This will be the final part of my series on “Educating the local church” (parts 1-6 can be accessed at the bottom of this post). I hope you’ve benefitted from what you’ve read. Also, if you haven’t read my interview with Douglas Estes (see “The Pastor-Scholar: An Interview with Douglas Estes”, Pt. 1 and Pt. 2) or the one with Robert Jimenez (see “Being a teacher in the local church: An interview with Robert Jimenez” here) please take the time to hear from two people who are active in educating their congregations. I will end things by returning to the question that inspired the whole series: Should you hire the academically minded? Or as I put it in part 1: “Wouldn’t the local church benefit from having highly qualified resident scholars directing their education departments or functioning as teaching pastors or associate pastors?”
In the above interviews Estes is a pastor with a Ph.D. from the University of Nottingham (UK), so he is an example of someone who did an academic doctoral degree with an openness to pastoring and using his education in a local church context. Jimenez is a bi-vocational pastor who works at IBM to earn a paycheck, then volunteers as the pastor who oversees education.
These two were cautious in their interview response when I asked about whether their churches should hire an academic. For Estes it was unlikely since he was on staff already. There were likely other needs. But his own hiring should bring hope to those who did doctoral work, but who might want to teach as a pastor. Jimenez indicated that it was unlikely because his church paid one person: the senior pastor. If someone spends three to six years earning a doctoral degree it is not likely that volunteer work as a pastor will be acceptable if there was no job openings in academia.
Personally, I have had three pastors who have completed doctoral degrees or who were in the process of doing so: Jeff Garner of the San Francisco Lighthouse, Rick McKinley of Imago Dei, and Ken Garrett of Grace Bible Church. All three enrolled in the Doctor of Ministry (D.Min) program, which is understood to lean toward vocational skills more than traditional academics. I don’t know what it would be like to have had N.T. Wright or John Piper as a pastor and I don’t think I’ve been part of a church where the assistant/associate pastor had a Ph.D. Therefore, I can’t point to an example of a successful scenario first hand.
But I am hopeful. I think that the local church can benefit from having someone on staff who is prepared to wrestle with the tough questions. It has been my experience that the people who tend to ask these questions the most–youth and young adults–are often provided with pastors who are ill equipped to answer questions about theodicy, or “What happens to those who never hear the Gospel?” or “Why is the Book of Revelation in the Bible?” In fact, many youth and young adult pastors I’ve known try to deflect even more personal questions like “Why doesn’t God answer my prayers?” and “Why won’t my father believe in Jesus when I’ve done my best to live as a good example in front of him?” I’m not going to say that Dr. Know-It-All can answer these questions. Personally, I think the Book of Job provides the best answer to theodicy and everything else fills in the gaps. But the rigor of academia does force students to entertain questions that go unnoticed and this experience might benefit someone in ministry when they are asked the hard questions.
Of course, this is all very subjective. Dr. So-and-So might make a terrible assistant pastor and s/he may provide answers so lofty and full of academic rhetoric that no one understands what is being said. Meanwhile the volunteer youth pastor with a huge heart may make a life long impact by not only providing an answer, but doing it with a love that cannot be taught in the classroom. I get that.
But I am trying to think aloud and I have been trying to do so during this series. I’m wondering if the church can redeem to gifts of her sons and daughters who poured endless hours into study in hopes of someday occupying a classroom only to find that there are no jobs or really horrible ones that don’t pay (e.g., see “Working for Change in Higher Education: The Abysmal State of Adjunct Teacher Pay”).
One final word on adjuncts before I finish: I was talking with a dean of a seminary who told me that the seminary knows that it relies heavily on adjuncts, as do most seminaries, but that it has done little to educate their adjuncts. This dean aims to change that. This may sound odd: Aren’t adjuncts educators? That is not the point though. The point is that many seminaries and graduate schools have not even begun to consider ways to help their adjuncts: whether that means networking for them with churches and other local schools, providing them free training when it comes to engaging the job market, or even having the senior, full-time, paid faculty spend time with them as mentors helping them become better teachers and candidates for a future full time gig of their own. I think the schools that decide to invest heavily in training and empowering their adjuncts may find that more entry level teachers want to work with/for them and that their pool of potential hires will grow larger when it comes time to replace their full time professors.
