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Craig Blomberg, Bill Mounce, John Piper, Thielman

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The best possible ministry training?

Anglican Youthworks and Presbyterian Youth have joined forces to provide an exciting new form of ministry training called The Timothy Partnership.
The Timothy Partnership provides an online diploma in theology. It isn't just a correspondence course where you get dumped a bunch of notes. You get genuine interaction with a qualified lecturer and tutor online.
The course is three days a week and qualifies students to receive Austudy, so churches only need to raise a small amount for a ministry trainee to have a couple of days of ministry and a couple of days of training.
The partnership between Youthworks and the Presys is perfect. Youthworks prides itself on teaching anyone to do youth ministry, Presbyterian Youth prides itself on training young people to do any ministry. The combined effect is a program that can teach anyone to do any ministry.
The best part is that it resists the pressure to remove people from their local contexts to train them. (and they actually get a meaningful qualification at the end)
This has obvious benefits for rural churches, even overseas churches. But I think it even has benefits for city churches, as our current training models still tear people out of their contexts.
You could even use this training model for an evangelist reaching their own network, instead of removing them from that network to watch how you do (sometimes less effective) ministry currently.
This is a total win for the kingdom!

Church Army reflects on its move away from academic training

So, Church Army did some rethinking about how they train people so that the least, the last and the lost wold be reached with the good news from Jesus Christ. Recognising that the current church simply wasn't reaching these people, and wasn't about to soon, they CHANGED WHAT THEY WERE DOING. Crazy huh.



"While academic qualifications make Church Army candidates more employable in
local church settings, the demand and delivery style of academic training tends to de-
select mavericks and activists. Unfortunately, these temperaments tend to correlate
with those most suited to pioneering mission among those beyond the reach of the
traditional church.

Further, academic training tends to isolate the trainee from the mission context, and
focuses on ability to work with concepts and propositions in the artificial atmosphere
of the classroom. This socializes students towards the conceptual and away from the
practical - rewarding scholarly, introverted, compliant behaviour. This may lead to
the graduate carrying their college behaviour of studying and presenting theological
verbatim into parish life.

The net result of Church Army’s move towards academia was to socialize students
towards the behaviours and values of the established institutional church and its
clergy, thus preparing them for ministry within the church walls."


Not only that, but it removed the possibility of leadership from the very people they were trying to reach.
We seriously, seriously frown on that as a missionary practice overseas nowadays. The idea that the local church should provide leadership is pretty well entrenched in missionary thinking.
Yet the idea that a small group of people from an essentially alien culture have the sole right of leadership in Australian (and Sydney) churches lives on.
Hmm.
Now, I love College, I love the learning. I love theology. I love thinking. We need theologians. We need theologians on the street.
But there is more than a bit of truth in what they are saying.

Barba on training

" Let us understand each other, however: it is not by killing oneself with exhaustion that one becomes creative. It is not on command, by forcing, that one opens ones self to others. Training is not a form of personal asceticism, a malevolent harshness against oneself, a persecuting of the body. Training puts one's own intentions to the test, how far one is prepared to pay with one's own person for all that one believes and declares. It is the possibility of brisging the gap between intention and realization. This daily task, obstinate, patient, often in darkness, sometimes even searching for a meaning for it, is a concrete factor in the transformation of the actor as a man and as a member of the group. This imperceptible daily transformation of one's own way of seeing, approaching and judging the problems of one's own existence and that of others, this sifting of one's own prejudices, one's own doubts- not through gestures and grandiloquent phrases but through the silent daily activity- is reflected in one's work which finds new justifications, new reactions: thus one's north is displaced"
Eugenio Barba ' Words or Presence'

Of course, he is speaking of actor training.

But hey, if corporate training types are allowed to lecture us about training and development, why not a director?

Especially on the role of disciplined practice (so here I'm thinking especially meditation on the scriptures and prayer) "thus one's north is displaced"!