• Toward a Missional Vision of Theological Education: Community Rootedness

    November 30, 2009

    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.

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

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Recent Comments

  • Ben Sternke said...

    1

    I really like this, JR. I think something that could easily be "added on" to this kind of vision would be some way to network these kinds of missional congregations together, so leaders trained in Chicago could be "recognized" in Fort Wayne, for example. Of course this is part of the idea of denominational ordination, but this kind of training is vastly different from the kind one normally would get with a denominational school.

    I think this could very easily be developed into something a missional church planting network could adopt as a template for theological education from within its own churches.

    11/30/09 7:34 PM | Comment Link

  • jrrozko said...

    2

    Thanks Ben. Hope to get into more of those specifics when I get to contextual training and cross-cultural pioneering.

    11/30/09 9:36 PM | Comment Link

  • Josh Garrington said...

    3

    Church-based theological education is actually something I've thought about a lot and in theory I'm a huge fan of the idea. But I keep banging my head against two issues that I can't find a satisfying solution to:

    1) Lack of access to 'experts in the field'.
    I actually think this is a realatively minor issue, but if you're training is coming in a church you probably won't have the same exposure to people like a Dan Wallace or Peter Enns who have made a specific area of Christian studies their life's work and who's knowledge in that field is unparalled.

    2) Lack of theological diversity.
    This is my biggest concern. If you are converted in a church, discipled in that church, training in that church, and serving in that church (or a daughter/sister congregation) the entire limit of your formal theological exposure will be the point of view of that congregation. This seems like a (in?)breeding ground for predjudiced positions and a major handicap to any productive eccumenical activity.
    And yes, I realize that denominational seminaries can be just as bad with this.

    11/30/09 10:25 PM | Comment Link

  • Josh Garrington said...

    4

    By the way, Salvation Army Officers (and lay people for that matter) have been "commishioned" for well over a century. Although, that's primarily a semantics thing and not entirely what you're talking about.

    11/30/09 10:25 PM | Comment Link

  • Jason Coker said...

    5

    "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."

    And, I would add, can affirm their character.

    Concerning funding, I have one question and one concern: I'm assuming based on earlier posts that you're not talking about sending leaders to seminary…is that correct? Relying on the old system would be philosophically self-defeating and financially prohibitive, even if a missional group was only funding one student. You're talking about whatever the (presumably less expensive) "new educational wineskins" costs, yes? Also, I'm concerned about steering clear of the old clergy/laity split if we maintain some kind of class separation (complete with tuition privileges) between the leaders and the non-leaders. How do you envision protecting the priesthood of all believers int his proposal?

    11/30/09 10:44 PM | Comment Link

  • jrrozko said...

    6

    Hey Josh.

    1) Two things to day here. First, I'm not familiar with the names you mentioned, but if they are specialty sorts of people, then chances are that few, if any, people have any real access to them anyway aside from information they dispense, which I am willing to bet they do in book form – thus wisely making their work widely accessible. Second, in a missional vision of theological education, as I mentioned above, the faithful practice of communities is far and away more important to the formation of leaders than the expertise of individuals.

    2) I haven't gotten there yet, but to a degree, I share this same concern. Ben intimated at a way forward in the comment above and I will go further in a future post. The reason I say, "to a degree," is that no matter how hard you work, this will always be a reality and that is not a bad thing. Again, faithfulness to the way of Jesus in any tradition is more important than a diversity of exposure to theological traditions that are impossible to simultaneously live in to. I am not advocating a posture toward theological education that allows for provincialism, but I am saying that if we are successful in helping people live more and more like Christ, who cares how theologically diverse they are!? There is something about Christlikeness that transcends theological diversity I think.

    11/30/09 11:18 PM | Comment Link

  • jrrozko said...

    7

    Indeed they have and like I've said before, I think those who ascribe to a missional ecclesiology would do well to take a good hard look at several of the practices of the Salvation Army. I am not sure I can even comprehend of a better example of a church being willing to commit to and support those they have trained as leaders than what we are currently witnessing with both your folks and the Sjogren's!

    11/30/09 11:21 PM | Comment Link

  • jrrozko said...

    8

    The character piece is next, I'll come back to that – good thought.

    Correct, I'm not thinking of local churches shipping their leaders off to a traditional seminary. Without spelling out in detail what I think the full spectrum of training missional leaders ought to entail, I am saying if and when there is cost involved, those communities who have identified emerging leaders should relieve the financial burden.

    On your second point – hmmm. I guess I take the priesthood of all believers for granted and suppose that within that paradigm, the church still bears the task of identifying leaders that God has supernaturally & specifically gifted to equip the body of Christ. I think the involvement of the body in identifying these folks would go a long way to communicate how these two realities coexist. This issue probably goes deeper into the overall life of the community and plays out through a new host of practices and structures. For instance, cultivating an environment in which everyone (teachers, city workers, engineers, artists, etc.), not only emerging church leaders, are missionally commissioned. However, I do think that the church bears more responsibility (and therefore should make more investment in) for identifying and training local church leaders. I also spend several posts detailing the how's and why's of bivocational leadership which I think serves to alter our perception of a divide between clergy and laity as well.

    11/30/09 11:40 PM | Comment Link

  • Jason Coker said...

    9

    And I think you've done a good job with those posts (about bi-vocational leadership), but I'm cognizant of the fact that the issue of "leadership" (i.e. should there even be such a thing and if so, what does it even look like?) is far from resolved in most missional communities. In my new community, for example, it's a major tension. I'm constantly trying to lead from a "power under" posture, but quite frankly, most people would prefer if I just "took charge." There's a constant gravitational pull on the entire community toward a split between the so-called "leaders" and "followers" (whatever those terms mean) – and the "followers" are often the biggest cheerleaders of that split! The majority of my people would be all-too-happy to start paying my seminary bills, and while I imagine that willingness comes from a certain healthy "involvement of the body" in identifying leadership, I also suspect it comes, to some extent at least, from a motive to be released from shared responsibility for the community at large. I very well could be wrong, and I'm well aware there's more to the tension than that.

    All that to say simply this: I'm wrestling with the tension : )

    11/30/09 11:56 PM | Comment Link

  • jrrozko said...

    10

    Not sure the element of context can be overemphasized here. Sounds like, given a host of factors, you probably need to walk a harder line on some things than others who find themselves in contexts where the felt need to have a designated leader isn't quite so strong.

    I wonder if the "answer" lies in a carefully constructed process of communal discernment. I am thinking in terms of collecting an ad hoc group of seasoned and spiritually mature folks to engage in a process of prayer, fasting, and question asking, and listening and then making a decision based on what the Holy Spirit seems to be communicating. Perhaps there is something to be said for the exercise of "power under" playing out as a submission to what the community discerns even if you might not think it's for the best. Not sure this is a universally applicable posture, but perhaps the appropriate one given timing and circumstances.

    12/1/09 5:07 PM | Comment Link

  • Jason Coker said...

    11

    Now you're reading MY mail ; )

    After the holidays we'll be heading into a season of heavy emphasis on communal prayer. Thanks for the well-thought out response JR. I really do appreciate it.

    12/1/09 5:12 PM | Comment Link

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