Theological Education and Training for Ministry

by Stephen Hayes1
Theological education and training for ministry are two different things, and
need to be distinguished more than they have been up till now. Both need to
be declericalised and made more flexible.

INTRODUCTION
Theological education and training for ministry are often regarded as
interchangeable concepts, and people sometimes speak of one when they
mean the other.
Some years ago Benjamin Bloom published The taxonomy of educational
objectives, which divided educational objectives into three domains – the
cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains (Bloom 1956). To put it more
simply, the domains of these educational objectives are what you want
students to be able to know, feel and do once they have finished the course.
It we look at the history of theological education, in the West at any rate, it has
largely been concerned with the cognitive domain, that is, with what people
know – head knowledge. As Naidoo (2010:350) puts it, “in reality, the
dominant structure of many seminaries tends to favour academic instruction,
tolerate the practical and compartmentalise the spiritual”.
Training for ministry, on the other hand, is more holistic. It is concerned with
primarily what we want a minister to be able to do. It is as much about skills
as about knowledge, but some of the skills have to do with the application of
knowledge. So training for ministry covers both the cognitive and the
psychomotor domains.

MODELS OF MINISTRY
As you have probably guessed by now, I believe that there has been too
much emphasis on the academic side, and too much emphasis on theological
education, and not enough on training for ministry. And because of that, in this
paper I will take a more narrative and anecdotal approach. I haven’t done
research on this topic so as to be able to quantify things, bit I can tell some
stories. So what is ministry, and why and how do people need to be trained
for it?
Let me describe an Anglican congregation some years ago in a place called
Groenvlei, in northern KwaZulu-Natal. Groenvlei isn’t a village; it’s a hamlet. It
has a pretty stone church with a corrugated iron roof, a general dealer store,
and a police station. That’s it. The congregation consists mainly of Zulu-
speaking farm labourers and farm tenants. It is what, in Anglican terminology,
is called a chapelry or outstation. It has no resident priest. The leaders of the

1
Stephen Hayes is a deacon in the Orthodox Church, and has taught Missiology at Unisa.
This paper was presented at the 2011 Congress of the Southern African Missiological
Society. He may be contacted at shayes@dunelm.org.uk http://khanya.wordpress.com

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congregation are two elderly men, Zitha and Sangweni, and a middle-aged
woman, Dina Mlambo. Between them they hold Sunday services, usually the
Anglican service of Morning Prayer, and they preach and teach, and prepare
people for baptism and confirmation.
Now, consider a young person, a teenager, in this congregation, who feels
called to ministry. What does he see? He sees these self-taught old men lead
the service, Sangweni reads the Bible lessons, slowly, hesitantly,
incomprehensibly, word by stumbling word, leaning into the window because
his eyesight is bad. Once every two months or so a priest comes from 70 or
80 kilometres away. He does a somewhat different form of service, the
Eucharist, and those who have prepared receive communion. He is dressed
in fancy clothes. He harangues the congregation, he is given a meal, and
afterwards gets into his car and disappears in a cloud of dust, taking the
money from the collection with him.
Let’s say our teenage observer -- let’s call him Sipho -- goes to seminary. To
train for “the ministry”. Will what he learns in any seminary have any
connection with his experience of church? And will anything that he learns in
seminary for the next few years be in any way applicable to the church in
Groenvlei? And when he completes his seminary course, the chances are
very slim that either he or his fellow will be sent to minister at Groenvlei,
except, just possibly, on the two-monthly visits from 80 kilometres away,
where he is likely to fall into the pattern of the model he saw in the church of
his youth, and not apply anything he has learned at seminary. And he will
have an itinerary of travelling to anything up to 20 or 30 congregations like
Groenvlei, to celebrate the Eucharist, preach, and take the money.
With small variations that pattern is repeated in rural Anglican congregations
throughout the country. With a few more variations, it is repeated in
congregations of other denominations too, and in other African countries. In
spite of urbanisation, the rural congregations are probably normative for most
Christians in sub-Saharan Africa.
What kind of training for ministry does Groenvlei need?
The answer that has generally been given is to try to make the theological
seminaries of this world more “relevant”. But if we look at congregations like
Groenvlei, that doesn’t begin to touch the problem, because the people who
need to be trained for ministry are unlikely ever to go near a seminary. The
people who need to be trained for ministry are Zitha, Sangweni and Dina
Mlambo, because they are the ones doing the day-to-day ministry in the
congregation. Zitha and Sangweni are leading the worship, while Dina
Mlambo is the pastor, and all three are teaching and catechising.
When Sipho comes out of seminary, he needs to be equipped to equip them
for ministry. The ministers in these congregations will never be full-time
ministry professionals. Some of the pastors might quite literally make their
living as shepherds of sheep. But they are ministers, and they need to be
trained.
But at this point we probably need some definitions before we go any further.
What do we mean by “theology”? What do we mean by “ministry”?

