Purpose,Partnership,and Integration: Insights from Teacher Education for Ministerial/Mission Training

What is the Purpose of the Course?

The first question we asked was about the purpose of the course, and whether it was suitable for the changing, contemporary schools our students were going into. Our conclusion was that it was relatively suitable for the schools of the past where education (or schooling), was primarily about the transfer of knowledge to well-motivated, able pupils. But the world was changing, especially in the post-sixties, when most schools were becoming comprehensive and most students expected to be less passive and more active in their learning. The prime purpose of teacher training was to prepare the students for a life of teaching students in contemporary schools. Once we thought hard about the purpose(s) of our course we found that much of the traditional PGCE course, which had been inherited from a previous generation, did not match the purpose.

A similar question must be asked of theological training: what is the purpose of our theological courses? To train up future theologians? Probably not for many. Different students will have different aims. Most will become ministers in contemporary churches, with multiple practical needs, including preaching, pastoral work, and administration. Some will find their mission in established churches in rural or urban situations. Some will major on in-church, others in extra-church, mission, or para-church activities. The purpose of our training courses must primarily be about preparing our students for becoming, in the short and long term, ministers and church leaders in the fields they choose to work in. Different courses will be needed for different purposes, but hard thinking needs to be applied to each part of the courses to ensure that it is ‘fit for purpose’. Above all, our purpose must be that all students leave our courses as self-motivated, self-evaluative, Christ-centred men and women equipped to start on their own servant ministry.

Who Owns the Course, Who Plans the Content?

Traditionally training courses are perceived as belonging to the higher education institution which directs them, the University, the seminary, or the bible school. Tutors there take the responsibility for planning the courses. We, at Oxford, realized that the training of teachers was a shared responsibility, between the University, the Local Education Authority, and the schools themselves, and consequently set up planning groups representing each body. Each had a distinctive perception to offer, the academics giving the deeper, theoretical insights whilst the teachers offered the practical realities. Each grew steadily to respect and value the insights the other brought and ensured that theory and practice were interrelated.

The parallels with training for church ministries are clear. Both the academics and the ministers have significant inputs and, with the denominational organizations responsible for the overall provision for church leadership, have joint ownership for the courses. By planning together, they can ensure that in the course academic theology does not get too far removed from the practical realities of the ministry, or that the day to day task will not become pragmatic and devoid of biblical foundations. In practice the different perspectives are likely to bring short-term tensions, but ultimately better grounded training.

Different students will come with their own, God-given, agendas and ultimately it is they who must own the course – they have the final responsibility before God as to what they make of it. This is a big challenge for all course planners, to ensure a course has coherence and structure but also allows the individual students to make their own decisions and to learn as best suits their own strengths.

Where Should the Training Be Located? Ivory Tower or in the World? In Universities or Colleges?

Traditionally, in a one year PGCE course, the student would have spent the first term in the University, ‘learning the theory’, the second term in a school, ‘applying the theory by teaching classes’, and the third term back at the University, learning more theory and preparing for a written examination which ‘tested how much theory they had learnt’. Not surprisingly, this pattern produced a very disjointed course with little co-ordination between the university staff and the teachers, or between the theory that was learnt in the University and what was demanded of teaching in a real school – in practice students had to develop a survival, ‘sink or swim’, approach to teaching. To eliminate these problems we arranged a concurrent rather that a consecutive pattern of locating the training, both in the University and in the school. As a general rule we would spend three days a week in the University and two days a week in the school. So typically we would have two days teaching about a topic at the University, followed by two days observing and teaching in the partner schools, followed by one day reviewing the practice and sharing experiences and insights back in the University. For instance, on Monday and Tuesday we might be teaching about introducing a lesson, developing questioning skills, or handling bad behaviour, on Wednesday and Thursday the student would be trying out these particular skills, and on Friday, back in the University, we would be reflecting together on how it had gone and what had been learnt. In this way the theory and practice could be brought together constructively, and the constituent skills of teaching considered in sequence.

