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Formal job performance evaluation of a church's pastoral staff has been almost nonexistent in many churches. While business and education have been making strides in evaluation techniques during the past three decades, the church is just beginning to notice the need for this kind of accountability and ongoing professional development. In this research, the author applied the evaluation techniques of education to church pastoral staff members. Evaluation can be understood as both a formative process and a summative decision. The steps to planning an evaluation that will be both formative and summative are discussed. Qualifying the ministerial tasks through objective job descriptions will enable the church to quantify the job performance through evaluation. Suggestions are given for developing a ministerial evaluation instrument. In this research a model from educational evaluation was adapted for use in a local church setting. One denomination was selected to demonstrate the process of evaluation development. Denominational governments differ considerably. Therefore, the key stakeholders of the church for the chosen denomination were identified as pastors and church board members. These stakeholders were used as a "panel of experts." The Delphi technique was used to develop consensus from the participants concerning (1) the core skills of ministerial effectiveness and (2) the quality indicators to measure those core skills. This required two rounds, one for identifying the core skills and one for identifying quality indicators. Each round consisted of three surveys. The research identified seven core skills for ministerial effectiveness and a number of quality indicators to measure each core skill. The results were used to demonstrate how an evaluation tool could be developed from the data. This evaluation tool was the consensus of the panel of experts in this study. While the process is a model that could be similar for any church's "panel" of participants, the resulting core skills, quality indicators and evaluation tool would vary for each "panel".

The major problem of this study is to identify through the use of the Critical Incident Technique the main requirements for successful ministerial service in the South Carolina Annual Conference of the Methodist Church, insofar as these requirements can be determined through lay observations and judgments. The following sub-problems are closely related to the major problem: 1. What special demands are made upon the minister by special subgroups within the church--e.g., youth, women's groups--in regard to pastoral behavior? 2. How important are the roles assigned to the minister by the church itself--e.g., preacher, teacher, counselor, visitor, administrator, priest? 3. Do churches of varying sizes differ in their expectations of the Ministerial office--e.g., do large churches place greater emphasis upon preaching? 4. Does educational training and/or the salary of the minister correlate with the number of successful incidents reported by respondents?

This dissertation provides a historical and theological examination of Baptist views of the gospel ministry from English Separatists of the late sixteenth century to the Southern Baptist Convention of the mid-1920s. Chapter 1 provides the thesis of the dissertation, background material to its being written, and the methodology by which its conclusions are reached. Chapters 2 through 4 provide overviews for the ministry among English Separatists, British Baptists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and American Baptists of the mid-seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, respectively. Each chapter focuses upon primary writings revealing each group's understanding of such issues as the office of the minister, the divine call to the ministry, ordination, preparation, the call by a congregation to a local church, and mutual responsibilities of ministers and church members. Chapters 5 through 7 examine the ministry among Southern Baptists from about 1865 to 1925. While the fifth chapter follows the same pattern as the previous three, Chapter 6 examines the beginning of a shift in the focus of the work of the minister from 1865 to 1900 with the introduction of organizational efficiency. Chapter 7 demonstrates that this shift became denominationally accepted during the early twentieth century. This work maintains that the heritage of Southern Baptists expressed consistent views concerning the office of the minister into the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The minister's call to the ministry, preparation, ordination, call to a congregation, and mutual responsibilities with church members were derived from clear biblical statements and principles. The end of the nineteenth century, however, witnessed a shift in the Southern Baptist view of the work of the ministry regarding the ability to produce quantifiable outcomes-a shift which became firmly established during the first two and a half decades of the twentieth century. This shift fueled a Baptist concern for organizational efficiency, a concern which viewed successful churches as those which were optimally organized to produce quantifiable results. Because pastors were seen as the key to organizational efficiency, they were judged according to the success of their churches' achieving those results. / This item is only available to students and faculty of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. If you are not associated with SBTS, this dissertation may be purchased from <a href="http://disexpress.umi.com/dxweb">http://disexpress.umi.com/dxweb</a> or downloaded through ProQuest's Dissertation and Theses database if your institution subscribes to that service.