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The Missiological Future of Theological Education – Training Kingdom Citizens
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.
The Emerging Guild of Missionary Theologians
An interesting thing was taking place when I began my graduate studies at Fuller back in 2004. A surprisingly large number of students in the School of Theology, of which I was one, were either switching their degree program or restructuring it as best they could to take advantage of courses that were being offered out of Fuller’s School of Intercultural Studies, the school which has traditionally trained missionaries as opposed to pastors and theologians. The reason was simple – more and more of us were realizing that if we wanted to be equipped for a future of ministry in and to Western culture, we needed to learn how to think and function as missionaries.
As Christendom continues to crumble and as the United States increasingly becomes a microcosm of the globe (it is predicted that by 2050 over 50% of our population will be comprised of minority groups), the work and supporting skill set of Christian leaders will undergo seismic changes. Actually, I hate to say it that way. It’s not that the work we should have been doing or the skill set we should have been operating out of all along will objectively change, but the shifting of our culture and context will smack us so hard upside the head that we will have no choice but to wake up to how we’ve gotten off track.I want to suggest that the people we will most desperately need to help guide us into a faithful engagement with this sort of future are Missionary Theologians.
I say “missionary theologians” as opposed to “missional theologians” to differentiate between those who do theology out of their cross-culturally oriented lives and witness as missionaries as opposed to those who might simply articulate theology from a missional perspective (however masterfully). The Bible, I believe, is the product of this sort of perspective. The books, letters, and poetry of the Bible, and the theology they communicate, emerge from the missionary encounter of God’s people with God’s world. We err when we read the Bible in any other way. Our work is no different. It is as we engage the world as the people of God that we actually develop the capacity to see God at work and the proper vantage point from which to do theology.
My friend Doug likes to say that “The Church in Western culture doesn’t primarily have a leadership problem or a missional problem, it has a discipleship problem.” Inasmuch as a disciple is someone who seeks to know God by joining in on God’s mission in the world by following Jesus in the power of the Spirit, I couldn’t possibly agree more. And who better to help us step forward into that future than missionary theologians?!
I don’t think my experience at Fuller was unique. I think this guild is on the rise. 2 questions seem to stand out however.
1) Will we encourage and facilitate the rise of missionary theologians or stymie it by persisting in outmoded paradigms of education and formation?
This question will be answered, in large part, by whether or not schools increasingly make the field of missiology standard fare in terms of equipping Christian leaders for ministry in Post-Christendom.
2) Will we recognize and incorporate the unique contributions that missionary theologians can make in the equipping of leaders?
Here, I think we must look to whether nor not schools (or other training organizations) are making principle use of missionary theologians to train future leaders.
Bottom line, we still have a lot to learn from Mr. Lesslie Newbigin!
The GOCN, Ecclesia, and the Missional Church
I was tipped off by a tweet from @bobhyatt that Tony Jones had a post up on his blog titled, “Which Missional Church?” which intrigued me.
He suggests that there are,
…two movements of people within American Protestantism who claim the term ‘missional.’
Specifically, he mentions The Gospel and Our Culture Network and the Ecclesia Network, two organizations that I have meaningful relational connections to and interest in.
Tony describes the GOCN like this:
These thought-leaders come from a mainline context, but they have evangelical leanings. They feel that the church has lost its missional impulse as the mainline church has been ultimately absorbed by American culture. And they found a theological patron saint in Lesslie Newbigin, a twentieth century missionary to India who retired to his native England to find that Christianity was no longer a prophetic force. Newbigin’s books, and those of missiologist David Bosch have guided thinking of this group. Newbigin and Bosch, as well as the books and newsletters of the GOCN, were all highly influential on the genesis of the emerging church movement and of Emergent Village in particular.
And Ecclesia like this:
These are primarily evangelicals with moderate to liberal leanings. They agree with the ECM’s critique of evangelicalism: that the evangelical church in America has been corrupted by culture, is too consumeristic, and has lost the radical, prophetic nature of the gospel. They are most influenced by the anabaptist theologies of John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas.
While their are certainly theologians sympathetic to them, this missional movement is largely populated by pastors, church planters, and consultants: David Fitch, Alan Hirsch, Bob Hyatt, and Ed Stetzer among them. The organization most closely aligned with this missional is the Ecclesia Network, begun in the mid-2000s.
There’s already some good discussion happening over on Tony’s blog and I don’t want to take away from it so please head over there and join in if you are so inclined, but I also wanted to springboard off of this post in terms of some of my own interests.
In a forthcoming (next?) post, I want to share more about the research project that is taking shape through the DMiss cohort I am a part of. It will become ever clearer then, just how timely and poignant Tony’s post is. For now, I’d like to make some observations about the commonalities of these two expressions of the missional conversation and see what thoughts others might have. Specifically, I see commonalities with regard to a cultural emphasis, a theological vision, and missional implications.
Cultural Emphasis
1) Post-Christendom. Both groups are seeking to engage a culture and context in which the Church no longer exists at the center of society and Christianity is forced to grapple with the advent of religious pluralism.
Theological Vision
2) Missional Theology. Both groups are trafficking in the world of missional theology – a way of knowing God, reading Scripture, and being the Church that is firmly rooted in the missio Dei. I should add here that for this reason among others, I simply do not get how and why some (as Tony does in his post) draw a line between the theology of Barth and Yoder/Hauerwas which seems quite united at this point (see this new article by Stanley Hauerwas, ht: Andy Rowell, and this unpublished PDF by Yoder about Barth’s theology)
Missional Implications
3) Missiology & The Local Church. Both groups are wrestling with the missiological implications of a post-Christendom culture/context and a theological vision rooted in the missio Dei as they intersect at the level of the local church. While the GOCN may have been (may continue to be?) focused on research and writing, if you take a look at their publications, in large measure they emerge from and seek to address life at the congregational level. Ecclesia, likewise, exists as a network of missionally-minded church planters, pastors, and leaders.
