Teaching Theology and Religion, ISSN 1368-4868, 2006, vol. 9 no. 2, pp 139145.

An Integrative Educational Strategy for Christian Leaders in a Multifaith World

Kathleen T. Talvacchia
Teaching and Assessment Consultant

Abstract. This paper asserts that training Christian leaders for faithful and effective leadership in religious communities, which is responsive to the reality of the diverse religious experiences of this country, requires that they learn the skills of integration, specically the ability to integrate formation into a community within the context of a multicultural, multifaith world. The process of pastoral theological reection, a process that seeks to methodically put into conversation the students experience, social context, and religious tradition, holds promise in a Christian context as a way to accomplish such integration. After discussing the process of pastoral theological reection, the paper examines a seminary ministerial formation curriculum, based on this integrative process, to discern how it might better engage multifaith realities in its formation of leaders for Christian communities.

Some years ago a student came to see me during my ofce hours to discuss her work in her supervised ministry eld site. When I asked her how things were going she responded that all would be well if she could just put all the pieces together faster. It seems to me that her complaint, a common one in seminarians training for ministry, is only supercially about her performance anxiety in the site. More importantly, I heard her frustration as a deeper desire to experience a holistic sense of herself as a minister in community, so that she could bring to bear all of the resources that she had to the work. This need for an integrated sense of self becomes even more urgent when situating that ministry within the context of the diversity of religious experience operative in many communities in this country. The thesis of this paper appears simple and selfevident, but designing an educational process to effect it is an enormously complicated undertaking. Training
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Christian leaders for faithful and effective leadership in religious communities, which is also responsive to the reality of the diverse religious experiences of this country, requires that seminarians learn the skills of integration. The act of integration is not something automatically developed merely from working in a practical ministerial experience. Rather, integration is a fundamental aspect of ministerial formation, and students must be taught ways to achieve the integration to put the pieces together. This integration of formation in community and multifaith awareness grounds ministerial competency in a diverse society. There are at least three types of integration necessary: the integration of theory and practice, that is, the need to think and act both analytically and practically; the integration of academy and church, that is, the ability to be both a scholar and a pastor; and the integration of formation into a community within the context of a multicultural, multifaith world, that is, the ability to be both rmly grounded in a communal identity and open to and engaged in experiences with other faith traditions. Training students to become adept in the process of pastoral theological reection, a process that seeks to methodically put into conversation the students experience, social context, and religious tradition, holds promise in a Christian context as a way to accomplish such integration.

The Need for Integration

The experience of being in seminary puts one into the center among many competing demands with very specic community accountabilities. At times, academic learning (e.g., in Bible or Ethics) can put the student into conict with the belief systems of the Christian denominational tradition within which they have been reared

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in ways that make it difcult to interact with those communities. Sometimes the stretching of the new learning helps the student grow intellectually and emotionally; at other times, the cognitive dissonance and emotional shaking causes fracturing and confusion. Many seminarians in ministerial eld sites put the conict succinctly: When I am being faithful to my learning, am I betraying my community? When I am accountable to my community, am I betraying all that I have learned? This struggle in Christian theological education between theory and practice, academy and church has been much discussed in the literature (Wood 1985; Farley 1983, 1988; Kelsey 1992, 1993; Wheeler and Farley 1991). More to the point of the current discussion, Christian theological educators need to consider the ways that integration skills might help students negotiate the tensions between forming themselves for service to a particular religious community while helping them to be formed in awareness and engagement with other religious traditions. In theory this negotiation seems obvious, but in practice it is much harder to achieve with deep integrity. The complexity stems from the reality that in order for this integration to be achieved two events need to happen simultaneously, and these can often be in tension: 1) Being formed in a tradition means that you embrace it, understand it, critique it, and let it shape you into the minister that you are becoming. 2) Being engaged with another religious tradition means that you embrace it, understand it, view it with some critical awareness, and let it shape you in some way ways that might be at odds with or in conict with the religious tradition that is forming you for ministerial service. This is the challenge of ministerial education that seeks to be genuine training for a multicultural multifaith world: we need to prepare religious leaders in a way that creates a dialogue between training to serve faithfully in ones home tradition and training to function effectively as a minister in an interfaith world. These experiences generate potential conict that must be faced and responded to in the formation of ministers. Judith Berling reminds us that the complex process of learning another religion is held in tension by two poles: (1) understanding another religion faithfully and (2) re-appropriating Christian tradition in light of new understandings and relationships (Berling 2004, 64). Educating religious leaders capable of functioning well in a multi-religious world requires leaders who are capable of facing Berlings second tension with a secure sense of identity that is able to engage religious difference with an open, non-defensive posture.

Theological Reection as a Central Integration Skill

The process of theological reection holds promise in a Christian context as a way of helping students negotiate the struggle between understanding another tradition and re-appropriating our own. This type of theologizing seeks to integrate experience and Christian religious tradition so that they each inform the other toward a new way of knowing and acting that is ministerially effective. In an interfaith context this integration is essential, for it allows students to engage other religious traditions from a stable identity of themselves as whole persons in the world. As integrated ministers, they are engaging religious others with head and heart, knowledge and experience that will help them to see the boundaries of themselves with others, and the ways in which other religious traditions might affect them positively. In the Christian tradition, theological reection is a process of theologizing that has emerged out of theologies of liberation, contextual theologies, and experiential theologies. In this type of theologizing, specic contexts rather than generic truths are the starting point for reection. More than the development of theory, theological reection seeks to create practical action that is appropriate to the lived reality of the community. Robert L. Kinast, a leading articulator of this process in a ministerial setting, describes a deceptively simple movement to this theologizing: It begins with the lived experience of those doing the reection; it correlates this experience with the sources of the Christian tradition; and it draws out practical implications for Christian living (Kinast 2000, 1). He notes that it is a natural way of practical thinking, but that its complexities lie beneath the surface and are best expressed by questions such as:

What type of experience is suitable for theological

reection and who decides?

