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Citation: Puddicombe, Mike. “Missional Theological Education and Its Impact on 
the Local Church.” April 30, 2019, Tyndale University College & Seminary, Toronto, 
Ontario: MPEG-3, 41:36 min.

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Thank you.

As I was getting ready for, for today, I thought, well, I'll probably have about four or five people and one of those would be my wife. 
So I'll have a good crowd. I wasn't expecting this many people, which is, which is nice, a good thing. And my, my actual dissertation is on 
work with the Salvation Army. For some strange reason, it's the way I am. But I took a lot of that stuff out because I thought there's not going 
to be anyone there from the Salvation Army other than my wife. At the end, if you have some questions, maybe around the Salvation Army issue, if 
you're so inclined, you can ask. But the topic of my paper is missional theological education and its impact on the local church, which I thought 
was a little bit out of place at a symposium such as this. But as I reflected on it more, I began to believe that it actually fits in very well 
because I believe that Western theology is missional and that holiness is missional as well. And although I don't get the time to elaborate on these 
themes today, you do see this underlying presence within my paper. And at the heart of this paper really lies a passionate longing for the church 
to be the church, to truly become a community that mediates the liberating presence of God in the world through Jesus Christ. And central to it is a 
desire to see a rebirthing of the local congregation as missional congregations, namely the authentic signs, the foretaste and the instruments of God's 
kingdom. And theological education has a big part to play in this rebirthing. The logic of having missional oriented theological training is that such 
training will produce missionly minded clergy, which in turn will produce and lead missionally minded congregations. missionly minded congregations 
see themselves as a community created by the Spirit and that it has a unique nature, what gives it a unique identity, and that's according to Van 
Gelder, these congregations have a clear understanding of the purpose as agents of God's mission, the Missy O Day in this world. And as such, they 
are intentional in the witnessing task of the church and the activity involved in the community. The church is located. The reason why I chose this 
area of study really was because I see a lot of churches within my own tribe and within others that just do not have this sort of missional mindset.
And this is an area of concern for a lot of churches, a lot of denominations, where they can see, well, how is the church actually reaching outside 
of their building and into their community and how are they doing that effectively? And in my experience has been that we have a lot of churches that 
are very insular. They look only to themselves. They see that, okay, how can we meet the needs of us? And they get into these holy Huddles and us 
foreign no more and they just sort of get stuck there. How do we get out of that? Stuckness is really what I was attempting to find out as I was going 
through this. It was part of the solution to the problem was really how do we get our leaders to engage the people in their congregations and mission? 
And what I was finding out is that a lot of leaders are coming out of seminaries without an idea of what mission is and so it's very hard for them to 
teach something that they don't know. So that being said, that's sort of the the premise behind what I'm doing. The situation that we're in today is that 
church service attendance and personal religious commitment has steadily declined since the 1940s. In Canada, the steepest declines occurred in the 1980s 
and 1990s followed with modest declines during the early two thousands. And that's according to data from the Canadian General Social Surveys. What is 
often at the heart of many church sustainability issues is an inaccurate perception of the current cultural landscape among the church area. And that 
misunderstanding is within the church's leadership and sometimes not only with the leadership, but also within the congregants as well.
The understanding that the church occupied an official place in society and that the church had the primary responsibility for guiding the social 
order remains central to the Canadian understanding of the church up to the 1960s. The reality that church leaders do not or cannot perceive is based 
on the fact that the culture and society in which we live today is not the same as the culture of the 1940s when the church pews were full and the 
church was the center of the community. By living in yesterday's reality, church leaders look for ways to engage their current reality with programs 
and systems that are from a bygone era and then discover that they have little success engaging their current context. This false reality also assures 
them that the church still has a prominent place within the community and has an influence on the culture of that community, when in fact it does not. 