Wondering what others people see or have to say here. Next time around, I’ll dig into some aspects of the research I hope to do and how it might contribute to the common aims of these groups and the spheres of influence they represent.
The Role of the Bible in Society
As Christendom continues to unravel and the Church loses its privileged role within culture at large, we live in an increasingly biblical illiterate society.
– Quoting Scripture will mean less and less.
– Bible stories will be increasingly misunderstood or forgotten altogehter
– And the battles that Christians wage with one another over the objective nature of Scripture will continue to damage our reputation in a broken world.
For these reasons and more, there is an incredibly important conversation to be had regarding the role of the Bible in society.
In contributing to that conversation, here’s a 40 minute panel discussion from the recent Q conference here in Chicago between Tim Keller, Alastain McGrath, Dempsey Rosales-Acosta, and Brian McLaren (you can find brief bios on all these panelists here) on that topic. I’m anxious to see what kinds of responses others might have to the questions and discussion here.
(For those reading in a feed reader, the video is flash and may not come through, so you might want to click through to the actual post to view or download.)
An Interview with N.T. Wright
The guys over at Homebrewed Christianity recently posted an interview they did with N.T. Wright. The interview was full of some really great sound bytes that I went ahead and divvied up to make your life easier
You can listen to or download the interview in its entirety here.
On being a bishop.
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On the unfortunate split between church and academy.
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On returning to fulltime academic work.
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On Bart Ehrman.
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On Marcus Borg & John Dominic Crossan.
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On Jurgen Moltmann.
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On E.P. Sanders.
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On Karl Barth.
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On Stanley Hauerwas.
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On his most recent book, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters and why he chose to write about eschatology before ethics.
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On the difference between Aristotelian virtue and Christian virtue.
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On the role of character and virtue in other religions.
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On cultural virtue.
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On the renewing of our minds when they have become largely detached from the rest of who we are.
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On Christianity Post-Postmodernity.
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On the after-after life.
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What NT Wright is reading, thinking, and planning for his “big book on Paul” as the next in his Christian Origins series.
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What we can expect from NT Wright in his new role.
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Reviewing Deep Church by Jim Belcher
Jim Belcher, the author of Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional, and I have much in common.
We both did masters degrees at Fuller Theological Seminary.
We both have a heart for church planting.
I teach a class on the Emerging Church based on the intensive that he references in his book. (35)
We get frustrated when people talk past one another, defaulting to caricatured stereotypes rather than embracing a posture of openness.
And we both value looking for a “third way” to approach dichotomistic thinking.
He is right when he says,
It seems that every time someone criticizes the emerging church, they pick the worst-case scenario or the most extreme statements. (49)
He is also correct in noting,
It seems the emerging church, for rhetorical purposes, uses sweeping generalizations about the traditional church that are unfair. (76)
The larger Body of Christ would indeed be served well by discourse that is deeper, more specific, and marked by a sense of humble openness. Belcher’s chapters on Deep: Truth, Evangelism, Gospel, Worship, Preaching, Ecclesiology, and Culture, are essentially his attempts to facilitate just that – a worthwhile enterprise in my opinion.
While Belcher’s book is truly helpful in this regard, I’m not sure he really hits the mark in terms of articulating a true “third way” as a means of engaging these topics. Very often, his conclusions in these chapters are a combination of a chastened version of the EC position he articulates and an expanded version of the traditional position he articulates (usually w/ reference to Tim Keller and his church!). I suppose this is a kind of “third way,” maybe even precisely the one Belcher desires, but I’m not certain it’s the most helpful kind of third way for the Church to pursue.
The mistake, I believe, comes in the assumption that one can simply pit the positions of the EC against the positions of the traditional church. The main problem here is that many in the EC camp are themselves trying to articulate and maneuver a “third way” between the modern categories of conservatism and liberalism, a feature that Belcher seems to either overlook or discount w/o comment. An indication of this is his quick dismissal of the Anabaptist tradition from which many in the EC draw as one which is able to circumvent many of the dichotomies addressed in this book on account of its fundamentally, Christendom-rejecting, stance. Belcher never seems to ask, “How might people in the EC camp already be searching for a third way in response to classic approaches to these issues?,” but assumes that their positions are simply reactions against the positions of traditional churches.
Belcher sets himself on this course in stating,
We need to define it [the emerging church] as a movement, particularly its theology. The best way to do this is to look at what the emerging church movement is against – the things they are protesting and the rasons why they are calling for change. (38)
For the life of me, I can’t grasp why someone would want to define a movement by what they are against (even it it is a protest movement) rather than what they are for. We certainly regard what the classic reformers were for as far more more important than what they were against! But more than this, Belcher fails to identify missiology as a core motif for the EC. For many, if not most, in the global EC movement, it is an attempt to participate with God and God’s mission in the world that is reshaping how they understand the sorts of topics that Belcher raises in his book, not vice versa.
These criticisms notwithstanding, I am glad that Jim wrote this book and don’t doubt for a second that it has an will continue to help many.
**Jim has recently decided to resign from his position as lead pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, CA. You can read a letter he wrote to the congregation regarding this transition here and some additional discussion about this sort of trend here.
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