Advancing Practical Theology

Critical Discipleship for Disturbing Times

Eric Stoddart

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780334051916
• eBook ISBN: 9780334051930
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Advancing Practical Theology argues that the practical theology as a discipline does not at present fulfil its radical potential and addresses some directions that the discipline needs to take in order to respond adequately to changing social, ecclesial and global circumstances. This book will generate debate as a polemic contending for a future of the discipline that features an enhanced role for the lay (i.e. non-professional) practical theologian who is radicalized with respect to the discipline's preferential option for the broken in which practical theology addresses and is addressed by postcolonial concerns.

1. Approaching Practical Theology

A scholarly text would normally be chomping at the bit, desperate to launch into a literature review. It might be disguised as a discussion of definitions of, in this case, Practical Theology. I have to admit that the thought of contributing yet another section to all those called ‘What is Practical Theology?’ fails to inspire me. However, it is incumbent upon me to set out for you what Practical Theology looks like – not least because I’m claiming that it demands to be advanced. Instead of a formal literature review I want to crave your indulgence for an autobiographical account. By telling you how I discovered Practical Theology and realized that I am a Practical Theologian, I hope you can appreciate what it is that I believe needs to be made more accessible, more radical and better attuned to globalized contexts. I know there are dangers in the setting up of an account of the discipline on the scaffolding of my particular experience. On the one hand, it could so easily be hopelessly subjective, limited in its horizon and thus deeply distorted. On the other hand, this way of telling the story might be more interesting and perhaps more authentic to Practical Theology itself. On the third hand, I’m all too aware that my journey is just that – it’s my journey and, to put it kindly, is likely to be idiosyncratic. To put it more abrasively, I just might be odd.

While there’s sufficient residue in me of North-East Scottish Calvinism to make me tip towards the latter explanation – I really am odd – the particularity of my encounter with Practical Theology is a strength. Perhaps you will see glimpses of your own journey or that of others you’ve supported over the years. Mine is, as is everyone’s, a selective story. I’m choosing what to tell you and will not offer you a blow-by-blow account of each year. Lack of space excuses me – and spares you.

In a previous life

When I introduce myself to people and it seems as if they need a bigger canvas on which to place me, I’ve taken to explaining that ‘in a previous life I was a Baptist minister’. I trust that they don’t assume I’m talking about reincarnation. But I suppose that if they do, being a reincarnation of a Baptist minister is rather different to having been a Pharaoh or Druid priest. In Scotland, more so than in England, Baptists are theologically conservative, while not a few would be fundamentalists. The congregation in which I was baptized (re-baptized if you will) as a university student was on the up. The young people’s fellowship of 18–23-year-olds, having come to charismatic stirrings, was attracting disgruntled Christians from other denominations. Having moved from the Church of Scotland parish church of my childhood to one of expository preaching only a few years before, I made another leap, this time to the Bible-believing Baptists. To cut a slightly short story shorter, I evolved – or perhaps I should say slid – into being first pastoral assistant, then associate pastor, in this Baptist congregation. As is my wont, it was after a number of years of locally recognized ministry that I applied and was admitted to the list of ministers held by the Baptist Union of Scotland. I retained my ministerial credentials upon leaving that congregation in 1996 to start my PhD studies with the thought that I might, at some time in the future, return to pastoral ministry or take an academic post. When I had almost finished my PhD, I took a post at the now no longer Scottish Churches Open College, an ecumenical venture delivering adult lay theological education around the country, but based in Edinburgh. In due course, in 2004 in fact, I concluded that I would never be a ‘good Baptist’ again, so I withdrew from the accredited list and from participation in Baptist life and theology.

So, we’re talking of a conservative Evangelical with significant charismatic tendencies. Responsible for pastoral care, for some years organizing the house group system and for other years leading the worship band, my context was typical of a city-centre, student-oriented Baptist congregation of the mid-1980s to mid-1990s. We could find out God’s will through prayer; a holy life and the parameters within which God might speak were set by the Scriptures. A surrendered life was defined in terms of New Testament strictures filtered through various lenses. Colin Urquhart, David Watson, Watchman Nee and A.W. Tozer shaped our spirituality in no small measure through charismatic prayer meetings.2 Sunday worship was what might be called charismatic-lite with an emphasis on listening to God and being brought close to God in worship. Ours was not the fervour of Pentecostal nor house-church worship – although we did have a dignified dalliance with the Toronto Blessing one Sunday morning. Our musical style would have been recognizable to those owning Graham Kendrick cassette tapes and, latterly, the worship VHS tapes of Don Moen and ilk.3 Hillsongs were just beginning to influence us in the months prior to my departure from pastoral ministry in the summer of 1996.