When confronted with what is really happening in their neighborhood, the church must make a decision on how to proceed by either continuing on the path 
they have set for themselves or by trying to change. And then there's that old joke that goes the only thing that likes change is a baby when it's diapers 
wet. And we all have seen that when we try to introduce some sort of change into a congregation. The era when the church and society share the same values 
has come to an end. While the church may hope and pray for return of the ideals of Christendom, it is not going to happen. Frost explains Christendom as the 
name given to the religious culture that has dominated western society since the fourth century. It started when Christianity moved from being an underground 
movement to becoming the state religion under Emperor Emperor Constantine. And over time, Christendom became the meta narrative for all of society as 
Christianity became an official part of the established culture. And the net effect over the entire Christendom epoch was that Christianity moved from 
being a dynamic, revolutionary, social and spiritual movement to that of being static religious institution with its attendant structures, priesthood 
and sacraments. This change did not go unnoticed by the Church. And Tim Keel says that we know, and I believe we have known for quite some time, that the 
world has changed. Before we ever became aware of the notion of post modernity or globalization, post colonialism and a hundred other posts. We knew something 
was changing, the Church just ignored it. With the fall of Christendom has come a new era, a post Christendom era where the meta narrative, Christianity's effect 
on culture is no longer viable. Unfortunately, in the Church, many of its systems and structures are ill equipped to deal with the new environment and the 
challenges it presents. Church leaders now find themselves in a culture where the Church no longer is as influential as it once was, and it is increasingly 
antagonistic towards them. Society believes, according to Eddie Gibbs, that there is no meta narrative to inspire people, no explanation of everything, 
no meaning or purpose to life awaiting discovery at either the cosmic or the personal level. This is not saying that there is no room for the Church in the 
world today, but only that the Church's participation in our current society must be done on society's terms and not on the Church's terms. As James 
Smith comments, the exclusion of faith from the public square is a modern agenda. Postmodernity should signal new openings and opportunities for Christian 
witness in the broad marketplace of ideas. Smith also issues a warning to the Church, and he says we must be careful, however, not to continue to propagate 
the witness in modernist ways by attempting our own rationalist demonstrations of the truth of the Christian faith and then imposing such on a pluralistic 
culture. So what can the Church do? Craig Carter suggests that the Church of Jesus Christ must renounce Christidom and to seek to live as a pilgrim people 
bearing witness to the kingdom of God and proclaiming the resurrection hope of the Gospel. We are at a place in its history where the cultural changes in 
society and a new season in the life of the Church are colliding. In what Phyllis Tickle describes as a great emergence, she defines the great emergence as 
a phenomenon that affects every part of our life. And she says, in its totality, it interfaces with and is the context for everything we do socially, 
culturally, intellectually, politically and economically. She believes that the Church is at a time of great emergence and is also in a period of drastic 
change, which she seems to liken to a rummage sale. She explains what is happening to the Church in this way she says to understand what is currently 
happening to us in the 21st century North America is to understand that about every 500 years a church feels compelled to hold a giant rubmage sale. 
About every 500 years, the empowered structures of institutionalized Christianity, whatever they may be at the time, become an intolerable carpus 
that must be shattered in order to that renewal and growth may occur. From its beginning to today, the Church's 500 year rummage sale looks like this 
the first church yearly church of first century. About 500 years later, we have monasticism pop up. About 500 years later from that, the schism for 
east and west comes into the forefront, followed by the Reformation 500 years after that. And now we're entering into what she calls the emergence.
She says there are consistently three results that come from these rummage sales. First is that a new and more vital form of Christianity does in fact 
emerge. Second, in the course of birthing, a new expression of faith in practice, there is a refurbishment of the previous expression of organized religion. 
Third, there is a period of growth and the spread of the faith into new geographic and demographic areas. And Tickle uses this example of one such Roman 
sale when she speaks about the Reformation, and she explains these three results as such. She says the birth of Protestantism not only established a new, 
more powerful way of being Christian, but it also forced Roman Catholicism to make changes in its own structure and practice. As a result of both those 
changes, christianity has spread over far more of the earth's territories than it ever had in the past. Talking about theological education, what makes a 
theological school theological? That is a question posed by David Kelsey, and he answers it this way. He says Ultimately, it is not the subject matters. 