There was also the debate as to whether training should be done in Universities or training colleges. The University has high status, which is passed on to the professionals being trained there, but tends to emphasize the abstract and theoretical rather than the practical and vocational. There is evidence (e.g. Esin, 2005) that in the later part of the twentieth century the subject of missions disappeared from many seminaries and Universities as the strength and status of academic theology reasserted itself.

Many theological or ministerial training courses separate the location of their teaching quite strongly. Often the theory, the theology, is taught in the University for a continuous period of time at the beginning of the course, before a placement period is started in a church or in some other form of ministry. If it is intended that the theory acquired in academia should be relevant to the subsequent practice of mission after training, would it be worth explicitly relating and linking the two through concurrent periods in both the host University and the placement church or ministry site? The role of the placement is enormously important, all the more so if the experiences there can be shared and evaluated with others. I remember speaking with some lecturers from UBS in Pune, India, who had just extended the range of student placement from being church based to include experience working with deprived communities in the slums with a local NGO. The response of the students had been enormous and quite transformative, giving them a deep insight into the meaning of Holistic, or Integral, Mission. The theory, theology, was given meaning by practice. It also persuaded some of the students to seek work among the missions and CNGOs rather than in church ministry as they had originally intended.

The practice of involving schools more fully with PGCE students was initially quite difficult. Were there schools that would want to get involved with training teachers? Could they cope with more than one student at a time? Were suitable schools available locally? Previously we would have sent students away to quite distant, but ‘excellent’ schools. Undoubtedly, the negotiations needed highly committed leaders from both sides to drive the internship model through, but once established everyone was delighted with the scheme, despite the hard work involved. The schools in particular enjoyed the status of being ‘teaching schools’ linked to the local University, and got first pick of some really good, well prepared, students at the end of their training when recruiting for new teachers in their school!

Who Should Teach the Course?

Just as the planning of the course should be done jointly, so should the teaching of it. In the school, a teacher was appointed as a mentor for each student and that person would be responsible for the teaching, the supervision and the development of the student. That teacher would not be the Head of the school but an expert, empathetic teacher, normally the head of department. For some of the university staff, this involvement of teachers as colleagues, and the demotion in status of some of the academic lecturers, was difficult and revealed a previously hidden sense of pride and superiority in some of the lecturers who did not feel confident working in schools alongside practising teachers with ‘real pupils’! For some of the academics, expert in one of the theories of education (the history, the psychology, the sociology, the philosophy of education) but not in the practice of teaching, this change was not easy. Indeed, the best teachers of such a course in the University were those who had had significant experience in teaching in schools themselves and who thus had credibility in the eyes of the trainee teachers. In some cases, no significant changes to the course could be made until the non-practitioner academic lecturers were removed.

The same principles would no doubt apply to theological training too (Burnard, 2015). If all of the trainees’ teachers were pure academics, expert in church history, theology, or New Testament Greek, their teachers would be less able to relate to the reality of the trainees’ future professions. One might expect that faculty would include a varied range of experience, from parish priest, to social workers, to inner city home church leaders, to overseas missioners and relief and development workers, and that still-practising ministers, academics, missioners, CNGO workers, and so on would have central roles in teaching the course.

Should Training Be Done Individually, in Pairs, or in Groups? Should Placements Be in One, or More, Locations?

One of the incidental findings we learnt from our change to an internship PGCE scheme was that students working in groups, and in pairs, learnt far better than students working in isolation. They were able to give each other mutual support, co-operative reflection and evaluation, and often found that they learnt more from each other than from their mentors or tutors! We found that schools could accommodate up to 10 students, working in five pairs for each subject. With a bigger number of interns the school felt it worthwhile to take their job seriously, and involved a senior teacher as Professional Tutor to co-ordinate whole school issues.

Could, big, teaching churches accommodate students in pairs, or in groups? I suspect that this would be possible, and beneficial to all involved over a period of time.

Similarly, there is the question of whether the student should experience a single or multiple placements. We previously had student placement in one school only, but changed this to two schools, the majority done in an initial placement with a shorter experience of a second school towards the end of the course. Not only did this give students experience of more than one school, but the second school experience enabled the student to start afresh, having developed their specific skills in their earlier school, and have an experience more similar to the ‘starting a new school’ which was to follow.

