I was really lucky to be able to spend a few hours imagining educational programs with David Male over coffee this morning. David was the founder and pastor of the NetChurch in Huddersfield, UK until accepting the call to a new position in Cambridge serving as a tutor in Pioneer Mission Training (emerging church-ish), and will also serve Westcott House and Ridley Hall. He is in the process of re-imagining what clergy training will look like for those leaders/pastors seeking to serve pioneer/emerging/networked/missional churches in the UK.
It’s so interesting to watch formal educational systems, historic Christian denominations, and even other religious traditions in the ongoing process of assessing and adjusting the equipping of young leaders. Together with Stan Grenz, Dan Allender, Roy Barsness, Brian McLaren, Carl Raschke and the rest of Mars Hill Graduate School’s faculty I got to participate in crafting our entire MDiv curriculum to prepare our graduates to lead in these rapidly changing times; so to imagine together with David about what such an educational program might look like in the UK was just not only generative and fun, but also stimulated my thoughts around why and how I teach what I teach, in the the way I teach it.
It feels like we stand at a unique convergence point in Christian history; the flattening of the world through rapid networking, combined with radical epistemological and hermeneutical shifts, combined with the death of Christendom (or at least a shift to a church centered in the global south) leaves the church and its educational institutions wondering who are we now? What’s important now? What should we let go of? How do we steward what we have? How do we prepare those coming behind us? Etc.
It was great to be with you today David.
Peace, dwight
