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We live and operate in a professional world. As a result of that, pastors are expected to be able to interact in that professional world. Therefore, they must be constantly growing and improving, both in their pastoral skills and in their awareness of changing trends and perspectives that surround us.
Ministerial Directors should be keenly interested in the personal and professional growth of themselves and their pastoral team. In fact, one of the most important things you can do to invest in the ministry health of your pastors is to help make sure they are involved in regular growth opportunities. And one of the best ways to encourage that is to model it yourself.
That means that you should be very public about the learning opportunities that you personally take advantage of, which gives you broader license to then encourage your pastors to engage in continuing education.
As a Ministerial Director, it's likely that you will be asked to oversee (or at least participate in overseeing) the conference's continuing education policy and funding. In most conferences, requests for CE funds route through the Ministerial Director's office for approval before heading on to Treasury. This gives you opportunity to see first-hand who is taking advantage of it, and what breadth of training they are taking.
With the arrival of the Adventist Learning Community, the NAD Ministerial Department has made a major investment of both time and people resources to gather together a broad range of pastoral CE experiences that are freely open and accessible to any pastor in your field.