Clearly ministerial training would face similar questions. How many placements, and of what type, should be appropriate?

What Model of Learning is Assumed? Expert-Learner or Master-Apprentice or Experiential?

Underlying most training courses are the implicit, tacit assumptions about models of learning; how do our trainee students best learn? What is often inferred is that students learn best by having us, the experts, imparting knowledge through lectures to passive students who learn what we teach them – and then we examine them to see that they have learnt it properly. But once we have explicitly asked this question, and thought back on how we have learnt the really important things in our lives, that answer is worryingly obvious. I suspect that there are very few of the really important aspects of our lives which have been developed through listening to lectures in University lecture rooms. A few, perhaps, from really inspirational lecturers, but even lessons learnt intellectually from someone else need to be personalized through personal experience.

This is not the place for a full discussion of learning theories; others have done this far better than I could (Ausubel, 1978; Myers, 2000). But three teaching–learning models are important. Are we using an expert-learner model, a craftsman-apprentice model, or an essentially experiential model? Most learning is more of a craft activity than a science. Suffice to remember that in both training teachers and church leaders we are dealing with adult learners, and highly motivated ones at that. Students will also arrive at the courses with a variety of relevant experience. Such students will consider themselves the prime driver for learning. Course constructors must give structure and space to encourage such individualized learning. In ministerial training too, and I do not say this flippantly, we have the Holy Spirit acting in developing the lives of the students.

In our PGCE course we were well aware that much, probably most of, the interns’ learning would be achieved experientially, through their own thinking, reflecting, and experiencing. The works of Ausubel, Kelly and Polanyi have been influential in ensuring that students have experience in planning, delivering, evaluating and refining their own practice, and reflecting on how the insights of others in their theoretical writings can continue to contribute. We were not projecting a simple trial and error approach to learning; students, and especially pupils, are too precious for that. But we were aware that much personalized learning is tacit, and is acquired through practice, as a craftsman learns his craft, not through absorption of instructions from others (see Polanyi, 1958).

Clearly similar questions can be asked of theological training; how do trainee students or ordinands best learn? The answer must be from their own experience, reflecting, evaluating and refining their own practice. The questions as to what the course should aim to help the students learn, and what theoretical insights can do to enhance that practice, will be discussed later.

What Sort of Curriculum Should Be Implemented? Academic or Vocational? Knowledge, Skills, and Attitudes? What Sort of Theological Education is Appropriate for Training Practitioners?

Having established that the prime aim of our PGCE course was to produce effective, self-driven, teachers ready to start on, and develop through, a career of teaching in a range of secondary schools, the question as to what the curriculum should consist of, and what had little or no place in it, became much more straightforward – and meant the elimination of much of our previously taught material from the traditional course. The explicit curriculum would be structured around what knowledge, skills and attitudes we would want the students to have by the end of the course. Clearly there was some knowledge about the legal, context, organization and administrative structures of the education system which – as members of the teaching profession – our students should be familiar with. Equally, if the students were to be teachers of, say, physics, they should be expert in the facts and theories of physics – though it was not self-evident that the physics they had learnt in order to acquire a good degree in physics was appropriate for the physics which should be taught to beginner learners in schools. Skills required for teaching also needed to be developed, ranging from lesson planning to organizing practicals, to teaching styles for different ages and abilities, to methods of evaluating what pupils had learnt, to presentational skills, to class control and disciplining, to … all the basic necessities that a classroom teacher needs. And beyond the knowledge and skills that teachers needed were the attitudes that a person needs to be a committed, reliable, exemplary member of a teaching team. All such factors needed to be spelt out explicitly, and addressed through the curriculum. Apart from such an explicit curriculum, the ‘hidden curriculum’ of the training institution is important in instilling appropriate behaviour and attitudes, as it is in schools (Department for Education, 2011). We found that the development of skills was more important than the transferring of knowledge for the beginning teacher.