It is not the courses nor scholarly disciplines it employs, but rather, it is in the overarching goal to understand God more fully. The Cape Town commitment, 
which really got me thinking about this whole study that I have done, states that it is the mission of the church to do the mission of God and that the 
purpose of theological education is twofold. First, it is to train men and women to lead the church as pastor teachers so that they may be competent in 
teaching the Word of God with faithfulness, clarity and relevancy. Second, it equips clergy for the missional task of being able to understand cultural 
context and to effectively communicate God's truth within those contexts. If missional curriculum in theological schools will help produce missionally 
minded clergy that will ultimately influence and build congregations that are missional, then it can be assumed if the theological schools curriculum and 
pedagogy trains clergy to be insular, then the congregations those clergy are responsible for will also be directed inwards and eventually languish. 
Therefore, theological education is not an end to itself, but it is to serve the mission of the church in the world. One cannot automatically assume that 
the existing training model is the best way to develop leaders for the church. It is only by maintaining its close links with mission that the theological 
education will remain relevant to changing circumstances and hold the true missionary impulse that gave rise to the church. But theological education is 
torn between the academic norms of excellence where they have to consider the historical disciplines of Bible and systematic theology and church history 
and practical theology and the professional norms of excellence in modern disciplines required to lead a church in the 21st century. And because of this 
conflict and the strain and the stress, theological schools do not succeed at accomplishing either very well. So is there a way that the theological 
institution can successfully integrate historical disciplines to produce men and women who are biblically and theologically literate and able to disseminate 
the knowledge in a way that is culturally relevant in today's society? According to Van Gelder, the answer is yes. And in fact, we have been accomplishing 
this feat since theological institutions first came into existence in North America. Van Gelder has identified seven congregational leadership styles that 
have been taught to the church, to church leaders since colonial times in the United States. So in the colonial times, pastors were trained to be resident 
theologians. In the early 18 hundreds, they were the gentleman pastor. In the late 18 hundreds to mid 19 hundreds, they were the churchly pastor. Post World 
War II, they became the pastoral director of a congregation. And they were trained as such in the they were trained to be therapeutic pastors. In the 1980s 
to the 2000s, entrepreneurial leadership was the key fact. And I was trained in that period and I can attest to that fact. And from 2000 to present is the 
missional leader. I'm sure you can find where you are on that scale and say, yeah, that was true of me or not true of me. It is apparent from Van Gelder's 
research that there has been a change in the way church leaders are taught and that change has been a reflection of the norms of society in any given era. 
It is also apparent that the change was slow at the beginning, like years slow. But as we get closer to today, they are happening increasingly in a quicker 
manner. So what exactly is involved in training missional leaders? Well, first I think we have to gain an understanding of what mission is because some of 
us may have different ideas of mission and I don't have time to go into all of it, but we'll just sort of hit the high points. The Trinity as a community of 
divine sending has created a space for the church to take part in God's mission to be sent, empowered and accompanied by grace into the end to the ends of the 
earth. The sending of the church is intimately linked to the sending activity of the trinity. It is not by human authority, but through the authority of the 
triumphant God who as Father sends as Son, redeems and a spirit empowers receiving the church with all its human frailty into a divine missional. Communion 
shows the depth of God's love and motivated by God's love, the church should not seek to exercise dominance or impose its rights upon other people or organizations 
to the detriment of others or of the mission of God. So God, in his mercy and his grace, has chosen and equipped the church to participate in the mission day, 
a mission that will reveal the one who loves and is actively involved in the world. This mission cannot be thought of as one aspect of the Church's existence. 
