why (and how) kellen plaxco's 'premise one' is right

there has been quite a stir since the emergent theological conversation here at yale last week. lots of energy has gone into reflecting on the event and much of that chatter has been thoughtful and compelling theological musings on what miroslav had to say (see here and here and here, for example.)

nothing has caused more stir than than kellen plaxco's critique of the gathering (you can read it here if you haven't seen it yet). admittedly it caused a stir in part because of its tone and broad-brush critique. but as i read kellen's post i thought that the substance of his critique is in an important respect right. he likes tertullian, a crabby early church father, so i'm not sure we should be surprised by his crusty critique. i rather like tertullian and am writing a book on him because i think the church today is far too nice and not at all theologically serious enough. a good dose of tertullian's spirit might be just the tonic. my book will be called american spectacles: saying yes and no in a culture of excess. i hope kellen likes it.

kellen, looking happy in an engagement photo (wedding date: june 9, 2006, and yes I did crop Jamie out)

kellen's 'premise one' is that pastors have been reduced to a position of not reading, or to reading and not understanding, theology. in order to do so, they need more time and the proper tools (one assumes here that he means philosophical tools since he reports a certain 'philosophical illiteracy' making it difficult for one pastor to engage miroslav).

I've been musing on this premise since i read kellen's post over the weekend. here are some interrelated reasons why i think his 'premise one' is largely true (with some supporting evidence).

• on saturday i got a newsletter from a pastor-friend's church in spokane wa. the pastors at this church (lutheran) are smart and generally academically oriented in their thinking. The lead pastor, Richard Finch, is just now going on a six-month sabbatical. in his "pastor's column" announcing this sabbatical, he notes that "since this sabbatical is from a theological vocation, I think this means that I ought to do a lot of thinking about God during this time. Some churches don't encourage independent thinking. The Lutheran tradition was born in debate and the encouragement of original thought. Our faith can never be mindless. Critical thought and analysis is the 'stuff' of how Lutheran's think about God. We never check our reason at the door." After challenging his members to consider how they challenge their minds, he says this: "If this were confession time, I would have to confess how little I challenge myself intellectually and fall back on the 'busy pastor' excuse. For the next six months that excuse will be gone and I hope to get as excited and into theological reason and thought as I was when I was in seminary." let me assure you that this honest report from a very fine pastor is the TIP of the iceberg. his self-report exemplifies the situation of so many pastors who, while doing theology in highly complex and grounded ways in their daily ministry, feel that they have precious little time to go back to the deep wells of the tradition and seriously think afresh in theology.
• another smart and very fine pastor, susan johnson, is part of our national working group in the faith as a way of life project. she has reported similar things. she is part of a group of women who are senior pastors in the american baptist church. they gather every year and she tried to present on the faith as a way of life project and get them to reflect on how they engage theologically in their ministry. she found that they had a hard time with it and reported that they too often feel overwhelmed with persons and programs and don't have reflective time for theological reading and thinking.
• the faith as a way of life project has this as its claim: that the most important task of ministry is for pastors to model and mediate faith (a theologically thick portrayal of Christianity as a lived whole) as a way of life to persons, communities, and cultures. national working group, a group of pastors, youth pastors, laity and theologians, are charged with thinking together both about what prevents pastors from successfully embodying this core task of ministry and what means we might find to foster it. on the first night of the emergent theological conversation tony and miroslav recounted an experience from one of our national working group meetings early on. we found ourselves so quickly shifting from giving theological reasons for our position to speaking on the basis of emotion, feeling, or what amounts to technical efficiency. miroslav was so struck by this that when we came back from a break, he outlined his 'bare bones' framework for how to think theologically. at this point in the monday night gathering, tony passed out a 3x5 card with this simple theological framework on it, suggesting that it could be something we build upon in thinking theological about ministry and life. you can find it here.
• and if you you think i'm just missing how deeply engaged pastors are in theological reading, just ask them what they are reading! a few months ago i wrote a blog post here about a george barna survey that says pastors don't read theology. but then i compared this to reports of an 'emerging' interest in theology among younger pastors (and not only younger). part of the issue here is what you count as theology. a book by a systematic theologian? a book by rick warren? how about eugene peterson or brian mclaren? does a journal count? my friend peter marty subscribes to 30 (or so) journals in religion and theology. does he read them all? i'm sure not. does he scan them and read around to press him to deeper refection on issues that matter. you bet. still, while peter is exceptional, how much do we really know about what pastors read, how they think, in what ways they draw on theology? this is damning commentary on much of the writing about ministry that it has been so poor at portraying the complexity--the theological complexity--of their work, body and mind and heart together.
• lastly theological education doesn't help pastors prepare to do this. part of the point of kellen's argument is that seminary doesn't do pastors well by its fragmented nature and its division between theology and practical ministry. our faith as a way of life project gives creativity awards to faculty for proposing courses that heal this fragmentation by offering integrative cross-disciplinary courses modeling faith thought about not as abstract doctrine but as a way of life. while this is the cutting edge of theological education (see Chuck Foster's marvelous new study of theological education in this regard), it is by no means everywhere the standard. and until it is, pastors will continue to graduate with the sense that theology is good in theory but not very helpful in practice--because that is what seminary taught them. in addition, as opposed to say engineering or medicine, theological education has very little in the way of prerequisites or serious standards for continuing education. it is as if we don't care about the quality of spiritual care and leadership people get. perhaps the jesuits still require a philosophy degree before seminary, but most candidates in an average entering seminary class have backgrounds that are all over the map, and it really is not fair to expect someone who majored in computer science to understand augustine or volf, for that matter, without some serious catch-up.

