What Theocademy is really about

Today, at a conference I was preaching and teaching at, I met a couple of folks who mentioned the ideas I was floating this past week about rethinking seminary. One of them said they were mulling over the first call for submissions over at Theocademy. I said that I hoped they would be submitting a video lesson, and the response was interesting:

“Absolutely, but when I think about answering the question ‘What is Theology?’ all I can think about is what I read in Shirley Guthrie’s Christian Doctrine. So…”

Whether I’m right or not, what I heard in that response was, “I’m happy and excited to participate, but I’m not sure I have anything earth shatteringly new to say.”

Let’s be clear: That’s perfectly fine.

Most of the work I’ve done in the last several years (as many of you know) has been on the integration of open source theory and the Church. One of the ways I explored this in Open Source Church was to take a look at the foundational principles of Wikipedia. One aspect of those principles has some encouragement for us, I think.

As they construct their articles, the Editors of Wikipedia often remind one another that they are after “verifiability, not truth.” The idea is that they do not pretend to be establishing the “best” or “correct” view, but trying to create a record of verifiable information. Wikipedia explicitly states that they are not a place to post opinions or cutting edge research, but a place to amass the “sum of all human knowledge.” Likewise, the point of Theocademy is not to see if we can develop a new theology from scratch, but to see if we can build a online video archive of theological lessons. That’s a totally different thing.

Don’t get me wrong, if theology is art (as I think it is) then we never know what will happen and someone may show up with something AMAZING. But when we remember that the point is to make what theological expression we already have freely available to those that need it, that seems to take the pressure off.

Theocademy is first and foremost a distribution idea. It is only a content idea, second.

So, if you’re a little nervous about coming up with something brilliant, please stop. Just say the truest thing you know to say, and say it as interestingly as you can. Provide us with resources, and tell us who first said that amazing things you’re saying and then say them to us.

But let’s not get worked up about this. Let’s just do our best to help our friends who want and need the education we’ve been fortunate to already receive.

Scared of the dark

I don’t know of a kid who wasn’t scared of the dark. As far as you know, there are lots of things in the dark. Lots of things that you have know idea about. Lots of things that will scare you and keep you up at night.

In my adulthood I have heard stories of people coming home late at night – very late (usually after a long night of drinking) – crashing on their couch and waking up at two or three in the morning to find a “shadow” sitting in the chair or coach next to them.

When I was in college I went home to visit my best friend from high school and he told me about how, one night, he had gotten home particularly late after being out at the bars, and fell asleep quickly on his bed. As most drunks do, he woke up in the dead hours of the night and had to pee. As he stumbled out of his bedroom to go down the hallway he stopped cold. There was a “shadow” blocking his way to the bathroom. He said that he waited and waited for quite a while to see if the shadow would leave, but it never did.

He eventually ended up peeing his pants and he swore that he hadn’t had a drink since.

I don’t know about you, but when I was a little boy I didn’t have many late nights out, drinking and carousing. My bedtime was 8:00pm (8:30 in the summers), and I still saw “shadows.”

It still creeps me out if I let it.

I’m sure it was like any other night in our house. I went outside to play after dinner, came in and took a bath. My parents read me a night time story and, before I hoped into bed, we most likely prayed the most ubiquitous children’s prayer of all time:

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

And if I die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

When you think of it, it’s kind of a morbid, scary little verse, and I’m surprised that it hasn’t been known to send children into a state of fear and anguish.

But, actually, why would it? Kids know nothing about death. They know nothing about grave, mortal fear. At the most they have squashed a bug (or forty), or pulled the wings off a fly or the legs off of a spider. Usually, kids in my situation (white, Christian, suburban, middle class) don’t think about death, and if they do, well, it’s because they’ve been told about Jesus. And Jesus is alive damn it. Still, even though Jesus is alive, if he came into my room, late at night and unannounced, I’d probably wet my bed.

So after a while of my sweet little slumber I awoke to find that, like my high school friend, I, too, had to pee. I hopped up and went.

Now there was a fairly strict rule in our house that once you’re in bed – you’re in bed. And by strict rule I mean that when I or my siblings ever would get out of bed we would get “the look” and our parents would yell that “we’d better hurry our little butts up and not come out again.” I hurried my little butt up and rushed back to my room. As I crawled into my bed, which was right next to a window, I spotted it.

There was a shadow in that window, and it was shaped like Batman. The entire bottom half of the window was covered with this shadow – it was a bust of Batman. The ears were a dead give away.

This is perfect, I thought. Batman is standing right outside my window. He had jumped off the pages of the comics and into my reality. I may have had Jesus in my heart, but I had Batman right out side my window. And it hit me – I have Batman outside my window.

I took a few deep breaths. I was nervous. I was about to meet my very own personal superhero. I slid out of bed, slowly placed my hand on the curtain, and ripped it back.

