• Archive of "Jesus" Category

    Multiplying Missional Leaders by Mike Breen & 3DM (Book Review)

    May 15, 2012 // No Comments »

    The book, Multiplying Missional Leaders: From Half-Hearted Volunteers to a Mobilized Kingdom Force, by Mike Breen and the good people of the @weare3DM team was released today. As someone who’s been working w/ 3DM from the angle of the future of theological education, I was privileged to receive an advance copy, which I read last week. I think this is an important and timely book and thought I’d share a few reasons why I might say so.

    1. Amidst the proliferation of “missional” everything, we have given scant attention to implications of this paradigm for church-based leadership development.

    It’s not that missional leadership has received NO attention. Alan Roxburgh, Tim Keel, and Lois Barrett among others (I especially want to get to this new book by Mark Lau Branson & Juan Martinez) have all written helpfully in this area. However, and this is what Mike and 3DM does so well, none have written quite so practically, providing explicit models for leadership development along missional lines. The reason that Mike and the 3DM team (by the way, I use “Mike & the team” rather than just Mike because having journeyed w/ these folks for a while I know how truly collaborative all their work is. Much to his credit, and in keeping w/ the point of this book, Mike is a rare find these days – an experienced and skillful leader who cares way more about empowering and deploying others then he does turning the attention to himself) are able to write so helpfully here is that they are primarily drawing on their experience. This isn’t theoretical speculation for them, it’s what they’ve done and how they’ve seen God at work. We could stand quite a bit more of this kind of exposition. It’s what, in my opinion, qualifies them to say…

    I would argue that our churches don’t have missional leaders, but I’d take it a step further. I also think that most of our churches have next to no leaders. Sure, we have leadership development programs. We have dinners, classes, meetings, and maybe even some training. But leadership means that we’ve been given a vision from the Lord for ourselves and given the power and the authority to execute the vision. This isn’t happening in our churches.

    That’s because in most churches, we don’t have leaders; we have managers. We have people who are executing and managing the vision of the few (or the one), not people who are implementing the visions the Lord has given them. Usually we have one genius with a thousand helpers. And to plug-and-play those helpers, we have manager development programs.  (3-4, pre-published version)

    It’s statements like this that indicate that the kind of leadership development that 3DM advocates is intrinsically tied to an understanding of the nature and purpose of the Church that differs significantly from its dominant expression in the West.

    2. The paradigm of leadership development held out in this book calls for a missional understanding of the church.

    For better or for worse, 3DM isn’t explicit about their ecclesiology. But as one considers what they have to say about Building a Discipling Culture, Launching Missional Communities, and the notion of Covenant and Kingdom, you can begin to put some pieces together. Discipleship and mission are at the core of how they understand the Church and they follow this conviction through to its logical and practical implications far better than many others who remain ensnared by the assumptions of Christendom patterns of thought. Their ability to escape these, I suppose, comes from having cut their “ministerial teeth” in the context of Post-Christian Europe. From the perspective of Breen & 3DM, the Church is called to join God in his mission in the world, principally, by making disciples. It’s what compels them to join in the (increasingly common) refrain of, “… if you make disciples, you always get the church, but if you’re really about building a church, you won’t always get disciples.” (14-15, pre-published version) Incidentally, I get what they are doing/saying here, but it’s precisely at this point that I wish they’d do some more constructive ecclesiological work because if discipleship is fundamentally an ecclesial responsibility then there is no such thing as making disciples apart from it, as the quip would seem to advocate.

    Nevertheless, the book offers a prophetic indictment against the Western Church’s penchant for celebrity, consumerism, and competitiveness (Ch. 3) as it calls for a a way of being the Church that leads to the creation of movements (rendered impossible by a focus on celebrity), is predicated on fruitfulness as people are invited to be producers (rather than consumers), and invites people to join God’s mission (as opposed to compete with one another over our own). Though it’s not taken up as a topic in the book, this perspective leads to a third and final reason I think this book is so valuable.

    3. In holding out a practical model of missional leadership development that calls for a missional understanding of the church, this book will add fuel to the fire of those who experientially or intuitively know that our systems of theological education are largely anemic when it comes to training men and women for this sort of service.

