lifeasmission
exploring the mystery of life and mission as one and the same
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Toward A Missional Vision of Theological Education: Conviction Shaping
Previous posts in this Series:
Preliminary Thoughts | The Root of the Problem | The Fruit of the Problem | New Soil | Community Rootedness | Character Formation
One of the greatest needs of missional churches is leaders who have been trained how to think as opposed to what to think, who are able to equip others for deep incarnational witness, and whose character and giftedness has been practiced and affirmed in the context of a local community. This was the point of my previous post – the centrality of character formation in a missional vision of theological education.
From here, I want to go on to say that a missional vision of theological education will emphasize the shaping of Kingdom convictions in leaders.
No one is more responsible for my appreciation of this dimension of a missional vision of theological education than the late Dr. James Wm. McClendon. His work was the center of my masters thesis and continues to shape my life as a disciple of Jesus is all its forms.
The most admirable Christian leaders are not those men and women who have sought to do great, big things for the Kingdom, but who have faithfully responded to that which God has done in their lives. They were and are men and women of conviction and as McClendon points out,
Convictions are not so much things we have, but things which have us.
Christendom, as a system of coercive power, naturally emphasizes control. This emphasis has resulted in two dominant emphases in the shaping of leaders – the passing on of systems of belief and/or the training in particular models of ministry. I am against neither of these things in themselves. I am merely suggesting that they need to be peripheral, not central to the training of missional leaders. I advocate for the centrality of conviction shaping for three main reasons.
1) The shaping of Kingdom convictions is primarily the Holy Spirit’s work.
We have fooled ourselves into believing that the passing on of right doctrine or refined training in ministry models are of prime importance in theological education. When these are our emphases, not only do we create one-dimensional leaders, but we run the greater risk of making Christian leadership development primarily a human enterprise – like training a mechanic or a sales person. The shaping of convictions in correspondence with the reality of God’s Kingdom is much more fluid and finally contingent on the work of the Holy Spirit. We need leaders who not so much “get God,” but ones “God’s got.”
2) The shaping of Kingdom convictions is more in accord with missional theology.
We all see and interpret things through various lenses depending on our background, experience, education, culture and so on. Thus, missional theology is never fixed, but exists in constant interaction with Scripture, our community & its tradition, and our broader context & experience.
As I’ve said before, theological convictions are not the same as theological foundations. Churches built on theological foundations and hell bent on being right are brought low when those foundations are assaulted. Missional churches on the other hand, more concerned with being faithfully responsive, embrace the notion that,
The convictions that cohere within any community are in principle always subject to rejection, reformulation, improvement or critical revision, and the church is no exception to this principle.
We desperately need leaders who are more convicted about a way of believing, living, and following, than they are a way of knowing or structuring.
3) The shaping of Kingdom convictions naturally flows from community rootedness and character formation.
Convictions are the result of the work of the Holy Spirit in the midst of our community-rooted character development. As McClendon has shared, the shaping of Kingdom convictions are not
…so many ‘propositions’ to be catalogued or juggled like truth-functions in a computer, but are inextricably interwoven with ecclesial practices such as baptism and eucharist, hospitality and reconciliation, peacemaking and the mutual bearing of burdens, where they ‘give shape to actual lives and actual communities.’
They are,
generated by ‘a shared and lived story, one whose focus is Jesus of Nazareth and the kingdom he proclaims.
This is what we see when we look at the relationship of Jesus to his disciples. The cultivation of a community of followers who, dense as they were, and prone to weakness, were convicted of Jesus’ Messiahship, his judgment and triumph over the evil powers at work in the world, and the beginning of the renewal of all things in his resurrection.
Think for a moment about the people who most inspire you and you enjoy following. Chances are the reason is that something has gripped them, you sense it in all they say and do and you’re interested, if not desperate, to know it for yourself. This is what I am saying, for the Christian leader, is the work of the Holy Spirit in accord with a missional theology that finds its home in the midst of community of people following Jesus on mission together.
Can you offer examples of this? Anyone who has counter-examples? How have traditional approaches to theological education helped or failed you in this regard?
Next up – the place of contextual training in a missional vision of theological education.
Some quotes and ideas stem from: Harvey, Barry. “Beginning in the Middle of Things: Following James McClendon’s Systematic Theology. Modern Theology 18:2, April 2002.
