Posts

Re-post: Back to the Future: A Sankofa Moment

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Each month, we post a series of blogs around a common topic. This month, Rev. Shavon Starling-Louis, NEXT Church interim communications specialist, will be sharing particularly timely past NEXT Church blog posts. These posts point to hope and wisdom for these days that you might have completely forgotten about but are faithful reflections. We invite you to join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.

This article was originally posted on December 27, 2013. The author’s ministry context may have changed since then.

by Paul Roberts

17 If you say to yourself, “These nations are more numerous than I; how can I dispossess them?” 18 do not be afraid of them. Just remember what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt, 19 the great trials that your eyes saw, the signs and wonders, the mighty hand and the outstretched arm by which the Lord your God brought you out. (Deuteronomy 7:17-19)

13 So in the lowest parts of the space behind the wall, in open places, I stationed the people according to their families, with their swords, their spears, and their bows. 14 After I looked these things over, I stood up and said to the nobles and the officials and the rest of the people, “Do not be afraid of them. Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight for your kin, your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your homes. (Nehemiah 4:13-14)

And Stephen replied: “Brothers and fathers, listen to me. The God of glory appeared to our ancestor Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran” (Acts 7:2)

These are just a few snapshots in the life of Israel, moments when they are commanded to go forward into new and sometimes dangerous places and circumstances. Each time, the people of God are challenged to first look back, to remember, to be confident not in themselves but in the God who is constantly sending and rescuing and delivering and saving and calling and loving.

sankofaIn the African-American community, we have embraced the concept of SANKOFA, from a West African proverb. SANKOFA teaches us that we must go back to our roots in order to move forward. That is, we should reach back and gather the best of what our past has to teach us, so that we can achieve our full potential as we move forward. SANKOFA is visually represented by a bird that is in forward flight while looking back, with the egg of the future in its mouth.

At Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary, our tag line is “called to create what’s next.” But to create what’s next, I believe we do well to first look back, gather all the best in preparation for exploring what’s next. Should theological education today resemble that represented in scripture? Many would question whether that is even reasonable, but, if it should, then it seems that that education must be less about the accumulation of knowledge and more about the formation of a way of life, of being.

Pastoral education should not take place in an isolated academic environment, but in the midst of the world for which the disciple is being prepared. It should, at least in part, take place at a point within which there is a seamless integration of spiritual, intellectual and practical concerns; there should be strong mentoring/partnering relationships with individuals who have not just experience, but are themselves active learners, willing to push against and test the status quo, who themselves embody faith rather than just imbibe knowledge about faith. These mentors should be men and women who can exegete the culture as effectively as they can exegete Scripture and are able to guide the disciple in how to weave both exegeses together.  So, pedagogy should move outside the walls of academe and into the world of the missioning God where people live and work and worship. The interaction between academy, church and community should be always in flux.

Looking back for one more moment, Gregory of Nazianzus (who fled the pastorate four times and was finally forcibly ordained by his congregation) noted that pastoral formation is a life-long endeavor: “Not even extreme old age would be too long a limit to assign.”). Becoming a pastor is the work of a lifetime. Theological education needs to give pastors a better start on becoming a pastor.

Roberts

Paul Timothy Roberts is president-dean of Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary and a member of the NEXT Church Strategy Team. You can watch his keynote to the 2013 NEXT Gathering here.

2017 National Gathering Ignite: Lee Hinson-Hasty

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Lee Hinson-Hasty, senior director of Theological Education Funds Development at the Presbyterian Foundation, gives an Ignite presentation on the future of theological education and clergy at the 2017 NEXT Church National Gathering.

Meditations of the Heart by Howard Thurman “Sheds a Little Light”

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by Lee Hinson-Hasty

Eighty years ago (1937) this month, the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. published a poem by the Rev. Howard Thurman, an African American Baptist minister, professor of theology, and dean of the chapel at Howard University. The title of the poem was “O God, I Need Thee.” Thurman poetically describes our need of God’s sense for time, order, and future.

This month, the NEXT Church blog will help us all investigate God’s timing, order, and future by recommending and reviewing books that shed a little light on what is happening all around and within us in these seemingly chaotic days of 2017. The inspiration for this phrase, “shed a little light,” comes from James Taylor’s song, “Shed a Little Light.” You can watch a video of it being performed by the Lowcountry SC Voices in Columbia here.

