The Lord Gave Me This

Understanding Historic Leadership Development Practices of the Black Church to Prepare Tomorrow's Leaders

Carter

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781498239394
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

When it comes to learning necessary ministry leadership skills, African Americans are unique in their view towards traditional theological education. They have a historical educational experience that requires anyone attempting to teach them ministry skills to acknowledge the differences in how blacks and whites have learned leadership skills through the history of the United States.Those who seek to teach these pastors and leaders must be supported by a creative learning process and delivery system that incorporates the felt needs of leaders, acknowledges their long held distrust towards traditional white theological educational processes, develops a way to have a regular presence and relationship with black churches, offers learning experiences that are provided through multiple formats, and is taught by instructors who have similar life experiences as the pastors and leaders being taught.There are opportunities for traditional seminaries and universities to help meet the needs of African American ministry leaders through the development of programs that take these points into account and create opportunities that make these potential learners feel welcome and accepted as brothers and sisters in Christ whose experiences within ministry are valuable and contribute to the building of God's kingdom.

Chapter One

What’s the Point of This Book?

The purpose of this book has been to discover the most effective ministry development training practices to help African American church leaders and pastors become more effective leaders within the contexts they serve. This book investigates a variety of ministry development training processes through critical research, individual and group interviews, and both formal and informal discussion groups in order to discover which process is most effective in preparing tomorrow’s leaders. The first step in answering this question is to understand the training practices of leaders of the early church and then compare them with the current practices traditionally employed within the African American context.

What is the New Testament Model for Leadership Development?

The best manual we have to guide our thoughts on church leadership development is the word of Jesus as found in the gospels, as well as the words of his apostles as found in a handful of epistles in the New Testament, primarily 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus. The practices we find in these letters give us a solid foundation to work with as we seek to understand God’s desires for leadership development.

Upon a general review of these books, it seems that God’s desire is for leadership development to be managed through the church:

The ideals of the core principles found in the letters to the first churches [especially Ephesians] and to church leaders [Timothy and Titus] point to the biblical nature of leadership training being church-based. Training took place in the context of the ministry. Training was viewed as an entrusting of the ministry to faithful men by faithful men who were doing the work of the ministry. Confirming of those trained was fundamentally the responsibility of leaders at a local church level.1

Within the epistles to Timothy and Titus, Paul commands leaders to live their lives as examples for others to follow, to live out their faith through their relationships with their family members, to study God’s word in-depth and be able to defend the church’s teachings, to fight against false and heretical teachings, to cast out false teachers, to mentor others within their congregations, to live in peace with each other as much as humanly possible, and to even separate themselves from people who are not following the established doctrines of the church.

Outside of these commands, there are no other strict set of criteria laid out in the New Testament for how a church leader is to be trained. This leaves the process of leadership training open to the creative impulses of those who are leading the training process, as “the church-based training of the Early Church was clearly understood as a flexible leadership development strategy rooted in the life and ministry of local churches, in which gifted men entrusted more and more of the ministry to other faithful men while they themselves remained deeply involved in the process of establishing churches.”2

With this flexibility in mind, I will briefly explore a few initial differences in how this flexibility has played out in the leadership development processes within black and white contexts.

Some Initial Differences between Blacks and Whites as they relate to Ministry Leadership Development

For multiple historic reasons that I will highlight shortly, on the whole, African Americans are far less likely than their white counterparts to obtain higher levels of education past the high school level: “African American Protestants tend to have lower levels of educational attainment than the general population. Eighteen percent of black Protestants have a college degree, compared to 27% of the general population. A majority of black Protestants (57%) have a high school education or less, compared to half the general population.”3

Conversely, within the black church, leadership development has little to do with participation in a certain educational program. Instead, it depends more on whether God has “called” a person to ministerial service within the church context and whether that person is able to prove this calling through preaching and serving the church immediately.

Foundational to understanding this issue is the reality that within the African-American community the whole issue of call and access to ministry is totally contrary to what is typically observed in white settings. For example, an African-American comes to know Christ, senses God’s call to minister, acknowledges that call before others through what is known as a “trial sermon,” becomes ordained, enters ministry, and then somewhere down the line might go back to school in order to receive some type of formal theological training.4

This is essentially the antithesis of the training tract found within white contexts. “The process of ministry accessibility is totally opposite in most situations in the white community. Here, a person senses God’s call, goes off to seminary or Bible college, and then, after graduating from seminary or Bible college, gets ordained and moves into full-time vocational ministry.”5

Another reason for the divergent views between the ethnicities is that the environments cultivated at white seminaries are not always welcoming to African American students. “Part of the reason for this abysmal showing [of black students at white seminaries] is the perception by some who have attended such schools that not only are they not user-friendly environments, but that they are downright ‘hostile,’ in a covert way, to African-Americans who choose to attend.”6

The reasons for this highlight the perception that white instructors and curriculum developers operate from a position of power over minorities:

There are a number of reasons for this perception, ranging from the subtle inferences of a curriculum that looks at the history of the church and lists primarily European and/or European-Americans as significant contributors, to the area of systematic theology that uses terminology such as “black” to represent evil and “white” to represent good. In addition, practical theology communicates, either outwardly or by implication, the perception that some of the cultural expressions of African-American faith are incorrect because they do not line up with the expectations of the majority community. The lack of minority faculty as role models and administrators also contributes to this perception of an unfriendly, if not hostile environment.7

As long as this perception persists, black students will likely continue to be hesitant to enter traditional educational programs that they assume will not benefit them or the unique needs of their individual congregations. Indeed, “It is not logical to assume that a curriculum geared largely to the expectations of white, middle-class Protestantism will produce competent leadership for churches that are urban, frequently located in or near ghettos, and with poor and insecure constituencies.”8

In order to better understand this divide, I will briefly review how the educational practices for leadership development have h...