My recent visit to the Logos Hope ship, prior to its arrival in UK ports and Cardiff Bay at the end of May, prompted a number of questions in me about the nature and value of contemporary training for Christian ministry.

In fairness this has been a matter for personal reflection over many months, whose roots have to do with the falling number of applications for theological college, the lack of a clear post-academy development track in the independent church sector particularly and the seemingly weak vocational element of theological training - especially when it’s separated from a hands-on, weekly, local church experience.

Methods and models

I'm not even sure that we are in fact training people for the church that now exists. Our methods and models seem designed to meet the challenges of the 20th rather than the 21st Century. But that’s a sweeping statement I have no time to unpack here!

What 36 hours on Logos Hope showed me was the value of active learning in community.

Those of the 350 ship’s crew who were part of the core OM two year discipleship programme had directed studies, access to good resources and the opportunity to practice both the skills of gospel ministry and develop the character of a minister of the gospel as they moved from port to port, went on shore to share the good news, and were part of a team doing basic practical tasks on board.

I could well imagine that two years in such an environment with people from different cultures and Christian backgrounds is a far better place to learn about the real world and the real church than a fairly cloistered Bible College which we have chosen because it pretty much suits what we already know and the people we 'get' culturally.

Of course there’s some sort of mix in most Bible Colleges. I remember from my own days how getting to know a man called VJHS Nelson from India - to whose Church in Hyderabad I have subsequently gone to preach - taught me much more about the gospel and cross-cultural understanding than any lectures I attended on the subject. Not that there were any to attend!

Limited practical experience

But the learning methods were fairly passive and the practical experience limited to a couple of afternoons a week doing cold contact door to door, the occasional open air event and some Sunday preaching at a huge variety of churches in the valleys from ten people and an electric fire which burst into flames after the second hymn, to a cavernous chapel where 30 people were scattered all over the pews instead of sitting in the first three rows. There was nobody there from the college to check out what I was saying or how I was saying it. I suppose the church secretary may have reported back to the principal a student’s really awful sermon (!), but in the main we were left to get on with it and then when the years of study were over we hoped and prayed that something might come up which would be suitable as the church we could work in.

Doubtless things have changed since the 1980’s - my fear is that they haven’t changed nearly as quickly or as radically as they need to.

Two years on a ship is not a substitute for thorough theological learning of Bible handling skills, a competent grasp of doctrine, church history and the like. We need robust academic grounding for the next generation of preachers, evangelists and Christian workers.

New Testament Church

But the New Testament doesn’t seem to allow for an institutional Bible College - miles from the community of the church. It assumes that the local church is the place where we disciple and equip people for ministry. Granted, the OT had its School of the Prophets but they seemed - at least under Elijah and Elisha - to be a peripatetic establishment in which pupils followed the Prophet - Master in much the same way that Jesus trained the twelve and the 70 by a "watch me, listen to me, now go and do it" approach.

In my own experience, it wasn’t until I left Bible College and became an Assistant in a church in Southampton that I started properly learning about ministry. I shadowed an older man, preached to the same congregation on a regular basis and worked out how a church operates effectively and why it doesn’t.

50% of what I had studied in college was practically irrelevant to the actual job. And much of what I needed to know I had received no specific training for - like planning and chairing a meeting, training others in Bible study leadership skills, taking a funeral/wedding/baptism, counselling, running a mission, working with other church leaders, inter church co-operation, making strategic changes in church, negotiating with the organist (!). In fact because you were primarily trained to be a preacher, the skills of a motivator, organiser, forward thinker, planner, fund raiser, problem solver were not addressed in the academy at all.

Bible handlers and communicators

Now, I’d be the last to say that effective preaching doesn’t matter and therefore a Bible College should really seek to train managers, counsellors, and financially competent administrators. We must above all train and equip Bible handlers and communicators to a post-Christian, secularized society.

My passion is to make sure that we attract and retain the best minds and skills for the next generation of Independent Churches we need to see built. That requires a leadership development programme which the local church and the academy in isolation from each other just won’t be able to provide. An effective partnership between them is the way forward as gospel workers are trained in community.

Peter