Toward a Missional Vision of Theological Education: Character Formation
Previous posts in this Series:
Preliminary Thoughts | The Root of the Problem | The Fruit of the Problem | New Soil | Community Rootedness
In my last post I tried to make a case for the necessity of theological education of missional leaders being rooted in missional community. With this as a contextual prerequisite, I would further suggest that the ultimate aim of a missionally oriented process of leadership training is the formation of Christlike character.
more of this artist’s amazing photography here
It is too naive to suggest that Christendom was wholly uncritical of the character of Christian leaders. It is more accurate to say that there’s an inherent assumption within Christendom that if we can only ensure that our leaders believe all the right things, their character will follow suit. This has turned out to be a deeply lamentable mistake.
It may be necessary for me to reiterate at this point that I am no anti-intellectual. You would never find me downplaying the importance of continuing study, exposure to new perspectives and ideas, or deep, thoughtful reflection. Instead, I would suggest that a missional vision of theological education will only value intellectual dimensions of training inasmuch as they contribute to the formation of Christlike character in missional leaders. Therefore, we might expect a missional vision of theological education to…
1) Train leaders how to think as opposed to telling them what to think. This is only possible when we humbly buy into the reality that our systems of truth are all fallible and trust that encouraging leaders to follow Jesus is preferable to warning them of the dangers of venturing outside of a particular theological grid. Thus, through books, articles, media, speakers, discussions, conferences, etc., we may freely (and wisely!) expose leaders to various biblical/theological traditions and perspectives. Where the rubber meets the (missional) road, so to speak, is in the questions we encourage students to ask of what they are being exposed to. I won’t go into them here,* but I submit that a missional vision of what it means to be the Body of Christ inclines us to ask different questions of all that we learn than that of Christendom.**
2) Conjoin all intellectual study with missional practice. Only given the assumptions of Christendom could we have divorced religious study from community based missional practice and witness. A missional vision of the church and theological education is characteristically and relentlessly incarnational. Missional theology is nothing if not that which we come to know about God as we participate in God’s mission in the world through the Body of Christ. In this light, I would suggest that each and every aspect of intellectual study find its place within a structure of missional practice which includes both personal and corporate spiritual disciplines.
3) Develop a community based assessment of a leaders process of character development. When character formation is the central issue in the equipping of missional leaders, time frames are perfunctory. It’s not one’s ability to make it through a process that qualifies them as a leader, but the manner in which they participate and their holistic development from start to finish. It takes a community to discern these things. As valuable as having the commitment and support of a community is to a leader in training, their willingness to speak the truth in love regarding their development is every bit as essential. Incorporating various means of mentorship and scheduling regular checkpoints between leaders and communities are key components of a missional vision of theological education.
What we know and what we can do as leaders isn’t just meaningless w/o Christlike character, it’s actually negative, destroying the very nature of what it means to follow Jesus and participate in God’s mission in the world. As Jesus was only worth following inasmuch as he said and did as God said and did, so too are his disciples w/o power and authority if they are not leading out of this sort of Christlike character.
This is all relates to the subject of my next post, the shaping of convictions. Hope to have some helpful dialogue before then though, so let’s have at it!
*You can find a very helpful article on this subject here.
**In proposing this I readily (and happily) admit that we will always be coming from a particular (hermeneutical) vantage point. I will explore this further in a future post, but the notion of some completely objective posture in the formation of leaders is neither possible nor desirable.Toward a Missional Vision of Theological Education: New Soil
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.
Toward a Missional Vision of Theological Education: The Fruit of the Problem
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.
Bi-Vocational Ministry & Spiritual Formation
In my last post about bi-vocational church leadership, I tried to make the point that this approach derives its theological significance from a truly missional approach to theology and ecclesiology.I wanted to winnow that thought down a bit further and suggest that the biblical appeal for a bi-vocational approach to leadership (and in my opinion, the biblical appeal for anything that has to do with the church and Chirstian life!) has to do with spiritual formation.
Far too often people seek to defend their church structures and practices because of their supposed ability to, “grow the church,” “meet people where they’re at,” or “reflect people’s cultural expectations.” These have a ring of nobility to them but are far off the mark biblically speaking. Far worse is when we are forced to admit that we do what we do because, “that’s how it’s always been done,” “if we try to change things people will leave,” “so and so will stop giving if we stop doing things that way.”
As the Body of Christ, we should have a singular defense for everything we do, namely, its power to spiritually form people and communities into Christlikeness.*
Here’s why…
There’s a battle going on. The Church, as a foretaste of the Kingdom of God, through its formational practices and structures, wages war against the principalities and powers at work in the world which seek to “steal, kill, and destroy” all that God would have us be and do.
