Class and theological education

One of the ways in which working-class people are said to be excluded from evangelical ministry is the emphasis on theological training, and the need for formal (degree) qualifications in order to be a minister.

[W]e need to address deep-seated levels of class bias that honour formal qualifications above all attributes and reconsider how we develop and train our leaders.[1]

Why do church leaders need to have a degree? The simple answer is: they don’t. What they do need, however, is a knowledge of how to teach the Scriptures, which means a good knowledge of what the Scriptures say and how to read them. That is enormously enhanced by a raft of other skills, which at the moment are most commonly and efficiently taught through university-ratified tertiary education institutions. What are these other skills that so help to teach the Bible well?

The first is knowing the original languages, something I have often heard criticised by working-class Christians (and, to be fair, Christians of all other classes) as unnecessary, esoteric and specialist. That is not true. Knowing the biblical languages is enormously helpful in maintaining faithful and accurate preaching. Yes, they are hard to learn. It is a great shame that language teaching in general is not much more common in schools, which would make learning a new language as an adult much easier. We can only work with what we have; that does not change the fact that learning biblical languages should be seen as commonplace for Bible teachers.

Bible teachers also need a grasp of what the Bible teaches overall on particular topics about God, humans, and the world. That is, they need a good knowledge of doctrine, and they need a good knowledge of how our understanding of these topics develops throughout the Bible. They need both systematic and biblical theology. Otherwise they will not be teaching particular passages in the context of the whole Bible, and so will not be teaching Scripture accurately.

It is greatly helpful, in coming to understand the Bible and its doctrine, to know at least some church history – to learn from other Christians throughout the ages who have studied Scripture themselves and who have had to fight battles to keep to its truth. Bible teachers also have to know how to teach practically; how to do their exegesis of a particular passage, how to construct a sermon, effective ways of teaching, effective ways of applying to people. Pastors teach people. Pastors have to know their congregations to preach to them (also an argument against mega-churches, but that’s a different issue.)

That is why training pastors for word ministry includes these things. But there are, in our current way of running churches, other things that a pastor has to do. Knowing people and dealing with personal issues is greatly helped by some knowledge of counselling and psychology; running a team of staff or volunteers is helped by having knowledge of management; there are also planning and organisational skills, running children’s work and youth groups, the practicalities and legalities of weddings and funerals and church buildings, dealing with public and cultural issues, and knowing apologetics.

There is a lot that goes into training a minister with enough to keep him or her going throughout a lifetime of ministry (and it should also include ongoing training). This is why training for ministry needs to be taken seriously; it will take dedicated time, and it needs churches to provide adequate funding.

But does it need a degree? No, not necessarily. The university system, however, is already there, set up to provide structure and accountability in educating people. It has been very useful for theological colleges to ally themselves with them.

Yet it doesn’t have to be that way. The university way of teaching has major drawbacks, something that many university teachers themselves have tried to combat. Strategies such as flipping the classroom, changing assessment structures, and challenging the unwritten curriculum, are efforts to overcome the bias towards a particular kind of learning that assumes a particular kind of background. These efforts often struggle in the current system which is so top-heavy and bureaucratic.

The modern Western university system also has all the drawbacks of modern secularism, which will mount an increasingly hostile opposition to traditional Bible training. This is certainly something that churches will need to take into account as they consider the future of theological education. That education, however, still has to happen.

The teaching of all the subjects mentioned above could certainly be done, and may well be done better, in less formal settings; apprenticeship-type models, in-church training and so on. Jesus taught his disciples without any university being involved.

But it has to be done properly. Current alternatives for ministry training don’t always work. ‘On the job’ training is very often severely lacking in content; students just don’t get the ‘information’ part of formation if they are not having hours in which they are taught it. Jesus taught informally, but he did teach, privately and publicly. The disciples lacked formal education, but probably had hours as boys hearing the Scriptures taught in the synagogue. Paul certainly had a great deal of formal learning.

Part of our problem, of course, is that churches themselves are not teaching congregations enough. There’s a lot more that children could learn (whatever class they come from) if we were prepared to make the effort. Where are the Sunday Schools of yesteryear? My Presbyterian friends remember not having just memory verses, but memory chapters, not to mention their Westminster catechising; an excellent foundation for understanding biblical doctrine.