Lent, if nothing else, is a time for reflection on what has been and living toward what is possible with God’s help. We die to our old selves as we pray to rise to newness of life in fullest form.

Thurman published Meditations of the Heart in 1953, the second in a volume of meditations that were originally written for personal and congregational use at Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco where he served as co-pastor with Alfred G. Fisk, a Presbyterian minister, and professor of philosophy from 1944-1953. Both were deeply concerned about building bridges of understanding among varied races, cultures, and faiths.

The purpose of these meditations is, as Thurman puts it, “to focus the mind and the heart upon God as the Eternal Source and Goal of life.” The meditations in this 210-page book are chock full of insight, centering prayer, and nourishment for the journey. For me, all three are needed in these days as they were for his congregation in the 1940’s and ’50’s. Meditations are the type of sustenance that fed civil rights leaders including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr,. who was, in many ways, mentored by Thurman.

Mentoring voices from around the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and beyond will follow this post throughout the coming weeks, each from various walks of life and ministry contexts including those leading theological schools, congregations, presbyteries, the General Assembly, and non-profit organizations. Each will identify their context for ministry and call, a book they recommend, what the book is about, and why they believe it is critical reading today. My prayer is that these will become timely and descriptive “meditations of the heart,” so to speak, for a holy pilgrimage into God’s imagined future: the NEXT Church.

My sincere hope is that these posts will also provide a foundational backdrop for the conversations many of us will be having at the 2017 National Gathering on Well-Being in a Thirsty World.

I am Lee Hinson-Hasty and my call to ministry centers on vocation of leaders in the church and the world. I am always curious about how we find what Thomas Merton described as “our true selves.” Discerning vocation is, I believe, a personal, spiritual, religious, and theological journey, and, for Reformed Christians, it is a communal process. Vocation discerned becomes educational and, ultimately, economic in a particular social context. As a resource and advocate for theological education in the PC(USA) for more than a decade, I find my current call as Senior Director of Theological Education Funds Development at the Presbyterian Foundation provides me the best opportunity I know to invite and embolden others to used their gifts to glorify God in ways that will empower leaders of Christ’s Church by supporting future ministers. I pray regularly with James Taylor and others that we will all “Recognize there are ties between us… ties of hope and love, sister and brotherhood. …. We are bound together by the task that stands before us and the road that lies ahead. We are bound and we are bound.”

Serving Our Creative God in Creative Ministry and Ecofeminist Theology

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Each month, we post a series of blogs around a common topic. This month, Layton Williams is curating a series we’re calling “Ministry Out of the Box,” which features stories of ministers serving God in unexpected, diverse ways. What can ordained ministry look like outside of the parish? How might we understand God calling us outside of the traditional ministry ‘box?’ We invite you to join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter!

by Abby Mohaupt

I knew I was going to seminary by the time I was 14.

Actually, by then I knew I was going to McCormick Theological Seminary to get an MDiv and then be a pastor in a church where I would preach about how Jesus is pretty cool and God loves everyone.

I thought I would say prayers over bread and juice and I would baptize babies.

I did enroll at McCormick when I was 22 years old, but between my middle school self and my post-college self, I fell in love with creation. I realized I was better at listening to God when I was hiking in the prairie than anywhere else. I studied religion and sociology as an undergraduate and my white, able-bodied, educated, middle class self learned to unpack categories of difference and systematic oppression on the streets and in a shelter of Chicago.

When I met with my presbytery, I knew I was really called to do environmental ministry and antiracism work. I could tell you about my ordination process—how I often forgot to talk about how much I love Jesus until I started talking about how he’s like Captain Planet or how I felt a lot of joy in taking the ordination exams or even how my first call let me explore ministry in really prophetic ways.

But my ministry has never been traditional.

My first call was in a wonderful congregation that let me spend 10 hours a week at a non-profit that works with farmworkers. When those 10 hours stretched into 15 and 20 hours a week, I knew that my heart was not fairly in the work of the congregation. God was calling me to be immersed in the work of a rural northern California community seeking to build bridges between farmworkers and the people who eat food every day. I fell in love with the children I worked with, who taught me to sing boldly and to carry stickers and chocolate with me at all times. I grew from meeting with congregations who sought to build relationships with the rural community, and I learned to be fierce in asking congregations to pray and to give their time and to share their financial resources.  My heart grew three sizes from working long days with colleagues who made me laugh and who wondered if my two graduate degrees in environmental theology really qualified me to sort through the donations of crayons and toiletries we so regularly received.

