Vital Signs News of the Episcopal Church
	Theological education for a new century? Steven Charleston, chaplain at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., is former Episcopal Bishop of Alaska and a longtime advocate of culturally relevant theological education grounded in the needs and realities of local faith communities. Carol Bell: As we enter a new century, what kind of direction do you think theological education for Episcopalians should take? Steven Charleston: It seems to me that if the church is to move forward, we will need a coherent, cohesive, and comprehensive look at theological education-- from Sunday School all the way through and beyond retirement. It's something a person needs to feel engaged in, and excited about, at every stage of life. Sunday School is the ground level of theological training. Theology isn't something we suddenly come to as adults. If a man or woman has not had some in-depth background before becoming an adult, that person either will be always playing catch-up, or will be just plain ill-equipped to understand why theological education is important at all. Theological training is a process that goes on throughout life; it renews us, gives us new insights and new skills as our ministries change through life. C.B.: When you speak of theological education, what exactly do you have in mind? S.C.: When I speak of theological education, or theological training, I'm talking about it in the traditional sense of "equipping the saints." Theological education, whether it's for lay persons or ordained persons, has the same purpose: to give us the knowledge and skills that we need in order to carry out the ministries we are called to do. So to me it is a very pragmatic issue for the church. We need leadership in the church at all levels, and theological training is the primary way in which we can help people claim the ministries or gifts that they have. C.B.: How and where is such broad-based theological education taking place in the church today? S.C.: I'd say it's taking place primarily in the many dioceses across the U.S. where we have really been forced to confront the fact that we can no longer provide seminary-educated priests for every single congregation. It's taking place because communities that cannot rely on the traditional model of one parish/one priest have to think of new models. And these communities begin to experiment. And we begin to see some very creative new ways of designing education. By necessity, these folks have come to the realization that theological training is a community effort. They now realize that theological education is something that's localized within the life of a community. And it is also something that must be made culturally relevant for people. Those two insights, localized education and education that is culturally relevant, are going to be two paths, two highways, that will carry us into the 21st century. The more we bring theological learning to the very heart of our communities, with local people involved as both learners and as teachers, the more it will have the ripple effect that we need--which is to engage people of all age levels, of all backgrounds, and of all offices or callings, in one common enterprise. And that's what's starting to happen. It is happening in different dioceses in different ways, but it is happening all across our church. C.B.: What are some specific examples? S.C.: Well, it's happening in Province I, and it's happening in Northern Michigan. In Minnesota and South Dakota, there has been some very creative work bringing theological training out into the reservations. In Alaska, they are working hard on the idea of involving the whole village, the whole community, in the process. (Whether the village is a rural town or a suburb or a city, the village is a model of the place where training occurs.) New models of education are also being designed in many of the dioceses in California and throughout Province VIII. It's happening in Navajoland and in Florida; African-American training is taking place in Atlanta. There are many others; I'm only trying to point to a few that I personally know better than the rest. Within reach of most of our church communities are all sorts of resources and many, many people engaged in such alternative theological education. C.B.: In a community-based model, how is theological education introduced, and how does it take place? S.C.: Teams of people go to local communities from the diocesan center where there are resources and training for people to do the work. Teams of people, both lay and ordained, go out into the village and conduct the training on the local level. Folks of the community come to the training, and among them, there might be one or two who are looking toward ordination, either to priesthood or diaconate. C.B.: Does it happen, in these alternative models, that a person who is headed for ordination might change her direction as the education process goes on? S.C.: That's exactly right. And that brings up an interesting point. Theological education is unlike education for any other vocation. Most of our education in this culture is product-oriented. That is to say, it trains you to do a particular job. You're being prepared, and when you're done, you can now do the work. Theological training is not product-oriented, it's development-oriented. And that's quite a different proposition. Theological education may well change your vision of yourself Ñ and of your vocation Ñ as you're going through the process. We come to theological training open-minded and open-hearted, not at all sure what God has in store for us, just enjoying the journey. Then the process begins to shape us and transform us. Theological education, at its best, is a transforming experience; its whole purpose is to transform our lives. C.B.: So how do you begin the process? S.C.: I think the very point of genesis for theological education is in spirituality and worship. Transformative education emerges from the Spirit, emerges from within the worshiping