Conclusion: What Do We Need the Seminary to Do?

Let me tie a bow around the discussion about the best locale for pastoral training by making a few observations from my experience in Russia. The whole purpose of these past few blog posts was to establish a case for pastoral training within the context of the normal functions of a healthy local church. Although my Evangelical brothers in Russia are light years ahead today compared to where they were just a few years ago, Russia still has a desperate need for a biblically-based model for training pastors that is not simply another western program. Since the church has dealt with this theological issue over the years, the experience of practitioners and the reflection of theological writers have bearing on this discussion. If pastoral training can be seen as an ultimate end of one branch of healthy local church discipleship, then pastors are best developed in that context. For Russia, this means rethinking the way institutions of formal education can service the church. But I would add that America needs to rethink the way we've done pastoral training as well.

There are numerous models throughout church history. There are more eastern models whereby church members simply attend sessions of theological inquiry at their convenience. Bill Hull points to the hall of Tyrannus as an example, but he quickly admits that “contemporary culture does not provide the kind of environment the hall of Tyrannus had. Opponents do not stroll in church buildings and dialogue with a speaker.”[1] Furthermore, this still does not insure the discipleship training of all church members nor the holistic and relational training of pastors.

Peter Penner advocates the western integration of theological education and secular schooling. He cites the British model whereby a theological institute has a partnership with a state university; the Turbingen model whereby a state university student experiences his theological education through a local community; the Odessa model whereby there is simultaneous enrollment in formal but disconnected secular and sacred educational programs; and the St. Petersburg model of distance education for theological training while studying at a secular university.[2] He points to the attractiveness of western education to Russian students and how Russian “theological schools recognize the variety of programmes and the individualization of education which characterize the school systems of the West.”[3] Yet, Mark Harris warns that a western “desire for accreditation can lead to a curriculum that is more heavily theoretical, and which doesn't prepare people to serve effectively in churches.”[4] So this too fails to supply an adequate pastoral training model. Just look at where we are with some of our own American institutions struggling to jump through SACS hoops or catch at least a smile from ATS.

The question as to what can provide positional, functional, and relational training for local church leadership can only be answered by a local church theology. It is more than a village mentality; it is a biblical community, something that the academy neither can nor should provide.

            In Russia and America, local churches need to develop a more full-orbed theology of church-based discipleship that results in pastoral training in the local church itself. There is a place for both seminaries, bible colleges, and institutes, but even training programs cannot effectively take place without a simultaneous participation in local church discipleship training. Like Hull says, “Unless they have a place to practice, people don’t learn well.”[5] Theological orthodoxy must somehow lead to theological orthopraxy.

            If seminaries or other institutes of formal theological training survive into the mid twenty-first century in Russia, it will be because the theological rationale for their being and purposes are considered in light of a healthy ecclesiology. And I would posit that American seminaries must do more than simply restructure the delivery system for busy pastors. The seminary must serve the teaching role of the local church, whereby it equips senior leadership to train its younger pastors and whereby local lay persons experience the indirect benefit of full-orbed theological education as disseminated throughout the entire membership of the local church.

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[1] Bill Hull, Disciple-Making Church, 192.

[2] Peter Penner, “Contextual Theological Education,” 117.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Mark Harris, “Proposal,” 9.

[5] Bill Hull, Disciple-Making Church, 192.

Potential Dangers of Formal Theological Education

"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]

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[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, “Raising Up Pastors is the Church’s Work,” n.p. [cited 25 February 2010]. Online: http://www.9marks.org/CC/article/0,,PTID314526_CHID598016_CIID2463176,00.html.

[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.

[5] Bill Hull, The Disciple-Making Church (Grand Rapids: Fleming H. Revell, 1990), 46.

[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.

[13] Bill Hull, Disciple-Making Church, 165.

[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.

Training Pastors within the Local Church

My next few posts will attempt to pose a question and seek a few biblical answers related to pastoral training. As a seminary graduate, I would have probably identified pastoral training with the seminary or bible college in the past, but in recent years I've come to see a healthy local church as the best place for pastoral training. In fact, I'd even say that seminary training apart from active practicum in a local church is theoretical at best and devoid of any meaning at worst. Of course, most of my own pastoral mentorship has been done in Russia, but the biblical precepts are universal. So herein lies the question we need to ask: what relationship should the local church have with men God is calling into the ministry?

