Reclaiming Our Roots as Ministering Communities: Pathways for Baptismal Living
Julie Lytle, PhD
In Scripture, Jesus gathered ordinary people — fishermen, tax collectors, women collecting water at a well, otherwise unremarkable disciples — and told them stories. He did not simply preach to crowds and move on; he stayed with them long enough for them to recognize God's action in him and their own lives. Having experienced God’s transforming love, he then sent them out, entrusting them to carry and share the message of God's faithfulness into the world.
Paul follows this model both as he travels the known world and when he writes letters to the young churches. Paul reminds believers that the gifts each of them carries, however different, belong to the whole community, and that each person is called to share them in service of one another. Gathering, forming, and sending God’s people as members of ministering communities is a long-established rhythm that did not end with the apostles. Through Baptism, we are embraced as members of God’s Mission, and we inherit the responsibility to share God’s Story with every generation.
Somewhere along the way, we let that pattern narrow. Ministry was professionalized and primarily became the responsibility of the clergy. Theological education became concentrated in one place — a residential seminary campus reserved primarily for those pursuing ordination. But that was never what Jesus intended.
Ministry belongs to every baptized Christian, exercised everywhere a community of faith gathers — around kitchen tables and in food pantries, at vestry meetings and in hospital rooms, in recovery circles and around neighborhoods. The church works when the whole body — not just its clergy and staff — takes responsibility for God's people, both within the church and beyond its walls. Each of us is responsible for deepening our own relationship with God and for sharing the story of God's unending love using whatever gifts we have each been given. Pathways for Baptismal Living at Bexley Seabury Seminary was created to support individual’s life-long, life-wide, and life-deep learning and support them on their faith journey.
From “Served” to “Serving”
When I joined Bexley Seabury’s faculty in 2018 and was asked to oversee distributive and lifelong learning initiatives, the faculty and staff committed to expand our focus beyond ordination candidates to include all the baptized. By listening to and working with community organizers, faith formation leaders, congregational developers, and diocesan staff, we recognized that there are a great many passionate, faithful people already doing ministry who lack the preparation that matches the seriousness of what they have already taken on. These folks do not need a three-year seminary degree. They need targeted, actionable formation, delivered in ways they can access. Pathways for Baptismal Living (PBL) grew directly out of that recognition.
We built PBL around a conviction I have carried since my earliest research into formation: our whole environment forms and fashions us. What we do in life — with family, school or work colleagues, fellow faith-community members, and others — shapes how we understand our world, and participants bring all of that lived experience into the learning community with them. More than being born into a Christian home, we become Christian in community: hearing God’s Word together, sharing stories of faith, and coming to understand our place as members of the Body of Christ. Every PBL course is built to work the same way. Participants prepare at their own pace, then join instructors and fellow learners for live 60 to 90-minute sessions — roughly three to six hours a week in all, a rhythm built for people already balancing family, church, and work.
Getting that design right meant resisting the temptation to start with the technology. The mantra I still teach by is Message, Method, then Media: start with the end in mind — who you are trying to reach and what you are trying to accomplish — then choose how you want people to engage with each other and with course resources, and only then think about delivery systems and platforms. Bexley Seabury’s Seminary Beyond Walls model exists to meet people wherever they are, and Pathways for Baptismal Living gives them a learning community built to help them get there.
Moving a congregation from served to serving asks something real of the people doing the serving — they need to be equipped, not just encouraged. Most laypeople who show up ready to lead were never given the vocabulary that seminary students spend three years absorbing, and without it, even a gifted vestry leader or a natural mentor can feel like a guest in her own tradition. Equipping begins with language: opening up the words and ideas of theology and church so they are usable, not intimidating, and building from there toward action.
Inform, Form, Transform
That is the work of Inform, Form, and Transform — the same three movements I have long used to describe what happens to a minister-in-the-making. Students are informed, formed, and transformed by the experience, and in turn they learn how to inform, form, and transform the individuals and communities they go on to serve.
Inform lays the foundation: learning about Scripture, theology, sacraments, and the church's history and tradition, in language accessible enough that a student can claim it as their own — something a standard parish adult-education class rarely has room to build. Once that vocabulary is theirs, Form equips them to practice it: participating in, practicing, and sharing the Christian life and faith, actively leading worship and cultivating spiritual practices until a student learns how to help others recognize and celebrate God's action in their own lives. Transform motivates a response: being challenged to explore the depth and breadth of Scripture, the tradition that grew from it, and the systems within which we operate, until a student learns to serve as an agent of personal and social transformation, actively seeking God's promised realm. None of the three stands alone. Inform without form stays abstract. Form without transform never confronts the world it is meant to serve. Together, they lay the foundation for how a person serves — carrying a learner from knowing something about the faith to being equipped to live it out, and to equip others to do the same.
That equipping depends on access, not just intention. Our distributed learning model allows students to study rigorously without leaving their local context, their families, or their jobs — the same barriers of time, cost, and geography that keep so many gifted, called people out of the classroom altogether. Accessible does not mean diluted. It means the rigor travels to where the ministry already is.
The Next Cohort Forms September 7
Fall registration for Pathways for Baptismal Living is open now, with the next cohort beginning September 7. Whether you are a vestry leader looking for operational confidence, a deacon sharpening the tools you use to mentor others, or a layperson ready to explore what your baptismal covenant asks of you, there is a path already carved out for where you are. Take a look at the fall course lineup and claim your seat in the virtual classroom — the church beyond walls is already forming, and it is forming right where you live
