TheBolgBlog: Dreams for My School

A seminary training model is built around the idea that a single person or a set of staff workers has most of the gifts in a particular church community and then we train that one person or group of persons. But, what do we do when the gifts are spread throughout the community as they are in many new forms of church? How do we continue to train the many, rather than the few?

In the first of a series of posts about his dreams for Fuller Seminary, Ryan Bolger introduces his first dream with the foregoing observation. In many ways, his description of the emerging type of church where leadership is distributed among the people reminds me strongly of what we Baptists have long said we believed in: the universal priesthood of believers.

My experience to date, though, has been that this belief is one we tend to hold intellectually, but we have never really tried to believe it experientially in our churches and our seminaries. I'm not sure if this is a result of the lure of power among the clerical class, or whether it is that our people broadly are just like the Israelites at Mount Sinai. After God spoke directly to the people, they insisted to Moses that they wanted him to go between them and God, and promised that they would listen to him and follow his leadership — just don't let God speak directly to us any more.

Whatever the reason, I have long had a dream of being part of a local congregation which did indeed express the kind of broad-based, communal approach to leadership, teaching, and many other spiritual offices. Ryan Bolger's dream sounds very familiar to me.