Over the last few months I’ve seen an increasing number of advocates for a higher standard of education to be a requirement for those considering officership. The reasons given seem to be pretty much for worldly considerations, rather than from a truly ministry point of view. Therefore, it was interesting to see Stephen Court’s take on this over at his Armybarmy blog (see October 28th entry)!
I’m amazed, and in some ways frightened, by this growing insistence on seeing highly qualified officers as being the only way we can go. I look at the majority of the early day officers in the Army and ask how many of these would have made the standard of these advocates of education. I look at the men that Jesus chose as his disciples and again ask what criteria they would now need to meet.
I know of some Salvationists who put great store in the letters after people’s name! For them it seems that the only true indicator of leadership ability is what follows their name! The problem is that some of the best officers I know are uneducated in the world’s eyes and yet have personally led many people both to the Lord and to a deeper faith in Him.
This is not to say that education is wrong, but when the lack of it becomes a barrier to stopping passionate, God appointed men and women from following His will for their lives through officership, then I’m sure the enemy will be rubbing his hands in glee!
Officership is about leadership, not just leading people to Christ. Leadership demands intelligence, and a disciplined and orderly way of thinking really helps, as does a practiced ability at articulating the inner life of faith. When the church sends out really dense leaders - and believe me I’ve seen my share - everyone brighter than them leaves because they simply can’t bear to watch what results, and it can be considerable harm. I’ve seen good Christians leave the army because of the standard of leaders sent to lead them - they reach a point where they simply can’t take it any more. I’ve also heard ministers in other denominations remark that the army corps they’ve known have had poor leaders not just for a few years but over decades. They end up picking up the pieces. Lets raise the game. Great discipleship for all believers is a good step - because the next generation of leaders comes from the believers we disciple. So lets get discipleship and formation right from the word go, and then send into training people who really have what it takes both spiritually and intellectually. :0)
I think you know me well enough that I’m not talking about discipleship and formation when I mean education. I’m talking about the fact that a growing number of people seem to feel that candidates must have degrees coming out of their ears before they should even be considered for officership! If that’s we end up going then we will lose a vast number of the leaders I know who are actually bringing people through in discipleship!
Of course we don’t want ignorant leaders like some have been and still are, but likewise we cannot rely on academic achievement as a benchmark for serving as an officer!
But what is to be gained by not trying to raise the standard? Surely fewer leaders but more competent leaders is a better route to go? And academic qualifications - provided they are suitable - within reason are actually good indicators of someone’s self discipline and motivation in being able to complete an arduous task and grow intellectually through the process. What I’m not impressed by is a denomination which takes so long to select and process applicants they spend in the end up to eight or nine years getting first degrees and a couple of MAs, even a PhD, in theology, usually on top of the degree in another subject that they acquired when younger and at the start of a different career. I’ve literally seen people go through 8 yrs of theology study only to be turned down by a selection conference at the end of it. Once turned down, of course, the church often doesn’t find them anything to do, because it is usually still working on the basis that the professional clergy are the only people qualified to minister. You are left, then, with an individual experiencing disaster and tremendous loss.
Emphasis on academic qualifications can be taken to ridiculous lengths which I wouldn’t support. It can also be the case that people spend years doing theology in a setting which is not focussed on practical application and ministry training. Some courses are very academic in focus, in contrast, others are much more anchored to how it is to be worked out in a church context. The course I’ve been doing has full pastoral training as part of the course. In contrast, I’ve spent time over coffee with theology/ordination training graduates who have been ordained without ever having covered even the most basic pastoral subjects - never mind mission. I remember one a few years ago who had done her entire ordination training doing things like writing 6000 word essays on the history of the Anabaptists, and she had not only not done a single course on planting or fresh expressions, but she hadn’t even had a discussion in that time with other students about the quandaries of rebooting, planting and fresh expressions. She simply didn’t have a clue and she was having to catch up by privately arranging supplementary courses after she became a curate. Mind you, she could tell me a lot about Anabaptists! :0) She had spent about 20 hours on preaching training in her entire training course. I had done I think over 100-200 on mine, with another 200 optional to come, and which we were encouraged to take. It all depends on which course and how it is designed.
That’s really where I’m coming from on this argument.
Blessings! :0)
I understand where you are coming from, Eleanor! I’m not against the idea of qualifications, but these should not be the first criteria by which a candidate is measured.
