Pipelines and pathways: A response to “Strange Times: On (Not) Considering Theological Training”

My friend, Dan Strange of Crosslands has recently contributed to the discussion about ministry pathways and pipelines in the latest edition of Themelios.

Here’s my response to the article which I shared with Dan via Facebook inititially.

Thanks Dan,

There is much that chimes here with things I’ve been saying for some time, not least the need to democratize theological training and to see that there are many different pathways in.

For what it is worth, I’m not convinced that there is a shortage of people coming into church leadership but there are shortages in some of those traditional pipelines because there have been blockages.

It’s not just the financial cost, though that would need democratization too. Many churches don’t have the resources to put into training funds unless there is collaboration and that means perhaps that larger churches should be careful that they don’t think that training means that they are “training churches” funding and placing their own pipeline of graduates but rather being willing to share resources.

For example, what about pooling Ministry training schemes. A lot of smaller churches attempted and gave up on this but what if a Ministry Training scheme placed people from and to a variety of churches, there could even be rotations as you would see with graduate and apprentice schemes in business.

There is also the cultural cost -to stick with your theme. Our seminaries and even our ministry training schemes are academically and culturally distant from the people we are seeking to raise up. My go to example is the guy who aged 10 was recruited into the cartels. He arrives in the UK and seeks to share the good news, he accidentally plants a church. He has clear gifting but he has no secondary let alone higher education experience and the culture of theological college seems remote from his experience.

I did talk to Crosslands about these kinds of needs a few years back but pandemics and such like interrupted those conversations. Perhaps it is time for another attempt. I think it is no bad thing if we are primarily seeing people in their 30s rather than people in their 20s beign the primary demographic considering Goisepl ministry. Perhaps some of the “costs” act as a filter to help people make decisions. If there are multiple pathways then perhaps that doesn’t need to worry us too much.