    Plain and simple, our currently dominant models of theological education (and therefore our systems of accrediting) are simply not capable of cultivating leaders who can serve and reproduce along the lines sketched in this book (and I say this as a guy well on his way to a third theological degree!). Why? I could name a slew of reasons, but the bottom line is that by and large people have to evacuate churches and other ministry contexts in order to engage in programs of theological education. As convinced that Mike is when he says,

    You see, I am absolutely convinces that 100 years from now, many books will be written on the phenomenon that is the late 20th Century/early 21st Century American church. And I am fairly certain that it will be with a large degree of amazement and laughter that people, in reading about it, will say to each other:’You must be joking! Seriously? People actually thought it was a good idea to structure the church as if it were a business? Honestly? (4-5, pre-published version)

    I am convinced that in the future we will find the notion of theological training apart from ministerial rootedness every bit as laughable.

    Many, and I mean tons and tons, of current and aspiring Christian leaders will read this book and something inside of them will not only resonate with it, but will leap w/ a desire to be led and lead others into the vision of church and leadership development offered within it. Sadly, they will have precious few places to turn for examples, guidance, and training. Good for 3DM, bad for nearly everyone else – really bad for those places of theological formation who are without the flexibility or vision to engage and respond. The model of leadership development offered in this book, predicated as it is, quite simply, on the life and ministry of Jesus, is an invitation to us to reconsider what the purpose of theological education for church-based ministry is really all about and how we ought to be re-structuring our programs in light of it.

    Conclusion

    That’s really more of a personal reflection than a proper review of the book I suppose, but those were my major takeaways. The book is an easy and accessible read that really seeks to do one simple thing, encourage us to look to Jesus and the pattern of the early church as we think about cultivating leaders around principles related to discipleship and mission. On that count, I think there is a lot of good stuff to be gleaned here. This is a book I would encourage any Christian leader to pick up and work with.

    Chad Stoianoff liked this post

    Posted in 3DM, bible, books, christendom, culture, discipleship, Jesus, missional, missional theology, post-christendom, review, spiritual formation, theological education, theology, western culture

    Jesus Revealed (a helpful new video series)

    March 28, 2012 // No Comments »

    From theological as well as artistic perspectives, there is no shortage of embarrassing Christian media out there. Given the inherently visual dimension of our present context, this is doubly bothersome. It’s why, when someone like Rob Bell comes along and produces videos like the Nooma series, which are both theologically profound and artistically compelling, it’s incredibly significant.

    A couple weeks ago, I caught wind of a new series of videos called “Jesus Revealed.” While done w/ Nooma-like quality, these aren’t the same thing. This series seeks to more directly explore the person of Jesus as he is “revealed” in specific biblical texts. These are short, narrated films (around 12-minutes) that depict Jesus as Underdog (Mt. 4:18-22), Revolutionary (Lk. 4:14-30/Jn. 2:13-20), Hero (Mt. 27:24-54), etc. You can read more about these (and the 4 additional short films) here – DVD 1, DVD 2, DVD 3. There is also a Vimeo page w/ extended clips that you can check out here. I’m embedding the extended clip for “Jesus, the Dreamer” (Mt. 5-7) below.

    These short films were created and narrated by a guy named Andy Frost.

     Regarding the vision and purpose behind the series, Andy had these things to say…

    … ‘Jesus Revealed’ is about unearthing the radical reality of Jesus’ life. I think it’s different from other resources in that it focuses solely upon the identity and the mission of Jesus and the implications it has for us today. The DVDs also use stunning dramatization footage that helps the viewer imagine they were there…

    … I am always amazed at how the Church has often turned the life changing, explosive gospel of Jesus into a boring weekly event. When I read the gospels, I am continually challenged, excited and fascinated by Jesus. I am passionate about helping others re-engage with the raw and radical Jesus we find in the gospel accounts.

    … The church in the UK has been in decline for many years, but I believe that this is changing. In the US, there are some pretty negative predictions on church attendance over the next few decades. I just really believe that if people can be given a vision of Jesus, rather than religious dogma, then they will be released to live for Him. I hope that ‘Jesus Revealed’ might just be a helpful resource in doing this.

    I think these videos would be an excellent way to spark conversation w/ anyone who had some level of interest in the person of Jesus, or even to carry those who have been Christians for some time into deeper reflection on the significance of knowing and following Jesus. Would you use these? Why or why not? If you did, how would you use them and with who? In any case, hope you’ll check them out here.