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 Definitions of terms
Defining such things is not a simple matter. There are more than ten thousand
different Christian denominations in South Africa alone, each with its own
theology and its own conceptions of ministry. There are certain
denominational or confessional “families”, which can group some of these
denominations together, so we can perhaps speak of Catholic, Reformed,
Anglican, Methodist, Pentecostal, Zionist, and Orthodox traditions, among
others. But even so, there are a great many different answers people could
give to questions like “What is theology?” And “What is ministry?”

Theology
In Western Christianity “theology” means primarily the academic study of the
history and content of Christian teaching and practice. As an academic
discipline Christian theology is usually divided into various sub-disciplines,
such as dogmatic theology, church history, liturgics, biblical study, homiletics,
missiology and various others.
In Orthodox Christianity, however, “theology” has a somewhat different
meaning: it is knowledge of God, and is expressed in the aphorism, “a
theologian is one who prays, and one who prays is a theologian”. Only three
saints in the Orthodox Church have the title “theologian”: St John the
Theologian (author of the fourth gospel), St Gregory the Theologian (Gregory
of Nazianzus) and St Symeon the New Theologian.
The distinction is that theology is knowledge of God, while academic theology
is knowledge about God.
In this paper I shall be discussing mainly academic theology, but the
distinction needs to be borne in mind.

Theological Education
Theological education is the teaching of academic theology, as described
above. It is mainly concerned with the imparting of knowledge in the cognitive
domain. It is enabling people to know things.
But in the other sense of theology, it also is concerned with spiritual formation,
and this has certainly been one of the aims of Roman Catholic theological
education.

Training for ministry

If theological education is primarily concerned with enabling people to know
things, training for ministry is enabling them to do things, and to perform
certain ministries in the church.
There are many different ministries in the church, and all of them require
some knowledge, that is, some theological education, but some ministries
require more theological education than others. Among the ministries that
need more theological education, for example, are those of teachers and
catechists. And their “training for ministry” will be mainly teaching them how to
teach others.

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One problem here is that not only are there 10 000 or more denominations
with different theologies, but they also have different conceptions of ministry
and ministries.

Ministry and ministries

We read about some ministries in the New Testament. There are ministries
given formally by the church in ordination, such as the ministries of bishops,
priests and deacons in the Roman Catholic, Orthodox and some other
churches. Because the church knows when people are to be ordained to
these ministries, it can also determine the kind of training they need for those
ministries before and after their ordination.
Other ministries are given more directly by the Holy Spirit, such as apostles,
prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers (Ephesians 4:11; cf. I Cor 12:28).
Apostles and prophets, especially, are usually recognised as such by the
church long after they have begun exercising their ministry, and so it is
impossible to train them for it beforehand.
In the religiously plural society in which we live (in South Africa alone there
are more than 10000 Christian denominations) there are many different
understandings of ministry. The role of a particular minister within a particular
religious body will depends largely on the ecclesiology of that group. An
Orthodox priest is not the same as a Methodist minister, a Congregationalist
minister, a Pentecostal pastor or a Zionist prophet. Each group has its own
understanding of ministry and ministries. In some denominations, especially
Lutherans and many Pentecostals, “Pastor” is an ordained ministry, and a
ministerial title. In others, such as Roman Catholics and Orthodox, it means a
priest in charge of a parish, who may cease to be a pastor if transferred to
other work.
While one can speak of “training for ministry”, it is sometimes better to speak
of “training for ministries” in the plural. “Training for ministry” can to easily be
misinterpreted as training for the ministry, as if there were only one ministry.
And many speak and write as if theological education, ministerial formation,
educating clergy, are interchangeable descriptions for the same thing. Naidoo
(2010), for example speaks of the disjunction between the cognitive, practical
and spiritual training. These correspond to the cognitive, psychomotor and
affective objectives of Bloom’s taxonomy. People go to seminary or university
and study theology, and then are ordained as clergy but often fall short of the
church’s expectations in performance of the practical and spiritual spheres.
There are different definitions of “clergy” as well, but most would agree that it
refers to a person in full-time paid professional ministry in the church.
And my point is that there is far more to both theological education and
training for ministry than simply educating and training clergy. And to speak
about “the ministry” is misleading in more ways than one, firstly because even
clergy do not have a single ministry, but they have many ministries, which
vary not only from one denomination to another, but even within
denominations.

