Reimagining Nimble Ways of Preparing Persons for Church Leadership—1 of 2

If the world needs the church to be better at being the church and the church needs theological education institutions to be better at educating a wider range of people for leadership in the church, sildenafil then how might we imagine such work?

Recap

Many schools are working to rethink both the time to degree and the delivery methods needed to prepare persons for ministry. Changes in ATS accreditation standards now define a minimum of 72 hours for a Master of Divinity Degree and allow up to 25% of the degree to be handled through advanced standing. Advanced standing is distinct from a simple transfer of credits. Advanced standing takes seriously a thorough assessment of the competencies a student has in relevant areas. Institutions are trying multiple models to take advantage of this new flexibility. One shift embraces a shorter time to degree as a way of reducing the cost of education. Another shift is to offer more “distributed” learning, particularly online and hybrid courses so that the student does not need to relocate which may also reduce the cost of the degree. These are important and worthy experiments.

Competency Based Learning

Another approach is to test the imaginative possibilities to reframe the whole theological education enterprise in a way the moves away from a proscribed number of courses to competency based learning. My institution, Gettysburg Theological Seminiary, has been working with Educational Development Consultants, in partnership with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Bishops of Region 8, spending the last year developing and testing the document “Duties and Tasks of an Ordained Minister.”

The initial draft was developed by a diverse group of a dozen people, most of who were not directly connected with teaching in a seminary. We posted the draft in the form of a Survey Monkey and distributed it across the church and on our website; we received initial feedback and refined the survey to further validate the profile. The faculty has developed a draft of the outcomes assessment using a scale of sufficient, good and superior behavior for each of the tasks in the profile.

The next step is to develop an assessment tool for students which utilize instruments already in use to help map their strengths and learning needs. A personalized Learning Pathway would be crafted with the student that maximizes prior learning, adapts to the specific competencies needed in a ministry context, and creates multiple and nimble ways for the student to traverse that path. The idea is that this learning pathway accompanies the student as a lifelong learner in their first call and beyond.

The ELCA Bishops of Region 8 are very interested in thinking with us how this competency based learning might serve as a holistic, integrative and adaptive tool that might also be useful for them as they work with pastors who are eager to continue to build capacity or who may not be flourishing in their context.

Outcomes

We think this competency based learning approach maximizes our strengths, captures the strengths students bring, personalizes learning using multiple paths to competency, establishes a culture of lifelong learning for the long term flourishing of ministry, integrates the church much more closely in the preparation, assessment, and capacity building of the ministerium.

Competency based learning requires a deeper and longstanding working relationship with both church judicatories as well as ministry contexts who will need to work closely to refine and redevelop competencies germane to their own context and learn from other contests what competencies are helping faith communities bear faithful witness to the living God.

Strategies

We need to develop more refined and simpler assessment tools; design a learning portfolio which a student might carry with her throughout ministry; help congregations develop a learning portfolio to help match strengths of leaders with learning needs of congregations or other ministry contexts; map the curriculum in ways that better chart competency outcomes rather than credits earned; train the faculty and regional colleagues in how we advise students in this competency based learning; communicate to prospective students and to congregations ways competency based learning can help theological education institutions and networks better prepare leaders to enable the church to be better at being the church.

What do you think may help the church be better at being the church? What may networks of teaching and learning do to better prepare leaders for this crucial work?

Welcome to the conversation.

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