If you take nothing away from this series other than this one point I will be pleased: What I am advocating here is not the admiration of the educated, but the acknowledgment that many of the church’s sons and daughters have prepared themselves over many years to do work for the Kingdom of God by using the mind God has given them. There may not be a job at the local college or seminary. Will the church respond? Will the church reach to those who have shown that they are willing to pour time and energy into preparing for service, even if the service they had in mind was not the local perish? I hope so.
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Prior posts:
Pt. II: the concerns of pastors
Pt. III: what do congregations need to know?
Pt. V: introducing critical scholarship
Pt. VI: avoiding quick-and-easy apologetics
Also: read Mark Stevens’ response, “Does the Church Need, or Want Academics?”
I think the answer to your main question should be “no.”
Typically, academically trained seminarians and/or biblical scholars don’t have answers to the questions people are asking, and this remains the case even if we restrict ourselves to questions about biblical texts (e.g. consider your own activities on this blog, which have mainly been an exercise in wrestling with questions concerning biblical texts and related theological issues without actually coming up with satisfying workable answers for regular church people). Worse still, the answers that seminarians and biblical scholars can provide aren’t all always well-suited to the context of a local church. For example, consider the case of someone who is wrestling with the historicity of Adam and what that means for Christian theology, how useful is it for that person to learn that Gen 2-3 is an ahistorical myth that was incorrectly taken to be historical by Paul but that it really doesn’t matter to Christian theology that Adam is no more historical than Hercules? In a great many local church contexts, I think an answer like that, although almost certainly true by my lights, would likely to do more than harm than good to the questioner’s spiritual life.
Of course, an academically trained seminarian and/or biblical scholar might be suitably equipped to help people wrestle with questions concerning their faith, even if they cannot provide the satisfying answers people want; however, it’s been my experience that most church people who have questions are looking for answers and not an overly complicated dialectic that will give them a headache.
Perhaps the greatest benefit these people could contribute to the local church is that they could help regular church folk resolve in their own minds a great many damaging confusions about their faith (e.g. consider all the nonsense you were exposed to in the Pentecostal church(es) of your youth). Unfortunately, it’s been my experience that many of these damaging confusions trace back to the leadership of the local church in question, and so to address them is to, in effect, take on the leadership of your own church. Not exactly a good idea! In any case, I think a pastor is the right person to address this problem.
Here’s another way to think about it. In general, people have questions about their faith because the theological tradition associated with their church (formal or informal) doesn’t have answers. For example, someone might wonder why Gen 1 says that God made the world in six days when our best science tells us that the world as we know it was formed over billions of years? In the typical case where that person attends a church already committed to a certain kind of biblical hermeneutic but at the same times isn’t willing to just toss out modern science, there isn’t a good answer to their question. So, if you were to come around and show that person other ways of interpreting Gen 1 that resolve the tension they are experiencing you, typically, also run the risk of raising the ire of a self-appointed defender of the faith and/or Norm Geisler wannabe who doesn’t approve of the different hermeneutical moves your offering that are at variance with their tradition. My point being that answering peoples questions typically means bucking against the theological tradition of the local church in question, although this is certainly not always the case.
Bottom line, I just don’t think the local church is the right place to help people work through their questions.
I understand your concern because I have been part of churches where there was no room for addressing the hard questions. I’ve been at other churches where you could address it under the eye of scrutiny. I’ve been part of churches where there was a lot of freedom for me to answer questions as I saw fit. Now, as to the last type, I knew what kind of respect I was being given, so I was cautious as well, trying to make myself aware of the presuppositions behind the questions being asked as well as the person’s capacity for an in-depth answer. Oddly enough I received a call from a friend today who wanted to explore my availability with a church in another part of the country. I am committed to San Antonio until at least mid-2015 so it wasn’t a possibility right now, but it was this series and our relationship in the past that lead him to call me. I say that to say this: even if 90% if churches aren’t on board w. what I suggested in this series all we need is that rare 10%. It is true that those churches may be larger (as stated by Robert Jimenez in the comments of his interview), and they may be in places like California or the northwest where churches are a tad more willing to take risks because their mission field is so overwhelmingly large, but I think they exist.
