• Archive for November, 2009

    Toward a Missional Vision of Theological Education: Community Rootedness

    November 30, 2009 // 11 Comments »

    Previous Posts in this Series:

    Preliminary Thoughts | The Root of the Problem | Fruit of the Problem | New Soil

    A hallmark of theological education within Christendom is the primacy of the individual.  Individual choice, individual abilities, and individual achievement; these are the prized marks of Christian leaders within systems of coercive power.

    This conflicts however with a missional vision of Christian leadership in which community is the most basic point of reference and choices, abilities, and achievements are all products of the Holy Spirit’s working amongst a community of people on mission together.  Thus, I am firmly convinced that the most faithful and helpful forms of theological education will be those rooted in missional communities.

    Think for a moment about how our current system of theological education favors the individual.

    1) While others may be consulted, basically, individuals make up their own minds to pursue theological education.  They choose the school they find most desirable and go through the academic motions as individuals (a class does not a community make!)

    2) More often than not, whether by working, soliciting random scholarships, or taking out loans, individuals are on their own to fund their education.  They bear enormous amounts of responsibility for not only their finances, but their own decision to embark on an often terrifying and difficult educational venture.

    3) These individuals have only their individual experience and knowledge as a grid through which to process the new information being thrown at them.  They may enter into dialogue with other at a superficial level, but again, this is a personal choice with no real consequence if not practiced.

    4) Once students have made it through the process of theological education, they are once again basically on their own in terms of deciding what they want to do with their degree (mine is hanging on my bathroom wall!).

    That theological education favors the individual is only 1/2 of the issue.  The other 1/2 is that those leaders who go through this process are formed by it – they will have a bent toward leading individualistically and lack the skills to help form missional communities.

    My Proposal:

    If helping people learn how to make decisions, live their lives, and find their identity not on their own, but in the community of the Body of Christ, is central to the task of Christian leaders, then their training must take place in that same context. This has implications for how we identify potential leaders, how we commit to and support them, the nature and structure of how we train them, and for what follows the completion of the training.

    Identifying Missional Leaders…

    Rather than being self-selected, in this vision, our pool of missional leaders are identified by people who have known them over the course of years of personal experience and can affirm their areas of giftedness.

    This is part of the reason that missional communities embrace sustainable sizes – for this to work, people need to be known.  When this is the case it is much more realistic for those entrusted with leadership responsibility to be looking for others that seem gifted and inclined toward leadership.  Once they are, they can be shepherded toward a more intentional process of leadership formation.

    Commiting to and Supporting Missional Leaders…

    I cannot underestimate the importance of local communities committing to and supporting leaders in training.  Leadership training is (if it’s any good!) hard.  There is just no substitute for a leader in training having the constant reminder that what they are a part of is no mistake; it’s not just their idea, but an entire of community of people has affirmed their giftedness and potential and they have said publicaly, “whatever you need, we are here for you.”

    More than this, the local church should bear 100% of the responsibility for funding whatever aspects of theological education are necessary for the leaders they themselves have identified. It is a great sin that any church should say to a young man or woman that they God has placed a call on their lives to leadership in the local church and then not say, “we’ll do whatever it takes to help you pursue that dream.”  Please keep in mind I say all this in light of what I have already said about the practice of bi-vocational leadership.

    Training Missional Leaders…

    Leaders in training become part of a community within a community. There is the local church community that has done its job of identifying future leaders and committed themselves to those people, and a smaller community of gifted leaders, committing themselves to each other and the larger body that has committed to them.

    The various aspects of leadership training within this vision would all be rooted in community.  From reading and writing to praying and serving, the point of each and every dimension of leadership development would be suited to helping those who participate in it understand its place in the formation of people in community.

    Commissioning Missional Leaders…

    Modern church leaders graduate, missional church leaders are commissioned.  At the end of the more intentional process of leadership formation, it is the discernment between the leader and community, not the desires of either alone, that serves as the vehicle through which the leader is commissioned into leadership.  Commissioning is inherently relational.  It is a community saying, “As we have identified you as a leader, committed ourselves to your formation and supported you, we now send you affirm a calling on your life and support you in it.”

    In the next post, I aim to address character formation as a second central mark of a missional vision of theological education. Looking forward to your questions, comments, etc. till then.

    Posted in bi-vocational, christendom, church, community, individualism, leadership, missional, spiritual formation, theological education, theology, western culture

    Malone Thanksgiving 2009

    November 26, 2009 // 6 Comments »

    Last weekend was the annual Malone Thanksgiving – the 5th since I started blogging (2005, 2006, 2007, 2008)

    There was a twist this year.  After a decade of gathering at the Hurst household, as our community has grown by marriage and birth, it seemed like a change of venue was in order.  Thanks to the searching labors of a few friends, we decided on the Tara Lodge in Hocking Hills outside of Columbus.  The place was amazing: 7 bedrooms, HD projector theater system, ping pong tables, pool table, darts, karaoke set-up complete w/ guitars, huge yard, hiking trails, hot tub, and on and on.  Basically an amazing place for us to gather.

