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About the Author:
Ralph D. Winter is a senior mission thinker who has been actively involved from the beginning of the massive mission transition from simply thinking in terms of countries or individuals to thinking in terms of peoples. He is founder of the
U.S. Center for World Mission,
and is currently chancellor of
William Carey
International University. |
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I'm a little embarrassed by the wording of this topic. It sounds pompous. There are, of course, other problems besides the one to which I refer, although none, I believe, more serious.
I'm not going to let you wonder until the very end of this talk just what I think that stumbling block is. I refer very simply to the far-reaching practice of selecting the wrong people for training. It is that simple, and it is as much a problem in the West as it is in the rest of the globe.
But, why would we-and I include myself as part of the theological education movement-why would we do such a thing as to select the wrong people for training? Why, all over the world, would we put enormous sums of money and manpower into training the wrong people?
Thus, you can see why my simple statement of the problem cries out for further comment. Just to state it seems baldly and hopelessly erroneous. How could it possibly be true?
Note carefully that if in fact you spend your energies training the wrong people, you also bypass the right people. You in effect suppress the training of the right people if you are using up your time and facilities and resources in training the wrong people.
Nevertheless the fact is that all over the world, especially in the United States, but also wherever the "long hand" of the Western church reaches, precisely the more gifted leaders of the Christian movement are being sidetracked and not being recruited into ministry. The growing edge of Biblical faith around the world has little to do with residential training of pastoral leaders.
Visit the Global Church
Let's go to Africa. In Africa the majority of those who earnestly follow Christ, who seek the living God, and for whom the Bible is the most prominent feature of their movement, are not even what we would normally call Christians. They are part of a very wide spectrum of movements earlier called the African independent churches, and then the African indigenous churches, and now more recently I hear it is the African-initiated churches. People are struggling to get respectable terminology for a movement that has for a long time been considered quite unrespectable. The World Christian Encyclopedia claims there are more than 50 million Africans in this movement! These movements do not employ residential schools for church leadership.
Let's go to Brazil. Seven out of eight new churches-and there are about ten or fifteen new ones a week-are Pentecostal. They don't have seminaries. They don't believe in seminaries. That isn't quite true: the Assemblies of God now finally have a seminary in the United States-and will inherit all the problems that is going to create. In any event, Latin America is a very rapidly growing sphere of world Christianity, even though some feel it is not growing "properly," "respectably," "normally."
It is growing out of control. It isn't coming to our feet for training. It isn't coming to our institutions. Its people don't have time for that. And our institutions are not interested in reaching out to such people.
A little digression here. I was asked to go back to Brazil ten years after first preaching the gospel of Theological Education by Extension
(TEE) at a Sao Paulo conference of 65 seminary leaders. I was there as the last Anglo executive director of the Association of Latin American Theological Schools, Northern Region (in Brazil I was asked to speak outside of my territory). At the end of this four day conference they formed (right on the spot) an association for theological education by extension. I didn't propose that they do that; they just did it, and I
was very pleased to see it happen.
Ten years later I was invited to speak again at their annual meeting. They said, "Come back to see what we've done." So I went back and in ten years they had developed over a hundred specialized textbooks in Portuguese for their burgeoning extension movement!
Then, twenty years later (these visits were in 1965, 1975 and 1985), I was asked to go down again. This time I was for the first couple of days quite in the dark as to what was going on. But I found out at a lunch the second day that they had changed the name of their association. They dropped out the word "extension." It was now just an association of theological schools. After 20 years of what the anthropologists call "cultural levelling" most of the people at the meeting didn't really know much about extension. They wouldn't have ever come to an ACCESS meeting.
I was aghast, and so I shifted gears. In the last two days of the conference I preached the gospel of extension from scratch. As it says in the book of Acts, "and some believed." However, although the seminaries are moving away from extension, the church movement is out of control, and "standard schools" have little relationship to the growing edge.
Let's go to India. In South India there may very well be more people outside the formal church movement seriously reading the Bible and following Jesus Christ than the number of equivalently serious believers who call themselves Christians (or who are called Christians by anybody else). This vast movement of believers does not employ residential schools to create leaders.
Or go to China. Here's the largest movement in human history that has grown as fast as it has. Out of practically nothing in thirtyfive years to 50, 60, 80 million people. There are now also thousands of "regular" churches.
But I'm mainly talking about the fifty thousand "house churches". What are they really like? I don't think we would want to know in some cases. We could be aghast. Some are no doubt in the category of the Africa-initiated churches and their heresies.
It bears mention that the saving grace of the Chinese church is the fact that in most of the house churches the "theological anchor man" is a woman, trained as the result of the work of women missionaries years earlier.
The irony is that the male missionaries were expected to carry the load of conveying the Biblical inheritance. They were expected, naturally, to teach in "proper" schools. They did. But note, for every man taught by a man in a "proper" school, women missionaries taught dozens of women (who really learned and loved the Bible) by "extension" methods. What a providence. That unplanned extension phenomenon is the principal reason there is a husky church in China with the degree of Biblical knowledge it does in fact possess. Korea is similar. The vast majority of the 50,000 house churches under the umbrella of the Full Gospel Church on Yoido Island are, for example, essentially pastored and taught by women who have learned the Bible by non-formal methods.
Granted that not all of these movements have their theology as straight as we do! But I remember McGavran used to say, "Look, it doesn't matter what these people believe. The main thing is, are they reading the Bible? If they are serious about the Bible, they'll turn out okay." That brief comment of McGavran's shouldn't be taken as his complete wisdom on these movements. But in any event, it doesn't really matter; according to McGavran, what they believe will balance out if they are pursuing the living God in the pages of His Word. And it is up to us to get that Word into their hands.
In India illiteracy isn't the same problem. You've got a lot of very highly literate, highly educated, very wealthy people in India who can buy anything that's in the bookstore. In Africa, it is quite different. Many of the leaders of this 50-million block aren't literate. It isn't that these people are heretical due to rebelling against God. It is because-here's the key word-access was not there.
So we've now covered a very large proportion of the earth's surface. Let's return to the United States. Here I quote Wagner to the effect that most of the last 25,000 new churches in this country are devoid of seminary-trained leaders. Maybe five percent have seminarytrained leaders. Wagner is not saying this is a good thing. He's just describing what is true.
But, when you come to the United States there is a different dynamic to some extent. It is not that the people don't have the money to go to school, or that they don't live near enough to go to school, or that they can't leave their families or jobs to go to school. In this country those problems are much more rarely the case. It is in many cases an issue of trivial factors.
Thus, in this country the rapidly growing edge of the Christian movement employs what could be called "non-professional leaders." The same thing is true in England, with five thousand new churches over there. There's practically no connection between these new churches and the standard, traditional, orthodox theological training which we all rightly value so highly. And the reason is mostly a practical lack of access.
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On January 15, 1998, the annual conference of the Association of Christian Continuing Education Schools and Seminaries, known as ACCESS, met on the campus of the U.S. Center for World Mission, Ralph Winter gave the opening address on the theme, "The Largest Stumbling Block to Leadership Development in the Global Church." Following his presentation is a question and answer session. |
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