7 Ways to Reinvent Ministry Training
Following the bad news about theological education, what would it look like to reinvent ministry training? There are at least seven things that could be done.
1. Begin with the end in mind
Read the gospels and rediscover Jesus’ model of leadership development. He integrated spiritual and character formation with ministry formation and theological training in real life contexts. He expected loving obedience to precede and follow the attainment of theological knowledge. Otherwise you failed his class.
2. Find an apostolic mentor
Even if you never change your system of ministry training you can transform it by sponsoring in an apostolic mentor. Someone like Charles Simeon who invested in the development of over one thousand evangelical ministers who passed through Cambridge in the eighteenth century. You can find other examples in Ignatius Loyola who founded the Jesuites and Bobby Clinton at Fuller Seminary. Simeon was a local minister, Ignatius the founder of a missionary order, Clinton was on the teaching staff.
It doesn’t work to just assign each student to an existing minister and expect them to be mentored effectively. That’s a recipe for mediocrity. Pray and fast until God brings someone with the gifts and calling to empower a whole new generation of leaders.
3. Partnership with the frontline
Existing colleges could form partnerships with effective practitioners, churches and mission agencies. They need to be symbiotic relationships.
Why can’t colleges take the education they offer to the frontline? They could turn the best practitioners into visiting lecturers. They could help them raise standard of training at every level of church life. Colleges could let the best practitioners help them create new courses and deliver theological training in a way that is accessible to the whole body of Christ. They could provide the option of taking 10-15 years to complete a theological education so leaders can be trained on the job.
A few years ago the Australian College of Ministries under Keith Farmer, sold its campus in Sydney and went down this path. They now have hubs all over Australia based in local churches providing training and education for a region.
4. Take it to the masses
As a missionary in Honduras, George Patterson adapted Theological Education by Extension (TEE) and pioneered a model of obedience-oriented training.
He would:
- Model skills and activities in a way that the leaders-in-training can immediately imitate
- Listen carefully as each leader-in-training reports; monitor progress
- Help the leader envision what God wants the cell (church) to do
- Prioritize the next steps
- Link practical work with appropriate biblical and other study
- Gear training to needs and opportunities
- Encourage the local leaders to plan ahead, and solve their own problems
- Ensure leaders reproduce new disciple-making groups and train other leaders
5. Turn your church into a college
Hope Chapel, led by Ralph Moore, is one of the many flagship churches that have become a church planting movement. The church runs a ministry training school that rapidly trains proven lay leaders to become founding pastors and life-long learners through intense mentoring and small group interaction.
Their model is based on the MBA program at Pepperdine University. Entry is limited to people with a validated ministry. They have demonstrated effectiveness in evangelism, disciple-making, multiply leaders and small groups. The have a call to church planting.
Candidates enter an intensive nine-month training course with eight other church planters. The training provides a foundation in Bible, theology, church growth and leadership. Students meet weekly for 3-4 hour intensive “round table” interaction. Each student comes prepared to lead the discussion and teach on all topics for that session. They are expected to read several books each week. The class mentor calls on different students at random to lead and teach a topic. The focus of the course is not to teach the students everything they need to learn. It is to cultivate life-long learning skills.
Hope Chapel has planted 226 daughter churches in the US, Japan and Asia-Pacific. Many of them were planted by ‘lay people’.
6. Become a movement
Under the leadership of Chris Marantika the Evangelical Theological Seminary of Indonesia has become a movement. The seminary’s goal is to plant twenty thousand churches by the year 2015—one church in each of Indonesians twenty thousand villages. Over seven hundred churches have been planted this way and the college has started thirteen branch seminaries throughout Indonesia.
A seminary as a movement will be characterized by white hot faith, commitment to a cause, contagious relationships, rapid mobilization and adaptive methods. Run your college like this and you’ll change the world.
7. End with the end in mind
Are you in the business of developing godly and effective leaders who pioneer and strengthen healthy churches everywhere? Why not do whatever it takes to get the job done?