Nothing. There was absolutely no one or no thing right outside of my window.

I was baffled. I had seen the shadow. Something had to be there. I closed the curtains. There it was. I opened them. Nothing. What was going on?

The great thing about a child’s brain is that the child will search and search and search for the right answer. Despite what the researchers are telling us about television, kids really are inventive. If it can’t be A then it has to be B.

Take my oldest son, Ian, for instance. Every day I come home from work to hear another way that he has managed to categorize the world. Most of the time it has to do with patterns and similarities.

When his youngest brother, Julian, was born he declared to the family that Julian “had more of me in him than anyone else.” When he saw us looking at him confused as hell, he informed us that “My name, Ian, is in Julian’s named, and since he was born in Indiana that adds another layer to it. Because “Ian” is in Indiana, too.” This dizzying intellect is what I live with.

This is the same kind of fierce logic that kicked in as I sat down on my bed, trying to figure out the origins of my Batman shadow. I kept looking at it, and after a while it occurred to me that it looked like the bat symbol that Commissioner Gordon would shine into the night sky to call Batman. Maybe Batman wasn’t outside my window, but (almost as cool) maybe Gotham City was really the Greater Tulsa Metropolitan area.

I scrambled back to the window and opened it. No dice. There was a house right next door and there really was no angle by which the bat symbol could have reached my window from Police Headquarters. Even though a light was on in the house, I couldn’t see anything obstructing the light that would produce the kind of shadow that I was looking at. I was back to square one. What could the shadow be?

I hadn’t been staring at it for that long when a creepy feeling came over me, and I began to picture a similar scene in my mind’s eye.

Not that long ago there was a special event at our church where a man came and talked about the evils of rock-n-roll music. He played some music and then played it backwards to show us the evil messages that are hidden in the music. He played Queen, and we learned that “Another one bites the dust” backwards is “I love to smoke marijuana.” I didn’t know what marijuana was a the time, but I gathered enough to know that it was bad.

He also showed us some of the art from these albums. The one that struck me as the most eerie was the Eagles “Hotel California.” He went through a line-by-line dissection of the song, telling us it was a tribute to Anton LeVay and the Church of Satan. He buttressed his point by showing us the inside of the album in which a figure which could be LeVay, but looked more like the Devil to me, was barely seen in a balcony window overlooking the foyer of the “Hotel California.”

It was so creepy, this puppet master – barely there – convincing and condoning the unaware partiers to continue in their drunken revelry.

And now this puppet master was in my room. The Devil was in my room.

I didn’t know what to do. I was petrified. I just stared at it.

Finally, I called out to my dad.

“Landon, what is it?”

“The Devil is in my window.”

“The Devil’s not in your window.”

“He is too. Look.”

Of course, he couldn’t see anything. I started to feel like the kid in The Polar Express. But because parents, for the most part, love their children and want them to be peaceful and unafraid, I was able to convince my father to go outside and investigate further whether or not there was something that could be making the shadow.

He went as close to the neighbor’s house as he could without seeming like a freak, and looked as close to the window as he dared. He attempted to step between the light and the window to see if that would make a difference. It didn’t. Every time I closed the curtain, the Devil was there.

For what had to have been at least a half an hour this went on. And, finally, my dad came back in. He had exhausted all possibilities. Except one.

“I think we just need to pray, son, and bind the Devil in Jesus’ name. The Bible says that at the name of Jesus the Devil will flee.”

My dad knelt down beside my bed and I rolled to face him – away from the window. And we prayed. My dad bound the Devil in the name of Jesus, and told the Devil that he had no business being here – that we were children of God. He told the Devil to go away and to never come back. He told the Devil to leave his little boy alone.

When he was done he kissed my forehead.

“Do you want to look and see?”

I shook my head. What good was trusting God’s promises if you were always going to look over your shoulder to see if they worked.

“All right then. Good night.” And he left.

I would be lying to say that I wasn’t scared. I was. I was very scared. The only thing that got me to sleep that night was to repeat my bedtime prayer:

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

And if I die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

I never saw the Devil (or Batman) in my window again.

Let’s do seminary differently (repost)

Note: This is a repost of an earlier post. Some folks have indicated that something screwy on the interwebs made it so they could read. I think this project is important enough that I want everyone to know about it. Sorry about the repetition.

I’ve started an experiment, and I wonder if you’d like to help.

No lie, I was keynoting a conference last weekend, struggling with getting to sleep as I often do my first night away from home an a trip, and decided to read Seth Godin’s new (free) book STOP STEALING DREAMS: What is school for? (the all caps are his, not mine, btw). That was a bad idea.

