Most often we use the term "theological education" to refer to the training up new clergy, to impart skills and learning that will shape the minister want-a-be into a fully formed minister. Of course, we know that in reality much learning goes on after the M.Div. is awarded, that the minister who is finished learning, growing, and being formed in the spirit is finished indeed.
But we don't often think of the term "theological education" as refering to something that the professional minister shares with the laity. In our ordinary way of thinking, theological education is done to divinity students, and then the formed minister does ministry. But if theological education is good for clerics, why isn't it good for the whole community of the faith? If ministry is something that a religious community does, and the professional minister is called to educate the religious community about ministry, perhaps we need to go beyond "building your own theology" and think of building the kinds of habits of the heart that William Ellery Channing writes about in the passage below.
Channing is writing about the formation of divinity students, but why not the whole people of faith? What I find interesting about what Channing writes is his notion that "theological education" is learning to live religion. We will see that idea become mature in the Transcendentalists who insisted that religion must be "experienced" and have consequences for one's life. They suggested that transformative learning involves "conversion" a notion that many Unitarian Universalists would find challenging. Channing in his words below is suggesting that the most important part of theological education is transformative learning, that the goal is to become a new person because of one's experience with religion, to be (pardon the metaphor) born again as a person who has experienced religion and now wishes to share that experience as a minister. If we find a way to bring Channing's idea of lived religion into our practice of ministry then liberal religion would know its good news, not because we tell it, but because we would experience it. And then it would follow that the idea of sharing that good news would not raise so many eyebrows.
Channing wrote:
"The age in which we live demands not only an enlightened but an ernest ministry. . . .By this I mean not a louder voice or a more vehement gesture: I mean no tricks of oratory; but a solemn conviction that religion is a great concern, and a solemn purpose that its claims shall be felt by others.
To suit such an age, a minister must communicate religion - not only as a result of reasoning but as a matter of experience. . . .We ought to speak of religion as something which we ourselves know. Its influences, struggles, joys, sorrows, triumphs, should be delineated from our own history. The life and sensibility which we would spread should be strong in our hearts. This is the only genuine, unfailing spring of an earnest ministry.
The most important part of theological education, even in this enlightened age, is not the communication of knowledge, essential as that is, but the conversion and exaltation of religious knowledge into a living, practical and soul-kindling experience."
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