So what are the knowledge, the skills and the attitudes required of a budding church or mission leader? Is all the theoretical knowledge taught in academia helpful to prepare new church leaders? Is there some further knowledge which ordinands need which will prepare them for the modern congregations with whom they are to work? How much knowledge of the Bible will the ordinand need to know and understand before starting their ministry, how will they develop the skill of on-going Bible study? How much knowledge of Church history, or NT Greek, is really necessary for a beginning minister?! What are the skills which a new minister will need, and how will they be developed? Presentational and communicational skills, management skills, pastoral skills, the ability to cope with, and teach, young people, old people, non-conformist people, contemporary secular people, needy and bereaved people, violent and failing people, urban and rural communities, and the community of multi-cultural people outside the church? How will such skills be developed? And, perhaps most important in new ministers, what are the attitudes, the life-long ones, which will enable them to continue their journey into servant leadership, committed to and prayerfully following their Lord?

Having established explicitly what knowledge, skills and attitudes are needed, the curriculum can then be developed appropriately to encourage and develop them. I suspect that many ministerial training institutions concentrate too much on transferring theological knowledge and insufficient time developing the skills that a new minister will need in the churches of contemporary society. Emma Percy (2014) in her sensitive book on What Clergy Do stresses the ‘motherly’ skills of caring, comforting and cherishing. These are skills which all ministers will need, but which are less often stressed in most male driven institutions. Academic theology is a worthy subject of study in its own right, and essential in developing a career as an academic theologian. It needs to be tested, however, as to how much theology a beginning minister actually needs to minister effectively to their flock in contemporary society.

What is the Relationship Between Theory and Practice? How Can It Be Established? Can It Be Integrated?

This brings us to a fundamental question: how much is practice dependent on theory? How, if at all, are they related? Is practice dependent on theoretical understanding of the underlying principles? Do such principles, such theoretical underpinning, exist? In education, in our PGCE course, we looked closely at those theories which purported to give insights and meaning to the way pupils learn and behave. We found that Piaget’s theories, for instance, in cognitive psychology helped us to understand why some pupils could appreciate formal, abstract concepts whilst others could not (see McKena, 2015). We discovered that some of the sociological theories of Vygotsky (1978) and Bernstein (1990) helped make sense of different types of pupil grouping, while some of the philosophy of Hirst and Peters (1972) gave insights into how different curriculum favoured different models of society. But it would be true to say that such theoretical insights were probably more important to the lecturer than the students, who would prefer to work on the principle of ‘trial and error’ and ‘does it or does it not work?’! In practice, teaching is better developed on the experiential basis, perhaps incorporating the apprentice model (though it is worth noting that each student would find their own best way of teaching, usually quite different from that of even the best mentor) than on the expert-learner model. Learning to teach is more vocational activity than academic study. Ideally, of course, good practitioners are always reflecting, evaluating, and theorizing about what makes good practice (see Schon, 1985).

Perhaps the most perceptive work concerning the way that scientists, teachers, and, I suspect, Christian ministers learn has been provided by Polanyi (1958), when he speaks of ‘personal knowledge’. He distinguishes between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge, the former being deeper, more personal and longer lasting; the latter, whilst being easier to communicate and to assess, is much more superficial. Tacit knowledge comes through personal experience, as craftsmen learn their craft. Explicit knowledge has to be personalized before it can be useful, and more than rote learning. Polanyi’s thinking started in the sciences, but we found it useful in training teachers, and I suspect it would be equally valuable in training ministers holistically.

Suffice to say that in training future church leaders, any teaching of theoretical concepts, any theology, should in the first place be justified by how it facilitates good practice for the future ministerial or mission practitioner. Theology helps Christians ‘make sense’ of the way that God interacts with His world. The danger of too much academic theology is that it leads Christians, and in particular Christian leaders, to think that they understand, that they can ever understand, the mind of our incomprehensible, infinitely-wise, God. The work done in Practical Theology (Osmer, 2008) has more to give to the training of future church leaders. It is encouraging to see the growth of this in recent years in some ministerial training courses (e.g. Trinity College Bristol, Pars Theological Centre Iran, and UMN/TF Nepal).