    Here are some pictures from the weekend.

    And some videos.

    Like every year, there were some dear friends who weren’t able to make it and they were missed, but a good time was had by all as we reconnected, shared the things we were most thankful for in the last year, and chatted about the future.  With more and more kids being born into this community of friends, this was the first year that we really started thinking about what this gathering will be like when it’s our kids, and not us, who are most excited about playing the annual football game.  Weird to think about.

    These continue to be some of the most important and special people in my life making this one of my most looked forward to weekends of the year.

    Posted in friends, malone

    Toward a Missional Vision of Theological Education: New Soil

    November 24, 2009 // 12 Comments »

    Previous Posts in this Series:

    Preliminary Thoughts | The Root of the Problem | Fruit of the Problem

    After laying what I consider to be some necessary groundwork for this conversation, I’m excited to begin moving us in a more constructive path of conversation as we try to get at what a missional vision of theological education might entail.

    A missional vision of theological education differs from our current one, not as a reaction to it – the classic pendulum swinging in the other direction sort of thing, but as a completely alternative paradigm.  For the same reasons that megachurches can’t be missional, methods of theological education rooted in Christendom systems of coercive power are not designed to equip missional leaders.  Thus, at least two different kinds of work are needed.

    One, binding up that which is broken and doing what we can to restore it to health.

    And two, planting new trees in new soil.

    To the best of my knowledge, in the first instance, centers of theological education are…

    1) Making missional adaptations to their curriculum: offering courses in missional hermeneutics, missional ecclesiology, missional theology, etc.

    2) Offering more creative program options: utilizing online methods of delivery, developing intensive based courses, moving to cohort-based programs, etc.

    3) Trying harder to actually partner with local churches to offer students more opportunity for in-service learning.

    These are all good, helpful, and necessary changes within the current system.  We need to see more and more schools moving in these directions.

    But.  These remain changes within a system that I am saying is flawed at its roots.  It’s kind of like painting the walls, fixing the plumbing, and replacing the electrical systems in a house that has been irreparably eaten by termites.  You may as well do what you can as long as the house is standing, but if you’re not also working on building yourself a new house, you’re gonna be in trouble.

    This leads us to the second sort of work that needs to be done, not so much mending, but tilling and planting.  To use biblical metaphors, I think of it in terms of wineskins (Lk. 5:36-38) and kernels of wheat (Jn. 12:23-25).  Now is not a time for repairing old wineskins, now is a time for new wineskins and new wine.  To go further, our current system of theological education (not unlike the dominant expression of church in the West) has a God-ordained opportunity to count its loss as gain in Christ.  If they would only spend themselves fully on behalf of those that are coming after by being wiling to die rather than move into survival mode at all cost (a patently un-Christian stance for sure), what an explosion of Kingdom power we might see!

    Whether this happens or not remains to be seen, but as we move toward a missional vision of theological education, I suggest that it will be marked by the following:

    1) Community Rootedness*

    2) Character Formation

    3) Conviction Shaping

    4) Contextual Training

    5) Cross-Cultural Pioneering

    In the coming weeks, I hope to deal with each one of these in turn.  I’m anxious for your comments and insights on this and future posts.

    *I changed this from Communal Discernment to Community Rootedness as a more encompassing term.

    Posted in christendom, church, community, culture, discipleship, kingdom, leadership, missional, modernity, spiritual formation, theological education, theology, western culture

    About Me

    November 18, 2009 // No Comments »

    Oh yeah, forgot to mention, I finally managed to get a new “About Me” page up.  Let me know what you think it’s missing.

    about me screen shot

    Posted in random

    Idolatry, Desire, & the Lion’s Roar

    // 4 Comments »

    We interrupt this series to being you an important service announcement.

    OK, not so much an important service announcement, but a few streams of thought have come together for me and I needed to get them down while I was thinking on them.

    A few months ago I listened to a message on the gospel and idolatry.  The speaker was talking about how our living and proclaiming of the gospel always confronts the idols in our culture, the places we live, and of course, in our own lives.  How are we to give ourselves completely over to God and his mission in the world unless the things we love more than that are unmasked?

    I think this is a helpful corrective for those who would define or even emphasize the gospel as social justice.  To the extent that local churches rightly strive to be a blessing to their communities and make a place for any and all, these ought always to be seen not as ends in and of themselves, but as a means of exposing idols on the road to full participation in the mission of God in the world.

    A few weeks ago, listening to another message a different speaker had this to say…

    What we want… has a massive control on what we can believe.  If you want something badly enough and believing the truth will take it away from you, you will see the truth as error and remain enslaved to your want.

    This I think, is a helpful corrective to those churches who would spend the bulk of their time and energy trying to get people to believe the right things.  This is a dead end.  The real task of the Body of Christ is to live and love in such radical ways that the world yearns for a taste of it.  It is only then, when people “taste and see that the Lord is good,” that they may have eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts to obey all that God calls Good.

    Currently, Amy and I are reading through The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis.  Ashamed to admit it, I have never read them before.  We recently finished The Magician’s Nephew and I thought it was amazing.  I’m sure I’m not the only one, but one of my favorite part is when Aslan sings Narnia into existence.

