Formation and Its Credentials

Principle

Formation is the shaping of those God has called, for the work God has called them to. It is not a set of attributes that qualifies a person to be considered, and the church should be able to tell the difference in its own processes.

Background

Nothing in this document is an argument against education. Isaiah’s lips were touched and Jeremiah’s mouth was filled, and neither man was left as he was found; God’s qualifying of the called is not a substitute for preparation but the reason preparation is worth doing. Wesley, who required his preachers to read at set hours every day and built a curriculum for them, would have had no patience with the suggestion that learning is optional for a minister. Coke and Asbury put it well from the other side: “we are far from despising talents which may be rendered useful to the church of Christ. We know the worth of improved abilities.”

The question is not whether formation matters. It is what role formation plays in the church’s discernment, and there are only two possibilities. Either formation is the shaping of a person the church believes God has called, or it is the accumulation of qualifications that make a person eligible to be called. The first is election-logic and the second is selection-logic, and they can look identical from outside while being opposite in their theology.

Two features of our present arrangement suggest we have drifted toward the second.

The first is that our central credential measures an institution rather than a formation. The University Senate approves schools. A degree from an approved school counts; the same coursework elsewhere does not. What the church actually inspects is which institution a person attended, not what they learned, believe, or can do. That is not a criticism of the schools, many of which form ministers superbly. It is an observation about where the church has placed its trust: in a list of institutions rather than in an examination of persons. A church that believed its own doctrine of the call would be more interested in the second.

The second is that the same curriculum used to lead somewhere else. The Course of Study is now the educational track for licensed local pastors who are not ordained, and completing it is a condition attached to associate membership and to voting for General Conference delegates. In the Discipline of 1906 it is “the Course of Study prescribed by the Bishops as a preparation for elder’s orders,” and in 1920 a local preacher who completed the Four Years’ Course of Study was ordained deacon, and four years later, with further study, ordained elder. The curriculum did not become inadequate. The road stopped.

Set that history beside the ecumenical consensus, which is more permissive than our practice. The Lima text says candidates “need appropriate preparation through study of scripture and theology, prayer and spirituality, and through acquaintance with the social and human realities of the contemporary world,” and then adds: “In some situations, this preparation may take a form other than that of prolonged academic study.” The same document says plainly that “the church may also ordain people who remain in other occupations or employment.” Neither sentence is a concession wrung out of a reluctant committee. They are the settled view of churches that between them hold most of the world’s Christians.

There is a further cost that ought to be counted honestly. A residential graduate degree requires relocation, three years, and, for most people, considerable debt. Those requirements do not fall evenly. They fall hardest on people with dependents, on second-career candidates, on the bivocational, and on those rooted in a place by family or community. When a church makes a relocatable, debt-financed degree the ordinary road to ordination, it has not merely set a standard of learning. It has set a standard that selects for a particular kind of life, and it should not be surprised when the resulting clergy resemble the standard rather than the church.

None of this argues for lowering what ministers must know. It argues for examining people rather than trusting proxies. Coke and Asbury’s note on the trial of preachers says it as sharply as it can be said:

“Nothing will do for us without the life of God. Brilliant parts, fine address, &c., are to us but tinkling cymbals, when destitute of the power of the Holy Ghost.”

That sentence was written by two bishops who valued learning and had plenty of it. They were not disparaging preparation. They were putting it in its place, which is downstream of the call and in service of it.

Practice

Examine the formation, not the letterhead. Whatever educational requirements the church sets, the church should be able to say what it wants ministers to know, believe, and be able to do, and should test for those things directly. A credential is a proxy, and a proxy is only as good as the examination it replaces.

Make more than one road to the same competence, and say clearly where each road ends. If the church intends the Course of Study to be a genuine preparation for ministry, it should be honest about whether it prepares people for ordination, as it once did, or whether it has become a track designed to terminate.

Count the cost of the requirements the church sets, and name who pays it. A requirement that quietly selects for mobility, youth, and access to capital should at least be adopted knowingly, and defended as a formation requirement rather than allowed to function as a demographic filter that nobody chose.

And remember what formation is for. It is not to make a person worth calling. God has already done the calling, and, if this document has been right from the beginning, the calling is what supplies the fitness. Formation is the church’s part in a work God began, which is a humbler description of theological education than we usually give it and a far more hopeful one.