If you’re clear you’d like to chat about working together, simply click here. Otherwise, read on!
When I was preparing for the MFC, I felt so keenly how much was riding on this work, and I didn’t feel as though I had a lot of support. I was full of anxiety, and I honestly felt as though a lot of that anxiety was built into the system. Not everyone is as anxious as I was, but many of us feel that support in a process like the MFC could be very helpful.
Of course, there were generous people willing to read my packet when it was done and give me feedback. But that was after I’d already put hours and hours of work, sweat, blood, and tears into it. Were they going to give me vague feedback I didn’t understand or couldn’t work with? Was I going to get an evaluation, a number, I didn’t want?
The reality is no one can guarantee that you will get any particular number in your MFC meeting. There is an alchemy between the candidate and the panel that can never be entirely anticipated.
But that doesn’t mean that there’s no help. There is help, and I can provide a bunch of it. There are so many things I wanted help with, and maybe you’d like some too. There were things that would have made me feel more confident and calm about the process leading up to and include my MFC panel interview.
If you sense you’d like to chat with me about this, click here to schedule a time for a complimentary consultation.
About MFC Coaching
The concept of MFC Coaching was born of a recognition that, throughout my preparation and even after my panel interview, I had yearned for greater support leading up to the meeting than was available at the time.
After speaking with other MFC candidates, who voiced similar desires for support through the entire process of preparation, I launched a beta-test. This beta-test was successful: the concept proved to be viable, helpful, and even fun for everyone involved. MFC Coaching clients treat our time just as you might do in time with a tutor in any other context. All the folks who worked with me in those first months have said that our work together helped them develop self-trust, self-awareness, and self-understanding.
MFC Coaching is customized to your needs and can include, but is certainly not limited to the following:
- Meeting remotely to discuss your concerns and go over your materials
- My giving you feedback on your writing and helping make it concise, clear, true and reflective of your call, and compelling to your other readers
- My offering accountability with staying on top of the reading list, and discussion about how you’re using your study time
- Our talking through your anxieties related to preparing for the MFC
- Your sharing with me and our discussing how you are choosing (or have chosen) folks to write you letters of recommendation
- My reading evaluations, letters of recommendation and Career Assessments to offer suggestions about where questions may come up during your interview
- My strongly supporting you with sermon process and presentation, including the details of writing and delivery
- My providing help with clarity, explanation, concision and formatting of areas of ministry pages
Remember, the ultimate goal of MFC Coaching is to provide you with a safe container to come to know yourself better:
I want you to be clear and articulate about your strengths, vulnerabilities, and growing edges so you can minister as well as possible.
Finally, I hope to help you reduce the anxiety that is often inherent in the process of preparing for the MFC.
It’s great to have people willing to read your packet. It’s really wonderful, in fact, especially since it’s such a commitment to read through all that stuff. And you should have more people than I look over your materials. The thing is, it just wasn’t enough for me to have a minister or two look over it all at the end of my work. I needed help along the way, and you may too.
Do you need any of the above? I can help you. I can offer support and challenge. I can offer close reading and a preacher’s eye and ear. I can offer clear critique as well as encouragement and praise. I will make suggestions and you decide whether or not to take them.
I also commit to you that I will stay in touch with the good people at the Ministerial Credentialing Office and the UUMA to make sure I’m as up to date as possible on the status of MFC requirements and expectations.
Whatever you need to prepare, I am here to help you do it with structure, confidence, clarity, and a sense of well-being.
No one can promise anyone else a particular result from the Ministerial Fellowship Committee, but I do promise to answer any question you have via email or on our calls, to be accountable for our time together and the time that I spend with your documents, and to charge a reasonable hourly rate for our time.
Schedule a complimentary, no-obligation call with me and let’s see if we are a great fit for working together! Just click below, and we’ll talk!
Nuts and Bolts—What I’m NOT Doing and What I Am
One-on-one tutoring for professional development, credentialing, and testing can be very expensive. As a former test prep tutor, I know that as well as anyone.
