Categories: uncategorized
Date: 10 November 2011 15:58:22
Steve Taylor has posted an interesting piece about the nature and role of seminaries following on from an article by Brian McLaren. Within McLaren's article he highlights how the positive atmosphere of many colleges is the exact opposite of the church environments many people find themselves in when leaving college. Taylor looks at this by focusing on how pioneer "mission planting" approaches may be the way forward.
The articles helped articulate for me part of the problem I have, as somebody who is not within seminary but who has spent the last few years within the department and making odd forays up to the vicar factory for the conferences that actually related to my academic discipline of Applied or Practical Theology. I have spent alot of the last three years spending time reading about exciting missional type things and thinking about how mission in "the real world" might look. Yet, I have also studied the environment churches in "the real world" are operating. I understand that the issues of secularisation; funding and an aging population within and outside the church as well as the global recession all are contributing to the way churches operate within the real world. In turn I understand that the funding which seminaries recieve and the way theological education works is also impacted by the effects of secularisation and budget concerns particularly. We are encouraged to dream and think missionally but then we are either explicitly or implicitly made to understand that life is more complicated than we want to make it. We are subject not only to church discipline but also to the funding formulars of the churches and denominations we are working within.
This all scares me....more than I should probably be writing on here. I am offering for ministry, and setting myself up for the very situation which McLaren and Taylor describe; I know this! As I put it to some one recently I am in the situation where I want to be the ministerial equivilent of a midwife but feel like I am offering to work with the terminally ill. In reality I feel called to be more of a GP figure who seeks to support people through pregnancy and birth, helping new forms of mission come to fruition and to come alongside struggling, perhaps terminally ill congregations but actually to spend most of my time doing something in between which is actually more community based and relational dealing with the variety of things that come my way, but always from the point of view of wanting to give dignity and where possible renewed life and vitality.
I recognise that there are many people wanting new ways of doing things and answers to the new questions being asked, but I also recognise the place and worth of the inherited forms of existing church. Thinking back to the other day I want the reformation but I also want to keep contact with what is being replaced in order to try and bridge the gap between the two and ensure that our heritage is not lost in the process of the reformation.
If I end up in college in September - and at the moment that is quite a big if because I am back to very much to realising this is a period of me testing my calling as well as the church testing it- I know I want to be trained in how to be this type of bridge. I don't want to be the ecclesiastical version of Indiana Jones; I do want to be somebody who has adventures where the cartographers may not yet have ventured as well as having a stable base in an established community.
Realise that there were an awful lot of "I wants" within that post- those who know and support me please pray more strongly than ever that this whole process will find me doing whatever God wants in September and beyond and that both the church and I will feel in one mind about what that call is be it ministry or returning to teaching.