General Assembly is far more flexible than an Ivy League institution. It iterates and updates its offerings every few weeks, based on detailed student surveys. When its students said they wanted to study Android development, General Assembly ginned up a class two weeks later. A traditional college might take years to meet a new need. This close-to-the-ground, customizable model has been a missing piece of the innovation ecosystem. Top universities can’t always move fast enough to provide the technical and entrepreneurial skills needed in this new world.
A research-based, time-tested guideline for developing managers says that you need to have three types of experience, using a 70-20-10 ratio: challenging assignments (70 percent), developmental relationships (20 percent) and coursework and training (10 percent).
The 70-20-10 rule emerged from 30 years of CCL’s Lessons of Experience research, which explores how executives learn, grow and change over the course of their careers.
Does this sound familiar?
Of course, CCL is missing one core dynamic: the spiritual dynamic.
…The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life. (John 6:63)
For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. (Heb. 4:12)
…Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, (Eph. 5:25-26)
The Word of God is alive and powerful. The Scriptures are not only a source of accurate and reliable information – they themselves have the power to transform lives! When we are in the Word and the Word is in us, our lives are changed.
Books that are written about the Word of God are certainly useful (cf. Acts 8:26-35) – especially as they point us to the Word and help us understand it. But they do not have the same direct power as the Word of God; in fact, they have considerably less power.
Books that are written about books that are written about the Word have even less power. In a very subtle way, all in the name of scholarship, we get further and further away from life. The further away from the Word we get, the less the transformational power. We can still see bits and pieces of the Word – some vague reflections of Scripture – but we end up with our minds so cluttered with other things, and we lose the simple connection with the Word of life.1 Then we wonder: Where is the power of God? Where is the presence of God? Where is the life-transforming truth? We knew it once but now it has been lost in the muddle of human tradition, in man’s debates about man’s debates. Read more…
What else is the goal of theological education than to bring us closer to the Lord our God so that we may be more faithful to the great commandment to love Him with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind, and our neighbor as ourselves (Matthew 22:37)? Seminaries and divinity schools must lead theology students into an ever-growing communion with God, with each other, and with their fellow human beings. Theological education is meant to form our whole person toward an increasing conformity with the mind of Christ so that our way of praying and our way of believing will be one.
But is this what takes place? Often it seems that we who study or teach theology find ourselves entangled in such a complex network of discussions, debates, and arguments about God and “God-issues” that a simple conversation with God or a simple presence to God has become practically impossible. Our heightened verbal ability, which enables us to make many distinctions, has sometimes become a poor substitute for a single-minded commitment to the Word who is life. If there is a crisis in theological education, it is first and foremost a crisis of the word. This is not to say that critical intellectual work and the subtle distinctions it requires have no place in theological training. But when our words are no longer a reflection of the divine Word in and through whom the world has been created and redeemed, they lose their grounding and become as seductive and misleading as the words used to sell Geritol.
Here is a great piece of writing from Richard Pratt:
If I were king and could wave my magical scepter, I would radically change the basic agenda of seminary.
After 22 years of teaching in a seminary, I slowly began to realize something. We were not preparing the kinds of leaders that evangelical churches in North America need. Let’s face it; evangelicalism has seen better days. God is at work in many places and in many ways, but on the whole, the news is not good. Our numbers are dwindling; our theology is unraveling; our zeal for Christ is dissipating. Now more than ever, we need seminaries to give the church leaders who are empowered by the Spirit for radical, sacrificial devotion to Christ and his kingdom. And they’d better do it quickly.
Perhaps a large part of our trouble is that we tend to think of training as something of itself, a period of time, certain courses taken, a degree earned, abilities and qualifications that can be listed and enumerated on paper, so many credit hours, rather than as something that happened to us.
The emphasis should rather be on the man trained and his growth in maturity and in the capacity to apply what he has learned to new situations. Of itself training is nothing. It is the trained man that God uses. And God’s own training may include both formal and informal education.
Nor is the most fundamental training ever gained by proxy, reading about what God did in someone else. It is found in personally being put through the crucible of experience, fashioned and molded by His hand. The training that has value is that which enters into our make-up, fashions our attitudes, matures our thinking. We tend to include as part of our training much exposure to knowledge which effects no essential and lasting change in us.
I appreciate the simplicity of the illustration and the wisdom of considering what happened from a leadership perspective. In working this out, however, I see a long-term challenge that is beyond the scope of the clip. A growing crowd is irrelevant if they are not eventually touched and motivated at a deeper level. While I agree that the first follower is critical, the leader must step up and disciple others or the crowd will quickly fade away. That’s what makes working out ConneXions principles over time so critical – and takes much more wisdom, effort, and grace than drawing a crowd.