Rather, it must be thought of as the essence of the church's life. If the very ethos of the church is missionary in nature, then the church that ceases to 
engage in mission is not just failing to accomplish one of its mandates. It has ceased to be what it is called to be. The church is a product of God's mission to 
bring together people from all nations, tribes and languages. At the same time, the church is a people of mission sent out into the world to manifest and proclaim 
the saving grace of God. The church and mission refers to the local assembly of believers participating in the miss yode. The church opens itself to include different 
levels of fellowship, communion and expressions, and it also extends in time to include preceding and succeeding generations. Hunsburger Emphatically states most 
simply and directly put it is the church's mission to represent the reign of God. And Frost agrees when he says we have known for a long time that the resounder 
of the church is mission. The church's participation in God's mission, therefore, is a gift of God's grace, a gift grounded in and flowing from the inbreaking 
reign of God in Christ, created out of grace to be part of the divine communion. The church does not live for itself, but for God and for the world. Daniel 
Migliori in an essay on the work of Jurgen Moltman, he said this he said For Moltman, the goal of mission, rightly understood, is not the reinstatement of 
Christianity as the imperial religion, not the universal rule of the church, and not the saving of souls from God's judgment. Rather, mission is the 
invitation to life, the invitation to the future of God. The church that participates in the fulfillment of God's mission is at that very same moment a 
clear and visible sign of God's presence in that place. It is for this reason that congregations cannot abandon their obligation to participate in God's 
mission in the world or deemphasize. The theology of Mission the ethos of the church and its missional calling are entwined with the Church's relationship 
with God and its role in the miscellaneous. And this has a bearing on theology of the theology espoused by the Church. The church is a community which comes 
into being in response to the kingdom of God through faith in Jesus Christ as the one in whom the kingdom is realized. The church exists primarily for the 
sake of its mission in the world. The church, when it's true to its real calling, according to Hirsch, the church, when true to its whole calling, when it's 
on about what God is on about is by far and away the most potent force for transformational change the world has ever seen. This purpose is carried out not 
by aligning with the present world order, but by proclaiming and demonstrating the life of the kingdom that is in Jesus and by calling the world to this radical 
new order. However, the church cannot understand its relationship with the world if it fails to understand its relationship with God and his mission. The early 
church understood that personal conversion implied the embracing of the Messiah Day, the redempted mission of God to the whole world through the work of the 
Messiah. Since participating in mission is not an option for the is not optional for the church, what does it mean for the congregations that are not engaged 
in mission? Are they really the church? It has been sade stated there is no mission apart from God and there is no church without mission. This sentiment is 
carried on by Vistam when he writes if the church disassociates herself from this concern of God, that being mission, she becomes disobedient and can no longer 
be the church in the divine sense. OTT, Strauss and Tennant claim the church is not to be understood as an organization with the mission. Rather, the church's 
very identity is mission. Mission and the church are merged into one. Mission is not one function among various functions of the church.
In fact, mission is not a function of the church at all, but rather the church is a function in God's mission, god's constant outgoing and self giving love 
manifested in Christ Jesus. It is not that the church has a mission, but the very reverse. The mission of Christ has a church and it creates its own church. 
