Training and Tradition

Some thoughts on training for Christian ministry.

Where I work we talk about it a lot, so I thought, why not a little more? It's natural for us as humans to find that the things that we have systematized and refined for the purposes of understanding and transferability have lost their edge and clarity of vision. So, it's helpful and necessary to rethink old concepts reconstituted in new contexts so as to bring the vision back into focus and the life back into the methods.

In thinking about training, we want to train so as to enable the vision to take root and grow in the community of faith for the sake of the of the world. In our training we want not so much to instruct as to enable, to provide the trellises without which the vines have nowhere to go. We want to make level the roads to freedom, creativity, and inspiration so that students can engage authentically in Christ with the world around them, speaking and acting in the world and as part of the world so as to be light and salt, the truth and redemptive power of the Gospel, to bring people to Christ and Christ to the people.


"Tradition, then, is not something which is essentially static and backward looking. It looks to the past and seeks to learn from its inheritance; but it looks equally to the present and the future, seeking in the acquired wisdom of former generations appropriate ways and means of dealing with new challenges and circumstances; seeking to adapt itself, so that its voice may be heard speaking in the language which today's generation can hear and understand; committed to the view that what it offers is of lasting value, but open in principle to the revision and adaptation which ongoing engagement with reality and new discoveries may compel it to accept." - Trevor Hart in Faith Thinking, p. 180