The following update on Father Holmes’ work on the Lily Endowment funded Toolbox for New Catholic Pastors has been posted on the main Seton Hall University Website (see http://www.shu.edu/news/article/485320#.U-jShlzk1H00).  Below is the text of that update:

Seton Hall University and the National Leadership Roundtable for Church Management recently completed their ninth Toolbox for Pastoral Management last month.

Begun in 2009, the Toolbox is a weeklong seminar for new Catholic pastors, offering over a dozen presentations on the management skills pastors need to be a successful leaders in 21st-century parishes. Experts in various facets of temporal administration provide presentations on subjects including human resources, internal financial controls, stewardship and risk management, hoping that new pastors can “hit the ground running” when they return to their new parishes.

As director of the Toolbox, the Department of Religion’s Father Paul Holmes, the University Professor of Servant Leadership, hosts the weeklong seminars and offers a “Theology of Management” at the beginning of each seminar. Toolboxes have been held in January and July at retreat centers across the country, at the Jersey shore, Tucson, and Jacksonville. The Toolbox seminar in Jacksonville was featured in the “Beliefs” column of The New York Times earlier this year (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/18/us/helping-catholics-by-teaching-priests-how-to-be-the-boss.html?src=xps). The most recent Toolbox was held in Baltimore.

The Toolbox seminars are made possible through a generous grant from Lilly Endowment.