I gave thanks over juice boxes and granola bars and held children’s hands as we explored the scientific properties of water.

About a year into that second call, I realized that I was being called away. My love for studying and reading and teaching was an indication that I might be called to a PhD program. I looked for programs in ecology and theology and applied to four schools. In one week I visited three of the schools and knew by then I would be moving across the country to the east coast to learn to be a professor/clergy/activist.

It mattered to me just how I’d tell my beloved community I was leaving, and I eventually chose my program at Drew University based on conversations with some of the farmworkers and locals.  

This is a third call—a call in which I spend my days auditing extra classes and learning to be a better organizer and antiracist ally, in which I write papers about political and ecofeminist theologies and climate trauma and in which my heart swells with the four-month-old friendships of my peers. This is where I talk about how much I love Jesus for his solidarity with the poor, and how I see God’s heart breaking by the state of creation in climate change. I don’t preach anymore, unless you count the freelance writing and multi-media art I do, grappling with the sacred texts of the Bible.

There’s an arboretum here, and I run through it, listening to God and seeking joy, grateful for work my 14-year-old self would never recognize but for which she deeply longed.

abby mohaupt is a PhD student at Drew University in the Religion and Society Program. She’s the moderator of Fossil Free PCUSA, co-editor of Presbyterians for Earth Care’s EARTH newsletter, and a member of Presbyterian Peace Fellowship’s activist council. When abby’s not reading or running, she’s often drawing with crayons and seeking joy. she splits her time between CA, IL, and NJ.

Accounting for Hope

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Each month we ask a different person from the NEXT Church community to assemble a series of posts around a particular theme. This month, Lee Hinson-Hasty is curating a conversation around theological education. Have ideas or reflections to share? Offer your thoughts in comments, on our Facebook page, or contact us here.

By Edwin David Aponte

Slide1When I told someone that I was asked to reflect on the future of theological education, I was asked, “Is there a future for theological education?” That is a reasonable question given that theological education in the United States is at a crossroads of relevancy and effectiveness to church and society. We are in a time of major cultural changes, demographic shifts, and competing visions.

Most theological education can be traced back to a model from the early 19th century and the short-lived cultural ascendancy of the historic Protestant mainline denominations of the 1950s and early 1960s. But huge social and cultural changes have taken place in which many Americans do not identify with any religion, let alone 1950s Protestantism. The Pew Research Center reports that one-fifth of the U.S. public – and a third of adults under 30 – are religiously unaffiliated, including more than 13 million self-described atheists and agnostics (nearly 6% of the U.S. public), as well as the so-called “Nones” roughly 33 million people who say they have no particular religious affiliation. Younger people who had some connection to church are leaving in droves, concurrent with generations who never had the experience of any faith community. But this doesn’t mean that there is a decline of spirituality as many in these same groups work for the common good drawing on their own concepts of spirituality and meaning.

In addition to shifts in spirituality and social involvement there are new models and experiences of learning. Computers and tablets are used in many schools. Prominent universities are experimenting with MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) offering free unlimited worldwide participation in the same course via lectures, videos, and interactive forums. Other types of online distance learning are common as people earn degrees or selectively choose from a buffet of short-term opportunities via the Internet.

People are exploring new ways to be church, whether it is called emergent, or missional, a combination, or something different all together. Various types of social media show that vibrant virtual communities are possible. There are worldwide congregations whose life is mostly online as they push the boundaries of time and place. Other congregations are intentionally multicultural across racial, ethnic, and class lines, something still rare in the United States. Increasingly it is recognized that the locus of Christianity shifts from the “West” to places like South America, Africa, and East Asia.

Some seminaries are only just beginning to get caught up with the digital revolution. Certain seminaries are accused of preparing graduates for a church and society of the past. Add to these challenges that many seminaries enrollments have declined since the 1990s, while budget deficits grow. In such a context what is the mission and vision of theological education? One passage of Scripture that helps my thinking is 1 Peter 3:15, “make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you” (NRSV).  One mission of theological education for the present and the future is to help people called to ministry to articulate Christian hope for these times and places. Excellent seminaries of the future will need to embrace what always has been true, namely that people pursue theological education for a variety of reasons. Some come to theological education with hope well defined, and yet are still “surprised by joy” through deeper understandings of that hope. Others come as searcher and discover reasons for hope, meaning, and undreamt of avenues for service. Some are called to congregational ministry, but seminaries should acknowledge what God has affirmed that the church and the world also need excellent counselors, teachers, and those called to specialized ministries.

