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The Ministry Collaborative

Diverse network of pastors and congregations expanding their capacity for faithful, creative ministry

For over a decade, The Ministry Collaborative, a project of the Macedonian Ministry Foundation, has been providing support, training, and comprehensive peer learning opportunities for ministry leaders nationwide. Learn more about the many ways we do this at www.MMinistry.org

09/02/2026

New podcast episode! 🎙️

“Faith Is Not in the Landing, But in the Launching: A Round Table Conversation on Certainty”

https://mministry.org/podcast/faith-is-not-in-the-landing-but-in-the-launching-a-round-table-conversation-on-certainty/

Mark Ramsey, Adam Mixon, and Beth Daniel speak about Ryan Burge’s recent post (https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/belief-isnt-dying-its-just-getting) on faith and uncertainty, the give and take between apologetics and relationships, and the importance of remembering that God is durable.

Episode Transcript. (https://mministry.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/09-02-26.pdf)

09/01/2026

How we share the message can shape how people experience it.

In today’s article, “The Medium Is the Message,” Joe Scrivner reflects on shifting from being the expert in the room to creating space for study, discussion, fellowship, and shared discipleship.

Where might ministry leaders risk a little less control in exchange for greater participation?

Read more: https://mministry.org/the-medium-is-the-message/

08/25/2026

What if the next generation isn’t as far from the Church as we think?

In today’s TMC blog, “Here All Along,” the Rev. Katie Nakamura Rengers invites us to look beyond Sunday attendance and notice where young adults are already seeking purpose, practicing compassion, and doing the work of reconciliation. Perhaps the Church’s opportunity is not simply to bring them in—but to recognize where God is already at work and come alongside them.

Read “Here All Along”:
https://mministry.org/here-all-along/

Thank you for this important reminder, Katie!

08/21/2026

Our TMC Midwest Preaching Cohort recently came together for a meaningful time of connection, conversation, learning, and encouragement, with the added gift of welcoming Dr. William Watley as a guest speaker.

At the heart of this gathering, and of TMC’s work, is a commitment to growing ministry leaders’ capacity to navigate complexity with depth and imagination. Together, these leaders are making space to wrestle with the challenges of ministry, learn with and from one another, deepen relationships, and imagine faithful ways forward.

We’re grateful for Dr. Watley and for this wonderful group of preachers who continue to show up for one another and for the work to which they’ve been called.

08/20/2026

“Cleverness is Not a Ritual” - Mark Ramsey

https://mministry.org/cleverness-is-not-a-ritual/

Memes are rituals drained of transcendence.

— Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker

As religion recedes, politics takes its place.

— Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal

joy unspeakable is

practicing freedom

while chains still chafe,

singing deliverance

while Jim Crow stalks

— Barbara A. Holmes, Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church

These three are not making the same argument. Noonan names a vacancy. Gioia names what tried to fill it and failed. Holmes names what ritual costs, and does, when the stakes are as high as they get. None of them are really about politics. Politics is the ultimate shape-shifting proposition. It wears the shape of ritual — rallies, chants, flags, repeated words — but carries none of the substance. True ritual is a vessel that holds meaning, depth, and transcendence.

Ritual, at its best, is a practice, a habit, a received process that reconnects us with meaning we could never create for ourselves.

Ask any working clergyperson, off the record, which duty they’d hand off forever if they could, and I’ll bet that most would say officiating weddings. That’s not a knock on marriage. It’s about what many weddings have become. A wedding used to be a ritual in the plain sense: two people making a promise in public, before witnesses, inside a form older and sturdier than either of them, so the promise would hold even on the days their feelings for each other didn’t. The ritual did the holding. Now the ceremony competes with everything the wedding-industrial complex can monetize and Instagram can memorialize: color palate suggestions for guests, personalized vows workshopped for laughs and tears in the right order, a whole apparatus built to be remembered rather than entered. This hasn’t left the ritual threadbare. It has left it overstuffed — so much activity piled onto the form that the form itself, the actual public promise, gets lost under the production.

This trend is beginning to impact funeral rituals too — impinging on a time that should focus, for people of faith, on the promises of God which sustain and redeem us. Instead, without the guiding light of ritual, families grow increasingly anxious that “people will expect more,” or that “we can’t be too explicit about God” for fear of offending.

We work hard to create meaning, instead of receiving the meaning that ritual already offers and dwelling inside it.

Ritual fails in two directions, never one. It goes threadbare, worn down by rote until it carries no more weight than a shrug; or it becomes overstuffed with manufactured cleverness to the point that the form itself can’t breathe. Both are the same refusal: we stop trusting the form and let it run on automatic pilot or try to do its work ourselves.