This is not the context in which you’d find Practical Theology. Naturally, the church leadership were keen to encourage a practical faith. Pastoral care was emphasized as a corporate responsibility as well as through structured ministries. Yet, this was ministry of consolation and challenge geared around faithful application of God’s word in the Bible. Methods of care and strategies of mission had to be consistent with our reading of Scripture, although creativity in the application of the Bible was encouraged.

Now, with this set-up, I can begin to open up my story of encounter with Practical Theology and, more specifically, how I realized that I was really a Practical Theologian by nature. There are two streams of influence – the first arising from pastoral care, the second generated in the politically and theologically charged context of post-Apartheid South Africa.

Christian Listening

We all think we can listen, and often are quite sure we know when we’re not being listened to. I certainly fitted that description. Having a good few years of pastoral care ministry under my belt, I knew that listening was important but tended to see it as a prelude to gentle intervention or advice-giving. The Acorn Christian Healing Trust was, in the early 1990s, looking to expand their ministry into Scotland. Anne Long had been instrumental in designing a course on listening skills.4 Openly declaring itself as not offering counselling skills, Long and other English tutors had recognized the need for equipping clergy and lay people in the carefully delineated practice of reflective listening.

If I recall correctly, it was Muriel, one of my colleagues on the pastoral team at the Baptist Church, who was first approached to train as a ‘listener’. The condition was that she found a buddy with whom she would train alongside and have a partner to practise with and, in due course, deliver training days and longer courses. The initial training week was at St Ninian’s Centre in Crieff, Perthshire. While I recall only sketchy details about the teaching sessions, I have a strong recollection of the closing work in a triad. One person was being listened to – not in role-play, but drawing on actual personal experience; a second was the listener and another was the observer. It was not difficult for me as listener to replay, in short chunks, to my colleague so that she could hear what she had said, in her own words. I’d found this powerful enough itself when being listened to. However, it was important to maintain the listening discipline when the time came to pray out loud. As an experienced pastoral carer I was, so I thought, on home ground. I could pray a non-judgmental prayer based around what someone had shared – that’s the easy bit, because it doesn’t matter if I get it slightly wrong; God, I presumed, knows what needs to be prayed for anyway.

I don’t think I offered a bad prayer, but the observer offered feedback on the session as a whole. Now, I’d prayed often enough in evangelical and charismatic prayer meetings, but never been offered feedback before. It was pointed out to me that I had changed some of the person’s words when I had prayed out loud with them. I had done this out of habit, not realizing the power dynamics of offering someone’s situation up to God in front of them in my words rather than their words.

If you are familiar with these spontaneous pastoral prayers, you may recognize the effect. Rarely, if ever, is there an opportunity to correct how you are being prayed for. Sadly, I had denied my colleague the affirmation of knowing she had been truly listened to by praying for her in her own words to God. The moment of feedback from the observer crystallized for me that power of reflective listening and the discipline of not adding my own interpretation to another’s words. Being privileged to offer someone back the gift of hearing their own words – in a listening session and, if wished, in prayer – opened up pastoral ministry for me in a fundamentally new way. This hospitality of listening restrained my impulses to rescue. Creating space for another – while not pretending to be offering counselling – was a safe and guarded opportunity, where I could hold back on advice-giving. Granted, it was easy to be obsessional about refusing to offer any advice, but you need to remember the context in which I had previously been offering pastoral care. Whether or not they really wanted it, people felt obliged to ask advice of their minister. Even with the best of intentions, selecting a Bible text to read before a concluding prayer on a pastoral visit was, I could now see, fraught with my agenda. Perhaps most fundamentally, Christian Listener training showed me that the process of being listened to could become spiritually transformative – without corralling the encounter within biblical texts. People’s insight didn’t have to be framed as inevitably distorted – although it would always be partial.

