volf

anon--it means back soon. and so it is. an interesting proposal from miroslav about the role of faith today in relation to pastoral formation and leadership.

"Why are pastors, along with communities of faith, increasingly ineffective in their central task? The reasons are many. This proposal highlights those related to how Christian faith is understood and practiced. The difficulty starts with theological education. Theology, like all academic disciplines, participates in the movement of sub-disciplinary differentiation and increased specialization. This is an indispensable condition of fundamental theological research. In the process, however, the overarching subject of theology and its internal unity is lost, first on teachers of theology and then, by extension, on many students. After their first experiences in churches, many young pastors are no longer certain that the long years of theological study were useful. The narrowed disciplines and highly specialized theological interests of their former professors do not sufficiently overlap with the life realities of their parishioners. Three or more years of study have granted them a sophisticated but questionably useful tool.

To help themselves out of the predicament, many pastors revert to simplistic forms of faith familiar to them from the years prior to their theological education. They turn to uncritical, even naïve, approaches to sacred texts and theological concepts. These, however, soon prove woefully insufficient for the complexities of life and are intellectually implausible. Others opt for an easy relevance by adopting vague religiosity and interlacing it with various secular languages (e.g., from psychology or social critique). The value of these languages is indisputable, but their relation to the language of faith is often tenuous at best. The result of these two alternative ways of coping with the difficulty of connecting faith with life is, in Michael Welker’s apt description, a self-banalization of faith in the first case and self-secularization in the second. Either of these options deprives pastors of the ability to formulate a compelling faith-based vision of life capable of shaping persons, communities, and cultures."

I'm particularly interested in the ways the emerging church responds to this--say, Tony Jones (who is in our reflection pool) or Doug Pagitt -see http://pagitt.typepad.com/ and check out his new book called reimagining spiritual formation) or Karen Ward --see http://deepdirt.blogspot.com. I think they are doing it, but i don't know where they got it.