Future theological education will embrace gifts of time, space, and community to consider the hope of what we have experienced of God in Christ. Theological education can explore how that hope impacts our society and our life together as we realize we should work toward the common good. At our best in theological education we engage the traditions, but in ways that are relevant for this moment in time, as we deepen our emphasis on ministry and the formation of leaders who develop the contextual capacity to respond to shifting situations.  As theological education produces excellent leaders for contextual ministry, seminaries will be more nimble, offering education in a multiple formats and not just for those pursuing degrees.  Seminaries will be engaged in ongoing dialogue with the communities and contexts they serve.

Aponte-2012.jpgEdwin David Aponte is Vice President for Academic Affairs, Dean of the Faculty, and Professor of Christianity and Culture at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, IN. He is a member of Whitewater Valley Presbytery and earned the PhD in religion and culture from Temple University. Aponte’s most recent book is ¡Santo! Varieties of Latino/a Spirituality (Orbis Books 2012). edaponte@cts.edu

Back to the Future: A Sankofa Moment

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Each month we ask a different person from the NEXT Church community to assemble a series of posts around a particular theme. This month, Lee Hinson-Hasty is curating a conversation around theological education. Have ideas or reflections to share? Offer your thoughts in comments, on our Facebook page, or contact us here.

By Paul Timothy Roberts

17 If you say to yourself, “These nations are more numerous than I; how can I dispossess them?” 18 do not be afraid of them. Just remember what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt, 19 the great trials that your eyes saw, the signs and wonders, the mighty hand and the outstretched arm by which the Lord your God brought you out (Deuteronomy 7:17-19).

13 So in the lowest parts of the space behind the wall, in open places, I stationed the people according to their families, with their swords, their spears, and their bows. 14 After I looked these things over, I stood up and said to the nobles and the officials and the rest of the people, “Do not be afraid of them. Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight for your kin, your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your homes (Nehemiah 4:13-14).”

And Stephen replied: “Brothers and fathers, listen to me. The God of glory appeared to our ancestor Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran” (Acts 7:2)…

These are just a few snapshots in the life of Israel, moments when they are commanded to go forward into new and sometimes dangerous places and circumstances. Each time, the people of God are challenged to first look back, to remember, to be confident not in themselves but in the God who is constantly sending and rescuing and delivering and saving and calling and loving.

sankofaIn the African-American community, we have embraced the concept of SANKOFA, from a West African proverb. SANKOFA teaches us that we must go back to our roots in order to move forward. That is, we should reach back and gather the best of what our past has to teach us, so that we can achieve our full potential as we move forward. SANKOFA is visually represented by a bird that is in forward flight while looking back, with the egg of the future in its mouth.

At Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary, our tag line is “called to create what’s next.” But to create what’s NEXT, I believe we do well to first look back, gather all the best in preparation for exploring what’s next. Should theological education today resemble that represented in scripture? Many would question whether that is even reasonable, but, if it should, then it seems that that education must be less about the accumulation of knowledge and more about the formation of a way of life, of being. Pastoral education should not take place in an isolated academic environment, but in the midst of the world for which the disciple is being prepared. It should, at least in part, take place at a point within which there is a seamless integration of spiritual, intellectual and practical concerns; there should be strong mentoring/partnering relationships with individuals who have not just experience, but are themselves active learners, willing to push against and test the status quo, who themselves embody faith rather than just imbibe knowledge about faith. These mentors should be men and women who can exegete the culture as effectively as they can exegete Scripture and are able to guide the disciple in how to weave both exegeses together.  So, pedagogy should move outside the walls of academe and into the world of the missioning God where people live and work and worship. The interaction between academy, church and community should be always in flux.

Looking back for one more moment, Gregory of Nazianzus (who fled the pastorate four times and was finally forcibly ordained by his congregation) noted that pastoral formation is a life-long endeavor: “Not even extreme old age would be too long a limit to assign.”). Becoming a pastor is the work of a lifetime. Theological education needs to give pastors a better start on becoming a pastor.

Roberts

Paul Timothy Roberts is president-dean of Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary and a member of the NEXT Church Strategy Team. You can watch his keynote to the 2013 NEXT Gathering here.

Preparation for Ministry Without A Safety Net

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Each month we ask a different person from the NEXT Church community to assemble a series of posts around a particular theme. This month, Lee Hinson-Hasty is curating a conversation around theological education. Have ideas or reflections to share? Offer your thoughts in comments, on our Facebook page, or contact us here.

