What God Wants For Your Life

This week marked the beginning of a new academic year.  As in years past, I have spent a few days describing the nature of our spiritual formation program to new students.

Over a decade ago the program looked very different from the one we have today.  We relied on outside facilitators.  The student experience varied greatly.  And oversight for the program was assigned to someone whose primary responsibilities lay elsewhere.  The program was also required for certain degree programs, but no one received credit.  Predictably, it was difficult for students to take the task of spiritual formation seriously and the program felt a bit like an addendum to the other work that they did.  Students often observed that the program was “Like the Book of Judges — everyone was doing what was right in their own eyes.”

The situation is very different today.  The program is still required, but the students receive credit for their efforts.  Members of the full-time and adjunct faculty facilitate the formation groups.  The work of the formation groups serves as a structured introduction to spiritual disciplines, organized around a common syllabus and texts.  And we have supplemented our core program with elective course work in the field of spirituality, a track devoted to issues in spirituality in the Doctor of Ministry program, and a certificate program in spiritual direction for both clergy and the laity.

All of this, of course, restores an emphasis lost or omitted long ago in much of what counts for theological education — an emphasis that once lay at the heart of a seminary’s work: the formation not just of the mind, but the soul.  There are a number of reasons that this endeavor slipped to the margins of theological education, but one of the important factors has been the triumph of the university model of education.

The university model stresses atomization and specialization as the best means of subject mastery.  Faculty members are socialized into the model by their graduate students and then, in turn, they socialize their students.  The model has its strengths: Faculty are able to deeply familiarize themselves with a distinguishable body of literature and issues; and students benefit from their intimacy with that subject matter.

The problem, of course, is that (for the most part) seminaries don’t prepare academics.  They prepare clergy.  And the task of the clergy is (or should be) soul formation.  In other words, their task is integrative and its basic impulse is the very opposite of the university model.  That is why theological education as a bit like the experience of sitting on the floor of your den at 1am on Christmas morning with hundreds of parts to a child’s toy with instructions for assembling it in a language you don’t understand.

There will be those who argue that the failure of the seminaries to grapple directly with that issue is license for jettisoning theological education completely.  I can’t share their blithe confidence in the virtues of self-imposed ignorance.  But until the theological academy finds the courage to revisit the basic assumptions that lie behind the enterprise, future generations of seminarians will need to do the integrative task themselves, asking not just what they have been taught, but how it contributes (or doesn’t) to the formation of their souls and their relationship with God.

There is no substitute for sitting prayerfully with the varied, unassembled pieces of an experience like a seminary education — and a question we don’t ask often enough: “How is it with your soul?”  That is and always has been the question.  And if clergy give the question attention, they will be better equipped to help others ask the question as well.

Seminaries are a complex mix of more than one culture. They are part school, part business, and part church. Most academic communities struggle with the first two.

For seminaries the church part is defining. In some ways seminaries function like a church, even when they don’t they are deeply dependent upon the church. Until recently churches largely defined the mission of most seminaries, provided them with students, and supported them financially.

During the second half of the twentieth century this relationship served both the church and seminaries fairly well. Now that relationship is rapidly unraveling.

In part, the reason for the demise of this partnership is traceable to massive changes in “church” itself.

The changes in “church-as-we-have-known-it” could fill a book. It has already filled lots of them. A few of the better ones are listed below.

But, briefly, here are some changes:

• In the United States mainline Protestantism is already a minority movement. It will get more minor as time goes on. Where it does thrive, it will thrive not as denominations, but as individual congregations.

• Nonetheless, the church in the United States will grow. Most of it will be Catholic, charismatic, and non-denominational.

• There will be fewer full-time clergy and more bi-vocational clergy.

• Lay people will do more.

• Globally the church will continue to move south and east — to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The churches there will also dominate the global stage.

• Boomers will continue to retire and the agenda they have promoted will retire with them. People are already tired of it and the generations behind the boomers don’t even understand why they are fighting over the things they fight over.