In Christendom, the Church equipped itself to fight the wrong battle. Within Christendom, so much is assumed about the nature and purpose of the church, that we tend to ask pragmatic questions. Does it work? But, for those of us who realize that Christendom is crumbling and/or think that it was never a good thing to begin with, these questions aren’t good enough. We need to ask deeper questions.
Biblical faithfulness is about mission, not models. As one helpful commenter pointed out
in a previous post, the Bible does not prescribe one way to lead churches. There are several examples of what that looked like in the New Testament, but even these are not simply models to be copied as if we could then say, “We just do it like they did in the Bible.” The better way to understand biblical faithfulness is as an honest pursuit to join God in mission, not copy models. The Church is charged with the task of making disciples and is not given an exact blueprint for how to go about it.This brings us full circle. Those churches whose structures and practices mainly serve the ends of church growth, cultural relevance, and even conversion, miss the mark. They are fighting the wrong battle biblically speaking.
I am advocating for a bi-vocational approach to church leadership, not because I can defend it as THE RIGHT biblical model or because it’s most effective (Christendom approaches), but because the tendencies in our culture toward consumerism and individualism are so thick that faithfulness to the mission of making disciples, forming people and communities into Christlikeness, make it the most appropriate option (missional approach).
Hopefully that serves to clarify my thoughts and intention some.
*I was greatly encouraged today while viewing this seminar online to hear Dr. Darrell Guder comment that, “It was not the mission of the apostolic church to save souls! The apostolic mission was the formation witnessing communities.” This is a far cry from how we commonly envision the role of church leaders, but something we badly need to recover.
Bi-Vocational Ministry
Life on the Vine practices what we (I feel a bit more justified in the “we” since Amy and I officially became members last Sunday!) call bi-vocational ministry and a number of us met last Friday to discuss it.Some may take issue with the phrase bi-vocational, arguing that followers of Jesus, who may have multiple occupations, actually have a singular vocation – living as a Christian witness or something like that and I’d say that’s understandable. However, if it passes to understand vocation as “a compensated way in which our singlular calling gets lived out” I think it’s just as easy to defend an argument for bi-vocational Christians.
That’s all actually kind of beside the point. Here were our main talking points and my summary from our time together last Friday (via an article written by DF)…
1) Bi-vocational ministry breeds congregational participation in the life of a church.
When those who lead a church community are bi-vocational, they are more easily seen as those entrusted to guide and direct, as opposed to “get everything done.” This returns ministry to its rightful place, the corporate body.
2) Bi-vocational ministry guards against excessive organization and programming.
Without full-time people to create and maintain all sorts of programming options, the life of a congregation is able to be more relational and organic, drawing on the heart and commitment of the community.
3) Bi-vocational ministry fosters a church culture that is outward focused.
Bi-vocational ministry affords those who lead local church communities the opportunity to invest more of their time and energy in the marketplace. This, in turn, serves as a model for the rest of the congregation of living out a faithful witness in all areas of life.
This didn’t come up, perhaps because it’s so obvious, but when those who serve church congregations as leaders can supplement their income with alternative sources of revenue, more money is freed up for the community to meet the needs of others.
I tend to agree with these statements, but as a friend brought up in the course of discussion, embracing an ecclesiology which practices bi-vocationalism probably makes for all-around healthier churches and healthier pastors. The reason is that the inverse of these marks is typically true. Having full-time paid pastors stymies congregational participation in the life of church communities (why do it when you have people that you pay to do it?), encourages excessive organization and programming (afterall, if you’re paid full-time, you have to come up with stuff to do), and fosters an inward focused church culture (because apparently being a ‘professional’ minister is what those who are really serious about their faith do!).
Can you practice an ecclesiology predicated on one or multiple full-time paid staff that accomplishes the same ends as this bi-vocational vision? I am quite sure that many people will read this and try to make the case that multiple full-time paid staff just have that much more time to give to doing just that. The problem is that the medium doesn’t match the message. I think this is what we are after at Life on the Vine – embodying a style of congregational leadership that itself communicates (if not necessitates) our commitment to fostering a church in which the responsibility for equipping people for ministry to one another and the world falls to the body and not paid professionals.
Lots of discussion to be had on this topic, so I am interested and anxious for feedback, pushback, and further thoughts and questions.
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Hey, I'm JR - welcome to the blog.
I'm just an average guy trying to shape his identity around God's dream for the world and his place in it. This blog is a place for me (and you!) to reflect on and discuss all that might mean. Looking for a bit more on me? Check out the about me. Peace.
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