Fr. Marty Lally completed Good Leaders, Good Shepherds in April 2008. He is currently the pastor at Queen of Peace Parish in Aurora, CO.

In the summer of 1981 I became a pastor for the first time. Three years ordained, the first in my ordination class to be named a pastor, sent to a parish with an outstanding reputation—my head was so puffed up it wouldn’t come through a garage door!

Luckily I followed a priest who was then, and remains, one of our best pastors. He has all the right instincts and the natural ability to pastor a community. My first lesson in pastoring was to simply watch and listen. I did almost nothing my first six months in the parish because it was so well organized, ran so smoothly that I didn’t want to mess it up. I discovered that I possessed some of the same natural abilities as my predecessor, but I have to say most of my success at that parish and at the three other parishes where I have served as pastor, has been dumb luck.

That dumb luck combined with the enormous talents of other staff members and the people of the parish has made being a pastor a wonderful, if challenging at times, enterprise. Experience, the advice and counsel of others, my own reading and trial and error approach to pastoral ministry have served me well. I pray that these have also served the people of the parishes well.
Somewhere along the line, I discovered that I cannot rely on natural ability or instinct completely. While I believe that doing something repeatedly improves ability, I have discovered that improvement of performance is not a matter of experience alone.

I have discovered through Good Leaders, Good Shepherds (GLGS) that skills can be learned (and taught) and that while I am grateful for the dumb luck of the past, I don’t need to rely solely on luck in the future. GLGS has given me tools that make pastoral ministry more than managing a crowd, but rather leading a community. GLGS training has allowed me to complement my natural abilities with researched understanding of personality, proven ways of dealing with group dynamics and the art of leadership. I have found for example, that there is more to forming a committee than making sure I have an odd number to avoid a tie vote. Leading means chartering a group, being clear on its purpose, dealing with the complexity of personalities so that something effective can be done for the good of the parish.  GLGS has been a very valuable experience and I know it will continue to benefit my parishioners and me.