    Posted in art, bible, Jesus, video

    A Quick Hop Back Into the World of Student Ministry

    February 14, 2012 // No Comments »

    As a college student at Malone University, I majored in youth ministry.  I did internships as a handful of different kinds of churches, the last of which actually led into a full-time role as a student pastor at a large church, overseeing separate junior, senior high, and college-age ministries.

    When I was a grad student at Fuller Theological Seminary, I continued to serve in the world of high school student ministry as an interim director at yet another kind of church.

    Later, after some time working in a seminary context, I launched into yet another pastoral position at a new church, this time working exclusively with college students and other young adults.

    However, I haven’t really done much in the way of student ministry since the spring of 2009.  So, after nearly a 3-year hiatus, I was excited when my college buddy, Scott, who’s been a long time youth pastor at The Chapel in North Canton, asked me to come back into town and help lead a retreat for his high school student leaders.

    As you might expect, the topic of the retreat was leadership.  There were to be three main sessions over the course of our time together Friday night and through the day on Saturday, plus a final sermon on Sunday morning.

    The theme for Friday night was, “Leadership as Followership: Jesus’ Plan to Destroy Your Life.”  Here, we focused our discussion around Matthew 20:17-28 and reflected on how Jesus’ role as a leader was located not so much in clever skills and abilities, but a central focus on following where and how God was leading him.  We talked about how a relinquishing of our personal ambition and agenda is fundamental to receiving what it is that God might have for us.  I also sought to pass on a discipleship framework for leaning how to get better and better at recognizing where and how God is at work and responding faithfully.

    On Saturday morning our theme was, “Leadership as Discipline: It’s Always Easy… Until You Have To Do It.”  We moved our attention to Matthew 26:36-46 and we spent some time talking about how, contrary to the aberrant Celebrity Culture that seems to mark contemporary Evangelicalism, Jesus-shaped leadership is anything but glamorous.  Rather, a commitment to lead like Jesus did will nearly always take you to a place of utter desperation, disappointment, and dependence upon God.  In terms of discipleship, we focused on what it might mean and look like to structure our lives around practices that intentionally root us in relationship with God, fellow believers, and others who are hurting and/or far from God.

    The final session of the retreat on Saturday afternoon revolved around the notion of, “Leadership as Mission: Death as a Way of Life.”  As we spent time working through Matthew 28:16-20, we discussed what actually drove Jesus as a missionary-leader, namely submission to the unique role he was to play in God’s mission in the world.  We also reflected on Jesus’ commitment to equip and send others as opposed to keeping everything isolated to his direct (human) endeavor.  This led naturally into presenting a process for discipling others toward maturity and mission.

    On Sunday morning, in sharp defiance to the notion the Piperian notion that, “God has designed christianity to have a masculine feel to it,” Amy and I preached the sermon, “Leadership as Partnership: Embodying a New World Order,” as partners who together, as male and female, reflect the imago Dei!  We spoke out of Acts 2 and Ephesians 4, calling attention to the primary role of the Holy Spirit in constituting a body of people who, against all worldly convention, seek to lead one another out of their unique giftedness in partnership for mission.

    Seeing some family and friends was a highlight as always, but man, getting back around high school students for a while was a blast.  I was super-appreciative of just how seriously they took our time together and how much creativity and passion they brought to the discussions.

    Shame on youth pastors (Scott’s not one of them!), who sabotage their opportunity to shape a generation of students because they are so focused on growing a huge, cool youth group.  Double shame on senior/lead pastors who, out of their own insecurity, put that kind of pressure on youth pastors to do it!

    Posted in Amy, church, discipleship, God, Jesus, leadership, preaching/teaching, sermon, travles, young adults, youth ministry

    The Missiological Future of Theological Education – Training Kingdom Citizens

    December 9, 2011 // No Comments »

    Below is the fourth and final article that we’ve submitted to Patheos as a contribution to their forum on “The Future of the Seminary.”  I don’t believe it’s actually up over there yet and it seems like that forum has sort of run out of steam, so I thought I’d go ahead and post it here.  If it does make it up over at Patheos, I’ll update this post.  If this happens to be new to you and you’ve got some interest, here’s where you can find the first three articles:

    Shaping Students w/ the Character and Competency of Jesus (lifeasmission | Patheos)

    Missionary Pastors for a Missionary God (lifeasmission | Patheos)

    Ministers are Mobilizers, Not Managers (lifeasmission | Patheos)

    As I’ve noted in previous posts, this is some edited content from a more comprehensive white paper that I worked on.  You can find the whole paper here as a resource at thefutureoftheologicaleducation.com.

