Indiana college grants

Episcopal priest Van Howard Gardner has served the Cathedral of the Incarnation in inner-city Baltimore since 1987, starting the Children's Peace Center there to help young people resolve conflicts in their lives. Someone thought he needed some time off, so he's traveling to New York City, Los Angeles and southeast France for a while.

That someone is the Lilly Endowment in Indianapolis, which showered grants on 135 clergy and their congregations in time for the holidays. In another ongoing program, Lilly also gave an average of $2 million each to 39 church-related liberal arts colleges that had proposed inventive programs to stimulate young persons to consider the ministry.

Gardner and his 500-member parish received nearly $29,000 for his travels and to offset the congregation's expenses as well as enhance its own renewal while the pastor is gone. He will spend a bit more than the usual three months under this program--six weeks at General Theological Seminary to study conflict resolution, then time at the Los Angeles-based Institute for Urban Research and Development. With his wife, Gardner will worship and reflect for a month at the Taize Center in France and take another month at home to write about his experiences.

This third year of the National Clergy Renewal Program spread the grants to clergy in 35 states, representing 15 major Christian denominations and other church traditions. Of the pastors, 24 were women and three were clergy couples.

"We have heard wonderful stories from the pastors who already have experienced this sabbaticals," said Craig Dykstra, the Lilly Endowment's vice president for religion. "Their time away freed them up to pursue personal interests and needs in ways that have given them new energy for ministry." Many of their churches, in turn, found they "didn't fall apart" with the pastor gone, instead gaining "a newfound sense of their own strengths," Dykstra added.

Lilly upped the maximum grant for the fourth year of the competitive program--making it $45,000 (instead of $30,000), of which up to $15,000 (instead of $10,000) may be used for congregational expenses. The entry deadline is July 18.

In a separate grants program, the foundation awarded a total of $76.8 million to 39 four-year colleges from Seton Hall in New Jersey to Occidental College in California. The "theological vocation" funds go to programs encouraging students to reflect on how their faith commitments might fit into their career choices, possibly to a "call" to the ministry. Marking its third year, the program has given 88 schools a sum of $171 million, not including $5.5 million in planning grants, said Lilly spokeswoman Gretchen Wolfram.