So yes, absolutely, recruit working class ministers. And let us be adventurous in setting up structures that allow them to train. That includes funding them so that they don’t have to keep working fulltime while they do it. Theological training is demanding enough without requiring money-earning work on top of it. Practical work in a church can certainly be part of theological training, but it is only training if it is accompanied by proper supervision, preparation, debriefing and discussion.

It is worth adding to this discussion that we must train women as well as men. We need women to be teaching women in churches; this means they need theological training, as men do. Yet it is often much harder for women to access training financially, not to mention the encouragement and moral support to do it. Theologically trained women are especially necessary if we are to be reaching the working classes. UK women ‘are more likely to be living in deprived areas and struggling with poverty than men’; Sharon Dickens writes of ‘… the need for more and more women to be theologically trained to reach the least, the last and the lost among the female population living in our council estates and housing schemes’.[2] These women need evangelists and Bible teachers, not just social workers.

Is the answer in-house church-based training? Possibly. Nonetheless, there are considerable advantages to centralised training, financially as well as in terms of quality. A few highly specialised teachers can teach a lot of students at once if they all come to the same centre. The students then also get the benefit of a range of different specialities, precisely because we are not training the students to be specialists but generalists. Hands-on training in ministry is also a necessary part of the system; that is why we have apprenticeships beforehand and curacies afterwards. There are other ways of organizing theological training, but they need to work.

Formal, degree-based training for ministry can be difficult for working-class people, because they frequently have not had the educational preparation for it that middle-class people have. Joanne McKenzie, in her interviews with evangelical ministers, reports that working-class students ‘often … talked of the great emotional and spiritual benefits of the course.’ Middle-class students did as well, ‘But middle-class students did not express any of the discomfort.’ One working-class student described his experience of theological training this way:

I was accepted [for ministry training] and I went and, do you know what, it was the best thing that I have ever done; it's been the most challenging, spiritually and personally and emotionally. I went there and I was like, no one intentionally set out to make me feel like I didn't fit in, that's the part of the council estate chip on my shoulder, made me feel like as soon as I turned up and heard people from Lancashire sounding like they were from, I don't know, but they just sounded, they weren't Lancashire ... They were either doctors, I think someone on that course would be poorly qualified if they were a teacher (laughs); do you know what I mean? So like Oxbridge educated, some of the theological terms that they were using I couldn't even spell, I couldn't even pronounce never mind spell them …

The opportunities that are out there for training really require confidence. I mean, when I applied ... to do a theology degree it was so intimidating and I so nearly gave up a number of times. And part of me was thinking, 'Michael, who do you think that you are trying to get a theology degree, don't you know you're from an estate, you shouldn't be getting a theology degree'.[3]

What can we do to help those without a middle-class background to cope more easily with theological training? Churches could certainly do more to prepare students; as we saw in a previous article, churches that make an effort to train their teenagers for ministry also help them obtain the skills necessary for tertiary education.[4] Churches could also promote the necessity of theological training by encouraging it, supporting students financially, and supporting charities that promote theological education – this all helps overcome the culture shock that theological training can be.

Or maybe the answer is to invent a whole new way of doing rigorous theological training. If we do, working-class ministers must have a voice in its design. We need practical, efficient and cost-effective ways of providing the kind of comprehensive theological training that will support a minister through years of the hard work of church ministry.

It is worth it. Now, more than ever, we want thoroughly trained ministers of the gospel, for the sake of reaching all classes. It is possible; let us do it.

[1] Natalie Williams and Paul Brown, Invisible Divides: Class, Culture and Barriers to Belonging in the Church (London: SPCK, 2022), p. 18.

[2] Sharon Dickens, writing in Mez McConnell, The Least, the Last and the Lost: Understanding Poverty in the UK and the Responsibility of the Local Church (Leyland, Evangelical Press; 2021).p. 89.

[3] Joanne McKenzie, ‘'The Person God Made Me to Be': Navigating Working-Class and Christian Identities in English Evangelical Christianity’ Sociological Research Online, 22.1, 11, p. 6.

[4] After World War I, the large number of working-class men coming forward for ordination forced the Church of England to rethink preparation for ministry, and in particular, helping students obtain the level of education necessary to start theological training. One result was the establishment of the Knutsford Test School, a fully funded full-time residential course, which ordination candidates attended for six to nine months before going onto to university or a theological college. This provided the chance not only to bring candidates up to an academic standard where they might enter university, but also allowed teachers to be able to assess men for their personal suitability for ministry.