Rebooting Theological Education for the 21st Century

It is past time to completely rethink Christian theological education; starting from the most basic principle that it is to serve the mission of the Christian church.

I have been involved in theological education continuously since I was student in the late 1970's. Most of my teaching has been outside the US, but while the schools in Asia and Eastern Europe in which I taught were more conscious of contextualization and cultural diversity than is typical in the US, they still fell under the long shadow of Western European and US models of theological education.

That tradition, in its context, had much to offer the church. But the context in which Western models of theological education were formed is gone, and those models must go as well.  Hence an outline of the kind of reflection we need:

1. The sole purpose of the church is the evangelization of the world. It is to witness to the truth of God’s love as revealed in Jesus Christ so that all humans and human societies may accept it as the basis for transformed human self-understandings.

Evangelization in this understanding is primarily a social process that inevitably has a personal impact, rather than a personal process that it is hoped will have a social impact. Human self-understandings are always formed in large part by culture and social location. Therefore to address them with the gospel it is necessary to not only take those contexts into account, but to engage them with God's love revealed in Jesus Christ. After all, Jesus as Messiah witnessed to the community of Israel, not merely individuals. Similarly the New Testament always places individuals in their social and cultural context.

Evangelization, as opposed to traditional understandings of evangelism, focuses on the universal nature and outworking of God’s love rather than the uniqueness of its revelation, thus the process of evangelization seeks points of common belief and concern with cultural and social movements outside the Christian community. How people and societies choose to accept and realize the love of God as revealed in Christ could and has varied. Evangelization is an invitation that does not presume a single, normative response. The work of Christ through the Spirit is broader and longer than the work of the Church.

2. Traditional Protestant theological education has its origins in providing the training necessary for: a. professional pastors, b. ministering to established churches, c. in a  Christian context, d. that is validated and perpetuated by the local culture, society, and the state.

Traditional seminaries may teach mission and evangelism, but these are invariably seen as additional pastoral tasks directed outside the church rather than being the focus of pastoral leadership of the congregation.

Because the church must rediscover its mission if it is to be faithful to Christ’s command, the preparation of professional chaplains for established Christian congregations should now be regarded as secondary in theological education.

Instead theological education must focus first on preparing leaders for the evangelization of the world by the church and thus by individual congregations.

3. Preparation for leadership in the evangelization of the world by the Church is the same as preparation for the evangelization of the local community by the local congregation. 

Evangelization must always be undertaken, as it is in the life of Jesus and his apostles, in concrete acts that simultaneously realize God’s love in human lives and witness to the nature of that love. Such acts in scripture are interpersonal because the nature of God’s love as revealed in Jesus Christ is relational; in every instance it is revealed in the interactions between two or more people.

Such interpersonal relationships invariably form networks and thus engage individual persons in communities, as did Jesus' ministry. Moreover, we can see in the ministry of Jesus and the apostles that these communities embrace those who are marginalized or excluded from the broader society. It is a distinctive sign of the nature of God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ, that it draws the excluded and marginalized into community.

Thus the central witness to the distinctive love of God revealed in Christ is the congregation making real the love of Christ in interpersonal relationships that simultaneously reiterate the work of Christ and invite those who are outside, and frequently alone, into the community.

4. The first and primary task of the pastor or elder is thus shaping a congregation toward, and leading it into the mission of evangelization. In the United Methodist system, in its older and better form, this would be the preparation of traveling elders, who by definition were evangelists rather than chaplains. 

The church engaged in evangelization will need, as Paul so clearly enumerates, a variety of different ministries and thus leaders. Theological schools will be the appropriate place for preparing for many such ministries. However, to the extent that United Methodist Elders and their equivalent in other denominations are understood to possess a distinctly apostolic vocation, then their most basic training must be in leadership in congregational evangelization.

5. The first task of a congregation engaged in evangelization is to understand the self-understanding of those to whom it witnesses.

We see this consistently in the life of Jesus, he understands both the felt needs and real needs of those to whom he ministers. And he understands these as both deeply personal and completely located in the social/cultural context.

For the leader of congregational evangelization this makes listening and interpreting primary skills that must be fostered in theological education. Such listening isn’t merely interpersonal. It is listening to all the forms of expression through which a society gives expression to the self-understanding of its members. Most of these, at a practical level, are found in the popular arts, including music, theater, television, movies, culinary arts, architecture, and so on. But they are also found in movements that are overtly political and economic.

As importantly, the current social context is multi-cultural, requiring pastors to listen to multiple cultures as they express the self-understanding of their members. This requires that pastors possess cultural intelligence and be able to lead congregations in interpreting what they have heard across these different cultural contexts. 

6. The second task of a congregation engaged in evangelization is understanding God’s love as revealed in Jesus Christ through its study of scripture, which is the continuation of God’s Word manifest in Jesus Christ through history. 

For Protestants making this understanding secondary to understanding persons in their social and cultural context may seem strange, yet in scripture this is pattern of apostolic witness. The distinctive love of God revealed in Jesus Christ comes to be fully understood only through the process of evangelization. Orthopraxis always precedes orthodoxy.

But more bluntly, until pastors and congregations understand and engage their contemporary human context they cannot understand the meaning of scripture at all. 

7. The final task of the congregation is to actually engage in evangelization, to engage in interpersonal witness to the love of God revealed in Jesus Christ and to invite others to embrace this love as the basis of their own and their society’s self-understanding. 

8. These three tasks of the congregation should determine the shape of theological education. 

• Theological education needs to begin with the study of humans in their social and cultural contexts.
• It can then take this understanding and, amplify and augment it through the study of the history of the witness of the church,
• This will allow approaching scripture as an apostolic conversation between the authoritative apostolic witnesses and their contemporary apostolic partners in discerning the nature of God’s love revealed in Christ.
• Learning the necessary skills in leading an evangelizing congregation would come next, preferably directly in the context of using those skills in a real congregation.
• Systematic theology is the last subject pastors should study, not the first, and realistically it should be taught only after they have actual experience in leading evangelization. Systematics provides the opportunity to construct the kind of theological framework that can guide future ministry and relations between different churches, parachurches, and non-Christian groups. But it can only be based on reflection on the personal and communal experience of engaging in evangelization. 

In sum, a contemporary, faithful approach to curriculum design in a seminary should be almost the opposite of currently models. It should begin with understanding the immediate context, then the wider context, and then the historical context. The study of scripture will build on the study of context, since there can be no non-contextual study of scripture. The skills necessary to lead the congregation in witness follow. Theology, or the articulation of orthodoxy, comes last; equipping the student to test and articulate an understanding of the gospel relevant to the mission of the church in the larger context of social and cultural diversity.