    I hope to round this all out with a (more brief!) summary post soon.  Thanks to those of you who have been following along and weighing in.  Engagement is the only way to refine these sort of ideas toward the creation of something truly new, helpful, and concrete.

    This is the 4th and final article in a series that we have been happy to offer related this Patheos forum on, “The Future of the Seminary.”  For our part, we have sought to call attention to the idea that inasmuch as theological education seeks to locate its purpose and aim in the missio Dei, its shape and future can be most helpfully understood from a missiological perspective.  This is the fundamental point of the white paper from which these few posts have emerged, The Missiological Future of Theological Education.

    We first offered a video, which summarizes the issues surrounding the way in which Christendom obscured our view of God’s missionary nature, thereby mis-shaping not only our theology, but our ecclesiology and the systems of theological education that we constructed to prepare leaders for these Christendom-shaped churches.  The video also suggests that…

    as we seek to re-imagine theological education along missional lines, the most important ‘accrediting factor’ for our schools lies in their ability to do their part in producing leaders who are able to demonstrate having taken on the character and competency of Jesus.

    If you haven’t seen it yet, the video is embedded below:

    After this initial post, we offered two more that sought to outline the missiological principles that we believe best contribute to creating processes of theological formation along these lines:

    1) Missionary Pastors for a Missionary God, in which we suggest that missional approaches to theological education will be praxeological – geared toward the training of theologically reflective practitioners.

    2) Ministers are Mobilizers, not Managers, in which we suggest that missional approaches to theological education will be mobilizational - geared toward the training of missionary leaders.

    In this final post, we’d like to outline a final missiological principle that we believe will guide a faithful re-imagining of theological education, that of being spiritual – geared toward the training of kingdom citizens.

    Spiritual, of course, can mean many things. For us, it simply means that everything about what theological education is and does, ought to be predicated on the centrality of a vibrant and growing relationship with the triune God and his work in the world.  In other words, just as Jesus’ efforts to train and form his disciples would have had no ultimate significance apart from their connection to God and God’s work in the world, so too are the efforts of seminaries wasted apart from this same connection.

    Having lost its proper missiological shape, theological education within Christendom made it possible to separate ones intellectual development from ones spiritual maturity. This is a dichotomy that our centers of theological education must repudiate if they hope to lend any support to the shaping of leaders for Kingdom ministry.  Moving forward will call for, at the very least, processes of theological formation that shape convictions, impart spiritual knowledge, re-frame our relationship to Scripture, and embrace the irreplaceable role of the Holy Spirit.

    Shaping Kingdom Convictions

    As theologian James McClendon once said, “Convictions are not so much things that we have but things that have us.”  As important as we believe Christian doctrine and truth are, if we fail to cultivate leaders who are as convicted by them (as evidenced by life transformation) as they purport to be convinced of them, we will only continue to contribute to the collapse of Western Christianity. If seminaries are to make any sort of meaningful contribution to the mission and witness of the Church in Western culture, they must show primary concern, not only for the information that their graduates possess, but for the convictions that will shape, drive and sustain them through all the trials and tribulations of not only ministry in a Post-Christian context, but amidst the sort of suffering and persecution which the Bible tells us always accompanies faithful witness.

    Imparting Spiritual Knowledge

    Seminaries and churches are full of people who know plenty of things about God. What our seminaries and churches seem in desperate lack of are people who truly know God in the way the Apostle Paul speaks of when he says, “I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death…” What we have to accept is that this kind of “knowing” cannot be manufactured or controlled. The impartation of spiritual knowledge is finally the work of the Holy Spirit as we live in relationship with God and participate in his mission in the world in the way of Jesus. Thus, it is incumbent upon seminaries to create environments where God can do this kind of work in shaping Kingdom leaders.

    Re-framing Our Relationship to Scripture

    It should go without saying that in the endeavor of theological education to contribute to the shaping of Christian leaders, there is no text more important or sacred than the Bible. Unfortunately, the experience of many a seminarian is that the Bible is reduced to little more than an object to be examined and dissected. However, when you abstract an engagement with Scripture from a predisposition towards inviting the work of the Holy Spirit, we miss God’s intention for this discipline. Therefore, in terms of truly honoring a spiritual disposition towards theological education, not only will the Bible occupy a primary place throughout the whole of our programs (as opposed to being confined to individual courses), it will increasingly need to be seen as the very story out of which seminaries derive their own identity, purpose, and function.

