Thoughts on Equipping Leaders for the Church in a Changing World.

This morning I was stimulated by a post by Cynthia Holder Rich on equipping leaders.  What follows is largely my response to her thoughts.  (Several years ago, I wrote a short thought about the life of our seminaries called A Developing Vision of the Seminary.  I am beginning to see how far my thinking has developed!)

In an interesting way I found myself pondering two books.  One that I read a long time ago - Ed Farley's "Theologia: The Fragmentation and Unity of Theological Education" and another book that I have been reading recently by Chris Scharen and Aana Marie Vigen entitled, "Ethnography as Christian Theology and Ethics". In both books, there is a sense of what my pastoral theology professor, Charlie Brown, called "the Prego principle" - after the popular spaghetti sauce. The concept is that God blesses and enriches each person with insight and imagination sufficient to strengthen the witness of the church and the work of ministry. The challenge for leaders in the church is to have developed skill in "teasing out" that which already exists within each Christian and place those gifts within a framework for faithful witness that aligns with the calling of the Church. Farley approaches the question from a theologians point of view. Scharen and Vigen draw their insights from an effective method we rarely teach in a structured way to people entering the ministry - ethnography.

I have been richly blessed by exposure to the global church and international theological education. Even more, in particular while serving in Arizona, I learned much from the immigrant communities with whom we worked as new communities emerged. Yet what I have learned is that every place has a local language that is influenced by a wide range of forces that bring change to the doorstep of every Christian at a dizzying pace.

Thus, the gift of ministry and deep spiritual reflection is now, more than ever, a requirement for all dedicated disciples. Those who will be blessed by graduate training for ministry, and the academy that provides that training, must be equipped with sufficient skills to assess the wide and various contexts in which the Gospel is proclaimed - so that the message is intelligibly received in the local language. Even more, that depth level of theological training should equip future leaders with powerful skill at listening to the lives of those they serve so each localized manifestation of witness can be nurtured and offered to God's symphony of praise in every language.

Indeed I realize that the world is now demonstrating a more diverse and rich cultural and spiritual fabric that most of us have recognized in the past.  This diversity of expression in the language of faith does not necessarily mean a fracturing of the unity of the Gospel and its witness in the Church.  What it does portend is the requirement that Christians will need to be as culturally multilingual in matters of faith as they are having to be in the global village that keeps getting smaller by the day.