The hunger hasn’t disappeared. Here is Gioia, again: “In an overly digitized world, people embrace with intensity the few remaining ritualistic activities available to them.” Grown adults dress for Halloween now the way children used to; whole blocks are transformed into theatrical stages for a night that used to belong to eight-year-olds. That’s not evidence people have moved past ritual. It’s the opposite — people grabbing whatever ritual is still standing and over-stuffing it, to the point that it’s carrying weight it was never built to bear alone. Clever, not deep.

The project in front of us isn’t inventing ritual from nothing. It’s eviction. Many cultural memes have rushed to fill that vacancy. The question is whether we notice, and whether we’re willing to receive and embrace something truer in their place.

The old forms weren’t always good — plenty of ritual went dead long before Pinterest boards and slideshow tributes took over. It isn’t wrong to want more meaning. What’s wrong is where the meaning is now coming from.

None of this — the overproduced wedding, the deferred funeral, the vacancy that politics rushes to fill — gets fixed by trying harder. Trying harder is what got us here. What’s needed is something closer to surrender: trusting a sacred form enough to let it do the work it was built to do.

Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote: “In the tempestuous ocean of time and toil there are islands of stillness where we may enter a harbor and reclaim dignity.” Let’s rediscover those islands. Let’s not wait for the tempestuous ocean to calm down before we venture out to seek and find them. And once we can delight in the rediscovery, we should stop re-decorating. Walk in. Inhabit the sustaining rituals we did not invent. Feel the welcome home.

08/19/2026

New podcast episode! 🎙️

“Time and Tenderness: A Round Table Conversation on Navigating Grief”

https://mministry.org/podcast/time-and-tenderness-a-round-table-conversation-on-navigating-grief/

Jennifer Watley Maxell, Adam Mixon, and Mark Ramsey speak with the Rev. Carla Jones Brown (Oxford Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia) about the toxicity of nostalgia, the difference between change and loss, and how the church is uniquely positioned to bring healing to our pained times.

Episode Transcript. (https://mministry.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/08-19-26.pdf)

08/12/2026

New podcast episode! 🎙️

“So Where’s the Good News in This? A Round Table Conversation on Relational Ministry”

https://mministry.org/podcast/so-wheres-the-good-news-in-this-a-round-table-conversation-on-relational-ministry/

Adam Borneman, Adam Mixon, Beth Daniel, and Mark Ramsey speak about the critical importance of context, the powerful fear of loss, and the persistent joys and good news of ministry.

Episode Transcript. (https://mministry.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/08-12-26.pdf)

08/06/2026

“Series Recap & Key Takeaways: Reflections on a Season of Choosing Well”

https://mministry.org/series-recap-key-takeaways-reflections-on-a-season-of-choosing-well/

Every day, ministry leaders make countless choices.

Some are obvious, like how to spend the next hour, or which meeting to attend, what to preach, or where to invest limited resources. Others are quieter but no less significant, such as choosing to listen before speaking, to remain present when the work feels overwhelming, to trust God’s timing rather than our own, or to notice the small signs of hope emerging around us.

Over the past several weeks, our Tuesday blog contributors have explored this overarching theme of choices, reminding us that faithful ministry is not built on one defining decision, but on the steady accumulation of intentional choices made day after day.

The series began with Adam Borneman’s reflection, Beautiful Constraints for Ministry: A Choice About Choices (https://mministry.org/beautiful-constraints-for-ministry-a-choice-about-choices/). Adam challenged the common belief that more options inevitably lead to better outcomes. Instead, he argued that healthy constraints are often gifts that bring focus, clarity, and freedom. Rather than trying to do everything, ministry leaders are invited to embrace the practices and priorities that allow them to faithfully do the work God has actually called them to do.

Building on that foundation, Mark Ramsey, in The Choice of Faithfulness Today (https://mministry.org/the-choice-of-faithfulness-today/), reminds us that faithfulness is rarely dramatic. More often, it is found in the ordinary choices we make each day, to remain attentive to God, to love the people in front of us well, and to keep showing up even when immediate results are difficult to see. In a culture that often measures success by growth and achievement, Mark gently redirects our attention toward the enduring value of simply being faithful.

In Discernment, Not Decision-Making (https://mministry.org/discernment-not-decision-making/), Beth Daniel reminds us that faithful leadership is about more than making good decisions, it is about cultivating the spiritual practice of discernment. Rather than rushing toward answers or relying solely on our own instincts, Beth encourages ministry leaders to slow down, listen deeply for the movement of the Holy Spirit, and trust that God is present and active even before we act. Discernment, she reminds us, is not simply a leadership skill but a way of faithfully walking with God.

