Does the health of the church depend on the health of its colleges?

James Robson thinks so.  In Evangelicals Now he quotes John Stott on this favourably.  Do I agree? Well, I think that the answer is “yes and no” depending on what is meant.

Stott was speaking  from a perspective where Anglican clergy to a man (it was men for most of his life) went through formal theological training at one of the colleges. 

Health mattered because the colleges were preparing pastors for ministry. Their theology, approach to preaching, ethics and pastoral care were being shaped there. Sadly we have had a lot of unhealthy colleges and so these were often seen as places which harmed rather than helped faith.  Why have there been plenty of evangelicals who seem muddled and uncertain?  The answer is surely at least in part to do with their training.

That’s why David Peterson and then Mike Ovey were so determined to develop Oak Hill as a robust, healthy, Biblical centre for training and formation.  In Mike’s case, it was driven by his own poor experience of training.

So, yes health, if we are talking theological and spiritual health matters.  I write as someone who continues to believe that theological colleges continue to have a part to play in training pastors and other Gospel workers.

This means too that the colleges must look to the maturity of their staff too. It’s important that they aren’t just teaching good theology but that they are able to model the Christian life and pastoral leadership well too.

However, no it doesn’t matter if we are talking about size and strength of particular institutions, especially when we are thinking of a specific model of residential training. 

So I have a few question marks and differences with what James has to say.  For example, he comments that it is necessary to have a degree to be a primary school teacher but not to be a pastor. 

I wonder if that’s the right analogy and if it is helpful.  To be sure, elders must be able to teach (should all elders have a theology degree?) but I want to be cautious about always thinking in terms of churches being educational centres, a bit like schools!  There are other comparisons to make. In fact I wonder at times whether or not the education model has hindered spiritual growth in churches.  We should not be at church just to acquire knowledge

It is worth noting that when it comes to training teachers, there are a number of models used for the training itself these days, including many teachers being trained within the school environment with senior, experienced practitioners taking responsibility for their training and development.

My further concern is that the risk is that we give the impression that pastoral ministry is in effect a graduate job.  As I’ve written here so many times, my experience in the secular world of leading a team of graduates and non graduates was that the non grads were as brilliant as the grads in highly demanding work but a University education would not have worked for them.

My experience as a pastor with a focus on encouraging and developing planters and church pastors has been that some have benefited from formal theological training and others would simply not have benefited from this.  We have sent people on to residential seminary training, run a learning community for a Flexi- approach course and developed a lot of in house stuff to enable men and women to access significant levels of training who would not otherwise have gone to college

If our attention is primarily on the colleges and degrees , then it’s not just that we exclude some, it’s that we keep missing the vast majority of people who could be mobilised into ministry as pastors, planters, women’s workers, youth and children’s workers, cross cultural missionaries etc. 

In fact, I would go so far as to say that in most cases, the best option is not theological college. 

So, it is not so much that a healthy church needs healthy theological colleges as that it needs  healthy theological training, in whatever shape that takes.