By Kathy Wolf Reed

safety net copyWeek after week as I serve Christ’s church, I see theological education from some varied venues. As a pastor I see theological education playing out in Sunday school rooms and Bible studies, members of our church giving up free evenings to study Scripture together and vacation time to attend continuing education events. As a member of my seminary’s alumni council I am twice a year invited to come see what God is doing on the campus whose halls I once roamed – now complete with technological innovations I could not have imagined possible that first summer as I sat in the hallway on my laptop straining to find just the right spot where I could connect to the unreliable wifi. As a member of the PC(USA) Committee on Theological Education I am then privileged to take a broader view of theological education as I serve alongside seminary presidents and teaching and ruling elders from throughout the church to try, in as many different ways as we faithfully can, to keep our finger on the pulse of both church and academy and connect the two to create more seamless venues for training up leaders of faith, intelligence, and integrity in our churches.

However, all this aside, if you were to ask me where it is that I catch the most frequent glimpses of what is “coming and becoming” in theological education these days, I would have to turn to what has become one of my favorite tasks in ministry: serving on the Presbytery of Sheppards and Lapsley’s Council on Preparation for Ministry.

Like many CPMs, at some point along the way we imposed upon ourselves a duty to inform Inquirers and Candidates of what exactly they are getting themselves into when they enter the ordination process in today’s PC(USA).

“It won’t be easy,” we say.

“There are many more candidates that positions,” we remind.

“You’ll have debt,” we grimace.

“You likely won’t be able to work fulltime/in a big city/at a large church,” we warn.

I entered the process at a very different time – what, in retrospect, seems to have been the tail end of an era where it was common to recruit bright young twenty-somethings with a passion for church and throw boatloads of money at them to go to seminary.  The unspoken assumption as I was working on my MDiv was that each of us would graduate with our terms of call already worked out, head to large churches where we would serve an obligatory 3-5 years as associates, and then climb the proverbial ecclesial ladder to a solo pastorate, a bigger church, a “better” call.

Obviously, times have changed.  But, here is the exciting part – the landscape of the denomination has changed, but these new Inquirers’ enthusiasm and sense of God’s calling have remained resolute.  No jobs?  No worries.  Debt?  They’ll figure it out.  A need to take a creative approach to ministry?  They are up to the challenge.  What is coming and becoming in theological education, from my point of view, is a generation of leaders who understand that seminary is not a means to an end. As so many pilgrims before them: Moses, Abraham & Sarah, Jesus’ disciples, Paul and Barnabas – they are spending less time plotting out their five year plans and more time present in the moment that is their calling to pursue a theological education.

Their openness and courage is a call to us all.  As I think about my own situation (ironically, an associate pastor at a large church) and where God might lead me next, I realize there is no ladder to be climbed, no checklist of demands I need be making, only a willingness to go where the Spirit is truly leading.  Thank you to all of the upcoming leaders of the church who model for us what it means to be faithful to Christ’s call without a safety net.  And thank you to all the saints of theological education upon whose shoulders we all stand.

kathyRev. Kathy Wolf Reed is the Associate Pastor for Young Adult and Family Ministry at First Presbyterian Church in Tuscaloosa, AL.  She also currently serves as the Chairperson of the PC(USA) Committee on Theological Education and is the Chairperson-Elect of the Presbytery of Sheppards and Lapsley Council on Preparation for Ministry.  She is married to Rev. Nick Reed who also serves at First Presbyterian in Tuscaloosa, AL.  They have a one-year-old daughter Hannah and are expecting their second child in February 2014.  Read more about Kathy in a Dec. 12 Presbyterian News Service Story. 

Image: shutterstock.com/Tom Gowanlock

Lighter on Our Feet into the Wide Open Arms of God

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Each month we ask a different person from the NEXT Church community to assemble a series of posts around a particular theme. This month, Lee Hinson-Hasty is curating a conversation around theological education. Have ideas or reflections to share? Offer your thoughts in comments, on our Facebook page, or contact us here.

By Wendy Fletcher

painted cross copyWriting at the end of the 1960’s, Canadian author Pierre Burton observed that theological education, rather than serving as a vanguard which helped the rapidly changing church blaze a path to the future, functioned instead as a rearguard action that lagged behind the church sweeping up the pieces. Too often, in the immediately preceding decades, this has been all too true.

