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8. Teachers. The appointed teachers are themselves missional leaders and able team
players; they model Christian character, and integrate their personal faith and scholarship.
9. Students. It is acknowledged that good candidates for leadership are hard to find.
Local congregations take special responsibility for recruiting potential students. Young
people with leadership skills, passion and vision are identified and given a task, accompanied
with coaching or mentoring. If deemed suitable, they are subsequently challenged
to continue their studies in a seminary or in some other way.
We will return to some of the main findings of this chapter after we have discussed
views on and practices of leader education within three theological faculties in the Low
Countries. For now, we submit three short conclusions.
First, the literature of the EMC rightly suggests that in many instances it is likely that
theological education – in so far as it is meant to educate for leadership – needs to be reenvisioned
in the light of recent societal and cultural changes. As the respected theological
educator Samuel Escobar put it, the problem of seminary education has taken on
“dramatic urgency” 295 because of the sociological and cultural transitions toward postmodernity
and post-Christendom in the Western world and its churches.
Second, views and proposals concerning leader education as formulated within the
Emerging-Missional milieu – for example, their emphasis on reflexive understanding, on
tion is important because different notions of truth imply and encourage different ideals in regard to thinking,
knowledge, meaning, and learning.
Naturalistic thinking, for example, says that human cognitive abilities are a cerebral tool of bipedal primates,
derived by genetic variation and natural selection from the struggle of existence. However, if this is
true, than “human knowledge in its deepest impulse is not focused on truth but on fitness and pugnacity,”
and intellectual discussions become “boxing matches in the academic arena.” Jacob Klapwijk, Purpose in the
Living World? Creation and Emergent Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 203. Since
this prospect is neither attractive nor convincing, the question ‘what is truth’ and ‘how may we know truth’
should be tackled by educators.
This question extends also to the ethical sphere. According to the influential educationalist John Dewey,
for example, ethics and morality are rooted in the physical and biological human constitution. Nature changes
as a whole, and thus human nature, and thus his morality. Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European
and American Thought, 1860-1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), 176. We see in this reasoning Jerome Popp’s thesis illustrated that “John Dewey was
the first philosopher to see in Darwin’s thesis the basis for developing a naturalistic theory of meaning, including
a naturalized theory of value.” Jerome A. Popp, Evolution’s First Philosopher: John Dewey and the Continuity
of Nature (New York: State University of New York Press, 2007), xi. This leaves educators with this
quandary: if humans are biologically hardwired to form moral beliefs that contribute to their survival and
reproduction, as both pragmatism and naturalism assume (and the assumptions of these intellectual currents
underlie many of the popular experiential and constructivist learning theories, see n97) then these beliefs
simply are what they are. We have no confidence – again – that they are true. Why then should a leader
actually be good? Why should he care? Why should he pursue justice? If these questions cannot be answered
by referring to the Bible and to God’s character, where are these values being secured? John Dewey,
in effect, “appeals to a faith [emphasis added] in our transactions within nature, that is, within a situation
that can guide our plans, purposes, and judgments.” Gregory Fernando Pappas, John Dewey's Ethics: Democracy
as Experience (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), 307. But what justifies such faith?
295
Samuel Escobar, “Which Is the Ministry toward Which We Teach?,” in Malcolm L. Warford, ed., Practical
Wisdom: On Theological Teaching and Learning (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 143 ff.