you likely have a strong intuition about many of the things just mentioned, chances are you'll need to shore up your knowledge in other areas. You'll need to buy some books and attend some workshops and seminars. You'll need to huddle with other Ministerial Directors to find out what helped them, and be in conversation with your union Ministerial Director. You should also convince your conference administration that you need to be able to attend all the Ministerial Advisories that the NAD Ministerial Department convenes. You'll learn a lot just by being the company of other Ministerial Directors.

In other words, you need to up your game. And you need to lead your pastors by example.

Finally, it's likely that your conference will select you to monitor the CE units taken by your field using the Adventist Learning Community.