    The Lion was pacing to and fro about that empty land and singing his new song.  It was softer and more lilting than the song by which he had called up the stars and the sun; a gentle, rippling music.  And as he walked and sang, the valley grew green with grass.  It spread out from the Lion like a pool.  It ran up the sides of the little hills like a wave.

    The connection between this and what I’ve written above comes when Lewis provides us with Uncle Andrew’s perspective…

    It had not made all the same impression on him…  For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.  Ever since the animals had first appeared, Uncle Andrew had been shrinking further and further back into the thicket.  He watched them very hard of course; but he wasn’t really interested in seeing what they were doing, only in seeing whether they were going to make a rush at him…  he had disliked the song very much.  It made him think and feel things he did not want to think and feel… And the longer and more beautifully the Lion sang, the harder Uncle Andrew tried to make himself believe that he could hear noting but roaring.  Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you already are is that you very often succeed.  Uncle Andrew did.  He soon did hear nothing but roaring in Aslan’s song.  Soon he couldn’t have heard anything else even if he had wanted to.  And when at last the Lion spoke and said, ‘Narnia awake.’ he didn’t hear any words: he heard only a snarl.

    If you’re not already seeing how these things come together, let me try and summarize.

    What’s really wrong with humanity is that we want the wrong things – this is the result of sin.  When we think, speak, and act in ways contrary to how we were designed to think, speak, and act, we cultivate the wrong desires.  Subtly, silently, deceptively, those desires create idols in our lives.  There’s no shortage of options of what we might idolize; money, acceptance, friends, family, work, material possessions, even our cherished versions of truth.  When things like this get a grip on our hearts, it effects what we give ourselves to, what we love, what we worship.  And our worship of those things dulls our hearts and minds to competing desires. Thankfully, this cuts both ways.  The more we give ourselves to, love, and worship God, the less appealing the things of the world seem.

    Posted in church, gospel, idolatry

    Toward a Missional Vision of Theological Education: The Fruit of the Problem

    November 17, 2009 // 6 Comments »

    Previous Posts in this Series:

    Preliminary Thoughts | The Root of the Problem

    In my last post I made the claim that our current model of theological education, in assuming a Christendom context, is better-suited to train managers of Christian religious institutions than it is to prepare missional leaders.  If the root of the problem is Christendom, the binding of Christian witness and mission to systems of coercive power, we do well to ask what the fruit of the tree of our current system of theological education has been?

    The version of Christianity which is bound to systems of coercive power within modernity has been powerless to resist the trajectory of that era.  Thus, features like individualism, consumerism, and reductionism have been uncritically adopted by local churches and systems of theological education alike and have had mutually related effects.  On top of this, there has emerged a rift between theological education and the ministry of the local church.

    I’ve talked up a storm on this blog about what this has meant for the structure and ministry of local churches, but what about our systems of theological education?

    Individualism.

    For the most part, people make individual decisions to attend seminary and they are trained as individuals.  I’m not saying you can’t experience community in seminary education or benefit from peer interaction, but largely, you choose your courses as an individual, study as an individual, get assessed as an individual, and then decide where to go and what to do as an individual.  Not very good training for people who will then go on to be part of a staff team!  Even less conducive to a truly missional ecclesiology in which the theology, spiritual practices, and Christan life are all rooted in community.

    Consumerism.

    Seminary is freaking expensive!  I know I got some amen’s on that!  That’s because there’s a market for it.  Think about that for a second… There is a market (a system of coercive power if there ever was one) for being trained as a Christian leader.  Now, make sure you’re not hearing what I’m NOT saying.  I’m not saying it’s wrong for people to earn a living from educating others.  Nor am I saying that buying and selling is in and of itself a bad thing.  I am saying that this business of people needing to spend (or worse, go into debt) huge amounts of money to get a religious credential at an accredited institution is not only unsustainable as Christendom unravels, but has a negative effect on Christian leaders and those they lead.

    Reductionism.

    There are a number of ways we could go with this dimension of modern Christendom, but what concerns me the most is how we have reduced theology to information and the leadership of local churches to those best able to convey it.  How else are we able to account for a theological system so heavily slanted toward lecturing, book reading, writing, and testing?  It’s nearly all about the grasping and repeating of concepts.  I’m not saying at all that there’s no place for this, but this feature of Christendom-based theological education has resulted in a form of Christianity that lives as though it’s possible to really believe something without embodying it.  The Bible knows nothing of disembodied belief, but this is the very thing that our current system of theological eduction allows for.

    These are a few of the most obvious fruits of theological education rooted in Christendom that I am thinking of.  Are you thinking of more?  What are the angles and nuances that you see from your perspective that I’m missing?

    In my next post, I aim to take a stab how a missional vision of theological education differs from one rooted in Christendom.

    Posted in christendom, church, community, consumerism, culture, discipleship, individualism, leadership, missional, modernity, reductionism, spiritual formation, sustainability, theological education, theology, western culture

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