I pushed Scott over the top yesterday. I didn’t know it at the time, and I didn’t mean to, but there we were, having a good conversation, and the next day he sends me this six page rant. (He wasn’t angry at me, thank heavens.)
Scott has invested two weeks helping me think through the wholesale transformation of the church in order to make it more missionally aligned. It’s a tall order, and Scott has been very supportive of my pursuit. Meanwhile, Scott is on a quest of his own, to be an agent for the transformation of the seminary where he teaches.
Scott wants his seminary to change NOW, because the kind of training the students are receiving is based on an outmoded model of church. Watching me, after years of pastoral work trying to retool, and realizing that today’s graduates are going to be ill-equipped from the start, he wrote a manifesto for the reformation of the seminary.
I think his most herculean problem is that he wants the faculty to produce a different product. But these highly trained, conscientious scholars have spent a lifetime becoming good at what they do, and they would be very clumsy at doing anything different.
Scott, welcome to my world. I have a really fantastic congregation. They’re good at what they do. Asking them to become missional means asking them to acquire a new set of skills, to adopt a new idea of why they exist and to employ new measurements to evaluate how they’re doing.
Whether the task is transforming seminaries or congregations, it’s a God-size challenge, and getting there is going to be a faith-stretching adventure for all of us.
Posted in Missional Church
