"Don't let him go to the seminary! It'll ruin him." This was an oft heard comment about newly-called preachers in parts of South Georgia when I was growing up. For some reason, folks had a critical view of formal theological education, and I really never understood why. However, when I started working in Russia as a mentor to newly-called pastors, I began to see that there are some potential pitfalls to a theological training program independent of the local church.
If the local community of faith is
the biblical locus where discipleship takes place, and if pastors are the end
result of discipleship for some in the church, there should be no question as
to the validity of pastoral training in the context of the local church. There
is still a question as to the role of formal theological education in pastoral
training though. Institutions of formal theological education should still
serve the local church if they can be redefined according to their purposes and
parameters. Perhaps the real quandary is not about pastoral training but about
theologically equipping the entire church. There has been over two hundred
years of formal theological training of American pastors, and churches are still
ill-equipped to train their own pastors because of several dangerous areas.
Perhaps part of the
problem with educating pastors is that the church has chosen to outsource part
of its discipling commission to parachurch institutions. Creativity expert Sir
Ken Robinson says that
Our education system is
predicated on the idea of academic ability, and there’s a reason…Around the
world, there were no systems of public education really before the nineteenth
century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the
hierarchy is rooted on two ideas: 1) that the most useful subjects for work are
at the top....
And 2) academic ability, which
has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities
designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of
public education around the world is a protracted process of university
entrance.[1]
His comments reflect a teleological
problem that modern secular systems of education have in common with formal
institutions of theological education, namely the prioritization of academic
ability as prerequisite to vocation. Institutions of higher learning should not
serve themselves.
Mark Dever says that
seminaries “are ‘usually’ used for the wrong purposes” because they are “not
made to make pastors. Churches make pastors.”[2] He
explains that in an urban context especially, seminary is “certainly not
necessary. And it is not necessarily advisable.”[3]
Instead, he advocates that younger men delay any seminary training and spend
more time with the local church as training ground for overseer preparation.
For the church
that needs to make the transition into becoming a training center for pastors,
Dever offers practical advice for equipping future leaders. He begins with a
call to prayer for “raising up elders.”[4]
Then he advocates a dedication of time for potential pastors to preach on
certain Sundays. Finally, he encourages a deeper understanding of discipleship
as a local church’s responsibility and assigns Coleman’s Master Plan of Evangelism as a resource. Anything outside of this
ecclesiocentric praxis is what Bill Hull calls “artificial training”[5]
and should be rejected.
A
second area of danger is the subtle institutionalism that evolves over time. Care
must be taken to avoid an institutionalism that so often accompanies structures
that move away from their original design. According to the original design, “the
apostles felt confident that God had called the ordinary believer to ministry.”[6] Since
that time, however, congregations have moved away from all-member participation
to pastoral employment in order to “to do numerous ‘holy jobs.’”[7]
Instead of a clergy-laity distinction, Hull offers that “a full-bodied ministry
will engage clergy and nonclergy alike in such tasks.”[8]Although
geared mainly toward a missiological discussion of relationships between missionaries
and their national colleagues, Paul Hiebert states that when leadership
training becomes institutionalized, there are dangers of a lost “vision”, an
unhealthy concern for “self-maintenance”, a bent toward “inflexibility”, and a
“shift in focus from people to programs.”[9] The
institutionalized structure has certain advantages of efficiency and the ability
to mobilize more people than a more organic structure, but Hiebert notes the
detrimental factors. Thus, the institutionalization of missional structures,
like the institutionalization of leadership development, leads to a showdown in
which “institutional needs take priority over human needs.”[10] Unfortunately,
this is the current state of affairs in formal theological education in Russia.
In Russia, whereas
most Baptist pastors “have taken much responsibility upon themselves for the
care of their flock, the negative effect has often been a tendency for leaders
to ‘lord it over’ members rather than to be a servant.”[11] Penner
believes that holistic education should target
everyone at every level in the
church. The Apostle Paul and his mission team modelled [sic] and taught this
principle. On the basic level, they taught the fundamentals of Scripture to all
members of the church and, at other levels, equipped leaders for the
responsibility of training local congregations and promoting theological
training regionally.[12]
Instead of a holistic approach to
theological training for the entire church, however, most Russian evangelical
institutions of higher learning have targeted only the holy man as a separate
and disjointed entity from the local church.
