Additionally, some are trying to solve the ivory tower problem (the chasm between church and school) by focusing on ministry-based or competency-based educational experiences. These sorts of programs can and are often the right fit for many people, and offer unique partnership opportunities with local churches, often providing educational training “on the go” as students are also working within their local church. These programs usually have a small roster of full-time faculty, relying on ministry mentors rather than professors and scholars.
I’m cheering on my fellow workers for the Kingdom who are trying to do theological education and bridge the gap between the church and the academy. That said, Talbot School of Theology (and others) have chosen to bridge the gap quite differently, and we believe that this difference does make a difference.
The Opportunity of Embedded Education
At Talbot, we believe that a robust, theologically grounded church will require robust models of theological education. We want to see the academy and the church working together to provide world-class scholarship and education within the global church.
Here’s the reality. While the accessibility and competency models offer the right fit for a contingent of leaders, neither model adequately develops and deploys scholars for the church and its mission in the world. I recognize that some might respond that scholarship doesn’t matter, because they’ve seen too many scholars hidden away in an ivory tower and disengaged from the church and world.
But the ivory tower problem shouldn’t lead us to dispense with scholarship. Instead, it should motivate us to deploy scholarship for the church and the mission. We should ask how we can embed robust, theological scholarship deeply into the life of the local church. We should ask how church and academy can partner together to create hubs for scholarship that advance the cause of Christ. That’s the vision at Talbot and several other like-minded seminaries. We have a robust group of scholars who love the church and actively serve the church, all while simultaneously continuing the work of scholarship.
Specifically, we are pursuing a vision of embedding scholarship and theological education into local contexts. Here we’re leaning into best practices that we have learned largely from Asbury Seminary. Asbury is deploying the expertise and scholarship of their professors into various cities around the nation. And at Talbot we’re going to be doing the same thing through our program called Talbot Embedded.
We have preserved and valued theological education, and now we are deploying our professors to Chicago, Phoenix, Portland, Honolulu, Las Vegas, the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Boise, Houston, Orlando, and New York City. In each location, an embedded cohort of local students will journey together in their local context, and we will also fly in world-class faculty for in-person, in-context course intensives. This model combines the best of remaining embedded in local ministry with the best of residential education’s community and instruction.
We’re doing all of this, because we believe that the church matters, the mission matters, and that scholarship can better equip the local church to more effectively participate in the mission.
World-Class Scholars on Fire for a World-Deployed Church
If the only options for theological education are cheap, fast, easy, and divorced from robust scholarship, it probably won’t be long before the church no longer has access to scholarship. And scholarship matters for the church and the mission.
For example, a new work of ancient Greek scholarship went viral recently. For generations, the ancient Jewish historian Josephus has been a trusted source for scholars, with a notable exception. At one point Josephus wrote a paragraph about Jesus, but key sections of that paragraph have long been rejected by scholars as later additions, not considered original to Josephus himself. But as John Dickson points out, a new book by scholar T.C. Schmidt has turned the scholarly world on its head, arguing that the text (called the Testimonium Flavianum) is authentic as-is. Such scholarship provides intriguing evidence for the Christian faith in the earliest years of the church’s history.
