Let there be hope!
by Mark Sundby, MDiv, PhD, LP
“Give us hope!” The seminary vice president looked me squarely in the eyes and explained, “We need hope, Mark. Our churches and seminaries are struggling. If there’s a single thing you and your center can do to make a difference, it would be to give people in ministry hope.” We were in the seventh hour of strategic planning. Large newsprint pieces, full of goals and action steps, lined the walls. Toward the end of the day, his plaintive statement captured them all. “Give us hope!”
It was 2005. Being a man in his early forties, I admired this seminary vice president twenty years my senior, a Harvard-trained attorney who gave up a lucrative legal career to follow a call to ministry, and I considered him a mentor. It rattled me that he was asking me and our center to give him and his seminary hope. As a mentor, if he hadn’t figured it out, how could I?
Almost twenty years later, his words still reverberate, in fact, even louder. If we needed hope then, world events have only heightened this need. Now I’m his age. My mentor had guided me in the right direction, and it only took a couple of decades for me to realize it! If there’s a single thing our center can do to make a difference, it would be to give people in ministry hope.
Our center is now ready to answer this charge. Mary Kay DuChene, a LeaderWise colleague, and I are writing a book on hope, which is due to come out shortly after the 2024 presidential election. It will be based on the psychological research of hope, which includes hundreds of studies that date back thirty years, and it will be focused on churches and people in ministry. To our knowledge, none of these studies has looked at people in ministry. We want to change that and make our book as relevant to you as possible, and we need your help.
We’d like you to complete a five- to ten-minute online survey based on psychological science that measures hope. Although you won't receive individual results, the results of all of those responding will be instrumental to our understanding of hope among people in ministry, and we will share the findings in our book. In addition, your individual responses will be kept confidential and anonymous and will be analyzed only in group form.
To complete our Ministry Hope Survey, click here. Please forward it to other leaders in ministry, too.
We're grateful for your participation!