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In the New Testament we find many ministries. As St Paul says, “Are all
apostles? are all prophets? are all teachers? are all workers of miracles?“ (I
Cor 12:29).
In training for ministry, therefore, we need to bear in mind what ministry it is
that people are being trained for. This can cause problems when one is
discussing things like ecumenical accreditation of seminaries and theological
schools. When people are setting standards for theological education and
training for ministry they often have very different things in mind.
My experience of both theological education and training for ministry has
mainly been in Anglican and Orthodox settings so I can give some examples
from these, but I believe that something similar applies, mutatis mutandis to
other Christian traditions as well.
In the Orthodox Church practice has varied a great deal in different places
and different periods. In Russia, for example, in the last couple of centuries,
there has been a distinction between seminaries and theological academies.
It could be said that the primary concern of the seminaries has been training
for ministry, while theological academies have been mainly concerned with
theological education, and teaching academic theology.
In Greece most of the teachers of academic theology in the universities are
not ordained. Academic theologians have mainly been lay people, and the
clergy have not necessarily studied theology at the university level. Neither
theological education nor training for ministry should be confined to “the
clergy”.
And perhaps this is as it should be. A priest or deacon in a parish does not
necessarily need to be an academic theologian. Their primary ministry is
leading worship in the liturgical services of the church, and especially in the
Divine Liturgy. If we are planning to train priests and deacons for their
ministries, then one of the first competencies they need is to be able to lead
the services with reverence and attention.
In the Reformed tradition, on the other hand, there is a distinction between
“teaching elders” and “ruling elders”. The “teaching elder” is primarily trained
for teaching and preaching, and the “ruling elders” can preside at the
Eucharist.

IN-SERVICE AND PRE-SERVICE TRAINING

And this brings me back to the example I gave at the beginning, of those who
were actually engaged in leading worship in a rural Anglican church in
Zululand. And such rural congregations are to be found all over southern
Africa, from Cape Aghulas to the Zambezi and beyond. Zitha, Sangweni and
Dina Mlambo are the ministers who need to be trained for their ministry, a
ministry they are already doing with little or no training.
Most of our models of training for ministry are based on the idea of pre-
service training. Those who draw up the curriculum often have little idea of the
actual ministries of those who will be trained.
I’ve been to a couple of seminaries, and we were given a few lectures on
pastoral counselling that seemed to be based on the assumption that all the

5
students would be ministering in upper-middle-class congregations who would
consult psychotherapists trained according to a Western model, and so
potential clergy needed to be taught psychotherapy lite, and the textbooks
assumed this too. They did nothing to prepare people for ministry in
congregations where people feared that they would be bewitched, and sought
advice from the local sangoma because the clergy didn’t have a clue, and in
any case probably live 80 kilometres or more away. For Anglicans, a Zionist
prophet was more clued up, and probably more accessible.
People like those I have mentioned, and many others, need training and
resources for the ministries they are already engaged in.
What about Sipho, the hypothetical young man who feels called to full-time
ministry?
What would have happened to him a few years ago, if he had completed high
school, is that he would, after being interviewed to senior church leaders at a
vocational conference, have been sent to a full-time theological seminary for
two or three years. Then he would have been ordained and sent to serve in a
parish with another priest. He would be given an itinerary of places where he
would go to serve the Eucharist, take the money and return home, and the
priest in charge would breathe a sigh of relief because he could reduce his
workload to having to visit only one or two outstations on a Sunday instead of
three or four. And Sipho would fall in to the same pattern as he observed as a
teenager, because much of what he learned at seminary would be irrelevant
to what he was actually doing.
I will suggest one thing that could happen to someone like him, as an
alternative.
At the vocational conference the senior church leaders should try to discern
what kind of ministry he might be called to. Not “the ministry”, but a ministry. Is
he called to be a teacher, a pastor, an evangelist, a priest or a deacon?
Then for a year he is apprenticed so someone who has the most appropriate
ministries. He goes around with them, seeing what they do, helping them. And
one weekend a month he goes, with the other trainees, to a training centre,
where he brings his questions, his problems to discuss with other trainees and
teachers. I believe the Methodists already have something like this – it is
called Phase I, though I am not sure that it helps students to discern different
ministries.
At the end of that year, if he still feels called to that ministry, he is given a set
of 12 vouchers for a semester of training at a variety of seminaries and other
training institutions at any time over the next 20 years. This would be done
with the advice of his bishop and the director of training for ministries in the
diocese, who would have followed his progress during the year. He could
decide to blow them all on three years for pre-service training in a single
seminary. Or he could go to a school that specialised in, say, evangelism, and
spend a semester or two there, and work as an evangelist. Or he could go
and spend six months or a year in a monastery. Or he could go to a university
and register for a degree course. He might find that the focus of his ministry
changed over the years, so he could spend his vouchers on courses that
would help him with his new focus.