Of course I do believe that our seminaries and theological schools intended otherwise. However, the weight of the dual expectations of church and academy, so freighted with the commitment to a twentieth century professional model of clerical preparation, and a residual anticipation of the way church in the old world was, imagining itself at the centre of things, theological schools have lumbered.

Theological education for the future will need to be much lighter on its feet. If ever there was a day when its resources are needed in front of the change rather than behind it, that day is today.  Our context is one in which traditional models of Christian practice are in decline and one in which the Spirit of God appears to blowing manifold news forms of Christian practice everywhere on the ground of our culture. Only theological education which embraces this, not as crisis but as kairos – as the opportunity which God is giving us for faithful following in this generation – will thrive.

In this time of change, models of education are required that understand:

  • we are educating communities at the grassroots of church and  society for spiritual leadership and faith based discipleship rather than stand alone individual professionals;
  • learning which deepens spiritual practice – that practice which will keep us alive and able to scatter ourselves as seeds in hope of  God’s new day – is at least as important as the teaching of the classical academic disciplines;
  • we are preparing leaders to live a radically new missiology – one that understands that to live love rather than speak love in relating to this society where our  words of faith are increasingly not intelligible to our culture is key;
  • education that empowers us for faithful discipleship must be accessible to a broad swath of our people, which means it needs to be local, affordable and relevant in the context into which it presumes to speak.

Two things I know: this future will require risk; there is nowhere for us to fall in our risk-taking in faith, but into the wide-open arms of the mercy of God.

May we risk boldly in sure and certain hope of the resurrected life promised in God.

Fletcher, Wendy HeadshotWendy Fletcher is the professor of the History of Christianity at Vancouver School of Theology (VST), a multi-denominational graduate school located on the campus of the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada, where she has served for over 10 years. She previously held the position of principal and dean of VST. Prior to her appointment at UBC, the Rev. Dr. Fletcher served for 12 years as professor of history at the University of Western Ontario, Huron College.

For the past two decades Fletcher has worked in a variety of roles with the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) of North America. She served for several years as a commissioner on the ATS Accreditation Commission, as an accreditation visitor and as a seminar leader on the subjects of leadership, conflict resolution and women in leadership. In addition to serving as a director and board member of various professional and academic societies, she is the author of numerous published works on women and Christianity, spirituality and religion and ethnicity, and First Nations Education.

Fletcher holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Western Ontario, a Master of Divinity degree from Huron College, and a Ph.D. from the University of St. Michael’s College.

Image: shutterstock.com/Leks052

Three Observations

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Each month we ask a different person from the NEXT Church community to assemble a series of posts around a particular theme. This month, Lee Hinson-Hasty is curating a conversation around theological education. Have ideas or reflections to share? Offer your thoughts in comments, on our Facebook page, or contact us here.

By Jonathan Strandjord

children_youth_1Observation #1: Theological Education of Public Leaders is Becoming More Plural in its Forms and at the Same Time More Connected in its Development and Execution

For several decades, Lutheran churches in North America have done nearly all their work in theological education for public ministry using one standard model: an M.Div. structured as two years of on-campus study followed by a one year internship and a final year on campus.  This shared pattern has been seen as a key way our church fosters a connected leadership and a common theological conversation.  In the last few years we’ve added a certificate model, two different ways of doing an M.Div. using distributed learning, and a first-year-online program.  In the next two years we will likely see at least three additional ways of earning the M.Div., including a 2+2  model (two years on campus followed by a two-year residency internship during which one also does course work via intensives and/or online courses), a “fully embedded” model in which  the entire degree is program is done in ministry contexts, and a competency-based program.

So, how’s the whole “connected leadership” thing going in the midst of multiplying diversity?  So far, so good.  For one thing, the development of these new degree models have brought the ELCA seminary deans into much closer and more regular conversation with each other and with other church leaders (especially those related to the candidacy process).  Ideas are being shared, challenged and refined in an extended plurilogue.  And this multiplication of forms is also creating more ways for congregations and other contextual sites to be much more than just sites, but partners in creating new experiments in theological education (which invites them into conversation about why we bother with any of this in the first place).  In short, the multiplication of models has created an opportunity for the church and its seminaries to make theological education something that’s truly all of our business.