Of course, as in any human system, there will some who are either well placed for full-time ministry as an officer who do not make it through the process, as well as those eminently unsuited who do! Your illustration shows how this happens in many settings.
The concern I am raising is that there are some who have started to articulate that a university education should be a precondition of even considering someone for officership!
One of my most admired officers from my youth ws also one of the least intellectually capable. His preaching was far from great.
But he loved his people even when they sometimes turned on him.
Why did they turn on him? because he was willing to make the tough decisions and, gently, make the difficult confrontations that many other ’stronger’ officers said they would but backed out of.
Strangely, for a man with such limitations and poor ‘platform’ skills, he had the mercy seat lined week after week!
If I was unwilling to stay in a corps or the Army because my officer was too thick then I would clearly have been in the wrong place to begin with.
More concerning is when people who have the intellectual capability are not prepared to exercise it for their faith. Those who reject depth of spiritual exploration on the basis of wanting it ’simple’. AW Tozer accuses such of intellectual laziness - he has a point!
Hi Dave,
I’ve encountered people in ministry who were limited intellectually but who had a strong kind of ’social intelligence’, and they can get by with this.
I don’t think anyone needs to worry about people hanging around in a congregation when the leader is less well educated than the congregation. In the situations I’ve seen, the leader ruthlessly drives out everyone who is more well educated than they are for reasons of insecurity. They feel threatened, and they can’t work with them, so out they go. Similar dynamics operate with leaders who come and go with different attitudes to change. In a small town it creates a population of floating voters denominationally, who move from church to church depending on which leader is there at the time and where they can be useful and receive some kind of encouragement. The only people left with a denominational commitment are usually the ministers, but it all seems to work somehow. Perhaps it is signs of growing acceptance of ‘portfolio’ Christianity.
I’ve met many wonderful Christians who left school with nothing on paper, and never continued their formal education. They can be a huge blessing in a community - I’m thinking of one who literally alone created the hopeful atmosphere in a Bible college during a time of crisis. But he wouldn’t have made a college principal, even if he did hold the principal together spiritually now and again.!
Warmest blessings,
Eleanor
Sister under private vows
For every negative experience on one side of the argument, there is a matching one on the other side. In one corps I experienced the opposite situation with an intellectual, well educated elite making the life of the academically inferior officer a misery until they moved.
However, I refuse to dwell on the bad experiences any more! Whilst acknowledging that much is wrong in the systems we have in the Army, and indeed in almost every denomination, I am determined to be the best that I can be, through the power of the Holy Spirit. I want to focus on Kingdom values. This is the only way that this movement of God can move forward and be the spiritual force for good in the early years of the 21st Century. Where there is a conflict between the world’s standards and those of the Kingdom, I will always fight for the Kingdom’s views and highlight them as I see them through this blog.
2000 years ago Jesus took 12 men, the majority of whom were not brilliant academics, and modelled to them a new way of living. These disciples then went on and modelled this new way of living throughout the known world and lives were totally changed. This is the model we should be following! The things that build the church may be academic brilliance and social intelligence, but the things that build the Kingdom of God are faithfulness to our Lord Jesus Christ and to Kingdom living.
I’ll take the building of the Kingdom over the building of the church everytime!
Sorry to force my way into the discussion, but I think this is an interesting debate. I guess I can only speak from my own experience, so here it is: Generally speaking, I am an academic. I have a degree and a Masters, (although not in theology), but I have studied theology to an A level standard, and would be excited at the prospect of developing my knowledge in this way. However, I know many officers who have not got a degree, and most certainly did not have a degree when they went into training. Some of these people are very intelligent people who just never got the opportunity, others are people who would never have been inclined to try to be educated to this standard because they are not academics.
Neither of these categories of people are any more or less able to do the work of an officer, from what I have seen.
There are clearly certain advantages to getting further education. One of which is certainly to do with preaching. BUT may I also just say that some of the best sermons I have heard have been about living a life of faith. The only education you need for that is the experience of doing that yourself.
I agree that there are probably many occasions where leaders who are uneducated have negatively affected a church, but I would argue that the same is probably true of educated leaders too.
My brother would not mind me saying that he is not an academic, and yet he has so many more skills in approacj=hing people, commecting with people and caring for people than I do. I may be able to do the intellectual stuff, but I lack in other areas which are just as (if not more) important.