Mission does not come from the church, it is from mission. And in the light of mission that the church has to be understood. Perhaps claiming that churches 
who are not involved in mission are not really churches is a bit harsh. I would lean to that conclusion myself because it is possible that those congregations 
that have lost their missional focus have not really lost their focus on mission, but rather for them. Mission work was always performed by professional missionaries 
and was not seen as a responsibility of the local congregation. In the Western world, mission has been perceived as something which is done overseas in places 
where the gospel is yet to be heard or still in its infancy. The role of the church in the Western world was to send missionaries and or resources to accomplish 
missions abroad. If this is the case, the words of Lord Mead ring true when he states this. He says the structures designed for one mission do not work in 
the new mission. The church upside down, has not changed, has not changed its heart. Its focus is still mission, but the mission location has changed. And he 
goes on to claim that is not only the local congregation that has been slow to recognize how mission has changed, but local judiciaries and denominations have 
also failed to recognize the change. While it is true that especially in the west, mission activity has been identified as a task to be handled by the 
clergy or mission specialist, there has been a movement to rediscover a missional call to all believers. The clergy are no longer seen as the ones to 
solely do the work of mission, but rather it is their responsibility to equip the lady and empower them to use their Godgiving gifts in the service of 
mission in their community. Frost and Hearst expand on this premise and they add that the fivefold pattern of ministry as described in Ephesians, that 
of apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor and teacher is a responsibility of the whole church and not just the leadership. My wife told me not to use this, not just 
the leadership. Hershey and Frost believe that all these working together result in the equipping of the saints to do the work of the ministry and the maturity 
of the body. It's not just up to the individual pastor, but it is the work of the entire church to bring above us about David Bosch also reminds us that mission 
does not proceed from the Pope, nor from a missionary order, society or synod, but from a community gathered around the word in the sacraments and sent out into 
the world. The mission calling a vocation of the believer is to create a nurturing and self sustaining missional culture within the church. The task of the Church 
is not to create mission programs to attract new members. It is the task of the Church to be a people who carry the reality of the gospel within themselves and 
then communicating that gospel through being and action. The primary identity of the early Christians was that they were witnesses to the risen Lord and that 
they were sent even as Jesus was sent out by God. Recovering the primacy of the sentness or the missionary nature of the church is a main concern for many 
contemporary ecclesiologies. If this is so, there are some very serious implications for the teaching of theology and the training of men and women in the 
mission of the Church. For one thing, the primary concern for us cannot be ministerial education as such, but rather the equipping of people in local 
congregations for mission. The proper question for us concerns rather the sort of theological education that will adequately form animators in such an 
equipping process of local communities of faith and mission. So what sort of theological education will prepare men and women who will help the whole people of 
God in given context to manifest credibly the liberating presence of God in that context? While a mission model stresses an attitude of passion for the world as 
God has shown it, in Christ, mission has to have reference to all dimensions of life the family, work, friendships and community. One of the main goals of 
theological education is prepare women and men as ministers to equip the whole people of God, to develop leaders for mission, and to help the Church articulate 
its faith. Banks contends that the theological institution fulfills this educational service by forming character, abilities and thought, informing mind practice 
and contemplation and transforming values, peoples and communities. Theological education is a dimension of mission and it has a vital missional content, since 
it is an aspect of the teaching ministry of the Church involving specialized testimony of the kingdom. It is only by maintaining as close link with mission that 
the theological institution will remain relevant to the changing circumstances and hold true to the missionary impulse that gave rise to the Church and theology. 
Bosch is quick to remind us that theology, biblical understood, has no reason to exist other than to critically accompany the Church in its mission to the world. 
The central place for teaching Missiology in seminaries must be reserved for the concept of the Missio day because it understands the Church to be missionary in 
every facet of its being. This does not mean that a mythology course is added to the syllabus, but that mission becomes a catalyst that is at the heart of all 
curriculum. The importance of this lies in the realization that mission is not understood and not considered a duty of the Church, but rather that it is an 
integral part of the ethos of the Church. The Cape Town Commitment states theological education should be intrinsically missional since its place within the 
academy is not an end unto itself, but it has served the mission of the Church in the world. This declaration leads them to encourage all theological institutions 
to conduct a missional audit of their curricula, structures and ethos to ensure that they meet the needs and the opportunities facing the Church in their cultures. 
This needs to be done to reinforce that the mission of the Church on earth is to serve the mission of God and the mission of theological education is to 
strengthen and accompany the mission of the Church. Alan Neely argues that if the global awareness of the seminarian is determined from their seminary 
experience, then it is a responsibility the institution to provide as a fundamental part of their curriculum, an academic as well as practical preparation 
for cross cultural mission. And it can be said now that doing cross cultural mission is no longer going across the seas, it's just walking across the street. 
