lifeasmission
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Toward A Missional Vision of Theological Education: Cultural Pioneering
Previous posts in this Series:
Preliminary Thoughts | The Root of the Problem | The Fruit of the Problem | New Soil | Community Rootedness | Character Formation | Conviction Shaping | Contextual Training
Christendom bore no real need for leaders who were cultural pioneers. After all, if the culture is already Christian, what do we have to pioneer? It would be logical to conclude then, that as Christendom crumbles, the need for leaders with the skills for cultural pioneering would increase. This would be true and mistaken at the same time. It’s true that we have a greater and greater need for cultural pioneers, but the crumbling of Christendom isn’t the reason. Rather, a missional vision of the church carries with it an inherent need for leaders who serve as cultural pioneers which means we need a vision of theological education capable of equipping men and women for this task.
Allow me to offer just 2 basic points to support my argument for this need.
First, missional churches operate out of the assumption that mission is part of God’s very character and nature. God sends the son, the Father and the Son send the Holy Spirit, the Trinity sends the Church as the Body of Christ. Little wonder then that missional church leaders lament the modern phenomenon of churches playing the role of vendors of religious goods and services that spend the bulk of their time, energy, and money trying to get people to come. Missional churches are not those who focus on offering the best “Christian” stuff (teaching, programs, groups, etc.), but those who focus on engaging with world’s darkest and toughest needs.
Second, missional churches tend to be marked by their attention to Jesus’ announcement of the good news of God’s Kingdom, the new reality inaugurated in Jesus. Just as Jesus stood at odds with the culture of his day on account of his allegiance to God’s Kingdom, so too the missional church of today will find itself at odds with the culture of our day as we seek to embody God’s Kingdom through faith in Jesus. To understand the local church as an expression of a new reality, however, means that we recognize the need for leaders capable of cultural pioneering.
Current models of theological education seem to come up short in terms of their fit to equip male and female leaders on both these counts. How then are we to go about doing so? I offer three ideas for the training of cultural pioneers.
1) Deep involvement in a missional community
There is no better way to learn how to be a cultural pioneer that to participate in a community that is seeking to do this very thing. My hope and expectation would be that to a great degree, the various aspects of this missional vision of theological education that I have been describing would all serve to produce leaders who think and act in terms of cultural pioneering. I have a hard time imagining that someone could give themselves to a process of formation that is rooted in community and centered around character formation through the shaping of Kingdom convictions and contextual training and emerge as someone who would rather manage a program driven group of individuals than lead a community into the world as an expression of God’s alternative reality.
2) Encourage Cultural Creation & Cultivation
I am indebted to Andy Crouch and his book, Culture Making, for my thinking (and language) on this. The power and trajectory of Christendom resulted in a church that, at various times, thought of “culture” as some monolithic thing that it could condemn, critique, copy, or consume. Only now, as we increasingly find ourselves on the margins of society, are we rediscovering the postures of creating and cultivating culture. We create culture through values, practices, and imagination. However, as Crouch says,
We cannot make culture without culture. And this means that creation begins with cultivation – taking care of the good things culture has already handed on to us. The first responsibility of culture makers is not to make something new but to become fluent in the cultural tradition to which we are responsible. Before we can be culture makers, we must be culture keepers.
This leads us directly to the third ingredient in forming cultural pioneers.
3) Practicing Discernment
The need for skilled discernment is going nowhere but up! Never before in human history has so much information and so many opinions been so easily accessible. Add to this the pervasive individualism and relativism of Western culture and you are left with a cultural nightmare for those who believe in such a thing as contextual faithfulness to biblical truth. As Jesus’ disciples were, we must be taught to see, hear, and feel with eyes, ears, and hearts attuned to the reality of the Kingdom of God in our midst. How are we ever to create culture unless we can discern our way through it as followers of Jesus? This takes years of practice within community and remains a lifelong discipline.
Are there other aspects of cultural pioneering that you think I’m missing? How else might we equip others to this end? Anxious for your (end of the year and end of the series!) thoughts.
Toward A Missional Vision of Theological Education: Contextual Training
Previous posts in this Series:
Preliminary Thoughts | The Root of the Problem | The Fruit of the Problem | New Soil | Community Rootedness | Character Formation | Conviction Shaping
I have tried to make a case that a missional vision of theological education is one rooted in community that emphasizes the formation of Christan character marked by Kingdom convictions. I would further suggest that a missional vision of theological education will seek to train leaders contextually.