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He could use his vouchers for a mainly training emphasis, or for an academic
emphasis (that is, theological education in the strict sense) or for a spiritual
emphasis.
He might feel called to train others for ministry, including those back in his
home parish in Groenvlei. So he is not ordained, but becomes a teacher. He
still has an itinerant ministry, travelling from congregation to congregation, but
equipping the people in those places for ministries rather than trying to do the
ministries for them.
This model, or something like it, would make it possible to have in-service or
pre-service training, and recognises a variety of ministries. One of the big
problems with pre-service training is that there is a long gap between learning
something and being called upon to use it, by which time the lesson has
mostly been forgotten.

SOME PERSONAL EXPERIENCES

In academic circles it is often regarded as a bad thing to be “anecdotal”, and
“anecdotal” is often seen as a synonym for “unreliable” or “unscientific”. But
even in Western academic theology, “narrative theology” is beginning to be
seen as useful, and so I hope it won’t be taken amiss if I get anecdotal here.
My views on theological education and training for ministry have been largely
shaped by my own experience.
My first experience of formal theological education (apart from personal
reading) was a course in church history I did at the University of South Africa
in 19623, while I was working as a bus conductor in Johannesburg. It covered
20 centuries of church history, and was based on a textbook, A history of the
Christian Church by Williston Walker and Documents of the Christian Church,
by Henry Bettenson. There was no study guide, just reading, a couple of
essays, and an exam. Apart from the Western bias, especially after the 7th
century (when the East came under Islamic domination) it was a pretty good
introduction.
I studied academic theology at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in
Pietermaritzburg from 1963-1965, where I majored in Theology and Biblical
Studies. I studied other subjects like English, History, Zulu and Philosophy. I
was then an Anglican and worshipped regularly at the local Anglican Church
of St Alphege. I was also, especially in my third year, an active member of the
Liberal Party, and attended party meetings in rural areas, where most of the
members were black peasants under imminent threat of ethnic cleansing.
These three things formed a cycle. During the week I would attend lectures,
read theology, and write essays. On Saturdays I would attend Liberal Party
meetings, usually under the eye of the Security Police. These meetings were
often very little different from rural church services, opening and closing with
prayer, and with political speeches taking the place of a sermon. When I was
called upon to speak, it often had a theological slant, as most of the rural party
members were Christians of one denomination or another. Then on Sundays
the theory and practice were summed up in worship and offered to God.

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Thus when people like Paolo Freire spoke of an action/reflection model of
education, it made immediate sense to me, though I would add worship to the
action and reflection.
The Anglican bishop of Natal, Vernon Inman, did not approve. You are at
university to study, and not to play politics, he said, but as he wasn’t paying
for my university studies, I didn’t pay too much attention. And it seemed to me
that in a long period of pre-service training, by the time one comes to apply
what one has learnt, one has already forgotten most of it anyway.
After graduating, I studied at St Chad’s College, in Durham, England. It was a
constituent college of Durham University, and also (at that time) a recognised
theological college of the Church of England. It was much more of an
academic ivory tower. I learnt quite a lot there, but more through independent
reading and informal interaction with other students than through the formal
lectures. During one vacation I attended a seminar on Orthodox theology for
non-Orthodox theological students. It was held at the World Council of
Churches study centre in Bossey, Switzerland, where there were lectures by
people like Prof Nikos Nissiotis, Fr Jean Tchekan, Fr John Zizioulas, Fr Boris
Bobrinskoy and Fr Alexis van der Mensburgge. Prof Nissiotis was one of the
lay theologians I referred to earlier, and divided his time between Bossey and
the University of Athens. The Seminar ended up with Holy Week at the
Sergius in Paris, which was also a seminary where the students lived in far
more primitive conditions than they did at St Bede’s, Umtata, then the least
prestigious of the Anglican theological colleges in South Africa.