The relationship between theory and practice is a contentious issue. How does theory relate to practice? Theory, in theology as well as in education and in physics, has three main characteristics. It has a justification in its own right, as a worthy, intellectual, academic study seeking to see patterns in God’s world around us. Secondly, it can help us to make sense of the practical world around us, give us satisfaction and enable us to make predictions which we can apply to our practical problems and enable us to practise more efficiently. Thirdly, and negatively, it can be irrelevant to the problems we encounter, because when theory is either inadequate or unnecessary we can solve them empirically.

This relates to our whole model of being a Christian, and thus the model of how we interpret being a minister or church leader. Is being a Christian more like being a physicist, and engineer, or a football supporter? A physicist seeks theories to explain the physical world. An engineer seeks to solve problems, and is only interested in theories if they help to solve those real life problems. A football supporter grows up in a community of fellow supporters and absorbs their common culture through shared experience. In training church leaders I think we should adapt less the physicist model, and recognize that for most Christians the engineering, and even the football supporter model, are more helpful in shaping our methods of ministry.

How Should It Be Assessed? And By Whom?

When I did my PGCE at Cambridge the course was assessed by written examination, accompanied by a note from the school that I had ‘survived’ my teaching practice. The same was true with the PGCE course at Oxford when I started to teach there – indeed I remember that one student, a first class physicist and an excellent teacher, who failed his PGCE because he had not bothered to ‘mug up’ the appropriate theory for the examination as he was to be married the next day! It is said that ‘what is examined becomes important [and] what is not examined ceases to have importance’. Hence the examined theory had acquired undue importance, and the acquisition of the all-important relevant skills and attitudes for teaching was not taken seriously as these were more difficult to examine objectively. Consequently and subsequently we changed the system for assessment, got rid of the end of course written examination, and replaced it by a series of course assignments, an end of year dissertation, and, most importantly, a structured set of teaching criteria against which the school mentor and the University tutor jointly assessed the student’s competence to teach.

How should ministerial training courses be assessed? I would suggest that the model we developed for teacher education, using criteria referencing and course assignments, is appropriate for ministerial training too. The details would obviously depend on the particular aim of the course for each trainee. The course assignments and dissertation would ensure a sound and perceptive understanding of the relevant information, and the creation of criteria for the skills and attitude required to be a good minister would help all parties to become clearer about what they were aiming to achieve. The involvement of the school mentor and the trainees in their own assessment process would also help them to take ownership and mastery of what they should be aiming for. I suspect that it would be difficult to justify an end of course examination.

When Should the Training Be Done? FT or PT? Is Training Complete at the End of Course? What is the Place of INSET? How Long Should the Initial Training Be?

The length of training provided will depend on the local context, the economics of training, and the legal requirements. In the UK, our training of teachers was set up either as a one-year time slot for graduates or a four year course for those coming straight from school. My experience was on the post graduate, one-year course, but the basic principles, the underlying questions, would be the same for each situation. This is not the place to discuss the all-important on-going training that the newly minted minister should receive after they have completed their initial training. Suffice to say that the training for church leadership can never be considered complete at the end of the ministerial training. This is merely the beginning, and the rest of the practice as a church leader should be an on-going process of continual support and development, which should be and often is taken as a serious responsibility for the professional organizations behind the particular ministry. In schools this is done partly by the support of senior staff, professional tutors, in supporting new teachers. It used to be done by local education authorities (LEAs). Initial training cannot do everything that a teacher, or ordinand, needs for a lifetime of teaching or service. Much mature learning comes by building on past experience; initial training must prioritize what is needed to ‘get started’ and then develop a ‘life-long-learning’ approach as a reflective, self-evaluating practitioner (see Schon, 1985). The role of an expert mentor is invaluable in the ministry as well as in teaching.