Observation #2: We’d Better Get Even More Serious About Theological Education—and Not Just for Pastors

The theological education of the laity has always mattered.  It matters more now than in a long time.  Our members today are far less likely than they were even just two or three decades ago to simply pick up from the surrounding culture the basics of the biblical story and faith’s wisdom.  We swim in a rising river of competing messages and narratives, a very high percentage of them aiming to sell us something. More and more we are addressed as consumers, customers.  And since “the customer is king”, we find ourselves in the sad, lonely, dangerous position of all monarchs: continuously manipulated and flattered, it is so easy to fall into simply buying the lies or (just as dangerous) becoming cynical.

Given the acute need this situation creates for the discernment that faith’s wisdom makes possible, the church’s work in the theological education of the laity is more important than ever.  But our longstanding patterns of lay education have relied on a cultural consensus that left some times open and basically uncontested for purposes of religious practice and education.  That calendrical consensus is basically over and we find ourselves struggling to find new patterns for fostering both biblical literacy and theological fluency.

The current weakness in theological education of the laity greatly limits the vitality of the church and, over time, acts to negate effectiveness of the theological education received by pastors and other leaders who graduate from our seminaries. For the United States has a deeply democratic culture. This is not to say that our political, economic and social institutions are in fact true to the principles of democracy.  Rather, having a “democratic culture” simply means that leaders (whether they actually are democratic or are in fact profoundly elitist or even thoroughly tyrannical) have to speak and act in terms that are broadly accessible if they are to be effective. Thus in a church where theological wisdom is not broadly accessible, church leaders move to operating primarily out of something else that is (such as the categories of popular psychology, family and group dynamics, management theory, the market).  No matter how excellent college and seminary theological education is, when our graduates find themselves swimming in a pool with a low theological temperature (a community where there is very little practice of  theological study, reflection and conversation), the powerful tendency is for our graduates’ own temperature to drop to match their surroundings rather than vice versa.[1]  To put it bluntly, if we can’t find ways to strengthen the theological education of laity, the theological education of pastors won’t matter—at least for long.

Observation #3: There’s a Lot of Lay Theological Education that Needs to Happen in Congregations—But it Can’t All Be Done There

Our seminaries need to prepare and support the church’s public leaders so they can serve as front-line theological educators in congregations.  Indeed, we need to significantly upgrade their preparation to strengthen congregations as learning communities.

At the same time, we need to move beyond treating these congregational learning communities as being almost entirely self-contained circles.  For one thing, it is very difficult for any but the largest congregations to offer the range of learning opportunities that would be adequate to equipping people to be able to live, work and relate faithfully, wisely and generously to the wide and expanding range of others with whom they relate in a globalizing world. Add to this the end of the calendrical consensus noted above that makes it very hard indeed to regularly engage a critical mass of learners for any length of time in a single local faith community—well, a rich array of educational opportunities becomes a practical impossibility in even the largest congregation if it works alone.   We need to create more trans-congregational educational efforts, lay schools, and digitally-mediated learning communities (all resourced by and resourcing our seminaries) that can grow to knit the whole church together in a theological education network.  If we can do this, we will have a wider, deeper and more durably connected leadership than we’ve ever had before.

 

[1] Joseph Sittler’s essay “The Maceration of the Minister” made this point vividly already several decades ago.

Strandjord, Jonathan PicJonathan Strandjord has served since 1998 as the Director for Seminaries for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.  His work centers on strengthening the ELCA’s theological education network through deepening collaboration among the eight seminaries and expanding cooperation with their many co-workers in the ELCA, its ecumenical partners and global companions.

Engaging and Changing the World

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Each month we ask a different person from the NEXT Church community to assemble a series of posts around a particular theme. This month, Lee Hinson-Hasty is curating a conversation around theological education. Have ideas or reflections to share? Offer your thoughts in comments, on our Facebook page, or contact us here.

By Susan Fox

impossible copyThe Huffington Post recently published an article by Wayne Meisel, a Presbyterian minister whose many hats include working with the Faith3 initiative. This program is designed to support and resource the Church in its efforts to share the gospel with young adults in ways that significantly impact their lives. The title of the Post article,“Seminaries that Change the World. A Growing List of Transitioning Institutions for Transformational Times,” grabbed my attention immediately. Now, those of us connected with theological education do a lot of talking about our formative and transformative work with students and institutions (i.e., “the church”), and often that language shows up in seminary mission and vision statements. But changing the world? That’s an audacious claim, except for the fact that this is exactly what Christ calls us to do.