community. The workshop arises out of worship. Consequently, we must begin our theological education very intentionally with spiritual formation that is done in the context of worship. People must feel, in the deepest sense possible, a connection with God and with one another. Without such a spiritual center, our theological education will not hold. We may be momentarily excited about a particular piece of information, or by an idea, but it doesn't integrate. It is spirituality that integrates knowledge into a person's life, and that's why spirituality is so central, so important. C.B.: You mentioned local community participants as both learners and teachers? S.C.: Yes. We never learn better than when we're teaching what we know. People whose spiritual formation has already begun, will then go into theological training, and as they are educated, they will gain new information and new skills, and then, I think, the logical and organic next step is for them to teach. We become teachers and learners simultaneously. So local people become trainers, and eventually these folks become a source of continuity for theological education in that place. Certainly, local folks will continue to teach others in that place. But they can also travel into new communities bringing their ideas and their fresh insights with them. Eventually it becomes a wonderful cycle of people who are both learning and teaching and doing on the home front, and enjoying the excitement of going somewhere different and sharing with others in a community that is not their own. Once this kind of cycle begins to move within the life of a diocese, I think it takes on new energy, refreshing, renewing and exciting church members all across the diocese. C.B.: In this alternative model are there special courses for those who will be ordained? S.C.: People going on to ordination might be learning deeper skills, say in church history or in the Bible, but they will work together with men and women who are becoming Christian educators or evangelists or youth ministers or the like. We might not be able to take every single person off to seminary, but we can bring much of the quality of seminary education out to the grass roots, where community-based education will be available to everyone. The theological education process carries people along as partners. In an ideal setting, we really could not distinguish among those sitting in the room as to which ones might want to become diocesan workers or Sunday School teachers or priests or evangelists or deacons. Such an educational process follows the ancient scriptural model that suggests we are all called together to exercise our different ministries and gifts. C.B.: What role can the seminaries play in this? S.C.: Often we have thought that the alternative training I've been describing is in conflict or in competition with our great institutional centers of theological education. That's a big mistake. If we are to have a strong future, we must recognize a cooperative spirit between the seminaries and the local alternative models. It is important to understand the seminaries as partners with dioceses in developing local leadership. And we need to be able to see our seminaries as centers of deep spiritual formation, as well as centers of education. Furthermore, we must renew our understanding that seminaries are not just for educating ordained leadership. They are really educational centers for all the people of God--lay and ordained. And because of that, perhaps by virtue of that, the seminaries become cultural centers as well, open marketplaces that allow people to speak to one another in their own idioms; the seminaries become vibrant and exciting and inclusive centers where people have a sense of ownership and involvement in the transformative process. C.B.: How can alternative models of education be sure to honor a variety of cultures and make them part of the educational experience? S.C.: On the grass roots level, we need to make sure that our trainers represent what we are trying to teach. Our theological education needs to be a multi-cultural experience, and that means we must involve teachers from many cultural backgrounds. Are we really looking at theology from a holistic viewpoint of the many different ways that our various cultures have come to understand the Gospel? In the materials used, in the list of readings, in the examples cited, we must make sure we are integrating the best of every culture because, in doing so, we not only broaden the base of our education, but we also open another door through which people may come in and participate. C.B.: If a congregation, or diocese, is not very culturally diverse, are there ways in which local communities can draw on the rich traditions, insights and theologies of other cultures? S.C.: Here's something that I think is very hopeful: If you and I were having this conversation even 20 years ago, we would have been hard pressed to come up with ways by which we could experience this rainbow coalition of many cultures--especially in some small parish that is fairly homogeneous. But today we have an absolute wealth of resources. We have the theologies of African Americans, feminists, Asians, people of Latino background, and Native Americans. We have had an enormous renaissance of cultural contributions to Christianity in this last century. It started with liberation theologies in the late 1950s and 1960s and it has just mushroomed to a point where we now have vast amounts of material and information, in a variety of media, available and accessible to us all. And now that we have this wonderful warehouse of knowledge from which to draw, we also have the means to bring it into even the most isolated community--through technology, through the Internet, through satellite communications. I find it exciting that at the threshold of a new century we have all the tools needed for a major breakthrough in theological training. Writer Carol Bell lives in the Diocese of Northern Michigan <cedars1@northernway.net> Back to top Back to current issue