Namibia
After returning to South Africa I soon found myself in Namibia, where I was
ordained as an Anglican priest, self-supporting, as the Anglican Church did
not have enough money to pay me, so I worked as a proof reader on a local
newspaper. There were large distances to travel, and there were many
congregations without a priest, so they were cut off from the sacraments.
When I learned that the Christian Institute and the African Independent
Churches Association (AICA) were developing a correspondence course in
theology, it seemed to me to be a way of training local priests within those
scattered congregations. Unfortunately the course had numerous problems,
and never really got off the ground in the time I was in Namibia.
My main ministry was among Herero-speaking Anglicans, and at one point I
went through files in the diocesan office to discover what had been done by
my predecessors, and discovered the story of Thomas Ruhozu in the
Kaokoveld. He and two friends had walked a couple of hundred miles to the
Anglican school at Odibo, Ovamvoland. His two friends dropped out because
of culture shock – they couldn’t take Ovambo cooking -- but Thomas stuck it
out, and completed 4 years of primary school, during which he had been
baptised and confirmed. He had to return to the Kaokoveld before going any
further because his father died and he had to look after the family’s cattle.
I wrote to him, while doubting that my letter would reach him, but a few weeks
later he landed on my doorstep in Windhoek, having travelled 600 miles from
the Kaokoveld. It was during the diocesan synod, so clergy from all over the
diocese were there. I arranged with Fr Lazarus Haukongo, the Archdeacon of

8
Ovamboland, to try to visit Thomas, and in the week he spent in Windhoek
tried to teach him and encourage him to be an evangelist and pastor to the
Anglicans in Kaokoveld. A few weeks after he returned, Fr Lazarus visited him
and admitted 12 catechumens. On another visit a couple of months after that,
he baptised those 12 and admitted another 30 catechumens. What was
needed was a way of training Thomas so that he and a couple of others could
be ordained as priests, so that they could provide sacraments for the growing
flock, before the government got wise to what was happening and barred
Father Lazarus from going there (as subsequently happened).

Theological Education by Extension

And then my friend John Aitchison in Pietermaritzburg sent me a book edited
by Ralph D. Winter, called Theological Education by Extension (Winter 1969).
It had articles about various attempts, mostly in Latin America, to provide
theological education or training for ministry to people like Thomas Ruhozu.
The last part of the book was a manual for running an extension seminary.
Ralph Winter was a Presbyterian, and much of the book was based on
Presbyterian ecclesiology and models of ministry, where preaching was very
prominent. But some things applied to Anglicans too. The main point was that
where the church is expanding rapidly, it also needs to be able to expand its
leadership rapidly, but the leaders were usually involved in the expansion, so
if you took them out of the field for three years to train them in a conventional
residential seminary, the expansion would stop, and the new congregations
would be deprived of their leaders.
The answer was Theological Education by Extension (TEE). Instead of taking
the leaders out of their environment to send them to seminary, the seminary
must extend itself to meet them where they were. Lecturers from the seminary
would travel to where the students were, and have classes for them there.
But that would not have been very practical in Namibia. Yes, there was a
seminary at Odibo, with six students and one teacher. And when the teacher
got an assistant, he himself became ill and had to leave, leaving the one
teacher alone, Fr Rick Houghton, an Anglican priest from the USA. And if he
travelled the 200 km to Kaokoveld he would have been even more persona
non grata with the government than Fr Lazarus.
So the idea of a correspondence course was also attractive, except that for
someone like Thomas Ruhozu, the study material would need to be in Herero,
and suitable for someone who had not gone beyond Grade 4 at school.
In 1972 I was deported from Namibia. I drove straight to KwaZulu-Natal where
the Anglican provincial education department was holding its annual meeting,
and there I met Richard Kraft, who had been university chaplain in
Pietermaritzburg in my student days nine years before. He had been running
a self-supporting ministry training course for the Anglican diocese of Zululand,
and had been influenced by the writing of Roland Allen, which he told me
about. He invited me to visit him in Zululand, which I did, and he, John
Aitchison and I, having concluded that the Christian Institute/AICA course,
after three changes of director and direction, was unlikely to get off the
ground, decided that if they could spend half a million Rand and not produce a
theology course, we could produce a theology course and not spend half a

