Welcome, to a blog that takes up a running - but too often neglected - theme of these blogs: relationships between ‘established’ and pentecostal/minority ethnic churches; thistle in relation to how we train our ministers.
Ministerial Training for Belonging.
Willie James Jennings book ‘After Whiteness’ is sub-titled ‘An Education in Belonging’. Amongst responses to it are the first four essays in ‘Deconstructing Whiteness, Empire and Mission’, edited by Anthony Reddie and Carol Troupe, on ‘Decolonising Theological Education’. I believe that the concepts of both ‘Whiteness’ and ‘Decolonising’ themselves need deconstructing, since their origins are in very specific geographical and historical contexts - work for a later date. But this blog has a narrower focus – on how ‘theological education between the times’ to use the title of the series that Jennings’ book inaugurates, can create a sense of belonging between church leaders of very different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and between those leaders and the world and the societies that they are called to lead the church in serving.
The first two essays in Reddie and Troupe’s collection focus on a rather cosmetic approach to theological education. That is, they have a concern over how to increase the numbers of teachers or students from minority ethnic backgrounds, but without a strong awareness of how different might be the social backgrounds and theological undergirding of Christians from those communities. The deeper issue of epistemological differences is raised in another essay, but disappointingly doesn’t encounter specific issues. Yet an obvious theological and epistemological difference that is rooted in deep-seated cultural and mental formation is our understanding of both the spirit world and of the work of the Holy Spirit. Here is an obvious case of where the traditions of ‘Whiteness’ and its colonising arrogance need to be challenged and debated by majority world Christians. And where, for the benefit of all parties, a reconciling rapprochement could have major consequences.
How then, might training open up future ministers to the rich resources that have arisen from different social experiences and cultural formations? How might it deepen leaders’ sense of belonging to culturally diverse congregations, to a culturally diverse world church, and to culturally diverse societies.
Three areas to consider:
1. Residence.
Paradoxically the beginnings of theological education in the early centuries in monastic communities is an important pointer to theological education for belonging today. Whilst theological education has become increasingly individualistic, academic and professional, leading to the sort of ‘complete’ white(?) man(?) that Jennings rightly abhors, theological education in monastic communities involved not just studying together, nor even also praying and worshipping together, but also living, eating and doing together the manual work needed to sustain the community. It was, indeed, holistic. The intended outcome was not just theological competence but godly character.
That tradition provided a norm which has been eroded over time. Until the financial constraints of the past few decades training was usually residential, but in the intervening centuries it was shaped by conforming to the norm of education for gentlemen. Universities became largely the prerogative of the prosperous. Learning the property of the academic guild. The theological education that I received in a university city still had the characteristics of a learning community, but this was now so central, and conditioned by a social assumption of privilege, that someone was employed to make our beds for us. The aim was to send us out intellectually equipped and with minds sharpened by encounter with other learners, but not necessarily with a deep sense of bonding to a community. It produced professionals rather than servants.
Even that model has been eroded, for understandable reasons. The age of students training for ministry has increased. Married students are now the norm, single students quite isolated. Some sort of community life was possible when, as in my training, the students were very largely single men in their twenties. That has changed beyond recognition, whilst financial pressures (a factor Jennings properly pays attention to) has made residential training increasingly rare. The result is that whilst training can still impact people’s minds, nonetheless its potential to shape their character, and so inculcate the love, servanthood and humility that are the hallmarks of Christian ministry has been attenuated.
It is significant that Elam Ministries in Iran, despite financial limitations and state sponsored persecution, nonetheless provides six month residential training for its leaders, with the particular goals of deepening spirituality and creating Christ-like character. Modern Britain is a very different context for ministry, but I believe it needs the same thorough shaping of spirituality, character and deeply internalised sense of calling that residential experience provides.
2. Context.
My schooling taught me the importance of context. I got a scholarship to an independent school. The result was that my formal education was bracketed between the informal education of a daily commute from suburban Pinner to gritty urban Cricklewood) though the school pretentiously named itself as in Hampstead). As I have recalled with old school friends, the experience was formative. The feel, the sights, the complexity, the poverty of urban life was around us. Simon Schama, no less, has made a similar observation. A couple of years after I left, the school moved itself to the green belt - institutions tend to move to locations where they feel socially comfortable. (Zadie Smith was educated In a subsequent manifestation the buildings).
Our physical context ineluctably gathers our attention and shapes our thinking, our priorities, and our focus. I had a similar experience in the parish where I was a vicar for 31 years, Church and vicarage were on the same site except for an 18 month period when the whole site was being redeveloped and we temporarily lived in a house just 500 yards away. However, it was across Ealing Road, the Gujerati shopping capital of Europe, with around fifteen sari shops, large 24/7 grocers, restaurants and high end jewellery shops. At one level this was not strange to me – I visited there regularly and I knew it in my mind. But the day-upon-day experience of walking along the road shaped my instinctive and subconscious awareness of where I was ministering that was deeper than that developed when I took a thirty yard walk from vicarage to church.
The physical and social context in which ministerial training happens has a powerful impact on the themes and concerns that lay at the back of students minds when they study. Where we locate our training institutions is not a theologically insignificant factor in the training that students receive or of the concerns, convictions and sense of calling that they develop. It shapes the sort of ministry that they prepare themselves for. Thus it is serious that Anglican colleges are very largely not urban, and certainly not inner-urban. In the cull of residential colleges over the past few decades the five Oxbridge focussed colleges have all shown a sturdy capacity for survival as others have fallen by the way. It is ominous too that now the largest provider, the non-residential St Mellitus college in London, is situated in one of the capital’s most prosperous locations. It developed from an earlier manifestation in the East End.