    Embracing the Irreplaceable Role of the Holy Spirit

    Our prevailing systems of theological education train and equip people to be leaders in such a way that they assume an ability to succeed based upon their own intellectual capacity and/or skill-set rather than upon their ability to discern the Holy Spirit’s leading and therefore upon the Holy Spirit’s power rather than their own. We suggest that to the degree that centers of theological education want to contribute to preparing leaders for faithful service as Kingdom citizens, they must re-imagine theological education in such a way that the work and role of the Holy Spirit in the theological formation of leaders, as well as in the world, will be given primary attention.

    Concluding Thoughts

    One of the great travesties of our current Christian landscape is that emerging leaders often feel like they have to make a choice between “going to seminary,” because it will provide the sort of “accreditation” that many denominations and organizations require, or “going into ministry,” in order to give themselves fully to the sort of life & labor they feel like God has called them to.  As we re-imagine theological education along the lines of God’s Kingdom and God’s mission in the world, our hope and prayer is that these emerging leaders wouldn’t feel like this is a choice they have to make. Instead, we envision truly missional systems of theological education, so radically committed to a Kingdom vision of accreditation and to commissioning Kingdom leaders on account of their character and competency rather than their GPA, that ministry becomes the context for all our education and formation as we train reflective practitioners, that the aim of our education would become the mobilization of God’s people for loving and faithful service as we train missionary leaders, and that all of this emerges out of a vibrant and growing relationship with the triune God as we train Kingdom citizens.

    Posted in 3DM, anabaptist, bible, christendom, church, culture, discipleship, doctrine, God, gospel, Jesus, justice, kingdom, leadership, missiology, missional, missional theology, narrative theology, post-christendom, preaching/teaching, spiritual formation, theological education, theology, truth, western culture

    The Missiological Future of Theological Education – Training Missionary Leaders

    December 5, 2011 // No Comments »

    As part of their forum on, “The Future of the Seminary,” the 3rd of 4 articles that I’ve contributed to, Ministers are Mobilizers, Not Managers,  went up the other day.  You can find the previous articles both here at lifeasmission as well as over at Patheos…

    Shaping Students w/ the Character and Competency of Jesus (lifeasmission | Patheos)

    Missionary Pastors for a Missionary God (lifeasmission | Patheos)

    Again, this is some edited content from a more comprehensive white paper that I worked on.  You can find the whole paper here as a resource at thefutureoftheologicaleducation.com.  Hope to see some helpful conversation emerge there, here, and over at Patheos as well.

    In terms of our particular contribution to this forum, we began by suggesting that while we passionately affirm the important role that seminaries play educationally, from a Kingdom perspective, the more important ‘accrediting factor’ is their ability to graduate students who have increasingly taken on both the character and competency of Jesus.   Given those aims and the ways in which our systems of theological education have been corrupted by the (non-missional) assumptions and characteristics of Christendom, we suggested that the central task before us is identifying educational principles guided by a theological vision of the missio Dei as it relates to both the Gospel and the Church that can help us re-imagine and re-shape our processes of theological formation.

    In our second post we sought to outline the central features of the first of three of these educational principles, that of being praxeological.   This praxeological orientation to theological education would result in the cultivation of reflective practitioners – leaders for whom the practice of mission and ministry and critical theological and missiological reflection always go hand-in-hand.

    Here, we’d like to provide a sketch of a second educational principle, again drawn from the life and ministry of Jesus, that we feel must inform our processes of theological formation, that of being mobilizational – geared toward the training of missionary leaders.

    One of the most disastrous effects of Christendom upon our systems of theological education has been the unhelpful assumption that the Church does and should exist at the center of our society.   Under this vision, seminaries have equipped leaders who would excel at managing and maintaining this system.   However, as the missio Dei and its implications for the Gospel and the Church come back into focus in Post-Christendom, we submit that our systems of theological education must be re-imagined for the purposes of training missionary leaders.  These will be leaders whose concern and skill-set revolve not around managing churches as part of a culture believed to be “Christian,” or even further, around church growth, but around mobilizing the people of God for participation in God’s mission in the world.  We submit that a truly mobilizational system of theological education will be, among other things, affordable, accessible, designed to prepare leaders as cultural pioneers, and judged on its ability to cultivate leaders who are competent to make disciples and mobilize others for faithful participation in God’s mission in the world.