my point, ladies and gentlemen, is that kellen has exactly put his finger on a big problem in ministry. in some traditions the pastoral role is about emotion work. in others, the pastoral role is about practical life advice. neither necessarily requires serious theological thinking. but if we're to be faithful to god's mission in a post-modern context, and seek to live church in meaningful ways, then we need to think the faith in deep and substantial and fresh ways. i think that's what kellen wants to engage in, and that's what the faith as a way of life project is about. therefore, 'premise one', i'm arguing, is indeed a serious concern and worth thinking about (and i am! as are others--miroslav, obviously, but also see michael welker's essay in Loving God with our Minds: The Pastor As Theologian).

however, here's where i'd press kellen to rethink somewhat. his 'premise one' leads him to read the gathering as a sort of pastoral insecurity before a great theologian that amounted to putting miroslav on a pedestal. thus people could both say he's great but also so far up there that he's irrelevant to everyday ministry. kellen used the terms "enamored" and "distainful" in describing people's views. he gives various sorts of evidence for this and concludes that the conversation was conversation--it just wasn't very theological. well. let me accept his 'premise one' but offer an alternative reading of what happened. what happened was really really hopeful because 300+ pastors and church leaders desired deeper theological reflection and paid in money and time to travel to this conversation. many people felt intimidated by miroslav--he's tall, smart, european, wears leather, writes dense books, etc. but despite that they braved asking questions and the conversation was not thin--it went deep and those gathered there were provoked into thinking in fresh ways about very many things, not least of them the core question of how jesus saves. i'd bet that much post-conversation and theological reflection will take place. indeed, many will go home and read miroslav's books (or finish them). just a cursory look around the blogosphere shows the kind of intense engagement that took place and is still as people learn from each other, talking back and forth. it wasn't everything it could have been, nor even everything i wanted it to be, but it was surely a step in the right direction, rather than the wrong one.

anon, and +peace

Technorati Tags: chris scharen, emergent, miroslav volf, pastors, theology

Comments

[- kp -]

Thanks for the ultimately fair treatment of my admittedly snide piece.

"What happened was really really hopeful because 300+ pastors and church leaders desired deeper theological reflection and paid in money and time to travel to this conversation."

You're right about this, and I'd be doomed to reconsider my position -- though I never really meant to come off so condescending as I did. I think was just in a huff of disappointment when I wrote it.

Again, thanks for your words. You're dead on about what I was really trying to get at.

In Christ,

Kellen

[- kp -]

That's supposed to say "...doomed not to reconsider my position...."

[Bob C]

Just execeptionally well-considered post. Thanks for capturing so much of what I've experienced and learned.

Btw, can't wait to read the u2 book - the tertullian not so much.

[Joshua]

I wasn't at the conference, but have read about it and heard from others who were there. You nicely capture KP's points while also pointing toward the positive signs of change. Did anyone see Gregory Jones' faith matters recently on ordination?

[Adam Eitel]

The disparity between theology and practical ministry has been an interesting topic of discussion for Kellen and I since we left the conference. This has been especially true for me as a student at a Reformed-evangelical seminary. Interestingly, my tradition often has the opposite problem: methodology (in respect to liturgy, church aesthetics, etc.) is considered to be so tightly bound up with theology that the two become indistinguishable. Reformed-evangelicals, in other words, often make the mistake in thinking that our theology produces a specific kind of "everything." So, for example, Reformed theology = pipe organs. I wonder if this isn't just the obverse of pastors not having enough time to "do theology" but a function of a similar, more basic problem.