For example, at the test prep company for which I worked, 1:1 coaching for the GRE—a test you take before graduate school—starts at $1800, and that’s not including going over test results, doing any reading, or any other additions to the work besides actually meeting time.
I think $1800 is unfeasible and unreasonable for most Candidates for UU ministry. Furthermore, trying to pay that kind of money upfront while you’re in an internship or CPE residency is just a really rough proposition.
So that’s what I’m not doing.
Instead of charging an exorbitant amount, only covering face-to-face meetings, I have another plan.
For all the services detailed above, as well as any specific shifts you and I negotiate, your investment is $1200, in 4 payments of $300, 30-days apart.
This method (and my stating it clearly here) allows to you budget in advance for what you will need, pay a much more reasonable price than what I mentioned above, and receive far more support than corporate 1:1 testing prep. Our work is tailored to what you need.
Looking at my existing and past clients, I’ve come to a sense of what most people need and find helpful.
As a result of my analysis of those needs, here is my offer to you:
- Your $1200 gets you a detailed initial reading of your packet, along with detailed, concrete notes (usually 30-40 notes for each person’s packet), as well as the the following valuable material.
- You will have six blocks of 90-minute meeting time from the time we start working together until the week before your panel. We will discuss whatever seems most helpful at these meetings, including your essays, sermon, first question, study habits, timeline, feelings, concerns, and questions. (You may also purchase additional time, if you need it.)
- The two weeks before your panel, we may meet twice for forty-five minutes. In these meetings, we’re generally talking about your first question, your sermon, or particular details of the upcoming panel interview.
- The day of your panel interview, I will talk with you briefly over the phone, offering a blessing and moral support.
- In the week after your panel interview, we will meet for forty-minutes or so to discuss your experience with the MFC, as well as the thoughts and feelings that have come up since you saw your panel.
- Throughout all this time, you will have all the support I mentioned above. All the close reading, all the advice, all the experience, all the knowledge, and all the commitment I can bring to your process.
Let’s have a conversation about what you need. Simply schedule a free half-hour time slot for us to discuss where you are in the process, when and how you think coaching might be helpful, and whether or not you think our working together would be helpful and fun!
Who am I?
- I am an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister. My ordination was in April 2015 at All Souls Church Unitarian in Washington, DC. I worked at All Souls as the Pastoral Care Coordinator during my time at Wesley Theological Seminary, also in DC.
- One-to-one and small-group ministry really makes my heart sing, and that’s why I started this website to hold and shape my ministry. It allows me to offer one-to-one support, classes, retreats, and writing to help people develop and deepen their spiritual lives in a way that also nurtures me.
- I was an editor for years, and a tutor in English vocabulary, the SAT, GRE, LSAT, and GMAT.
- I am a teacher, trainer, and developer of curricula in various subjects.
- I have a particular love for the study of world religions, including Pagan traditions of various cultures, African Diaspora traditions, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.
- I maintain a regular blog on this site, as you may know. I also guest blog on such sites as Tiny Buddha and Sivana Spirit.
- Finally, I have been enthusiastically complimented on my preaching by ministers like Rev. Bill Sinkford (“That was the strongest first sermon from an intern minister I’ve ever heard.”), Rev. Dr. Rob Hardies, (To the congregation after a sermon of mine, “Well she surely can preach!”), and early on, Rev. Dr. Susan Newman (“You’re the best seminarian preacher I’ve ever heard.”). Even before I was ordained, I was asked to help seminarians and ministers in Preliminary Fellowship alike make sermons tighter, more compelling, and clear.
Besides all these “hard skills,” I frankly love this work. I love working with ministerial candidates. I love helping people who are working toward something they love, something so important to them they’ve given years of their lives to it.
My clients have called me, “encouraging,” “trustworthy,” “respectful,” and “uniquely gifted for this work,” among other things.
I know what it’s like to feel compelled, impelled to seek ministry. I know what it’s like to be terrified of all the evaluation, all the gatekeeping, and yet to persist. I know what it’s like to feel that you need this work, and to find the seeming unending evaluation and judgment just brutal. You are persisting. You are working hard, and I want to help you persist in this work.
Let’s talk about what you need.