    Affordable

    Unless you happen to live in a certain place, going to seminary requires the time and expense of uprooting your life and moving to another location.  In addition, the vast majority of seminary students are completely on their own to figure out how to pay for a seminary education.  A staggering number of students carry an enormous amount of debt for years, if not decades, following the completion of their program.   Not only is this problematic because of the current costs of seminary education, but increasingly, attaining a seminary degree does not translate into a proportional ability to get any job, let alone one that will alleviate students of their debt.   Moreover, because seminary degree programs remain, in large part, shaped by the assumptions of Christendom, students may quickly discover they are ill equipped to faithfully engage with the practical realities of ministry in Post-Christendom.  In order to be truly mobilizational, it is incumbent on us to re-imagine systems of theological education that are vastly more financially sustainable.

    Accessible

    Lack of proximity to the kinds of formational education that we are talking about isn’t just an affordability problem; it’s also an accessibility problem.  While we applaud the efforts of the increasing number of seminaries that value distance and
    distributed learning opportunities, we would suggest much more innovation is required.  Increasingly, seminaries need to embody in themselves the kind of character they should be instilling in their students.  In other words, just as we need to mobilize leaders, we also need to imagine what it might mean to mobilize theological education itself.  Institutions of theological education that are truly mobilizational will happily release power and control as they give their time and energy to initiatives that make quality theological education more accessible even if they don’t directly benefit.  The future of theological education belongs to those groups and institutions who care more for the work of God’s Kingdom than they do their own.

    Prepare Cultural Pioneers

    The ecclesial vision of Christendom provided for a system of theological education that mainly had in view the creation of Christian leaders who might well be described as managers or custodians of the church at the center of culture.  But, with the significant shaking occurring as we move from Christendom to Post-Christendom, the maps we previously used for theological education prove unhelpful and misleading.  In direct juxtaposition to a Christendom-shaped reality, a missional understanding of God and the Church compel us to give our time and attention to the equipping of missionary leaders capable of pioneering in a world without maps.  This will require the re-imagining of structures and programs that are designed to impart to students, missionary, as opposed to managerial, skill-sets.

    Cultivate Disciple-Makers and Mobilizers

    A final aspect of theological education that is mobilizational is the central importance of equipping leaders to be disciple-makers and mobilizers of God’s people for mission.  However, a particular person might be individually gifted, their ability to leverage that giftedness in concert with the biblically unifying commission to “go and make disciples of all nations,” is a fundamental marker of their fit for Kingdom ministry.  Said another way, we suggest that a profound understanding of one’s giftedness and a correspondingly profound track record of the exercise of that giftedness as a means of making disciples and mobilizing people and communities for mission ought to be seen as a basic requirement for the completion of any seminary program.

    In short, as the Church is increasingly pushed to the margins of society, it has (we have!) the opportunity to rediscover the missional nature of God, the Gospel, and the Church that was eclipsed within Christendom.   Among other things called for by this rediscovery is the complete restructuring of our systems of theological education as we seek to equip leaders who can serve the Church out of missionary rather than managerial perspectives and skill-sets.   We offer additional thoughts along these lines in the full paper, available here and check out the video and other resources at thefutureoftheologicaleducation.com.

    Posted in 3DM, anabaptist, bi-vocational, christendom, church, church planting, culture, discipleship, God, gospel, Jesus, kingdom, missiology, missional, missional theology, post-christendom, salvation, spiritual gifts, theological education, theology, western culture

    The Missiological Future of Theological Education – Training Reflective Practitioners

    November 22, 2011 // 1 Comment »

    The post below (edited slightly) was offered as the 2nd in a series of 4 articles on the “Future of the Seminary” forum over at Patheos (1st article here).  If you haven’t already seen it, this video will give you a good introduction to the basis for the perspective being offered.

    Based on this perspective, we suggest that the task before us is to identify educational principles guided by a theological vision of the missio Dei as it relates to both the gospel and the Church that can give shape and substance to processes of theological formation that are able to help students develop Kingdom-oriented character and competency.

