FutureChurch

My friend Sean Tucker recently wrote that of the 32 people who started out with him in his 1st year class at Baptist Theological College only 3 of them are now Pastors in churches. That's 9% of the class! These aren't your ordinary Christians either - these are people who were so convinced of G-d's call on their life that they committed to studying theology and preparing for the pastorate. These aren't the "weddings and funeral" people, or the "attend church once a month" people, or the "attend church weekly" Christians, or even the more involved "we have leadership roles in the church" people. These are the most committed - those who are preparing for a lifetime of service within a church, because they feel called to this as their vocation - and only 9% are currently doing that as Pastors!

I find that shocking...and I'm not pointing fingers at Baptist College either. I was one of those people in Sean's first year class - and I loved my time at college. I met great people, my mind and practice were engaged, I was mentored and accepted, and served too. My classmates were great people - and we had lots of fun (including the table tennis tournament, which I'll proudly admit to winning! I don't know if it is continuing - I hope so). The institution was well-run and was (and is) respected by most Baptist churches.

The issue isn't with Baptist College or Baptists - it is a systemic issue affecting the whole (South African) church. People are being trained to work within a system which no longer works.

Baptist College didn't turn enthusiastic Christians into cynical backsliders either. Consider Sean's first year class again:

...these guys are some of the most Godly people I know. One is running a school for handicapped orphans in the Drakensberg. Three are teaching English in the Far East. I recently watched a film made by one of the guys of the slums in Kenya which he made to create awareness of the situation there. One guy works running an AIDS clinic in East London. One guy trains teams to travel to churches and build up their youth ministries. One guy runs as sports ministry to under privileged kids. I could go on but the point is that they all struggle with Western Institutional Church… not because they don’t love God and what He’s trying do, but maybe because they love what He wants to do so much that they won’t give up on the dream of a restored world, and swap it out for Institutional mediocrity. When I take a look at the big picture; what they do feels more like Jesus.

Our church system is broken - or at least wounded and limping. For those for whom it works, that's great - keep on doing what you're doing and impacting the people you're impacting. The work you are doing is important, and needed. Churches will keep on changing lives and transforming people, and G-d will continue to use them in the work He is going in South Africa.

This fact should also be realised against the backdrop of what is actually taking place within the South African church and it's relationship to non-Christian society. People who aren't Christians simply don't care about the questions the Church wants them to ask. For instance, take the outline of the Alpha Course, the de facto standard for evangelism and discipleship in many churches. The course pre-supposes that people are interested in the questions it asks and interested in Christianity, but the post-Christian world isn't.

I stopped in at the Holistic Fair in Observatory, Cape Town last weekend, and amongst the esoteric books I discovered a work of non-fiction which can tell me the secret about how an advanced race of reptilian super-beings from another dimension has been controlling our reality for millenia. When I mocked that ridiculous concept to my wife, she paused, and said, "Most people think of Jesus in just the same way."

That gave me pause for thought.

On one hand, we have the Church as we know it, which trains its people to ask only the questions it can answer. On the other, we have a growing group of post-Christians who look at the church as some sort of quaint, odd place where closed-minded people go to feel good about discriminating against those who are different to them (don't believe me? Ask a non-Chrisitian - or a student in Philosophy 101 - what they honestly think about church).

Doesn't it make sense for the missions-minded church to train it's best and brightest to be missionaries to a foreign culture? Of course, the church has been doing that for centuries, except that in the past the missionaries were sent far away, to other countries which were probably uncivilised, or at least not Christian. But now that the "foreign un-Christian culture" is outside our doorstep, now that the missions-sending-impulse of Christianity is subjected to the critique of post-Apartheid South Africa, what now?

Given this reality, the church either continues to train it's best to serve as missionaries elsewhere, or it trains them to maintain the current system. Neither option is good enough: what we need is for all Christians to be trained as missionaries, and to have a cross-cultural post-colonial mindset.

Show me the South African church which is doing that, and I'll show you the church of the future.

Show me a South African church who is investing resources in young Christians who aren't yet conditioned by the institutional soul-killer of "This is how we've always done things," and is giving them permission to innovate without boundaries, and I'll show you the future of the church in South Africa.

In the meantime, we have people entering pastoral training knowing they won't become pastors (or discovering it along the way), simply because they have a missions mindset - but they don't want to leave South Africa and serve elsewhere. The church (on a systemic level) does not know how to engage its own neighbourhood missionally, and so these trainees know they cannot operate missionally within the local church at a leadership level.

So they do not. They may become a part of a local church, or they may not, but goodness knows they're not going to be pastors - because they're not into maintenance, they're into mission. And until mission becomes the main focus of the Church, post-Christians will continue to be bemused by this prejudiced-religion-club, and the most forward-thinking Christians will find themselves straining against the institutional confines of a once influential and innovative community.

Which is why out of Sean's 1st year class at Baptist Theological College, only 3 out of 32 people are currently pastors. Baptist Union, take note. South African denominations, take note. You may disagree with my diagnosis of the problem, and you may not think there are systematic issues with the church, or that Apartheid or post-Christian society has anything to do with it, but you cannot disagree with the numbers: the amount of people your colleges are training is less than the amount of people required to maintain your churches. What are you going to do about it?

[This whole post was sparked by reading Sean's blog, In Recovery. Sean is trained as a Baptist pastor and has been involved in church-based work pretty much his whole life. Recently he left the Anglican church where he was youth pastor, and is heading into the wide world of, well, non-church, which also means finding a job outside of the church (as someone who has mainly theological training). You can follow his journey at http://seantuck.wordpress.com/]

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