Making Excellent DiscipleS    

Overview 

In 2003, The Episcopal Diocese of Chicago, with a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment, launched the Making Excellent Disciples program which provides five years of pastoral leadership experience and mentoring for newly ordained clergy making the transition from seminary to parish ministry.  In the MED program, a newly ordained priest serves as a curate (associate pastor) in a mid-sized or corporate sized congregation for a period of two years and then moves to a smaller congregation as priest in charge.  The program continues to provide mentoring and colleague support for the priest for an additional three years. The new priest ministers with a mentor and colleague community for a total of five years. 

Program Goals

• Guide new clergy into exercising effective ministry by giving them the tools and means to sustain pastoral excellence.

• Renew, affirm and recognize the excellent ministry of mentoring clergy in order that it may be sustained and shared.

• Lead, expand, enhance and sustain the inherent ministry within a vibrant, established congregation with growth potential.

• Replicate and adapt the best practices of the established congregation in a nearby new congregation, thereby stimulating shared resources and congregational interconnection.

• Sustain the ministerial and congregational mentoring process and institutionalize it within the Diocese of Chicago, to benefit pastors and congregations in an ongoing program.

NEW 2010 Lilly Grant Information

We are pleased to announce we received a one million dollar grant from the Lilly Endowment for Making Excellent Disciples.  This will be the fourth grant awarded from Lilly since the program was launched and will allow us to sustain our current MED program, as well as expand our practices to the diocese of Dallas, Massachusetts and Olympia.    

This fourth grant will provide funds to help with the cost of curates for three congregations in the Diocese of Chicago.  Each mentoring congregation will be awarded the means to cover one third of the salary of a curate for two years.  At the end of two years, the curate will be encouraged to seek a position leading a congregation in the diocese.  The mentoring congregations will then be eligible for a second grant for one third the cost of a curate for an additional two year period.  A curate may stay in a mentoring congregation beyond two years, but there will be no grant money provided.   Rectors will be expected to provide quality mentoring to the curate, and both rector and curate must participate in peer groups and attend annual continuing education conferences. 

If you hope to bring a curate into your congregation and are in the financial position to do so, we welcome you to apply by responding to the grant application below.  Please e-mail your responses to Sarah Lenaeus (contact information listed below) by February 15, 2010. 

Grant Guidelines

Grant Application

News Article on Lilly Endowment grant

Please update your contact and ministry information using the Clergy Information form.

For more information or to apply for the new MED grant, place contact:

The Reverend Canon Clarence Langdon

(312) 751-4215* clangdon@episcopalchicago.org

or

Sarah Lenaeus

(312) 751-3578* slenaeus@episcopalchicago.org