9
million Rand. We called it the Khanya Theological Correspondence Course,
and John Aitchison started writing a course on the book of Amos,
clandestinely, because he was banned at the time.
After being deported from Namibia I was jobless, and over the next four
months I spent my savings travelling around South Africa trying to sell the
idea of TEE to anyone who would listen, and especially the three Anglican
seminaries and the bishops, including the Archbishop of Cape Town (then
Robert Taylor). We produced a 20-page executive summary of Ralph Winter’s
600-page tome, which we distributed to all the Anglican bishops, diocesan
education officers, etc. There were a few polite murmuring of interest, and
some more grumblings, especially from the residential seminaries, on what it
would do to academic “standards”.
Then I was banned, and with two out for three banned, the Khanya course
more or less came to a halt, though the Amos course was produced on an
offset litho duplicator in the Zululand diocesan office, and used by some
students on the diocesan training scheme there.

Self-supporting ministry
In 1976 my ban was lifted and I went to work in the Anglican diocese of
Zululand, and in 1977 was asked to take over Rich Kraft’s job of training self-
supporting ministers, which he had pioneered. There were about 20 trainees,
working in various jobs, though more than a third of them were teachers.
Among the others were shopkeepers, a baker, a factory supervisor, an
engineer and some civil servants working for the KwaZulu government. They
met at the diocesan conference centre KwaNzimela one weekend a month,
and for an annual meeting of 10 days at the beginning of each year, which of
course took half their annual leave from their jobs. I was also responsible for
post-ordination training of the church-supported clergy, which took the form of
a mid-week meeting once a month. This was done together with Peter Biyela,
who was the director of lay training. He was old enough to be my father, and
taught me an enormous amount.
Because this work took about one week a month, it wasn’t a full-time job, and
so I was also rector of the nearby parish of Melmoth, where we lived.
Just before I took over six of the trainees had been ordained to the diaconate.
So on the first training weekend, I sent the trainees to neighbouring parishes,
including mine, and said one will deac, one will preach, and the others will do
a critique when we get back to the conference centre in the pre-lunch period.
Not one of the deacons knew what a deacon was supposed to do in the
service (and for Anglicans it was a lot simpler than for Orthodox). I discovered
that in their home parishes the priests would not allow them to perform a
deacon's liturgical ministry, partly because they didn't know what it was, and
partly because they wanted to send them out to "outstations" to behave like
Methodist ministers.
I immediately revised the whole programme. The whole rationale of self-
supporting ministers is that they should be worship leaders, and enable
isolated congregations to have regular sacramental ministry. So I revised the
training programme to spend more time training them as worship leaders. We

10
practised in the conference centre chapel. Read the text, follow the rubrics,
see what can and can't be done, what variations are OK and what aren't.
But this revealed some strange inconsistencies in Anglican thought and
practice, and ultimately in theology and ecclesiology.
In South Africa generally, and in Zululand in particular, a lot of rural
congregations were under the pastoral care of “catechists”. The priest stayed
at the parish church, but might have anything from five to fifty “outstations”.
There would be a schedule of services, and the priest would be at some
congregations once a month, and some once every two or three months. On
the other Sundays the “catechist” would lead the service and preach. A few
catechists in early days were paid stipends, but as time past more and more
were volunteers. They often had no training in leading the services, and no
training in preaching and teaching. Zitha and Sangweni at Groenvlei were
typical of many of these “catechists”.
The church-supported priest had often been to seminary, and had some
theological education. The logical thing would be to train the local catechists
in leading worship, and then ordain them as deacons or priests, so that their
congregation could have the sacraments every Sunday. Then the parish
priest, on his monthly visit, would concentrate in preaching and teaching. But
no, the catechists, where they were to become self-supporting priests or
deacons, were trained to equip them to preach and teach (which they were
doing already, without being equipped for it). But they were not being trained
to lead worship as priests and deacons, which was the main reason for their
ordination.
As Roland Allen (1960:128) points out:
Here we must observe what Father Herbert Kelly calls 'the familiar absurdity of
the lay reader. The man who may not celebrate, because he is too
uneducated and has not passed examinations, is allowed to preach and
minister to souls!' We must notice also that the bishop (Bishop King of
Madagascar) speaks of outstations guided by these lay readers as 'daughter
churches', as if a congregation without ministers, without sacraments, was 'a
church'. This is a theory of the Church unknown to the Bible, unknown to early
Church History, unknown to any Catholic teaching: it is indeed the flat
contradiction of them all. And finally we are told that the 'group of native
workers thus formed depends more or less closely on the alien missionary'.
Thus the practical training of these men at this stage is training in familiarity
with 'a church accustomed to regard the Lord's supper as an occasional
luxury', and in dependence on what Bishop King calls the 'alien missionary'.
I have heard that some Anglicans are now talking of “lay celebration” and
some in Australia of having deacons celebrate the Eucharist. But if they are
competent to celebrate the Eucharist, what is to hinder them from being
ordained as priests?

