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 thousand s.
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.