beaconchurches

WARNING: Thread Drift Alert!

Someone once said the typical 4/3 year MDiv education plan has the educational equivalent for a lawyer. Is this true?

Of course it's true. One of my sons, a civil litigator, was required to complete a B.A./B.S. (4 yrs.) + J.D. (3 yrs.). It just so happens that he also holds a MBA (you know those overachieving McFaddens!). But it was not required.

The M.Div. will probably remain the standard of excellence in some situations. But, for those wishing to revive smaller congregations, those intending to be "chaplains" of no-growth churches in isolated areas, or for those planning to minister where salaries are lower, we can do it less expensively. My argument is that we can more effectively and efficiently educate and train pastors at minimal cost in the following manner:

* Free Bible Software (combination of WordSearch's Cross platform, Libronix's free version, and e-Sword). That will still allow you a very solid library of several hundred books, including some fairly recent ones. Besides, you can build quite an impressive library with PDF versions of classics online AND Google Books will allow you to read a number of current books online as well.

* Personal mentorship by an effective master pastor, including working as an intern in that congregation. This aspect could even be strengthened by denominational participation for polity and Greek and Hebrew study tools courses done on a regional basis for several interns.

* iPod available FREE seminary classes (RTS and Covenant have the equivalent of a seminary education for FREE, minus Greek and Hebrew). If you want to beef up this dimension, you could have assigned readings and even ministry projects, accepted either by the master pastor or by a denominational official.

There you go, an entirely FREE theological education for anyone with a computer. And, frankly, after interviewing nearly 500 candidates for ordination over the past 27 years, the content I have listened to from RTS and Covenant would be equal to or superior to what some of the candidates have been receiving.

[BACK ON-TOPIC]

From our Anglican kin and their struggles on this issue -

New Westminster is the southwestern Canadian diocese which early on gave permission for blessing homosexual unions (you might recall J I Packer wound up requesting alternative oversight - having a different Bishop to be responsible to - when this happened). One of proposals being considered (this coming out of the Windsor Report) is a world-wide covenant that would give expectations of national Anglican bodies (setting some definitions and boundaries). One of the proposed boundary markers could well be a rejection of homosexual unions; the Windsor report called for a moratorium on this sort of thing. There is a telling opinion piece posted on their web site

http://www.vancouver.anglican.ca/News/t ... fault.aspx

This states in part -
--------
Our present disagreements are deep; they are the result of not listening to one another for many decades. The most shocking allegation of the Windsor Report was that the Church in North America had sprung to its honoring of homosexual partnerships without having done the theological work to back it up.

But this work has been a central engagement of Anglican theology in North America for three if not four decades. The thing is that the rest of the church did not read that work; we did our theology but no one else bothered to read it.

[I think the rest did read it, and most rejected it.]

Only in this way can the surprise of the rest of the Communion at Gene Robinson's consecration be explained; to us, at the time, it seemed a perfectly natural development. That is why our disagreements can only be resolved "in an educative context" - there are four decades of education to catch up on, and that cannot be accomplished in ten months.

[Of course this means the 'education' of the benighted rest of the Anglican world; no possibility here that the 'progessives' got it wrong in the first place, and that they need to be 'educated'.]
--------

It seems that apologists for homosexual behavior have been reading out of a common play-book. We're the ones who have done our homework; we're the ones who have come to see the true light; we just need more time to educate the rest of the church. We are in the vanguard of progress; so wake up and join us.

<>< Ron Troup