In the New Yorker - an interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell about trying to predict who will be right for the job. He focuses in on NFL Quarterbacks and the teaching profession. And he focuses on the fact that success at training levels (or college football) is no indicator of success in the actual profession. His essay has important things to say about how we train ministers of course, too.
He writes:
In teaching, the implications are ... profound. They suggest that we shouldn’t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. That means that the profession needs to start the equivalent of Ed Deutschlander’s training camp. It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated.
Simply touting 'high standards' and 'rigour' for no good reason is pointless unless the standards track with what we think is most important. When he says 'standards should be lowered' he is speaking of entry requirements - and I don't think the training itself should be at all compromised. It is however worth asking if what is asked of students, and therefore measured in them, is any helpful indicator of how they will go as ministers.
9 comments:
Thanks Michale , fascinating article
some of the implications for finding pastors and planters along these principals would be quite radical.
"this emphasis on book smarts suddenly seems peculiar"
I wonder what it might look like if we went down a different recruiting line in anglican ministry?
do we avoid expensive and time consuming degrees until a person has deomnstrated they have the goods? that would seem to be the driscoll approach.
or do you make Moore low bar entry level - for younger men and women - then bring em back ofr a masters later on once the recruiters have seen they have the goods?
and what about MTS style apprenticeships - the current principal doesn't seem to value them but it would seem they are good evaluative tool?
one final thought - how much do we push the "value added" analysis. I supose this is the whole faithfulness/ effectiveness balance.
would love to hear more from you.
Thanks Michael
in NFL & teaching the problem of evaluation is the gap between training & the dangerous high pressure world of NFL/the classroom.
We should be working to reduce that gap by sending people to college with as much dangerous high pressure real world ministry experience as we can.
Unlike NFL we can expose people to a fair bit of ministry by sharing life & ministry with them. MTS shoud make that even easier. Going down the elder first train later Mars Hill route might also help.
While the article focuses on competence, there are also hints that character is significant - how do they handle pressure? do they include everyone? Was it the Swans that deliberately chose not to recruit some of the most technically talented players because of a 'No ****heads policy' - they would destroy team unity and lead other players into trouble. Lessons to be learnt there too.
Doug Wilson has a recent post on ministerial training that is both insightful and entertaining, here:
http://www.dougwils.com/index.asp?Action=Anchor&CategoryID=1&BlogID=6160
We generally insist on a high level of training for ministry, but you can train a chimp to get the banana he wants by pushing on a lever... We need men in the Church who know how to think.
Thanks Mike. Wilson as always is interesting. But, he says all this and still believes in a young earth. Go figure. At that point, for me, he becomes part of the problem and not part of the solution.
Heh - so do I. I thought not believing the Bible was the problem.
Well, for more on that see Noll's 'The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind', a thesis similar to Wilson's.
Yes, not believing the Bible is the problem; as is forcing it to say what it doesn't...
Really? From memory, John Dickson commented somewhere that if it was finally proven without doubt that the world was actually six thousand years old, it would have nothing to do with early Genesis because that is not what is being taught there. That has to be one of the dumbest things a very smart person ever said. It is our inconsistency the world most often laughs at, not our faithfulness to the authority of the Bible.
Anyhow, you brought it up. Thanks for the reply.
Well I would absolutely agree with Dickson! The scandal of creation 'science' is not the science, it's the exegesis. You can't say 'holding to the authority of the Bible' equates merely to your reading of it. And I think the measure of what the world laughs at are decidedly in my favour. Not that that matters, especially.
But - grace and peace. I did bring it up, but really by way of saying 'I think Wilson is interesting and intelligent, but there are holes in his thinking, this being one of them.'
Sorry Michael, just got back to this.
My point about Dickson's statement is this: if the Genesis account isn't teaching 6000 years, where did anyone get it from? As Spock would say, that's most illogical. The timeline comes from a plain exegesis of the text.
Post a Comment