• The critical issues that facing the church in the next fifty to seventy-five years will revolve around genetics, brain research, inter-generational conflict (huge elderly populations and much smaller populations of young people behind them), fiscal conflict, the decentralization of political authority, technology, and globalization.

• In order for the church to have anything significant to say about those issues the church will first have to prove that it is still relevant — as a spiritual voice and as a community.

• A growing number of Americans are spiritual, not religious. They find community on line, not within the walls of churches and they are perfectly capable of giving their faith expression without the church’s help. Only a church that can convince them that it has something to offer will get attract much interest.

Seminaries cannot ignore these changes. They can

play the tape,
whistle in the dark,
cobble together programs with other seminaries,
join forces with other schools in their denominations,
and/or sell property

These are Saab-like choices.

But these are attempts to save approaches to theological education that cannot be saved. They mask the realities and postpone the inevitable. They don’t change a thing.

Think Fine Cooking…

Other things to read:

Allen, John L. The Future Church. How Ten Trends are Revolutionizing the Catholic Church. New York: Doubleday, 2009.

Jenkins, Philip. The Next Christendom. The Coming of Global Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Tickle, Phyllis. The Great Emergence. How Christianity is Changing and Why. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008.

Wuthnow, Robert. After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty- Somethings are Shaping the Future of American Religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.

No market sector is changing more rapidly than the world of print media. It is hard to believe that the blockbuster romantic comedy, “You’ve Got Mail!” was made in 1998. Played out against the backdrop the commercial rivalry between big, bad “Fox Books” and “The Shop Around the Corner,” this remake of Judy Garland’s earlier film is shot through with the angst of New Yorker’s who fret over the demise of the local book dealer. Scarcely a decade later, we are now facing the demise of “Fox Books” and, for that matter, books themselves (at least as we have known them).

In response, the editors of Fine Cooking have managed to preserve a very traditional enterprise by innovating. Although they continue to produce one of the country’s most popular cooking magazines, they have also turned to the web. There, taking a thoroughly new approach,

• they work to be accessible
• they take into account the experience level of their readers
• they take a user-oriented approach
• and they focus on their market’s interests

Not surprisingly, the first tabs one sees in visiting finecooking.com are the tabs labeled “recipes, ingredients, how-to, and cooks talk.” In the run-up to the Super Bowl the site offers desperate entertainers a “Super Bowl Party Menu” and, of course, the key to their success, the tag line “We bring out the cook in you.”

The rave reviews that the magazine receives are hardly surprising. One fan writes:

Fine Cooking is the best! I have found that this magazine offers such a great balance of recipes… not too easy, not extremely hard. Just an ideal mix of some quick and easy everyday meals and bigger dishes that require more preparation. I like that the editors of Fine Cooking have mastered this balance because it is perfect for people like me who don’t settle for one or the other. I can’t afford to spend all of my spare time cooking, BUT I love cooking meals and entertaining as if I’m a “Fine” cook! I have used countless recipes given to me by my issues of Fine Cooking and have always been more than satisfied by the way they come out– simply delicious. Issues offer such useful cooking tips and strategies that just make cooking easier. I also find the reviews of kitchen appliances useful and the tips on cookware and the best ingredients to use. I love this magazine! 5 stars!

In an important way, the challenge confronting Saab, Fine Cooking, AND theological educators is the same. They are not operating in fast-changing, competitive markets. They are operating in environments that are disappearing and morphing into something completely different.

Marketing guru Seth Godin’s is right:

“Who will save us?
Who will save book publishing?
What will save the newspapers?
What means ‘save’?
If by save you mean, “what will keep things just as they are?” then the answer is nothing will. It’s over.
If by save you mean, “who will keep the jobs of the pressmen and the delivery guys and the squadrons of accountants and box makers and transshippers and bookstore buyers and assistant editors and coffee boys,” then the answer is still nothing will. Not the Kindle, not the iPad, not an act of Congress.
We need to get past this idea of saving, because the status quo is leaving the building, and quickly. Not just in print of course, but in your industry too.
If you want to know who will save the joy of reading something funny, or the leverage of acting on fresh news or the importance of allowing yourself to be changed by something in a book, then don’t worry. It doesn’t need saving. In fact, this is the moment when we can figure out how to increase those benefits by a factor of ten, precisely because we don’t have to spend a lot of resources on the saving part.
Every revolution destroys the average middle first and most savagely.”