    We will explore two additional missiological principles that we believe ought to guide this vision of theological education in forthcoming posts, but here we would like to suggest that a vision of theological education that is guided and shaped by a missional vision of God, the Gospel, and the Church will be praxeological – given to the training of reflective practitioners.  While other changes are surely called for, we suggest that theological formation that is praxeological calls for elongated programs, training by missionary theologians, diversified learning environments, a high degree of attention to contextualization, and an emphasis on creating learning communities.

    Elongated Programs of Theological Formation

    Whereas many seminaries seem to be spending their energy trying to find ways to help students achieve degrees more quickly, a praxeological orientation calls for more integrated, and therefore elongated, programs. Obviously an elongated program delays the conferral of a degree, but under the vision of theological education suggested here, the idea isn’t getting a degree so that you can begin to do ministry, but beginning to do ministry so that you are rooted in the proper context for theological education and formation in the first place. If the end goal is not the conferral of a degree but actually becoming a certain kind of person, there simply are no shortcuts to be taken.

    Training by Missionary Theologians

    A praxeological orientation toward theological education will require a faculty composed not mainly of traditional academic scholars, but of missionary theologians – those whose ability to guide and shape others flows from their own praxeological formation. Again, we are not suggesting that scholarship does not have its place; we are simply saying that the right kind of scholarship will always be driven by and focused on its implications for the life and ministry of the Church. As Karl Barth has famously said,

    There would be no theology if there were no ministry specially committed to the witness of the word… If we abstract its origin in the ministry of the community, all its problems are either irrelevant or they lose their theological character… (CD 4.3.2, 879)

    Thus, we are compelled to ask whether or not those who are trained and formed by traditional PhD programs are the best candidates for the kind of mentors/teachers needed to equip those who embrace this vision of theological education.

    Diversified Learning Environments

    Learning theory suggests there are three ways we learn: the passing on of information, apprenticeship to learn certain skill-sets, and immersion. The best learning experience occurs when there is a dynamic interplay between all three. Driven by Christendom presuppositions, our current systems of theological education are designed to do the first, pass on information, but give no real attention to issues of apprenticeship or immersion experiences. A praxeological orientation to theological education will require that our seminaries create all three kinds of learning environments for their students. The issue here isn’t merely the lack of second and third environments, but the fact that that apart from them, the relevance of time spent in the first environment loses the impact it ought to have.

    Issues of Contextualization

    Ministry never occurs in a vacuum. Students don’t just need to learn what to apply to their ministry context, which under the current paradigm of theological education they may not even have; they need to learn how to apply it to their ministry context, which we are suggesting as a prerequisite. This implies not only the need for missiologically-driven advances in models of distributed learning, but calls for a greatly enhanced focus on the part of instructors and the designing of programs with regard to the application of theological learning to specific ministry contexts.*

    *Living into this sort of vision will mean that increasingly, centers of theological education will see having a ministry context as a prerequisite for admission into its programs. In addition, this value should compel centers of theological education to put significant amounts of time and resources into establishing truly meaningful relationships and partnerships with local churches and ministry organizations in which students who don’t have their own ministry context might not just do occasional internships, but root the entirely of their educational process.

    Learning Communities

    A core component of a praxeological orientation to theological education is the importance of learning in community. Whereas we wholeheartedly agree that there is a unique and important place for those regarded as experts in their field who can offer their wisdom, experience, and insight as they guide students in their formation as Kingdom leaders, there is an equally important and formative dimension to theological education that is rooted within a community of learning. In line with the realities of Kingdom ministry, which always call for a collaborative approach to tasks and problems, seminary students should increasingly develop a capacity to embody an open and discerning posture towards the insights and critiques of their peers. Flying in the face of traditional assessment criteria that are nearly exclusively predicated on one’s individual academic performance, a core component of assessing the formation of Kingdom leaders will have to do with their posture toward and interaction with others in a learning community.*

    *We suggest that where theological schools continue to offer residential options, they will do well to structure them around a more monastic model where students come to be immersed in an integrated program of sharing life, resources, learning experiences, and diversified endeavors in ministry and mission.

    At the heart of the particular suggestion is the simple observation that, “this is how Jesus did it” – calling disciples to him “that they might be with him and that he might send them out…” (Mark 3:14)

    Read the full white paper, The Missiological Future of Theological Education, here and join in the conversation below and over at thefutureoftheologicaleducation.com.

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