For many institutions training church ministers and mission leaders around the world, time is at a premium, and the suggestion that they should follow the UK’s luxurious three or four years of training would be seen as impossible. Indeed, even in the UK the viability of three year FT courses is increasingly questioned. Recently Krish Kandiah (2015) said, ‘the days of the residential, three-year training course are probably numbered’. For many, a year’s training, or even less, is more realistic – which means even more thought needs to be given to fundamental questions about the content and location of the initial training. The issue of in-service, on-going, training and support, and the vital role of mentors, will be especially important for those receiving a small amount of, or no, pre-service training. For many, church leadership begins before any training has been received, and for them the training has to be done ‘in situ’ or at a distance. This is particularly true of fast growing churches in rural or undeveloped regions. Again the same principles apply; what is the most appropriate curriculum, and who is the best person (or persons) to act as mentor and hold the trainee accountable? The church, in its fullest sense, must take responsibility for its leaders.

How Should It Be Recruited? Who Should Be Recruited? Born or Taught? Nature or Nurture?

The question is often asked of teachers, ‘is a good teacher born that way, or can it be taught?’ Can anyone be taught to be a teacher? Are some people just natural teachers who need no further training? Similar questions might be asked of potential ministers, missioners, and church leaders. Clearly some people have the potential to become great teachers or church leaders, while others never will. We believed, increasingly, that appropriate training would make an adequate teacher very much better, though it could never make an unsuitable person competent. This places a large responsibility on the recruitment and assessment processes – we should not be afraid to ‘fail’ people who should not enter the profession and become a liability to schools and churches, to people and to congregations. No system of recruitment will be perfect, but by clarifying the criteria needed to become a good teacher, and by a process of interviewing jointly with the university tutors and school teacher working together, we developed our own insights and felt relatively confident in the people we took on the PGCE course. I suspect that similar processes can apply for ministerial training courses, and that selection should be a partnership too.

In many situations across the world, teachers and church leaders have virtually no training. In young, fast-growing churches, the need for leaders cannot be met by formal training. Leaders will emerge and receive what support they can from their fellowship, but will need some form of Theological Education by Extension (TEE). I have seen remarkable examples of this in India and in Nepal, where the courses have been tailored to the local needs. Though most of the discussion in this paper has been predicated on the basis of residential training, the same basic questions need to be applied to TEE.

Perhaps more worrying is the sometimes asserted principle that ‘anyone can teach’. In the UK we have recently had politicians asserting that teachers do not need training for the new ‘Free Schools’. In parallel we find church leaders, even in mega churches, where the leaders are unashamedly untrained and lead their churches from the principles of secular management, in which they have previously been successful. The dangers of preaching a false Christianity, such as the Prosperity Gospel, based on such dubious theology, are widespread. Clearly, more careful theology is required here, to keep the churches Christian.

What Underpins the Training? Personal Spiritual Commitment or Sound Knowledge?

In the UK system, teachers are answerable to their trainers, to the Government (in state schools) and the school governors, and to the children whom they teach. But above all they are answerable to themselves, to be the best teacher they can be. For a minister and church leader, as for all Christians, the individual has a further person to be accountable to, our Father God whom we seek to serve above all. This deep, all pervading relationship will be the driving and motivating factor which supersedes all other regulations and relationships. It cannot, and probably should not, be assessed by those responsible for the initial and on-going training of ministers, though its absence may be a reason to terminate an ordinand’s training. It is clear that the whole culture of the training institution and the school, in its broadest sense, deeply affects the trainee’s development as a teacher. Similarly, the example of the teachers, mentors, and fellow students, and their relationship with each other and with their God, will be central to the development of future church leaders and missioners for their future service and ministries.

Who Mentors the Mentors?

Being a mentor to a trainee teacher or church worker is not an easy task. It certainly does not follow that a good practitioner will make a good mentor to others. A mentor needs to be empathetic to the needs of the interns, to help them find their own way and utilize their own strengths towards good practice, not just copying the way that the mentor teaches, preaches or practises. So the selection of the ‘right’ mentor is the first requirement. We then found that the best way for the mentors to improve is to have them meeting and working together, planning and sharing experiences together. Once more the mentors learnt from their own experience and from others, alongside a mentor’s mentor.