Knowledge And Power: The Changing Face Of Church

Ryan Bolger has made two great com­ments (here and here) on the way access to know­ledge and opin­ion through the web may chal­lenge the role of lead­er­ship within the church. I think Ryan is onto a very fruit­ful and neces­sary line of thought. The whole ques­tion and “cul­ture” of lead­er­ship needs to be rethought in the light of changes in access to inform­a­tion, know­ledge and opin­ion about mat­ters of faith.

This is not just about the web, as revolu­tion­ary as that is, but also about the demo­crat­isa­tion of edu­ca­tion. If we look at trends in adult and con­tinu­ing edu­ca­tion, espe­cially via web-delivery, then it is not hard to ima­gine a situ­ation, say 10–15 years down the road when a sig­ni­fic­ant pro­por­tion of many con­greg­a­tions will have a least a par­tial equi­val­ent to a sem­in­ary education.

I have long felt that more atten­tion should be paid in aca­demic circles to research­ing the ways the explo­sion of Chris­tian pub­lish­ing through the 60s and 70s fed into the growth of the house church move­ment and also the explo­sion of para-church min­is­tries. A great deal of what we now see in the emer­ging church move­ment has ori­gins in the expan­sion of theo­lo­gical know­ledge and reflec­tion brought about by this boom in publishing.

Within some circles of evan­gel­ic­al­ism and the church growth move­ment the power (and power polit­ics) of pas­tors is freight­en­ing. This is built on many pil­lars, but the sup­posed “higher learn­ing” of pas­tors is one of them. The demo­crat­isa­tion of learn­ing and greater access to prac­tical stor­ies of new approaches to ministy (per­haps the greatest gift of blog­ging) should lead many par­is­hon­ers and con­greg­ants to rethink the cent­ral­ity and power of the pastor.

This rethink should be a pos­it­ive one. Churches still at times need and at other times can bene­fit from someone devot­ing them­selves full­time (or most-time) to min­istry of some form. It is also not to dis­miss the poten­tial of the min­is­ter as a “theologian-in-residence,” a model that still has much poten­tial in cer­tain contexts.

My hope is that this cur­rent revolu­tion in the theo­lo­gical dis­course through the web will create lots of new oppor­tun­it­ies to access theo­lo­gical edu­ca­tion for laity. Moreover, I hope it will shake up theo­lo­gical col­leges and denom­in­a­tions to recon­sider the min­istry of theo­lo­gical edu­ca­tion from a “whole-church” per­spect­ive and not just a “train­ing for full-time min­istry” per­spect­ive. But, in the end, I hope it will change the dis­course within churches them­selves; away from theo­logy as a spe­cial­ised ideas-only game, into a uni­ver­sal, ena­gage­ment ori­ented game. After all, the best theo­logy is always also, missiology.