Susan Rogers continues the conversation in Choosing to Nurture Newness (https://mministry.org/choosing-to-nurture-newness/), offering a beautiful image from nature to illustrate how God continually brings new life out of places we might least expect. Reflecting on nurse logs in Olympic National Park, Susan encourages ministry leaders to become people who intentionally notice, nurture, and protect the new growth God is cultivating, even when it begins in seasons marked by loss, transition, or uncertainty.

The series concludes with Joe Clifford’s Choices & Systems (https://mministry.org/choices-systems/), reminding us that our choices are rarely isolated moments. Instead, they are shaped by the systems, rhythms, and structures we build around them. Joe invites leaders to think beyond individual decisions and consider how their calendars, meetings, habits, and organizational practices either reinforce or undermine the values they hope to embody. Sustainable faithfulness, he suggests, grows from intentionally creating systems that support the ministry God is calling us to lead.

Taken together, these reflections paint a compelling picture of faithful leadership.

They remind us that ministry is not ultimately shaped by a handful of monumental decisions, but by thousands of seemingly ordinary choices. The choice to embrace healthy limitations. The choice to pursue faithfulness over success. The choice to practice discernment. The choice to nurture new life. The choice to build systems that support the ministry God has entrusted to us.

As another ministry season unfolds, these articles offer more than practical wisdom, they offer an invitation: to slow down, to pay attention, to trust that God is already at work, and to remember that, over time, the small choices we make each day shape not only our ministries, but the people we are becoming.

08/05/2026

New podcast episode!

"Preach the Gospel, Then Get Your Hands Dirty: A Round Table Conversation on Our Divisive Times"

https://mministry.org/podcast/preach-the-gospel-then-get-your-hands-dirty-a-round-table-conversation-on-our-divisive-times/

Adam Mixon, Adam Borneman, Beth Daniel, and Mark Ramsey speak about the importance of thinking God-sized thoughts; the critical role of contextual exegesis; and what the Church can learn from Fannie Lou Hamer, Karl Barth, and Reinhold Niebuhr.

Read Mark’s blog post, “The Choice of Faithfulness Today”. (https://mministry.org/the-choice-of-faithfulness-today/)

Episode Transcript. (https://mministry.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/08-05-26.pdf)

07/30/2026

“Choices & Systems” - Joe Clifford

https://mministry.org/choices-systems/

Each and every day, pastors make myriad choices. We choose where we spend our time. We choose who to pay attention to in pastoral care, and who to avoid. We choose what to focus on in our preaching and teaching, and what not to talk about. We choose what administrative issues to deal with, and what to procrastinate about. We choose how much time we stay focused on our work, and how much we give to those who love us outside of ministry.

Amid all those choices, it can feel like we don’t have much agency, as many of them are made for us. In fact, we may have even less agency than we think. Why? Because our families of origin and the emotional processes they gave us shape even how we approach these choices. They shape what we choose to address and what we avoid. They inform the people we’re drawn to and those who we run from. They whisper to us what issues to engage and which to evade. Sibling relationships, or lack thereof, how we were parented, how we were loved or not, how anger was expressed in our families, the roles we played as jesters or peacemakers or standard bearers or drama llamas—all shape every choice we make.

This means we have even less agency than we think we do, for the emotional process that informs our subconscious mind is always working in ways we do not notice. However, by taking time to consider these realities, how they work on us every minute of every day, we may be able to gain some freedom from them, or at least the capacity to step back and operate from our frontal cortex, the place where conscious decisions are actually made. When we do this, we just might discover a little more freedom in making the choices we face every day.

The same is true for the systems/congregations we serve. As leaders, we play a role in a system that is more powerful than any individual within the system. Throughout the system’s history, scripts have been written for pastors and board members and every role in our congregations. The system is not as free to make its own choices as some may think it is. It’s really hard for systems to change, to try new things, to make new choices.

So, how do we live into greater agency among the myriad choices we make? A first step might be to take a step back from ourselves and explore our own families of origin, and how they shape who we are and what matters to us most. It’s also important to understand the history of the systems we serve, how they have functioned through the generations of ministry, however many they may be. Then, it’s important to understand what role you play in that system, how that role has been played in the generations before you, and how you might want to play that role in this present age. By so doing, perhaps you may discover a bit more freedom and agency amid the many choices you make every day.

****

Questions for Consideration:

1. Are any of the issues I’m facing currently issues this system has dealt with throughout its history? What can I learn from how they were handled in the past?

2. Looking back at my own family of origin, who ordained me? Not the governing body, but the person in my system who shaped my sense of self in a way that led me to pursue ministry? What can I learn about myself from that reality?

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http://www.mministry.org/

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