“e-Formation”—A Case for Seminaries to Take on the Challenges of Faith Learning

My boss at a large protestant seminary in Metro Washington inherited two big problems: very few people were visiting the faith formation resource center she was hired to direct, and very few students were interested in the Christian education courses she was hired to teach.

For years, the Center for the Ministry of Teaching’s primary appeal was our close alignment with the needs of program-based institutional churches. We had sample Sunday school and adult education curricula from all the major publishers. We had a circulating collection of educational videos with public performance rights. We trained future and current clergy and directors of religious education in how to design and administer high-quality programming and hopefully to know something about the craft of teaching.

But the world has changed, and our center had not changed with them. Fewer congregations can sustain a Sunday school or dedicated Christian formation staff. Many publishers have folded or downsized, and the ones remaining make their resources available for online evaluation and distribution. Most church  institutional structures are no longer well suited to the ways we teach and learn and communicate and serve and give and even pray.

My boss knew we had to do a better job of helping the leaders we serve think differently about ministry in our current cultural situation. One of the first things she did was invite a half-dozen forward-thinking colleagues and a couple dozen regional leaders to an unstructured learning exchange called e-Formation. We didn’t know much more than that it would be about the intersection of faith formation and digital technology.

Two years later, we’ve just finished the second conference-sized e-Formation event. We gathered 150 participants (including almost 20 on a live webinar) from at least nine denominations. We did our best to hire workshop and plenary leaders who were genuinely interested in forming a dynamic, risk-tolerant learning community.

Each time we’ve hosted e-Formation, we’ve come away convinced that learning opportunities like it are essential for training professionals and volunteers for faith leadership. Here are some important themes from this year’s event.

Understanding Cultural and Technological Change

In her workshop and plenary, sociologist and church social media strategist Meredith Gould helped participants differentiate between the new cultural realities facing churches and the changing technology that is a part of those realities. She noted that many church people project onto the technology itself anxieties that are more broadly cultural.

For example, Gould spoke about the way technology has changed cultural understandings of time and responsiveness. She knows that pastors and other church leaders have to deal with increasingly challenging expectations about the time it takes to, say, reply to an email or social media post.

But it would be a mistake to think that simply getting better trained on how to use email and social media will change the broader cultural challenges associated with the social media revolution. The technology training is a necessary but, in itself, insufficient step.

Working With—not Against—Busy Households

Similarly, Roman Catholic faith formation visionary John Roberto encouraged Christian educators to think less like program directors and more like curators. Members of churches no longer keep much of Sunday plus Wednesday evenings penciled in for church activities. But being busy hasn’t changed their hunger for spiritual growth, and they are willing to learn in self-directed ways if leaders help provide the tools and get them connected.

“Don’t build a program; build a network,” John likes to say. Participants at e-Formation had the chance to reflect on the differences between those two mentalities and to develop skills and learn about resources that can empower this new ministry model.

When we reported on our action research project coaching congregational leaders transitioning from traditional Sunday school models to what we call hybrid faith formation, the session was packed. And we came away with what we’re worried will be too many leads for next year’s coaching cohort. We think hybrid faith formation is an idea whose time has come.

Preparing Leaders for New Media Collaboration

The highlight of the event for many participants was a plenary session with Sarah Lefton, creator of G-dcast. Facilitating “meaningful Jewish screentime,” G-dcast is a new media nonprofit that’s been called Schoolhouse Rock for Jews. (If you haven’t yet encountered the site, do yourself a favor and take a break from this post to watch their adaptation of Psalm 42 or play this Bible- and Fruit Ninja-inspired iOS game that teaches Levitical law.)

As we heard Sarah tell the story of her journey from self-confessed biblical illiterate to pioneering Jewish educator, we were struck by her willingness to learn as she went along and to bring together remarkable teams of collaborators. We know of clergy, lay leaders, and (yes) seminary professors who like to go it alone. But the skill sets required to make a splash online are too many and too diverse for even the most agile and well-trained individuals.

We believe it’s not just the creators of religious education curriculum who need to know how to work together. At every workshop and every level of leadership, we heard about the importance of teams, of coordinated strategy, of collaborative ministry.

The e-Formation Conference has been a great barometer for our institution about the realities facing our graduates in churches large and small, rural and urban, rich and poor and in between. We look forward to bringing these insights into our classrooms and our own institutional life. And we trust that God is doing a new, and good, thing in the midst of this eager and growing community of practice.

Center for the Ministry of Teaching (CMT) at Virginia Theological Seminary is pleased to share these images: CC BY-NC 3.0 US.

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