Ministry Leadership Requires a Love of Learning: How Institutions of Learning Can Help

A couple of weeks ago, we had the joy of welcoming Tod Bolsinger to Trevecca for a time of exploring adaptive leadership. His content was thought-provoking as always, and it was particularly fun to listen to him condense most of Canoeing the Mountains into a single verbal presentation. The piece of his presentation that I simply can’t shake, though, is this quotation from Eric Hoffer: “In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” It landed in the context of a story Tod told about helping an educational institution adapt to a dynamic future, which, of course, got my attention.

The institutions Bolsinger and I serve are preparing people to serve churches that are finding a way in a dynamic, rapidly changing environment. At the same time, those own institutions are also finding a way forward in a context of rapid change. The question, then, is what allows people and institutions to navigate that change well? What allows us to step into a dynamic future while still being faithful to our mission? I think Hoffer has it right: learning.

I’ll put it this way: the love of learning is a virtue that must be formed at educational institutions that want to help their students lead well in a dynamic future. The problem is that many of the students who come to do so with the expectation that learning is about equipping them with static skills that allow them to get a job. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with skills training, of course. The problem arises when a love for learning isn’t fostered alongside the acquisition of skills. In other words, if learning is only about acquiring skills, we may be equipping students for a reality that won’t exist twenty years from now. If we can develop a love of learning, though, we are giving students a capacity for growth over a lifetime, especially as they attempt to guide organizations into uncharted cultural waters.

In the work I’m doing in established educational institutions to offer undergraduate and graduate-level theological education, as well as through a large denominational project that’s developing ordination education, I’ve got this question on my shoulder, and I don’t want it to leave. I don’t want clergy education to be only about acquiring skills while not giving attention to fostering a love of learning. Quite simply, ministerial education has also got to foster a love for learning that will allow students to adapt, and lead adaptively, for years to come.

The fact of the matter is that while many of the ministry skills I picked up in my college training, about half were connected to the particularity of a cultural moment that has since passed. I do remember a youth ministry professor saying several times, “The container may change, but the content should remain,” so there was attention being given to adaptive leadership, even in courses where I was being trained to run youth ministry in a model that has largely faded away. I’m also grateful for the skills I picked up in exegesis, homiletics, pastoral care, administration, and so on. They continue to serve me well, and I’m quite grateful for them.

What I treasure, however, is that alongside those skills, I also developed a love of learning that allowed me to adapt to different kinds of ministry challenges, from the need to relate to a changing neighborhood to starting a small business when life called for a creative income stream. I’m grateful that when I bumped into a challenge, I wasn’t as prone to say, “Well, they didn’t teach me how to do this in seminary,” as much I leaned into a curiosity that was developed in me during seminary, saying instead, “I may not know how to do that now, but I’m sure I can figure it out.”

The hope, too, is that the institutions served by people who love to learn will take on a similar flavor. They can learn, grow, adapt, and thrive. How might these virtues be developed? How might institutions be able to adapt in a rapidly changing culture? How will they help new ministries come to be? How will clergy help existing congregations and institutions face a new future?

To get at these questions, I offer these bits of reflection, both to educators and students. First, to students:

1)    Consider your questions – What kind of questions are you asking in your educational journey? If you are primarily asking How? questions, consider asking a few others, like Why? How questions are good for acquiring skills, like, “How do I put together a worship service?” Why questions tap into a love of learning. For example, you might ask, “Why has the church structured its worship like this over time?” Also, “What if…” questions can help open an imaginative space for your skills to work in new ways. “What if my church were to do this thing?” might be the kind of question that sparks a bit of imaginative learning.

2)    Take advantage of learning in different fields – When I was an undergraduate, I surprised myself in a biology course. While that course wasn’t in my major, I ended up being fascinated with the content and it stretched me to learn in new ways. These days, I relish the opportunity to learn from experts in other fields. If you’ve got that opportunity, challenge yourself to take advantage.

3)    Consider learning as a spiritual growth discipline – What might happen if learning itself became a way of loving God? Jesus did talk to his followers about loving God with heart, mind, soul, and strength. How might engaging the mind be a way of loving God?

For educators and educational institutions:

1)    Help students celebrate learning – One of my favorite philosophers, Albert Borgmann, argued that things can be celebrated only if they make a claim on us. I think the gospel and learning are two excellent examples of that. How might we help our students celebrate the learning they’ve done in big and small ways? I encourage students to truly and deeply celebrate their college graduations, not just because they finished, but because they allowed learning to make a claim on them and shape them. But smaller claims can also be celebrated. I wonder what it would look like for professors to take time in class settings to celebrate what’s been learned and to make learning more of a celebration.

2)    Gamification – A newer field of exploration has emerged around the gamification of learning, largely around applying game theory and game design to learning. Think about a board game you might play as a team, and then consider how those team dynamics might enliven learning, and how it might evoke a love for learning. I’ll leave the analysis of gamification’s merits to those who are specialists in that field, but I’ll simply suggest here that gamification might be able to inspire a love of learning, especially when it demonstrates how learning can be used to adaptively apply what has been learned to dynamic situations and challenges.

3)    Consider learning as a spiritual growth discipline – Yes, I said the same thing to students above, but for educators, there’s a twist. Most years, I offer a short workshop for new Trevecca faculty that highlights what it means for my university to be a Wesleyan university. Yes, we are a Christian university, but our Wesleyan roots also give us some pretty wonderful resources when it comes to education. Namely, Wesleyans tend to prefer talking about human beings as being created in the image of God. We aren’t alone in that, but it’s our default mode for theological anthropology, or the study of what makes us human. I make the claim in that presentation that Wesleyans should excel at education because we understand education and learning as a means of grace that allow humans to more fully reflect the divine image. That doesn’t mean that folks without degrees are less human, but that we view learning as charged with graced possibility. For Wesleyans, learning isn’t just about filling fallen minds with facts and skills; it’s work we do as part of human beings being redeemed from the disease of disordered desire and sin. We don’t educate students to manage lives that are continually lived under the tyranny of sin; for Wesleyans, education is offered in the enduring hope that these students are becoming more free to be fully alive as humans, all by divine grace. How could we not love to learn with that as a possibility?

Though these only scratch the surface of the possibilities, the overall hope is that developing a love for learning will always be part of education, especially for those who are preparing to offer leadership to churches and organizations in an increasingly complex world. Skills are helpful and not to be overlooked, but they’ll also need to be coupled with a character-forming approach that models committed curiosity as a virtue, because I think Hoffer is on to something: the learners are going to be the ones who lead with a capacity to adapt.