An SP is a specially trained actor that interacts with a doctor in some standardized situations. Medical School is all about standardized evaluation. With churches becoming so diverse, standardization might not appear feasible.

But what would a Standardized Parishioner look like? Could fellow seminary students act as Standardized Parishioners, with some training? Could some missionaries, church planters, experienced pastors provide some scenarios for people to act out?

I actually participated in a Program for Integrated Learning facililator training, http://webcampus.drexelmed.edu/PIL/
Once I finish my disseration and finally get my PhD in engineering, I will be eligible to teach medical students. In a PIL course, the facilitator is not supposed to know everything, medical students learn to work in teams to figure things out together.

Both SP and PIL have been established as do-able, and research has been conducted to demonstrate their efficacy. Have any of these ideas been translated to the seminary world? Certainly there is a lot of overlap between a doctor and a pastor – caring for people in crisis, making decisions quickly but with compassion, etc.

A renovated seminary would need to address these issues.

Serious Ordered learning. (I think Biblical Theology is valuable here)

In Service Training not just for service training (side by side) This raises the question of instructor… professors will train professors won’t they? Who should train pastors? missionaries? Church Planters? etc.

Cradle to Grave Education framework (a view to lifelong learning)

Balanced emphasis on Knowledge / Character / Skill (Wisdom) I think we are heavy in one of these currently and very light in the other two.
Flexible educational path to reflect varying development in previous three areas.This will also require a wider array of instruction and demonstrated learning. Not all ministry leaders are verbals and we should consider alternatives to lecture. (Socratic discussion, wide reading, writing, and a host a varied projects that help to demonstrate competency, paired with in ministry context evaluation of the integration of the subject matter.)

Evaluate competency rather than standardized evaluation

But what I’m asking is to be more specific. What practically and specifically does it look like to look like Jesus and his disciples in an educational setting?

I would be curious to hear how you would answer that.

I single-handedly struck vivid fear, on a supernatural scale, in the hearts of the head of Sunday School, one of the head musicians, and one of the “relational pastors” at a large church a few years back. How did I do this at a superwoman level? I believe, after a bit of reflection, because I committed an unforgivable sin: I married outside the church. My husband is a deeply committed Christian, but he does not feel comfortable in non-traditional faith communities. Now I don’t feel comfortable in non-traditional, or traditional, faith communities, either. Renew is non-nontraditional, a use of 3-valued logic that makes sense in my world of computer science, but certainly not in the highly sheltered, traditional world of theology.

I looked too much like Mary Magdalene towards those people. She must have been in serious emotional pain to have so many demons exorcised out of her. I did a google on Old Testament seminary course and many seminaries popped up. I did a google on Mary Magdalene seminary course and nothing came up. This at a time when so many women are carrying pain heaped on pain, depressions, losses, many of them unaware of the burdens they are carrying because so much responsibility has been placed on their shoulders.

Thankfully, I am able to function and be respected enough in non-church spiritual communities that I can attend Renew with an attitude to serve, and receive nothing in return. The majority of the people who have earned my highest esteem do not attend church. You, J.R. and a few people at Renew are the exception.

I will take some words from Pat Benetar to go a little further: “YOU! You’re out of touch, all alone in a danger zone and I think too much, you’re out of touch.” Those three men that I mentioned in the beginning of this post either could not take me seriously, or were scared out of their mind. They shuffled their feet in conversation, could not look me in the eye, could not return phone calls, and told me through either email or third paries that I was not a suitable match to their ministry. I did not realize I was on an episode of Fear Factor, and I was one of the actors hired to scare people, until much later.

Now I can laugh the whole thing off as a deep learning experience to prepare me for people who take trust and respect of others seriously, and who can receive from me, whether they meet my husband or not. I am seriously blessed to be engaged with grounded, healthy people who are accountable to reality, not the make-believe, Prozac world where no pain exists. Some of those people are in Renew, some elsewhere, but I would be shocked to find anyone like that in a seminary. Thank you J.R. for having the courage, with others, to start Renew so that people like me are allowed to participate and be taken seriously.

Doesn’t do us much good to talk about how to change seminaries until we have in mind the sort of church they exist to help prepare leaders for. So, in my estimation, if we have in mind the need to prepare men and women to lead missional church communities for an increasingly Post-Christian environment then the formation process will…

1. Be rooted in Community
2. Focus on the formation of Christlike character
3. Emphasize the shaping of Kingdom convictions
4. Seek to train leaders contextually
5. Equip leaders to be cultural pioneers

I don’t want to take the conversation away from this post, but if anyone is interested in my explanations of those things here’s a link to the last post in a 9-part series with links to the previous posts (http://j.mp/4RsKs1).

Thanks for continuing this conversation J,R., hope that having a larger group of interested people assembled in the week to come will begin moving us beyond conversation to real, sustainable alternatives.

This is the very conversation we have been wrestling with at Penn Valley as we have partnered with BILD. (Biblical Institute for Leadership Development) I have yet to come across anyone who has such a thorough and masterful handle on this subject. Check out their response at…
http://www.bild.org/antiochSchool