So no parishioner ever asks their pastors about end-time theology, Christian politics, and the classic free will debate? Or, do you mean to say that no parishioner *should* ask pastors about these topics?
Yeah, I see your point. Certainly, I think there is a minority of churches where something like your idea could work.
Still, it’s been my experience that churches aren’t very good at being flexible, and perhaps given the seriousness of religion in general that’s somewhat understandable. Rather than becoming more flexible, we tend form new churches that are just as rigid as the old ones from which they sprang.
Sadly, I don’t see it getting much better for Christians who have questions about their faith. I think Peter zerger’s book called ‘in praise of doubt’ did a really good job talking about ‘true believers’ (all the bad connotations of fundamentalist) and how they have to avoid questions/doubt at all cost to keep their belief pure. But the modern world is being globalized, and with globalization comes pluralism. You are going to meet someone who loves more than you and says Jesus was nothing more than a good teacher. An someone who hates more than you who says he is their savior. Then your questions abound and the church can’t engage them because they need all the confidence in jesus so they can pull off their next seminar on leadership.
Hopefully the academy will retain its integrity and adapt and change with the current decentralization of education emerging as a place where questions can be engaged and truth will win its battles against folly in a fair and open encounter.
No, people can and do ask these questions, and it’s right and good that they do so. However, it’s been my experience that the local church isn’t the best place to get real answers. All they are equipped to provide are the answers given to them by their particular theological tradition, which you can always more comfortably learn about in the privacy of your own study. So, for example, the pastor at my church will answer your classic questions about free will and predestination as a typical Wesleyan-Arminian, which means he won’t have good answers if you press him too hard on the meaning of more “Calvinistic” texts such as those found in John 6, Rom 9, etc. Problematic issues and texts for his tradition are routinely ignored and he, along with others in the church, will only be irritated if you force him/them to confront these matters.
Whoops, sorry betweenathensandjerusalem, my eyes glanced over your questions and I missed the pastoral qualifier you were giving them. In general, if followers of Jesus have serious questions about their faith then I think their pastor is a good starting point; however, a pastor’s usefulness is generally limited by whatever theological tradition they and their church are committed to.
Residentoftartarus: I think this is the point Brian is trying to flesh out. A pastor may not have academic experience to answer these questions, and one who is an academic, or has academic experience should either know how to answer these questions, or at least know where to point one to in order to get an answer (unless of course they are furiously dogmatic). However, if you are concerned about the theological tradition, this maybe the case for anyone, anywhere. I mean, many Christian schools are connected to some sort of tradition, and so you may get dogmatic answers even there (see Brian’s posts on the wave of scholar’s being fired). So I think your concern should not just be directed at individual churches, but also institutions, and so we are stuck in a vicious cycle. But, I see taking the risk as a better option, at least there is a potential to have some brilliant minds influencing an institution that desperately needs the mind.
I talked to a pastor the other day and you can’t throw a stone in his church without hitting someone with a masters degree. True, not many Phd’s but still. Highly educated people are teaching at that church, almost to the exclusion of those who don’t have a masters degree. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?
Taylor
Globalization/pluralism have brought along a new set of questions while also resurrecting some of the older ones. One of the benefits of being raised on the west coast (and living in San Francisco and Portland for a time) was that I met people from a wide variety of places with a wide variety of beliefs. It has forced me to continually rethink my Christianity and what it means to engage in mission. Now I am in Texas where you are either a Christian, a cultural Christian, or hidden in a university library somewhere so no one knows your a Buddhist. People in this context may have a harder time adjusting to the shifts in our world.
Michael
That’s a blessed church. If the pastor doesn’t feel that any of them are worth hire that is a decision to be made by that community. I am sure many other churches would do the same–some out of desire, some out of necessity. But as I’ve said above, my goal isn’t to get every church to rethink this, just some.
I would like to think my academic work (PhD student at University of Wales, Bangor and Instructor in OT at Providence and University College and Theological Seminary) coincides and strengthens much of my pastoral work (solo-pastor) in a small rural congregation.
I imagine that it does strengthen it. I couldn’t imagine doing pastoral work without being able to take the time to think deeply about various matters.