            During the second century A.D., Tertullian posed his now infamous rhetorical question, “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church?”[1] In the space of two small lines, he encapsulated the struggle that has plagued the church ever since, namely how to balance the academic development and practical ecclesial training of a pastor. This struggle has not been limited to the western hemisphere. Some recent writers have begun to collect numerous data from varied Russian sources, and “several dissertations and theses have been written over the past few years regarding the issues surrounding theological education in Russia.”[2] The question of locale for the most effective pastoral training is a current issue among evangelical theologians, missiologists, and church planting practitioners, because the answer has both theological and pragmatic missiological implications for holistic church planting. My thesis is that the local church should be the primary location for pastoral training.

For the past two centuries, pastors have been trained as professionals in their fields in Russia, but this has not been without real pragmatic problems that reflect deep theological issues related to the doctrine of the local church. Since the fall of communism, Russia has provided a clear look at the establishment of the seminary or bible college as the preferred mode of professional training for Christian workers. In institutions like Moscow Baptist Theological Seminary, St. Petersburg Christian University, Bryansk Bible College, or Moscow Evangelical Christian Seminary, there is a current crisis that has resulted in an ongoing struggle for seminaries and bible colleges to survive.

It is not my goal to establish the exact curriculum for pastoral training. Even the description of the necessary steps for the transition from an extra-ecclesial model to an ecclesiocentric model of pastoral training is outside the parameters of this discussion. However,I have to say that the local church is the most biblical model for pastoral training. What do you think?

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[1] Tertullian, “Prescription Against Heretics” 7 (The Prescription Against Heretics [Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing, 2004], 12).

[2] 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), 2.

Patterson & Scoggins on Theological Education

For the past few days, I've been posting about George Patterson and Richard Scoggins in their approach to evangelism and discipleship as it relates to missions (taken from their Church Multiplication Guide: The Miracle of Church Reproduction). If you want to read the guide, see http://buckburch.blogspot.com/2012/09/waste-of-time-question-about-cm.html for a link to download a free copy. The guide could be looked at as a reference manual for systematic theology for the local church as well as a documented shift in the authors’ training methodology for leadership development. 

            In the first part of the guide, Patterson and Scoggins outline what they believe the church should teach. There are seven commands that a believer must obey. There are two ordinances: immediate baptism as confirmation of salvation and the Lord’s Supper. There are seven elements that make up the worship aspect for the local church: prayer, praise, Bible teaching, confessing sin and forgiveness, the Lord’s Supper, giving, and fellowship (p. 77). Albeit not an exhaustive work on these subjects, the guide does successfully answer the surface questions that must be taught to a new congregation. By looking through the eyes of several types of practitioners in this missiological process, the authors are able to address the basics for an elementary theological education. A potential drawback to this approach is the sheer repetition in the material as it is addressed by each practitioner, but the authors seem to overcome this weakness through the introduction of variations in perspective.

The authors prefer an on-the-job training for men who will be readily accepted as leaders of a new church. Patterson gives a personal historical testimony of how he abandoned centralized theological education in favor of a more decentralized approach wherein the entire local church undergoes training. Patterson “trained them to grow along with their congregations” (p. 47).  Only “elder types” are now chosen for theological training that leads to church planting. The “single young men who had previously come to our resident Bible institute” (p. 47) are now largely overlooked. For pioneer areas, they admonish the reader to “mentor able, mature men who will qualify as biblical elders” (p. 148). Instead, they encourage the reader to avoid training single, young men in pioneer fields as pastors (p. 148).

They also advocate more informal training methods rather than a formal seminary approach. According to the authors, this works best for pioneer areas where there is no established church, but this strict admonition only serves to limit the range of application, both in fields where there are existing churches or conventions as well as in those same pioneer areas after several new churches have begun. It could be argued that the Church Multiplication Guide is a great starting point but not a true guide for multiplication, because it fails to address the environment of a second or third generational reproduction. It seems to be more about the startup than about the maintenance, more about beginning new work than about facilitating later growth. However, perhaps this was never the authors’ intention.

Regardless of the pros and cons of formal theological education, Patterson and Scoggins present a valid case for informality within pioneer areas. The question for western mission fields and fields within other developed urban areas is this: Should the seminary baby be thrown out with the formal bathwater? Or does formal theological education still have a place for second or third generation churches in emerging networks?