This is missiology 101. Urban ministry is different than suburban. Ministry amongst the poor is different than ministry amongst the affluent. Ministry with adolescents is different than ministry with senior citizens. Traditional theological education, however, is not equipped to train people with these nuances in mind. The dominant expression of theological education within Christendom has been training at geographically specific institutions. These schools of course bring their own context to bear on the training they are doing, but are necessarily limited by that same feature. Geography isn’t the only problem, the very model of education employed in the seminary environment distances, if not outright separates, theological education from contextual factors. Some schools have begun trying to correct this problem through online education, allowing students to continue serving in their present context while doing intensive biblical & theological study. As I said here, these innovations within the current system of theological education are helpful, but they aren’t aimed at the other aspects of missional theological education that I have already covered. So, the question before us is,Within a missional vision of theological education, how will contextual leadership development take place?
I can think of at least three aspects of a beginning answer to that question.
1) Networks
Church networks are the missional answer to the decay of denominations. For good or for bad, denominations are crumbling. In an era of post’s (post-modernity, post-Christendom, etc.) you can add to the list post-denominationalism. Springing up in their place are inter-denominational networks of churches. In my opinion, the best of these are striving to make a shared vision of missional living more central than individual points of doctrine. Besides always being rooted in a particular context, the realities of globalization and pluralism mean that no one congregation has the capacity to train leaders for the church of the future by itself. It must look outside. If leaders are to be identified by local communities and if these same communities are to take primary responsibility for their holistic formation and contextual training, then meaningful involvement in a healthy network of missional churches through the sharing of resources and common ministry is a big part of how we accomplish the contextual training of leaders.
2) Apprenticeship
The most valuable resources to the spiritual formation & training of leaders are men and women who offer years of faithful service within a given context. Reading, writing, and peer discussion all have a vital place in the formation of missional church leaders, but all of these dimensions gain their final value in terms of their practical implications in a given context. Seasoned leaders are invaluable in helping to achieve this goal. Cultivating missional church leaders who have the skills necessary to help a body of people understand the gospel and its implications in contextually appropriate ways calls for a mentor-apprentice(s) dimension to any process of theological education.
3) Civic Engagement
Civic engagement needs to increasingly become a hallmark of both missional church ministry and leadership formation. Immersion has long been a defining mark of truly cross-cultural ministry. Therefore, those churches who embrace the West as a mission field should immediately resonate with the idea that the best way to become incarnationally faithful is to immerse themselves in their context. The reason for this is at least 2-fold 1) To discover where and how God is already at work. 2) To discern what incarnationally faithful witness to the gospel will mean and look like.
If it’s not already obvious, this aspect of a missional vision of theological education is tied directly to the centrality of the Missio Dei for a missional ecclesiology. A big part of what makes missional churches missional is their abdication of attractional approaches to church and ministry in favor of incarnational ones. All that Jesus said and did was said and done in light of the people he was speaking to and the place he was speaking in. In both ministry and leadership formation, we do well to follow this pattern of contextual wisdom.
What has your experience with contextual leadership training been? Do you see other ways to accomplish this goal in or outside of traditional models of theological education?
In my next post, I hope to round things off with some thoughts on cultural pioneering as a final mark of a missional vision of theological education.
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.Some Struggles with John Piper
When I was a sophomore in college, I helped to lead a high school mission trip to Russia. On the plane, I was reading a book someone had recommended, “Desiring God,” by John Piper. Through the first 1/2 of the book, I was looking for a way to throw it off the plane – I thought it was crap. By the end of it, I was transformed. I had a completely different take on the nature of Christian faith and discipleship that has stood the test of time.Once I started to get into Podcasts, Piper’s was one of the first ones I subscribed (iTunes link) to. I still listen to it with some regularity and commend it to you.
When I was contemplating resigning my role as a student pastor in 2004 to pursue more theological education, I decided to take some time off to think, pray, reflect, and ask questions. I traveled to Minneapolis, visited Bethlehem Baptist Church where John Piper preaches, and had the chance to talk with him for a while after one of the services. An alum of Fuller Theological Seminary, I expected him to be encouraged that this was one of my options. He wasn’t. He said that they had gone down a dangerous to path toward Christian liberalism.
I went to Fuller anyway and discovered that John was wrong.
My idolatry of Piper broken, I began to notice some other aspects of his theology that I had a really hard time with.
I think he gets the issue of God’ sovereignty wrong – not because I believe the opposite, but because I think the whole Calvinist/Armenian debate is flawed at its core. Both positions assume that salvation is something one can have and therefore argue about who secures our having it – God or man. With good intention, some will attempt a middle road and say it’s a both/and issue. It’s not. It’s a neither/nor issue. When you begin to understand that “salvation belongs to God” (Rev. 7:10) and is therefore something we can only participate in, never have, the whole debate changes.
I also lament Piper’s view on women. Again, he will argue the “conservative” side of the complimentarian/egalitarian debate, which I think begins with flawed premises. Do men and women compliment each other or are they equal? That question isn’t nearly biblical enough to be of any real value. A more important question, at least as the Bible is concerned, is, how do men and women, who only together image God, as couples and singles, function together in doing and equipping others for ministry. And the plain answer is that they serve as co-laborers – that each and every aspect of ministry, from preaching and teaching, to caring for children, suffers when not practiced by both capable and gifted women and men.