In getting to this insight the ecumenical spirituality of Christian Listening was just as significant for me as the content and training exercises. I, as a conservative evangelical, charismatic Baptist, was lighting candles, encountering icons, being conducted down elementary Ignatian imaginative Bible reading and meditation. Other than the candles and icons, the ambience was not wholly unfamiliar. ‘Waiting on God’ in lengthy periods of silence was a feature of many of our charismatic prayer meetings. What was different in Christian Listening training sessions was the release from the crushing burden of wondering if I had ‘a word from God’. Looking back, I might characterize this as a shift from listening for God to being silent for God. Yet, that continues to imply activity. Silence with God is perhaps a better way to express it. The shift for me in pastoral encounters with people was rather different. At a technical level, it was so much harder to listen accurately (replaying someone’s own words). However, the theological shift for me was in creating space wherein a person could come to insight. This need not be articulated in charismatic terms as ‘hearing from God’, but becoming more self-aware; hearing one’s own words opened up an opportunity for growth.

Anyone with even a sketchy knowledge of counselling theory will recognize elements of Carl Rogers’s unconditional regard or the possibility of insight from within a client.5 My epiphany within the context of Christian Listening will seem trivial – but the context is all-important. I knew about the evangelical framework of God speaking through Scripture by stirring up recognition in the human heart. The possibility that insight might be generated from a human heart without conscious acknowledgement of God’s Spirit was another matter altogether. I phrase it this way because the only way the Spirit of God could be ‘inside’ a person was by invitation through repentance from sin and faith in Christ. I make no claim to this being a nuanced articulation of evangelical conversion theology and the gift of the Spirit to believers. What I hope you can appreciate are the parameters within which we would hope that God would work. ‘The Word’ required to be proclaimed – albeit sensitively – and believed if genuine spiritual growth were to be possible. Experience of God was predicated upon conversion, holiness of life and committed seeking of the empowering by the Holy Spirit. Christian Listening was opening horizons for me against which God was less a charismatic Evangelical than I thought. More than this, the charismatic evangelical spirituality into which I had been inducted, and was inducting others, was clearly only one facet – not the pinnacle as my reading material suggested. Still more significantly, my experience of being given feedback on a prayer switched on a light for me. The power of (spiritual) words was much greater than I had hitherto understood and fundamentally more ambiguous than my charismatic theology had contended.

In a nutshell, Christian Listening training began to dismantle my parameters for how God might work in relation to our humanity. This was at once less spiritualized but more hopeful. There was scope for me to encounter God in safe ways beyond charismatic evangelicalism. In fact, my imbibed Baptist charismatic spirituality could be constraining, not least because it failed to acknowledge the power of words; ironic perhaps for a tradition so steeped in preaching and, latterly, ‘the prophetic word’. Mine was not an induction into Practical Theology per se at St Ninian’s in Crieff. But it was creating space, alerting me to our shaping by words and to a different way of understanding God’s engagement with us.

South Africa

If Christian Listening training was opening new horizons for me in terms of spirituality and the power of words, a three-month sabbatical visit to South Africa in 1996 dismantled the remaining vestiges of my implicit trust in Christian claims of knowing God. This trip was, in effect, the final few months of pastoral ministry in the Baptist Church in Aberdeen but, as colleagues kindly put it, ‘you’ve worked for your sabbatical, so even if you’re leaving shortly upon your return, you’re still entitled to it’. This visit didn’t fulfil the clichéd ‘turned my life around’, but to a large extent it was confirming my suspicions about the too-easy claims to knowledge of God in which I’d been formed in evangelical circles.

After almost 18 years I’ve revisited the report I wrote on my return – which was based on reflections in a journal that has got buried on a now lost back-up disc. My sabbatical plan was to visit a variety of Protestant churches in South Africa, so that I could be exp...

Table of contents

• Copyright information
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Approaching Practical Theology
• 2. Plunging into Practical Theology
• 3. Case Study: Scottish Independence and Christian Perspectives Study Group
• 4. Critical Discipleship
• 5. Professing to be Professional
• 6. A Passport to the Future
• 7. Case Study: The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology – The Neoliberal, Imperialist Elephant in the Room?
• 8. Radicalizing Practical Theology
• Coda: A Letter to 1996 from 2014
• Bibliography