The University is, in other words, an institution that has de facto had delegated to it the holding of a significant portion of the Church’s memory
That is, it is called to be responsive to the particular situation in which it is carried out, responsive to the particular gifts of the one ministering, responsive to the resources available in the immediate community. But it is also called to be responsible: answerable not just to that minister and that situation, but also to God, to the Bible, to the wider Church–and to earlier generations of the Church. Both by responsiveness and by responsibility, the Church’s mission is called to account–the practitioners of that mission slowed down and called to wait, and to pay attention.
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Theological education feeds both responsiveness and responsibility, providing resources which enable attention to the specific difficulties of a particular location, but also constantly making connections with the wider Christian tradition: allowing what happens here to be called into question by a community which stretches in time and space far beyond the local.
Now, training in responsiveness, in detailed attention to the local, is still often valued by Churches whose view of theological education is instrumentalized. It is a form of training that appears to feed effectiveness directly, by showing how the practice of mission needs to be reshaped in order to work well here. What I have been calling responsibility is less clearly valued. Imagine a program of study that included both a module in the sociological analysis of a local community, and a module in the Christological debates of the fourth Century. If both responsiveness and responsibility appropriately hold ministry to account, it will not be the case that the former module has to do with ministry whereas the latter does not.
And yet it is vital to the Church’s present health that the Church be reminded of forgotten aspects of its past identity
Much could be said about the resources that the University might have to offer to the learning of responsiveness, of appropriate and open-eyed analysis of the current situation. Continue reading « Christian ministry (whether informal or formal lay ministry, or ordained ministry) is called to be both responsive and responsible »