Creative Ministerial Training

A few years ago, I conducted a focus group during which I asked students to answer the question: "What can our college do to be more creative in the way it trains ministers and missionaries?"

The respodents were prolific as seen below:

1. Reconnect the classroom to the local church
2. Apprenticeship: A four-year internship in a local church
3. Opportunities to “practice” the ministry
4. Require a senior project such as planting a church
5. Teach critical-thinking and problem solving skills
6. Teach students how to think not always what to think
7. Use debates, forums, discussions and fewer lectures
8. Establish mentoring relationships
9. Professors who model creative teaching techniques
10. Assign activities that require creative thinking
11. Use cutting edge, up-to-date curricular materials
12. Provide training in the use of technology

Bold and courageous, the students invited opportunities to “get dirty for God.” They willingly welcomed the chance to wrestle with mental dilemmas and real-life challenges.

Repeatedly, the students pled for the chance to learn by doing—apprenticeships, internships, projects, social system simulations, presentations, and even debates.

Implications for Ministerial Training

From my dialogue, it became clear that in terms of training students to be leaders in the church, a clear vision, which grows out of an outward-focused passion and compassion, is the “jet fuel” that will help an institution blast its way out of the ruts of tradition and soar into the stratosphere of inspired ministry. It will invigorate the lazy, embolden the fearful, encourage the discouraged, and revitalize the wounded.

It is also clear that affective learning must play a fundamental role alongside the cognitive and the psychomotor.

Erwin Raphael McManus writes, “I know it may sound like heresy, but it is more important to change what people care about than to change what they believe!”[1]

Professors must assist students in discovering the who and why as well as the what and how of ministry. Students must feel compassion for those to whom God is sending them. They must develop a sense of urgency and a genuine passion for the call to minister to the “radically unchurched.” [2] The students must capture an ethos and zealous vision.

To achieve these affective goals, ministerial training must become “discovery learning” so the students will have a sense of ownership and begin to develop essential compassion, passion, and vision. According to Carl Rogers, “The only learning that really sticks is that which is self-discovered.”[3]

Ministerial training must also be inductive in nature—at least initially. Placing students in real-life settings (apprenticeships or internships) or realistic social system simulations prompts them to ask probing questions.

According to Bill McNabb and Steven Mabry, “Research has consistently shown that learners remember answers to questions they themselves ask”[4] This means that professors must raise questions, create dilemmas, and stage scenarios that prompt students to ask questions of their own and then set out to discover answers for themselves.

Rather than teaching ministerial students to color within the lines of the existing church, perhaps professors should be encouraging students to “paint” the church they believe will most effectively evangelize the emerging generation.

[1] Erwin Raphael McManus, An Unstoppable Force: Daring to Become the Church God had in Mind (Loveland, Colo.: Group Publishing, 2001), 111.
[2] Alvin Reid, Radically Unchurched: Who They are and How to Reach Them (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel, 2002), 9.
[3] Bill McNabb and Steven Mabry, Teaching the Bible Creatively (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Publishing House, 1990), 29.
[4] Ibid, 83-84.