Spurgeon’s College has recently closed with immediate effect as its financial situation became untenable.
This raises some interesting questions, even for those of us in movements in the UK that rarely use residential training settings.
Spurgeon’s had recently become a university, with its own degree awarding powers. It was the only independent evangelical Bible College to have done so in the UK and was being watched with interest by the others. Every other Bible College has its degree awarding powers underwritten by a university—this is how the UK education system works—though it is possible to give out ‘unaccredited degrees’ they aren’t generally considered to be ‘worth’ very much. There are lots of assumptions in that, I appreciate, but it’s the system as we currently find it.
A couple of Bible Colleges have chosen to be underwritten by institutions in America as a bulwark against manipulation of what they teach. It hasn’t happened yet as far as I know, but the concern is that the underwriting institution has all the power and can easily say ‘in order to get a degree you much teach x,’ though it wouldn’t be put so blatantly.
Spurgeon’s going under will, of course, make everyone concerned about their financial future. The thing is, having spent eight years working in British Universities, its unlikely to be the last. The major institution I most recently worked at was openly discussing its financial strategy as ‘ride out a few difficult years until a number of competitors go under, at which point the market will be easier.’ Everyone has been taking about universities going on for some years now, it’s just taken longer to happen than was first expected. The UK has too many for the available number of students, with the current funding model.
That won’t interest many of my readers, but it is relevant to Christian training for ministry. If we think it is of value to get formal training in theology—perhaps even accredited to a particular level so that it can be called a BA or MTh or similar—then the institutions that offer that are probably going to shrink. They are already beholden to narrow funding streams and have some potentially precarious relationships with the accrediting structures.
Expensive residential training is unlikely to be what we need, the costs are prohibitive right now as the cost of living is so difficult for so many, but also because we believe in churches training those they appoint because of their character. That means we want training that is church centred, rather than models where you disappear for multiple years and then apply for jobs on an advert. Most of my world are just waking up to the value of training, and the younger generation of elders are more likely to want to seek some more formal training for themselves and for their teams. I think this is good. My world runs some of our own training and then uses the Union GDip and MTh beyond that. It’s reaping good rewards throughout the movement.
We raise leaders and then we train them. That’s great.
What if the training provider isn’t there anymore? Well, we can do that sort of thing ourselves, even if it wouldn’t have a degree label attached. It would be possible; it would even be cheaper. The real problem, I suspect, is this: where are those who would run that training coming from?
How do we train the trainers? How do we raise up ‘Ephesians 4 Teachers’? How do we raise ‘Doctors of the Church’? I think those are all the same question, though your mileage may vary slightly.
I am unconvinced that relying on some people to go and do PhDs in a dwindling number of available theology departments is necessarily the way forwards, but the alternatives aren’t immediately obvious. A PhD doesn’t train you to teach, though it does form you in a particular way of thinking. I’d have mixed feelings about that. It does expose you to significant, sustained, and strenuous challenges to your thinking. That sounds deeply worthwhile for those that we want to train those who preach, teach, and shepherd the flock. We want clarity that’s been formed through interaction with opposing thought, we want an irenicism that comes from understanding why people think differently, and we want a mastery of the sweep of things that people do think and why.
But we’d also like them to be able to teach, not just lecture. We’d like them to understand what churches are and what church leadership is like so that they can make what they teach practical. Theology is practical, by the way, you do need to understand the hypostatic union for your daily work of pastoring. Your people need to understand it, even if they don’t know the term, because doctrine is for life and for worship.
I don’t have clear answers, though I think I have a clear problem. How will those of us in the British New Churches train our leaders so that we can think, know why our particular doctrine is our doctrine, and not just believe things because we do? That’s answerable, but where will those who do the training come from? That’s much more challenging.
How do you form a ‘Teacher?’ This is a question that individual churches and our networks need to be considering. We’ll need to think about it long before we need to or we’ll be sunk.
Photo by Victor Freitas on Unsplash
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