Formational Theological Education—Part 2: The Competency of the Folk

In my previous post, “Formational Theological Education—Part 1: Troubling a Metaphor”, I referenced Dan Aleshire’s forward-thinking vision of a formational model of theological education. Some theological educators have used the metaphor of classical musical as a way into such pedagogy: musicians learn basic performative building blocks (scales, etudes, etc.) on their way to more complicated and artistic forms of performance.

In that discussion I simply laid out a critique and invited some conversation around the metaphor. Here I’d like to put forward a more constructive argument for what I’m calling: “the competency of the folk.”

Theological Education as “R&D”

We learn in our bodies, in concrete situations. We learn from our built-environments and the constructed social contexts which surround us. In theological education, the turn to CPE and field or contextual education have brought these pedagogical realities to the foreground.

If it is the case that theological education shifts as models of ministry shift (and that seems to hold from my reading of history), then such learning in ministry ought to become the “research and development” arm of our seminaries and theological schools.

Toward Virtuosity…

This is the best of what Bonnie Miller-McLemore’s musical metaphor sought to name: that there is an embodied, practical “know-how” required for excellence in ministry. My concern has been that “excellence” here was trapped within a classical paradigm of performance: the virtuoso.

This is certainly one valid form of excellence in ministry. Though we need not always equate virtuoso with numbers, recent research on megachurches does seem to suggest that their senior pastors are indeed virtuosos. And several of their affiliated church planting networks have sought to train and educate other leaders in such virtuosity. The competency of the virtuoso is found in their ability to perform classic masterpieces. Their craft is clearly defined, disciplined and traditioned. Virtuosos, by definition, are able to do what few others can.

…Yet Still Folk

If the competency of the virtuoso is their refined and distinguished performances, the competency of the folk is their fluency with the mundane and the everyday. The folk is for the masses. The folk is gritty, down to earth and even a bit vulgar at times.

That our art—and the pedagogical metaphors we borrow from it—traces its aesthetics along lines of social class ought not to surprise us. Classical music is a social marker of upper class society. The folk is blue collar. In theological language, the classical virtuoso delivers to us a transcendent reality; the folk tends to our imminent reality.

Embracing Competency

The turn to competency-based educational models offers a particular opportunity for formational theological education. Through new technology and assessment tools, higher education has begun to find new ways to “credit” the learning and competencies developed in non-traditional learning environments.

Theological education is currently behind the curve, but there are promising studies[1]and new initiatives underway that could change that. Perhaps a future formational model of theological education might not only value the high-brow forms of classic virtuosity, perhaps it might also embrace the competency of the folk, of the everyday.

 

 

 

Photo Credit: “slippery rock bass virtuoso Gen” by Tomek Augustyn. Licensed for reuse by CC BY-SA 2.0 license

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