Since the title further suggests that there’s a list of such seminaries, of course I quickly skimmed the article to learn which ones made the cut. Sure, the organization behind this concept doesn’t pretend to be the final arbiter of seminary status and worth. It’s a tiny upstart with a big heart. Still, which seminary doesn’t want to be among the “world-changing” elect?

Being included in a list of world-changing seminaries by a program that has no official standing or power may appear to be an empty honor, but what about the underlying premise? Seminaries that change the world must engage the world. Herein lies the trajectory of theological education both now and in the future. Our charge: to understand and effectively prepare leaders to serve in a world that bears little resemblance to the world in the days when the concept of a classic theological education first appeared. The tasks that confront the new pastor or educator today include what we might describe as “traditional” ministry but set in a context that is increasingly diverse and complex. A seminary that crosses its academic fingers and hopes its graduates learn how to navigate one’s ministry context post-graduation is fortunately becoming a thing of the past.

The Presbyterian and Reformed Theological Field Educators caucus is a close-knit group of colleagues who are, obviously, passionate about contextual education. As a member of that group for twenty-four years, I’ve seen exciting developments in our discipline. To do our work we must have one foot in the academy and the other in the church and world. Our contextual settings for internships increasingly intersect the multi-faith and multi-ethnic realities of society. Targeted internships in small membership congregations promote discernment of call while introducing students to a growing denominational demographic. In one of the most exciting developments in years, our students now have the opportunity to engage in new church developments through the 1001 Worshipping Communities initiative. Through participation in this program, students learn 21st century ministry skills such as entrepreneurship, evangelism, and discipleship. Most important, perhaps, is the paradigm-shifting experience of taking the church to the people, broadening the concept of “church” to include non-traditional formats.

There is much to be excited about in theological education today and in the future. There is also much work and, yes, reforming, to be done. In an age in which the futures of denominations and seminaries are subjects of serious speculation, it seems imminently clear that stasis is not an option. The driver of the evolving and future shape of theological education is found largely in the two adjectives in Meisel’s titular phrase, “Transitioning institutions for transformational times.” Gone are the days when theological education could be limited to a three-year immersion of Bible, history, and theology and the hope that any other necessary ministerial formation would occur in the first call context. Not only is that poor pedagogy for today; it is inadequate preparation for ministry in a world that is, in popular jargon, a hot mess. Information is not enough. Today’s seminaries are charged with teaching students whose gifts may not include familiarity with the language, disciplines, and traditions of faith. Our graduates walk into ministry settings that expect them to be more than founts of knowledge. They must hit the ground able to provide leadership in a community and world that is culturally and religiously complex, technologically sophisticated, politically charged, and populated with a growing number of “nones” and aging baby-boomers.

I suspect that Meisel and his small band of colleagues in the Faith3 endeavor are onto something important. By putting forth a definition of a “world-changing” seminary, they have thrown down a curriculum-challenging ethos-examining gauntlet. Even a small “world-engaging” step is a step in the right direction. Seminaries that change the world, according to the selection criteria, develop a culture of sustained engagement on campus and offer courses and programming that integrate knowledge, faith and service. Internships—as important as they are—cannot be the sole realm of that engagement. Other professional degree programs such as k-12 education require students to participate in practicums from day one. Some seminaries are doing the same by adding diverse contextual learning experiences throughout the three years of the M.Div. degree program. Others offer young adults free on-campus housing or seminary scholarships if they participate in AmeriCorps or Peace Corps for a year before they matriculate.

Students and churches should not be the only foci for formation and transformation. Our seminaries too, fall under the same mandate. Perhaps that notion should be written into our mission and vision statements lest we fall victim to our own hubris. Nineteenth century historian Henry B. Adams wrote “Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.” Change – shifting gears – tends to make us nervous, especially in uncertain times. The exciting news is that the spirit of change is wafting through our theological institutions, the Church and through the world.

Give us open minds, O God, ready to see and embrace the new thing that You are calling us to do in our seminaries, churches, and world. May we resist the urge to cling so tightly to the past that we set limits on the future. Surprise us with new possibilities as we strive t0 make a difference in this world. In your holy name we pray. Amen.

Fox, Susan picIn November of 2013 Susan Fox entered her twenty-fifth year of service at Union Presbyterian Seminary. An administrator and faculty member, Susan directs the Supervised Ministry and Vocational Planning office. She characterizes her work today at Union as bridging academics with practical ministry during a critically important and energizing time in the life of the Church.

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