Globalization is widening our horizons through cross cultural experiences, a process of multiculturalization anely concludes by saying this curriculum will 
need to be global, evangelical, contextual and ecumenical if the seminarian is to live as a Christian missionary in a contemporary world. The world the church 
is called to minister in today requires that leaders develop a new set of leadership competencies and capacities that will help them cultivate an environment 
within their congregations for emissional transformation. David Bosch asserts that the clergy of the church are not prior to or independent of or over against 
the church, rather with the rest of God's people. They are the church sent into the world. And he continues to explain that the church in mission is today 
facing a world fundamentally different from anything it has faced before. Roxburg and Romanok argued that the church leaders have been trained in the past. 
The way that church leaders have been trained in the past isn't wrong, but their training has rendered their leaders to be ineffective in today's world. They 
illustrate it in this way it's if we are preparing to play baseball and suddenly discover that everyone else is playing basketball, the game has changed and 
the rules are different. As a church participates in God's mission, empowered by the Word and led by the Spirit and the Way of Christ, it engages faithfully 
and purposefully with the challenging context of the 21st century. Engaging prayerfully with the challenges of its context. The church needs to deepen 
continuously its theological reflection on the different aspects and dimensions of mission. A continued theological reflection on the practice of mission 
and on overarching mythological themes strengthens the church in carrying out its contextual. Mission if lasting change within the congregations take place, 
it must begin with the leadership of the church, because much of what will or will not happen within the church will stem from the leader. Pollster George Barnes 
stated for any movement to have a lasting impact, a strong, visionary leader must be in place. And Harvard professor John Carter says this. He says successful 
transformation is 70% to 90% leadership and only 10% to 30% management. Yet many organizations say don't have much leadership, and almost everyone thinks that 
this problem is one of managing change. Eddie Gibbs reminds us that yesterday's styles of unit leadership will not be adequate for the opening decades of the 
21st century because the future is too unpredictable for the predetermined parameters inherent in long term planning. How many of us here have 510 year plans? That's 
what he's talking about. He goes on to say Yesterday's solutions and procedures may not provide an adequate or appropriate response to the present challenges. 
The problem that longtime leaders face is not learning new insights and skills, but in unlearning what they consider to be tried and true. The problem new leaders 
face is that they have oftentimes only been taught the tried and trued methods of the past during their time in seminary. Gibbs offers this advice to the leaders 
in order to lead in today's fast changing. World leaders must not project an aloof, know it all image. Leaders need to know that they don't really know, and they 
have to admit that the things that they don't really know and readily acknowledge that they don't know it, but they need to learn what they don't know if they will 
increase their ministry effectiveness. Missional leadership refers to a kind of church leadership that trains and leads a congregation to participate in the missio 
day by joining the Holy Spirit to discern what God is doing in their context. Discernment involves the art of reading the times and the signs, and it is one of the 
biggest challenges facing spiritual leaders in a world of changing context. Because unless the Church is educated so that it can fully comprehend the reality of 
the situation, people will not sense the urgency of change. The skill of discerning is the door to transformation, to renewal of personal lives and the beginning 
of the renewal of faith, communities and the world. To discern what God is doing in the community is to be aware that the Holy Spirit may work in strange and 
unexpected ways. Missional leadership is all about transformation, the transformation of people and institutions by means of meaningful relations to participate 
in God's mission. This transformation shows the people that they are called sent, healed and empowered to do the work of God. It is a missional leader who is 
involved in creating the conditions necessary where this is possible and eliminating the impediments which impose constraints on the community, preventing them 
from experiencing life in its fullness. All right, okay, I'll finish off with this thing here. The Church follows the lead of the seminary. If the seminary 
focuses on the maintenance of current structures and practices through its curriculum, then the leaders of the institution produces will be satisfied to simply 
maintain the Church in its current condition. One of the consequences of missionless theology is a production of clergy who have an inadequate ecclesiology and 
largely abandon the apostolic nature of the Church. If the Church is to awaken its missional nature, there needs to be an appraisal of the theology taught in 
seminaries. The seminary needs to nurture an ethos for mission that prepares individuals during their school years for a lifetime of teaching others that same ethos.

Thank you very much.


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