Seth Godin is one of my “People you’d want to have lunch with” (Malcolm Gladwell being the other), and I find anything he writes to be perfect. He has an uncanny ability to cut through the bullshit of a given topic and lock onto the aspect that needs considering/questioning/improving/reforming/etc. In his new book, he turns his sights on education, specifically higher education. Here’s the blurb:

The economy has changed, probably forever.

School hasn’t.

School was invented to create a constant stream of compliant factory workers to the growing businesses of the 1900s. It continues to do an excellent job at achieving this goal, but it’s not a goal we need to achieve any longer.

In this 30,000 word manifesto, I imagine a different set of goals and start (I hope) a discussion about how we can reach them. One thing is certain: if we keep doing what we’ve been doing, we’re going to keep getting what we’ve been getting.

Our kids are too important to sacrifice to the status quo.

Reading this book did not help me go to sleep. Quite the opposite. Given my professed love of in depth theological education, I automatically thought of seminary as I read.

I thought about the countless seminary graduates who bemoan that “seminary did not prepare them for this” or “I didn’t learn to be a pastor in seminary. I learned to quote Calvin/Luther/Wesley/[theologian of choice].”

I thought about the crisis (yes, crisis) we are currently having around seminarian debt load.

I thought about the fact that the pilgrimage model of obtaining a residential seminary education is no longer desirable or tenable for many would be pastors (I, also, don’t happen to think it is a necessary model). Even if a person graduates with no educational debt, they often incur significant consumer debt in order to live.

I thought about the fact that, even if we can get young adults to enter ministry, a disturbing number of them are gone after 5 years. My own denomination released a study in 2005 that indicated that the number of “ministry drop outs” has quadrupled from a similar study in the 1970s.

I thought about the increasingly powerful tools of digital, online collaboration.

I thought about Wikipedia.

I thought about YouTube.

I thought about TED.

I thought about Khan Academy.

After all of this, at around 2am, I had an idea. I don’t want to be hyperbolic, but it was the closest thing I’ve ever experienced to a Divine Download. I was jazzed, and didn’t go to sleep until after 4am, and the idea I’m calling Theocademy was born.

Before I go too much farther, let me make a few things clear.

I love seminaries. Specifically, I love the seminaries of my own denomination (I serve on the national committee which seeks to serve these 10 amazing institutions). This is not about sticking it to seminaries. I know that a lot of people think that what’s wrong with the Mainline church today is our seminaries. I could not disagree more. These seminaries know what the Church is facing and they are working to respond. Cut them some slack that the change isn’t happening as fast as you want. Most of us can barely get our 100 member, $200K budget churches to change. Try turning the ship that is a seminary. It’s not easy or quick.

Yet, while the current slate of seminaries are working to address the coming future of the Church, we have an opportunity to dream new dreams and take advantage of the tools and ethos at our disposal. So, while this isn’t about hurting seminaries, it is about experimenting to see if there is a new and different way forward than the one we’ve assumed.

This is also not about trying to replace the process by which we form pastors. In fact, if I was being honest, I would say that denominations have wrongly abdicated their responsibility to form pastors to the seminaries. If the folks at the Learning Pastoral Imagination Project are to be believed (and I think they are), the only way to be formed as a pastor is to “practice pastoring.” Yes, we need a bit of information, but the way you become a pastor is by actually pastoring. And yet, we expect fully seasoned pastors once we hand them an MDiv. Sorry. That ain’t gonna happen.

And so, if the purpose of seminary can’t be – shouldn’t be – to “form pastors” then what are we left with? Learning theology, biblical interpretation, etc.

And here is where we have a problem. With the countless resources available to me online, what is to stop me from getting a theological education by taking advantage of those resources and working through them with my pastor? What? They aren’t qualified to reflect on that material deep enough to help someone reach a level of competence? Then why are they a pastor? We need to get those folks out of congregations quick before they screw up the people in Sunday School!

Here’s what I want to try: Can we figure out a way to generate a body of theological, biblical, and pastoral knowledge and make sure that everyone who wants it has access to it?

Yes, I’m proposing a theological Wikipedia of sorts. Yes, I’m asking if what has worked for Khan Academy can work for the Church.

We used to train pastors in apprenticeship situations all the time. For thousands of years, one pastor trained another. The centralized theological academy is not the end all and be all of theological education. When I have access to the teachings of Richard Rohr at my digital fingertips, why do I need to travel half way across the country to learn it from you? Why can’t I reflect on it with my pastor? Isn’t she equipped for that?

To that end, the experiment known as Theocademy.

I want to see if we can become our own instructors again. I want to see if the Church is able to reclaim its responsibility to train the leaders that she will need for the next phase of the Church’s life. I can give you a dozen names right now that already are stellar instructors and that I hope participate in this experiment. And that’s just from my Twitter following list. I know there are people out there that I don’t know that will blow our socks off. Would you come over and be a part of it?

Can we reimagine theological education?