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/02/who-will-save-us.html

Fine Cooking appears to have understood this, intuitively, if not explicitly.

• Its management embraced the new tech and used it well.
• They accepted that the market does not come to them as well prepared as it used to be.
• And they are learning to build a presence as an important and one of the best on-line resources for cooks.

Saab (and with it, GM) kept trying to make the old model work (literally) and the old model is gone. As Godin notes, “’what will keep things just as they are?’…the answer is nothing will. It’s over.”

The same can be said of the existing model of theological education.

Tomorrow and the next day I plan to outline the fast-changing environment that theological educators face —

Why contrast approaches to theological education using Saab and Fine Cooking magazine?

Because in some ways there are no two products on the market today that better represent two very different approaches to their customers and their brand — and — while the language of business may seem alien if not hostile to the world of theological education, business behaviors around customer service and branding are roughly approximate to service and mission in theological education.

So what do Saab and Fine Cooking represent?

Well, if you have been reading the Wall Street Journal for the last year, you know that Saab is in serious trouble. General Motors was working desperately to sell it. In the eleventh hour GM finally unloaded the brand with a manufacturer of high-end sports cars. What will finally happen to Saab is hard to say. What is instructive is the way in which it reached this sad impasse.

Read those stories in the Journal and it becomes clear that these were the issues and this, roughly, was the story:

• Saab had a narrow appeal, catering primarily to professorial-types with corduroy jackets and elbow patches. (I had the jacket thirty years ago and the car twenty years ago.)

• That narrow appeal was based upon quirky, iconoclastic design — including a hood that opened from below the windshield and an ignition switch located on the floor — and the fact that it was Swedish.

• Saab failed to monitor the change in buying patterns and it failed to innovate, relying instead on the narrow appeal that quirkiness offered it.

• Ignoring the world around it did not work so well, so, Saab was sold to General Motors. That is, the need to innovate was ignored in favor of a partnership with a larger, struggling car manufacturer. This move effectively — and temporarily — masked its real problems.

• When the brand came under even more pressure, instead of innovating GM produced a Saab that looked much more like a GM, weakening even further its appeal to long-time Saab owners.

• So GM decided to invoke the car’s heritage (“Born from Jets”), instead of building something that drove like a jet. This, too, did not work and it didn’t help to know that after World War II Saab considered making a number of other things than cars — including toasters.

• By the time GM began to revisit at least a few of the brand’s more endearing qualities, Saab and GM were both in undeniable trouble — and corduroy jackets with elbow patches were hard to find.

• Throughout it all, Saabs continued to be plagued by issues of reliability and proved largely unresponsive to its customers. In other words they never built the car their customers wanted. They built the car they felt that their customers needed.

How Fine Cooking responded to changing circumstances, tomorrow. In the meantime I invite you to think about how much of what happens in a theological education could be compared with Saab.

I promise not to write at too great a length about theological education.  Sadly, it is difficult to generate much interest in it, even among alumnae once they are absorbed with the demands of parish life.  It is harder still to interest laypeople.

That’s too bad.  What most people do not appreciate is that seminaries are both enmeshed in the trends that shape the culture and the church; and the graduates of seminaries (i.e., clergy), in turn, shape the church.  So large numbers of church leaders, lay and ordained alike, may ignore what is going on in seminaries, but that doesn’t mean it won’t affect them.  As a friend of mine in the business world (that’s “bidness” here in Texas) observes, “It isn’t what you don’t know that gets you, it’s what you don’t know that you don’t know.”

So over the space of a few blogs, I would like to map out my own evaluation of where we are and how theological education needs to change.  Specifically, “Why theological education needs to be less like Saab and more like Fine Cooking.”

The next blog in the series will explain the points of comparison.