Roland Allen
Roland Allen was an Anglican missionary in China in the first decade of the
20th century, and wrote several books, the best known of which are
Missionary methods: St Paul’s or ours and The spontaneous expansion of the
church and the causes which hinder it. One of the things he advocates was
self-supporting clergy, or, as he put it, “voluntary clergy”. Richard Kraft had

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recommended his books to me when I took over responsibility for the training
of self-supporting clergy in Zululand. His books were not read much in his
lifetime, but they were reprinted in the 1960s.
There were two other Christian missionaries who worked in the Far East and
advocated or practised similar methods. They were John Nevius, a
Presbyterian missionary in Korea, and Nikolai Kasatkin, an Orthodox
missionary in Japan, now better known as St Nicholas of Japan.
Roland Allen noted that St Paul, where he preached and made converts, did
not then say “give me your young men, and I will send them to the seminary in
Antioch, and after a few years one of them will come back to you, and then
you will be able to celebrate the sacraments.” Instead we read
And when they had preached the gospel to that city, and had made many
disciples, they returned to Lystra, and to Iconium, and to Antioch, confirming
the souls of the disciples, exhorting them to continue in the faith, and that
through many tribulations we must enter into the kingdom of God. And when
they had appointed for them elders in every church, and had prayed with
fasting, they commended them to the Lord, on whom they had believed (Acts
14:21-23).
Instead of young men, they appointed “elders”, that is, priests, for the English
word “priest” is simply a shortened form of the Greek presviteros, meaning
“elder”.

Joel
I gave a hypothetical example before, of a young man called Sipho, from a
rural Anglican parish. Let me give another example, a real one this time, of a
young man called Joel, who lives in an urban township in Gauteng, and
belongs to the Orthodox Church.
He was one of several people that a colleague and I interviewed to see what
ministries he might be called to, and what training he would need for them.
He was quite clear about his vocation. He wanted to be a carpenter.
After discussing it with him at length, we recommended to the bishop that if
possible he should be sent to Albania for six months.
Why Albania?
Because, in the reconstruction of the church in Albania after 27 years of
official atheism under the dictator Enver Hoxha, there was a need for physical
reconstruction. The bishop there raised money for a kind of church arts and
crafts centre. It is housed in a four-storey building on the outskirts of Tirana.
On the bottom floor is a candle factory, making church candles. The next floor
has a furniture workshop, making church furnishings. On the third floor is a
workshop making mosaics. And the top floor is an ikon-painting studio.
We recommended to the bishop that Joel be sent there for six months, mainly
to learn how to make church furniture, but to try his hand at the other skills as
well. On his return he could set up a project for making church candles and
furniture for sale to South African parishes – at present most of the furnishings
are imported from Greece. Such a project could provide income and an
opportunity to give other people job skills.

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The bishop, however, insisted that Joel should attend a theological school
with lectures in theological subjects, which he did, and didn’t do well at all,
because he was not academically inclined. It also had the effect of taking Joel
and other leaders out of the communities where they were, leaving those
communities leaderless while they were trained.
The fixation on a single model of ministry and insistence of pre-service
training had many disadvantages in this case, as it does in other cases too.

THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION
In South Africa most professors at university theological faculties are ordained
in one or other Christian denomination, and there seems to be a kind of
general expectation that they will be. There also seems to be an expectation
that anyone studying theology in these faculties is intending to be ordained. I
have pointed out that in Greece most professors in theological faculties are
not ordained, and most students have no intention of seeking ordination.
I believe that the latter situation is more desirable.
In Anglican history, up until 1832 there were only two universities in England,
Oxford and Cambridge. They were church foundations and most of the
teachers were clergy. At both universities all the colleges had chapels and
chaplains in which staff and students were expected to worship. It was
therefore thought an adequate qualification for a candidate for ordination to
have a university degree.
During the 19th century this changed. In 1832 Oxford and Cambridge were
joined by a third university, Durham, which was established by the Bishop of
Durham, but all three gradually became secularised, and were later joined by
other universities that were purely secular foundations. As a result of this,
theology faculties developed at the universities. As the universities became
more secular, so theology came more and more to be seen as a separate
discipline. At the same time the universities came to be seen as less and less
adequate for the spiritual formation of clergy.
So towards the end of the 19th century, theological colleges, or seminaries,
started appearing. These were founded with two objects:
1. To provide spiritual formation for those who had university degrees
2. To provide theological training for those (mainly working-class)
candidates for ordination who did not have the opportunity to go to
university

The theological colleges thus provided some academic teaching, but the
emphasis was on training for ministry and spiritual formation, though this
varied from one college to another.
South African theological education and training for ministry have to some
extent inherited this model, which still persists today, though to some extent
modified by other models. The question we need to ask is whether a model
developed to meet the needs of particular circumstances in 19th century
England is adequate for 21st century Southern Africa.

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Actually in many ways 20th-century South African theological education history
was a re-run of 19th-century British history. The universities that had theology
faculties were only for whites, and so seminaries were founded for black
students, the equivalent of the British working class students. In the case of
the Anglicans one of the seminaries, St Peter's in Rosettenville, was run by
the same religious order, the Community of the Resurrection, as one in
England. In the case of the Dutch Reformed Churches, there were two
faculties for two different denominations in Pretoria, and a Reformed
university in Potchefstroom, similar in a way to the pre-1832 British ones.
But with more than 10000 denominations we can’t really have 10 000
theological faculties. Larger and richer denominations can found their own
universities, but theological faculties in secular universities will need to be
ecumenical. But if the Orthodox theology faculties in the Greek universities
can be lay rather than clerical, how much more should the South African ones
be, in the circumstances of our country.
Theological education if often regarded as tertiary, that it, post-school
education, but it actually needs to take place at all levels. “Training for
ministry” is largely for ministry within the church – bishops, priests, and
deacons, certainly are within the church, as are readers and singers. So too
are pastors, teachers, healers and administrators. Evangelists, apostles and
prophets, however, go beyond the church. But it is ordinary Christians, often
without any special ministry within the church, who bear witness to Christ in
the world. They too need theological education to be able to interpret the
world in the light of the gospel. So theological education needs to take place
at all levels, and should not be seen as “clergy education” but more as “lay
education” (though clergy too are part of the laos, the people of God).
Even Sunday School is part of theological education, though I am not a great
fan of Sunday School with an emphasis on cognitive learning. Young children
should rather participate in the normal life of the church, until they start asking
faith-type questions, and then they can be given teaching of cognitive. For
what it’s worth, I’ve found youth groups for children in the 8-12 age group,
with discussion rather than formal teaching, are more productive.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

• Theological education and Training for Ministry are two different things,
and should not be confused.
• Training for ministry is not only for clergy (full-time professionals) but is
for all those, at every level, who have ministries in the church
• Theological Education is likewise not only for clergy, and should not be
thought of as “clergy education”
• Pre-service training is not appropriate in every case, and in-service
training is often better
• Training for ministry should be tailored for the particular ministries being
exercised, and should not be based on the principle of “one size fits all”.

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 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen, Roland. 1960. Missionary methods: St Paul’s or ours
Bloom, Benjamin S. (ed). 1956. Taxonomy of educational objectives : the classification of
educational goals. Handbook I, Cognitive domain. London: Longmans.
Naidoo, Marilyn. 2010. Ministerial training: the need for pedagogics of formation. Missionalia
38(3), November:347-368.
Winter, Ralph D. 1969. Theological Education by Extension. Pasadena, CA: William Carey
Library.

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