A couple of weeks ago I had a university day - one of those moments when I dip into my other life as a student and do some seminars or research towards my doctorate. One of the seminars I had to attend included a discussion of just what the purpose of a thesis was. The automatic thought is that it is to show what you have learned, to demonstrate your expertise in a particular area. But that is not really the answer.

The aim of writing a thesis (and this is borne out in the framing of the assessment criteria) is to demonstrate that you have done an apprenticeship and have demonstrated that you have the skills and resources to be admitted to the group of people who do good research, can develop opinions and defend them. It doesn’t even mean that you are right - merely that you can justify your position!!

I found this a bit of a relief (from the perspective of one trying to write said thesis). But I also felt it challenging. I am coming to the opinion that we (meaning that group of people who are trying to do some different stuff around church, mission and community) have a flawed understanding of expertise.

Some of these thoughts have been going around my head after the liquid conference last month, and particularly some of the effort to get away from a “talking head”/expert based seminar to a free flow of ideas. I imagine that some people liked this approach, some people were frustrated by it, and some people didn’t see the point. I wonder whether this comes from the same place as my reaction to my lecturer’s question. We think about our efforts in trying to engage in new ways in different places, and we think that training, whether through formal theological training, internships, seminars etc, is about getting to a destination. It is about increasing what we know, and showing it to others.

And we imagine that the acknowledged “experts” have reached that destination and that it is their job to help us get there. So we read the books and the theories with the funky titles and the colourful covers and imagine

There are training organisations and people who can share training and expertise in a formal sense and they do a fantastic job. However, this can’t be the extent of our learning, thinking and seeking understanding, nor even the necessary beginning. Let me explain what I mean. A simple model of a training program might be to engage in some intensive courses involving speakers and thinkers and to take part in an internship with an organisation which is engaged in good stuff. At the end of this process, are you ‘trained’? Are you now ‘qualified’ to be involved in creative and innovative mission?

Asking these kinds of questions about our call to ministry lead to ludicrous outcomes. It presupposes that being a minister is like a mechanic - that there is one way to fix a car and you go through a process to learn how to do that. Instead, training in a ministry environment (and we can include in this the training and equipping we receive through worship and teaching in a church environment) is all about resources or tools for the journey. There are a number of implications from this understanding. First is that tools and resources are relatively useless without action. You can have a whole collection of tools, but unless you are using them to do something, it is not much use.

A week or so ago, I was in a conversation about the role of CCTC in working with our churches. Much of the conversation came out of an understanding that the role of a theological college is to train ministers, or full time ministry workers. I think that the same assumption goes into other kinds of training - to the extent that we rarely talk about training for non-ordained people - we call it seminars or some other word which has a less didactical implication.

Why is this important? Because I think it builds some assumptions into our thinking. First that ordained ministers are necessarily more “theological” than lay members of the congregation. Second that those that are trained possess an “expertise” which is not consistent with the idea of a call to a new way of doing things. Finally, that working in secular areas or professions is separate from the christian life - lay people only engage in theology in christian community or direct service.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 11th, 2005 at 1:39 pm by dan and is filed under challenges for the church. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.