Location, as with my old school’s change, is an indication of what we think matters. So whilst it is good to have some presence in important centres of academic learning, development and debate, our disproportionate focus indicates an over-valuing of concern for the generally privileged and socially comfortable world of academia over against the greater needs and theologically significant areas of urban poverty. In a parallel distortion of concern, we identify and nurture ordinands with theological and intellectual capacity but have no similar pathway for developing people with the commitment and skills for urban and inter-cultural mission.
Alan Gilbert’s book ‘Religion and Society in Industrial England 1740-1914’ charted the churches’ response to industrial society noting how as the burgeoning popular energy of nineteenth century evangelical non-conformity increasingly set its sights on rivalling the established church amongst the more educated and affluent classes, so the training colleges moved from undistinguished places like Cheshunt and Homerton to Cambridge. In fact, the move became contemporaneous with their decline over the past 150 years, with small gains amongst the establishment offset by a disastrous reduction in widespread popular involvement.
If ministerial training is to regain a sense of training for belonging it needs to be located in places where it has found it hardest to belong, and to be developing in its ministers the capacity to both belong, and to work with or develop foci of belonging in such places. Jennings writes of the need for ‘a new sense of shared habitation – geographic, intellectual, spiritual’ (‘After Whiteness’, p 112). Learning to belong, and then starting to consider future ministry, in a new geographical location is a necessary uncoupling of the church from areas where it can still feel competent and comfortable to learning in the midst of weakness and fragmentation.
3. Inter-ethnic and inter-church.
Statistics of church sizes and growth show that incontestably the Christianity of the future in Britain will be multi-ethnic and multi-cultural. The evidence also shows that the two streams that will form that Christianity are not yet marked by deep inter-mingling, and that the newest and growing stream – majority world background, usually Pentecostal, often located in specific diasporas – has relatively little interaction with the traditional ‘mainstream’ denominations. Certainly these latter churches have growing minority ethnic membership, and that at a local level there are inter-church groupings which straddle that divide. But at the levels of senior leadership; strategy and planning for mission to the whole society, or in theological teaching and training the level of interaction is still very limited. ‘Many native [ie ‘mainstream’] European churches have either not wanted, or known how to, help diaspora Christians to reach the local population’ (from ‘Europe 2021 -A Missiological Report by Jim Memory’, European Christian Mission, p 28).
I believe these two streams will either die separately or flourish together – it is that important. On the one hand traditional churches will continue to wither, lacking the robust supernatural convictions that enable them to contest the inherently secular and pluralist mindset of our culture, and for minority ethnic churches a reliance on simplistic fundamentalism will fail to provide the intellectual resources to sustain the faith of their coming generations. On the other hand, mutual learning at depth can develop a church with both strong confidence in the supernatural and the theological sophistication to challenge the intellectual and emotional confusion growing in our culture.
There are positive signs pointing towards such mutuality. There is increasing recognition that effective ‘reverse mission’ will require a much more thorough engagement with the culture of the white English. The most recent mission strategy of the New Testament Church of God, the pioneering black majority church in Britain, includes emphases on both greater ecumenical working together and on developing theologically sound leadership They are developing links with Queens Birmingham, Spurgeon’s College and St Mellitus College. The fast-growing, predominantly Nigerian Redeemed Christian Church of God has its own theological college.
However genuine interaction in ministerial training will come neither from separate institutions, nor from majority world background churches being guests in English institutions. Rather it requires the creation of theological training which is genuinely mutual, where the administration, the teaching and the student body have roughly equal contributions, where neither stream has a controlling hand. Such a development will involve considerable self-emptying from all sides, deep-seated discomfort with each other’s views and practices, and a growing depth of love which will over-ride such tensions. But it is only deep-seated interaction in not just worshipping and praying together but also in studying and discussing theology together, and which involves personally interacting, eating, and living together, that will go deeper than the superficial friendliness of occasional ministerial gatherings.
The future of Christianity in Britain is incontestably destined to be not just ethnically diverse in an obvious way, but marked by deep-seated differences of social experience, including racism, and of very different cultural ways in how we express ourselves, of how we use and respond to authority, and indeed the expectations and assumptions we have about how God relates to his world. These are not little differences to be addressed in bi-partite theological discussions, or by producing statements of agreed wording about baptism or the work of the Holy Spirit; they are overcome only by much more deeply internalised awareness of how it might be to inhabit the being of someone formed by very different circumstances and culture. This comes only through sustained encounter that enables someone to start internalising how faith in Christ manifests itself within a very different experience. But only thus, amongst substantial and growing super-diversity, can Christians witness to the unity, hope and new life that Jesus brings.
Proposals.
How might the above proposals work out and theological education for belonging be developed, bearing in mind the above three areas?
Some suggestions:
* Units of 8 – 12 students, with one or two resident tutors tutor, living residentially for at least six months, with an emphasis on their common life together. (Are there old vicarages that could house such a unit). It would need to be in an urban area.
* A world of theological lecturing is now available by You Tube or Zoom, drawing on a range of global Christian traditions. Likewise a lot of theological textbooks are on line. Theological training can now be easily dispersed.
* Units could be linked to non-denominational theological centres, such as Roehampton University, or London School of Theology.
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Related blogs:
Pentecostalism and Englishness - on reading Harvey Kwiyani. #127
Interview with Bp Joe Aldred. #107
Diaspora Churches and Mission in Britain 1 & 2. #92/93
Black Majority Christian Groups at University. #72
One River, Two Streams: Global Christianity in Britain. #53