Articles

                 Forward: 18 Rungs in The New Ladder of Learning

                       by Leonard Sweet

 

I know of no work like the one you are about to read. Its richness and rarity comes from an uncommon combination of the particular and the universal.

 

The particular is a laser-like focus on the D.Min. “project” and the author’s proposed shift from a problem-solving methodology to a conversation-starting, metaphor-exegeting, story-catching/story-telling, systems-thinking, preferred-futures approach, or what he calls a “postmodern narrative approach to ministry research.”

 

The universal is a wide-angle view of the changes taking place in culture today and the need to reinvent the ways in which theological education delivers ideas, information, and best practices to the tens of thousands of religious leaders who have the closest day-to-day contact with people.

 

Here is my list of eighteen transformations that are changing the nature of how we prepare leaders for the church. Some of these are addressed directly in this book. Some are implied. Some the authors may not even agree with. But here is one attempt to put the reason why this book is needed into a wider cultural and theoretical context.

 

There are 18 “rungs” for a reason. In rabbinic thought, Jacob’s ladder had 18 rungs, symbolizing the 18 blessings contained in the Amidah, a daily prayer, each line forming one rung and corresponding to the vertebra in the spinal column.

 

These 18 “rungs” form the ladder forward to the future, a ladder which connects the body to the head, by the way, with the mind unifying the whole as the bodily “holy of holies.”

 

#1 Ministers must become life-long learners.

 

The top priority for every student is to learn how to learn, for a lifetime of learning. Life-long learning is The Prime Directive of ordained ministry, and an imperative for every “disciple” (mathetes = learner) of Jesus.

 

The D.Min. degree offers connected learning that enables imaginative, innovative, and transformative experiences which overcome the current norm of pastoral isolation and the various obstacles to participating in peer engaged continuing education. Continuing education has been called not without reason “one of the fastest-growing industries of the 21^st century.”^[i]

 

#2 Theological education is more important than ever. The question is whether seminary education as we know it, whether at the masters or doctoral level, is still the best delivery system for theological education.

 

Theological educators need to face facts: Some of the most influential and “successful” pastors in the US today were never “credentialed” by any accrediting system (e.g. Jim Cymbala of Brooklyn Tabernacle, Bill Hybels of Willow Creek), just as some of the most “successful” business leaders (e.g. Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Steven Spielberg) never finished college. One survey in the 90s revealed that the pastors of 75 out of the one hundred largest churches in USAmerica did not have seminary degrees.^[ii] Studies conducted by Hartford Seminary (CT) reveal that congregations pastored by seminary-trained leaders are less likely to “deal openly with conflict,” are “far more likely” to lack a sense of mission or purpose, and quickly “feel threatened by changes in worship.”

 

The ultimate credentialing is not “Do you have a degree?” but “Can you do ministry?” Or in terms of the language of the emerging culture, how good a network portal are you? Can you provide direct hyperlinks to the divine?

 

Andrew Higgins, who built landing craft in WWII, refused to hire graduates of engineering schools, even though there was a lot of detail and invention involved in making those boats. He believed that they only teach you what you can’t do in engineering school. His engineers were all self-taught. He started off at the beginning of the way with 20 employees. By the middle of the way, he had 30,000 people working for him. He turned out 20,000- landing craft. Dwight D. Eisenhower told me, “Andrew Higgins won the war for us. He did it without engineers.”

 

#3 The new learning methodology of the emerging culture is Wiki.

 

“Wiki” is another name for the open architecture that features connected learning and peer-to-peer (P2) learning. A wiki is a rapidly growing web-based collaboration tool that is not just based on “add-ons,” but on actual content improvement. Although wikis are similar to bulletin boards or Web logs in some respects, there are several main differences.

 

Often, wiki fans cite the "napkin example" to explain. Two people sit down at a table in a restaurant. One scribbles an idea on a napkin. The other modifies the idea on the napkin - changing the wording, adding new thoughts, drawing sketches or otherwise contributing new content.

 

A wiki is the shared napkin in cyberspace. Anyone who is authorized can go into the shared workspace and add, delete or edit content anywhere on the wiki's Web page. Unlike bulletin boards and blogs, users are not limited to changing their own posts or commenting on others' contributions. They can actually change the existing content, even to the point of modifying another person's posts.

 

A blog usually belongs to one person, and mistakes are set in stone on bulletin boards. But a wiki is a community forum, where history is dynamic. Wikis offer any number of people the chance to think aloud, comment and correct one another. For examples, see wikipedia, wiktionary, wikiletics, etc.

 

#4 The Web is the primary delivery system for learning and faith development. What the book was to the modern world, the web will be to the world that is forming.

 

Theological education must get over its aversion to and misunderstanding of the Internet. The most anti-social technology ever invented was the book, not the web. Education already is the “next killer app” online, and “just-in-time training” is the greatest need of “continuing education.” The Web can connect the learning to the person when the questions start to be asked. Just-in-time learning, not semester-based, print-oriented, classroom-learning, is the educational model of the future.

 

#5 Our thinking about learning must be shaped by the influences of learning theorists like Dewey, Whitehead, Knowles, Senge, Schon (his work on the reflective practitioner), Perelman (his theories of just in time learning), and Louis Kentner (e.g. his dictum that “no teacher can put anything into a pupil which is not already there”).

 

This comes together in both face-to-face learning and distance learning. I don’t do “classroom teaching” in either sense of the term.

#10An action-reflection model is assumed for the future. The “in-ministry” model of Jesus and Paul needs to be rediscovered, or what some have called “reflective practitioners.” Paul didn’t train anyone for ministry; he trained them in ministry. Ministry development should enable students to learn ministry in practice and not train them for practice. This is less a matter of seeing the relationship as theory to practice (a rational paradigm) and more as reflective-in-action or, if you insist, theory-in-practice. Theological education used to be a profession based on apprenticeship rather than scholarship.^[vi] If “the local church is by design the most effective incubator of spiritual leaders on the planet,”^[vii] then the education of the church’s leaders needs to revolve around what that leaders spends the majority of his/her ministry attending to: the congregation.^[viii]

 

#11 The search for a new “core curriculum” for theological education is problematic because the whole concept of “curriculum” is problematic. Church leadership today requires a mentor plus action/reflection methodology in which the character, spiritual authenticity and missional passion of the mentor is more important than the curriculum. This is the new “core” around which some form of the old “core curriculum” in Bible, Patristics, Church History, Christology, Missiology, leadership/entrepreneurship, etc. will need to be recapitulated.

 

#12 We need to explore self-organizing, complex adaptive approaches to contextual learning where students can choose participation in a network of teaching churches and public/corporate sector opportunities across the globe along with web-based interaction for ongoing coaching. An open-source system trusts faculty mentors to guide learners to other faculty whose competencies and interests best suit that student’s particular needs.

 

#13Words that need to focus future discussions include: narrative, systems, strategic, missional, relational, incarnational, prophetic, contextual, culture-engaging, open-source. It is a waste of time to get bogged down in asking political questions like “Does Seminary Education Help or Hurt Pastoral Ministry?” or “Does training for ministry have to be formal theological education?” or “What’s Wrong with Theological Education as it Now Stands?”^[ix]

 

#14The Mis-education of the Church’s Leaders is all too apparent in the pervasive problem of the “3Ms:” money, mileage, marriage.^[x] The traditional teaching model of seminaries requires a student to (a) travel to a specific location; (b) spend approximately 1500 to 1600 hours in a classroom (e.g. 3-4 years); (c) pay tuition amounting to at least $30,000; (d) turn in a specified number of reports and papers; and (e) pass the required written examinations.