There was much bally-who in the blog-o-sphere last week when Piper connected a tornado in Minneapolis to a meeting the ELCA was having regarding the issue of homosexuality (here’s the original article and a follow up one). I have listened to Piper enough that I think what he meant to say was that whenever natural disaster strikes it is an opportunity for us to remember and turn to God, but he seemed to be saying quite a bit more than that and it calls for some accounting.
Lastly, he’s got a bad take on the woman at the well (John 4). Like perhaps the majority of preachers, he is quick to assume the moral degradation of the woman Jesus encounters, frequently noting that “she’s sleeping with her boyfriend.” As I take into account the cultural factors at play in this passage as well as the fuller scope of Jesus’ ministry, I find this interpretation to be maddening.
Women had not rights in Jesus’ day; they had not power to divorce a husband; they were property. Unless they were from a royal or extremely well off family, they had almost no hope of being able to provide for themselves. As the Bible makes clear, the ability to produce children more often than not determined a woman’s worth.
While we might trip over some of the translated language, I think it’s much more faithful to the text to understand this Samaritan woman, not as a whore (essentially what Piper and others tend to d0), but as a shamed and broken victim of injustice. When Jesus notes that this woman had had five husbands, he’s not digging her for her sin – when did Jesus ever do that except for the religious leaders?! And when he says that the man she now has is not her husband, he’s not some *&$%^&# calling her out for “sleeping with her boyfriend” – again, just doesn’t fit the Jesus of the gospels. He is calling out the source of her shame and injustice so that he can heal it – something he did all the time.
I love John Piper as a brother in Christ. His passion and zeal for the supremacy of God captivates and inspires me. But here’s the final thing about John and this gets me more than anything else. I have never heard him say (and he’s really public!), “I might be wrong. There are other followers of Jesus who believe differently than me and they just might be on to something.” Even if he has said something like this at some point – it is quite definitely not a theme in his teaching the way I wish it was. I’m not talking about being wishy-washy. I am taking about some good ol fashioned humility and firm trust in God’s work over his theology.
I am not writing this to disparage. Beginning with myself, I would ask anyone who has some theological issues with another brother or sister in Christ, to think first and foremost about who they really are and what they have done for the sake of the gospel. I am no anti-Piperian. I consider John a true partner in the gospel and would run to his defense on most occasions. But this is just some stuff that I really struggle with enough to hope that others would as well.
Believing the Right Way
As I have mentioned before in a post on “What is Missional?,” Western Christians are bifurcated into two main groups – those who emphasize believing the right things (classic conservatives) and those who emphasize living the right way (classic liberals). Thankfully, there are people like Pete Rollins who desires to help people embrace not a middle-ground, but an altogether alternative paradigm, believing the right way, illustrated in this blog post of his from this past January.Without equivocation or hesitation I fully and completely admit that I deny the resurrection of Christ. This is something that anyone who knows me could tell you, and I am not afraid to say it publicly, no matter what some people may think…
I deny the resurrection of Christ every time I do not serve at the feet of the oppressed, each day that I turn my back on the poor; I deny the resurrection of Christ when I close my ears to the cries of the downtrodden and lend my support to an unjust and corrupt system.
However there are moments when I affirm that resurrection, few and far between as they are. I affirm it when I stand up for those who are forced to live on their knees, when I speak for those who have had their tongues torn out, when I cry for those who have no more tears left to shed.
His perspective shows both the short comings of language and the shallowness of the things we typically consider most important. This is indeed the sort of belief that I think the Bible calls us to.
Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say? I will show you what he is like who comes to me and hears my words and puts them into practice. He is like a man building a house, who dug down deep and laid the foundation on rock. When a flood came, the torrent struck that house but could not shake it, because it was well built. But the one who hears my words and does not put them into practice is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. The moment the torrent struck that house, it collapsed and its destruction was complete. (Lk. 6:46-49)
Some years ago, discussions and arguments regarding the inerrancy, infallability, inwhatever of Scripture ceased to be all that meaningful to me. It’s difficult to see this as an incredibly meaningful debate to Jesus. On the other hand, it’s easy for me to imagine God caring deeply about the extent to which we are seeking to bring our lives into harmony with the reality held out to us in the Bible.
I wonder who truly has the “higher” view of Scripture – the one who contends for its inerrancy or the one who demonstrates its truthfulness by the way they live?
If you’re really into this sort of discussion, feel free to have a glance at a paper I wrote on the topic of the opportunity afforded the Christian faith by the cultural turn toward Postmodernity here.
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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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