A third trap is a passivity that is
indirectly encouraged by formal theological training. It is “a dangerous
doctrinal dualism that springs out of the classic distinction between being and
doing.”[13]
Hull warns agains falling into “the trap of thinking, I must study and meditate for a couple of years before I engage in
service. Study and meditation should take place in the context of the pressures
and challenges of ministry.”[14] Alan Hirsch admits that one of the main inherent problems in seminary training “is that
the in-tray of information is piled high while the out-tray of action and
obedience is just about empty. The academy demands passivity in the student,
whereas discipleship requires activity.”[15]
Harris notes this passivity as “a great lack of deeper spiritual training for
Russian leaders, most programs being organized along the lines of an academic
American Bible college or seminary model.”[16]
He says that “the Russian student often expects to be passive in the classroom,
and the teacher will be expected to initiate all communication.”[17]
Somehow, for theological training to work in Russia, this passivity must be
overcome.
The fourth danger
is a general lack of discipleship ethos when there is no true community. Formal
training programs may be able to develop some sense of community, but Hiebert
warns against the absence of communitas. He
notes,
Perhaps the single most significant
source of the malaise of leadership in our day comes from the way, and the
context, in which we form leaders. For the most part, the would-be leader is
withdrawn from the context of ordinary life and ministry in order to study in a
somewhat cloistered environment, for up to seven years in some cases. During
that period they are subjected to an immense amount of complex information relating
to the biblical disciplines, theology, ethics, church history, pastoral
theology, etc. And while the vast majority of this information is useful and
correct, what is dangerous to discipleship in that setting is the actual socialization processes that the student
undergoes along the way. In effect, he or she is socialized out of ordinary
life and develops a kind of language and thinking that is seldom understood and
expressed outside the seminary. It’s as if in order to learn about ministry and
theology, we leave our places of habitation and take a flight into the
wonderfully abstracted world of abstraction, we fly around there for a long
period of time, and then wonder why we have trouble landing again.[18]
Without the presence of communitas or an informal structure of
relationships among equals within a local church setting that by necessity
exerts influence on the external environment, Hiebert believes that ritualism
begins to take the place of relationships. Hirsch validates Hiebert’s observations
when he says that “leadership development must inculcate in the disciples the
lifelong love of learning, but this can be done in a way far more consistent
with the ethos of discipleship than that of the academy.”[19]
[1] Sir Ken Robinson, “Ken Robinson Says Schools Kill
Creativity” (speech presented at TED2006, Monterey, Calif., February 2006),
n.p. [cited 2 March 2010]. Online: http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says
_schools_kill_creativity.html.
[2] Mark Dever,
[3] Ibid.
[4] Mark Dever, “How Do Pastors Raise Up Pastors?” n.p.
[cited 25 February 2010]. Online: http://sites
.silaspartners.com/CC/article/0,,PTID314526_CHID598014_CIID2463178,00.html.
[6] Ibid, 90.
[7] Ibid, 92.
[8] Bill Hull, Disciple-Making
Church, 92.
[9] Paul G. Hiebert, Anthropological
Reflections on Missiological Issues (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994), 163–64.
[10] Ibid, 164.
[11] Mark Harris, “Toward an Understanding of Russian Baptist
Preaching,” Paper Presented to Mission
Consulting Group, (Pasadena, Calif.: Mission Consulting Group, 1996), 6.
[12] Peter Penner, “Contextual Theological Education among
Post-Soviet Protestants: Case Study 1: The Development of a Masters Degree at
St Petersburg Christian University,” Transformation
18:2 (2001), 115.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006), 122.
[16] Mark Harris, “Proposal for a Contextualized
Educational Program for the Training of Russian Spiritual Leaders,” Paper presented to Mission Consulting
Group (Pasadena, Calif.: Mission Consulting Group, 1999), 1.
[17] Ibid, 8.
[18] Alan Hirsch, Forgotten
Ways, 121.
[19] Ibid.
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