I think if every leader we had was forced to get a degree first, we would alienate people from entering this kind of leadership who are very able, but not very good at essay writing (for instance). If we try to force all leaders to fit into a box then we will lose the wonderful diversity that makes up the leadership of the Salvation Army. We need to remember that the people within the chuch are not only intellectuals. They are all types of people, and if we only bring one type of leader, surely we will only reach one type of member?
I know many people who struggle to listen to an intellectual sermon, but are moved, inspired and discipled by the call to live a Christian life of love from those who live that out day by day in their officership.
Thanks to everyone for your contributions, and I’d love to here the views of anyone else on this issue! I think it’s safe to say that the key in all of this is obtaining a balance. The first and most important thing is the individual’s spiritual life. I would suggest that the real problem in the past has been a lack of depth in the spiritual lives rather than the lack of, or abundance of, intellectual ability.
That raises a question for me: what do we mean by spiritual depth?
Is it an absence of irritating platitudes in conversations?
Is it an ability to handle the mysteries within our faith, and people asking the really hard questions?
Is it an ability to articulate the inner life of faith and help others to find ways to express and explore theirs as part of the process of spiritual growth?
I know I lose whatever depth I have when I fail to spend enough time alone with God - but what is that depth in us that enables us to bless others? The Hebrew ‘Binoh’? Understanding?
Now there’s an interesting question Eleanor! What constitutes spiritual depth? Of the ’suggestions’ you make I’d say the first is what some people think is the answer, but isn’t. The understanding of the mystery of our faith and being able to articulate the inner life of faith so that others grow is part of it. But it’s this and more, and when you see it you know it, and when it’s missing you sense it too!
I’d also say that spiritual depth is something that only seems to come with spending time with God, not just in the sense of a daily quiet time (which if we aren’t careful can just become another legalistic and pious act), but in the sense of a life that is lived in close relationship with Jesus.
Although this is simply my opinion!
And in an understanding that holiness is fundamentally relational, and worked out in our daily lives, not just an inner experience, however much we feel it was life-changing. The only people who know if it was genuinely life changing or not are those who have to live with us. Surely holiness is relational because God is relational both within the Trinity and with humanity through the incarnation. Depth is to do with holiness and understanding. The two are not necessarily found together.
I think spiritual depth in a Christian has a lot to do with inner stability of life and a sense of rootedness within the life of faith. When a pilgrim goes in a time of desolation to a spiritual director, they want to be accompanied by someone who has absolute confidence they can and will come through it, borne out of the depth of having been there themselves. Likewise when a congregation has lost its direction, as a group they want to be in the hands of someone who absolutely knows they can recover their missional direction without disaster. Incidentally there’s a good article this week in one of the leadership magazines emailings on navigating congregations through change processes - I’ll email the link if I can find it again.
I am too shallow to discuss spiritual depth, but concerning the academic discussion could I, as an officer with no other formal education than as an officer,and with tongue in cheek, qoute one of the findings from the most extensive research into the health and growth of the Church ever (for thos who don’t know: This is related to Natural Church Development):
“Formal theological training has a negative correlation to both church growth and overall quality of churches”
Seems like academics is not the main issue!
I’m pretty suspicious of NCD statistics, but you can’t say they haven’t been thorough in the attempt. I’d have to come back to the point though and ask what they mean by overall quality. Nothing is ever that simple.
One of my fellow Jewish Christians spends his whole ministry visiting church after church to talk about the Jewish roots of Christianity, the relationship between the Old and New Testaments, and the sort of problems Jewish believers face in the church. He says the level of ignorance about the Old Testament, Judaism and the Jewish roots of Christianity,as well as how to integrate Jewish believers is scary. Ministers and congregants alike default unthinkingly to a replacement theology position which basically drives out or alienates almost all Jewish believers, and which they do not realise lays the foundations for anti-semitism and anti-Judaism. The consequences for individual Jewish believers can be dire, and it has led to a situation where now the routine advice given to Jews who accept Christ as saviour is to stay away from the gentile church. This to me is an example, among many, of how you can’t cut corners in forming leaders. I remain convinced leadership requires intelligence as well as spiritual formation and an awareness of Church history.
But I’m with you Henrik, I don’t think I’m qualified to talk about spiritual depth either! :0)
“I remain convinced leadership requires intelligence as well as spiritual formation and an awareness of Church history.”
I agree that leadership requires intelligence! Let’s just avoid insisting that the only proof of it is academic qualifications!
A certificate hanging on the wall, without the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is just a piece of paper.