How is the experience extracted from the context? Whose experience is given priority? How is this
decided?

Which religious sources are used to correlate with the

experience and who decides?

How are those sources interpreted? How are

hermeneutical conicts negotiated?

How much theology does a person need to know to

do theological reection accurately?

How does one move from the reection process to

effective action?

How does one insure that the action is consistent

with the belief of the tradition and who decides? How are conicts in interpretation negotiated? Thus, theological reection seeks to create a distinctive form of theologizing that involves experience corre 2006 The Author Journal compilation 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Educational Strategy lated with tradition for the sake of praxis (Kinast 2000, 3). Kinast notes several types of styles of theological reection: ministerial, spiritual wisdom, feminist, enculturation, and practical. He determines these styles by the type of experience practitioners of that style focus on, how they correlate it with the faith tradition, and what sort of praxis they envision emerging from their reection (Kinast 2000, 5). In this paper I will use an example of theological reection from both the ministerial style and the spiritual wisdom style (see also Talvacchia 1998). While all of the styles of theological reection are pertinent to ministerial formation, these two styles are, in my opinion, most often used in Christian seminaries for specic pastoral leadership training. The work of James D. Whitehead and Evelyn Eaton Whitehead is an example of a well-known style of theological reection for pastoral ministry contexts. In Method in Ministry, they present a method for theological reection rooted in the model of conversation (Whitehead and Whitehead 1995). They understand the lively exchange between Christian faith and contemporary life to be a conversation that is by turn debate, dialogue, reconciliation, and accusation. As a communal process rather than a monologue, it is a process of communication that should be at the core of a religious communitys life together. The model they present engages three conversation partners: (1) the Christian tradition the religious heritage of both the sacred texts of Holy Scripture and the wisdom of the Christian Church in its history; (2) experience both the experience of individual Christians and the collective experience of faith communities; and (3) culture the convictions, values and biases that form the social setting in which the reection takes place (Whitehead and Whitehead 1995, 5). The process of theological reection describes how the conversation among the Christian tradition, experience, and culture proceeds in a movement from listening, to assertion, to pastoral response. Listening or attending uses patience, active listening, and the ability to respond with accurate understanding to clearly comprehend Gods spirit in the situation. When ministers engage in skillful listening, they realize the diversity of experiences and interpretations that are part of their lives and of their religious tradition. It is at this point that assertion is necessary as an aspect of theological reection. In this step, ministers in community engage in honest and respectful sharing of their plurality of opinions and convictions in a type of constructive conict or debate. The success of assertion in theological reection especially depends upon the mutual partnership of the sources in conversation. Religious tradition, experience, and the surrounding culture must be given equal right to assert their claims in the conversation. In the nal stage of theological reection the
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insight of the reection process is turned into effective pastoral action. For example, I used this style of theological reection as an instructional strategy in the classroom to reect upon issues of vocational discernment in a ministry class. I structured the discussion around the following questions, corresponding to this form of theological reection: 1) Describe the language of vocation used as your eld site context. Give an example. (Listening/Attending); 2) In what ways is this language the same or different from the language used in your home community context? What are its theological groundings? (Assertion); 3) In what ways has your reading on vocation helped you to understand the languages of these contexts better? (Assertion) 4) What insights about your vocation do you gain that is pertinent for your ministerial work in this eld site context? (Pastoral response). With this series of questions I was able develop an instructional strategy to guide students through a theological reection process that helped to integrate their present experience in a specic context, their history, their Christian tradition, and their assigned readings towards a deeper awareness of their vocational identity. The work of Patricia OConnell Killen and John de Beer is an example of theological reection in the spiritual wisdom style. In The Art of Theological Reection, they outline a theological reection process that focuses on movement toward insight and correlation. They provide a useful denition that clearly articulates the dialogic nature of the experience:
Theological reection is the discipline of exploring individual and corporate experience in conversation with the wisdom of a religious heritage. The conversation is a genuine dialogue that seeks to hear from our own beliefs, actions, and perspectives, as well as those from the tradition. It respects the integrity of both. Theological reection therefore may conrm, challenge, clarify, and expand how we understand our own experience and how we understand the religious tradition. The outcome is new truth and meaning for living. (Killen and de Beer 1994, viii)

Thus, both personal experience and the Christian story are mutually respected as a discipline undertaken in openness and faith. Killen and de Beer believe that there is a structure to the process of meaning-making. They refer to this as the movement towards insight. First one enters experience, encounters feelings, and apprehends the images that arise from those feelings. Considering and ques-

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Talvacchia 1) Focus on some aspect of experience; 2) Describe that experience to identify the heart of the matter; 3) Explore the heart of the matter in conversation with the wisdom of the Christian heritage; 4) Identify from this conversation new truths and meanings for living. (Killen and de Beer 1994, 6869) For example, I used this style of theological reection as an instructional strategy in the classroom to help students design a Bible study. Using the story of Jesus and the ten lepers (Luke 17: 1119) the following reection questions were developed: 1) Read the Gospel passage rst to yourself, slowly, then aloud, slowly. What is the story about? Pick out a particular aspect of that story to reect upon (Focus on some aspect of experience); 2) Sit with the Gospel passage until an image emerges that captures the heart of the matter (Identify the heart of the matter); 3) What incidents from your experience does the image evoke for you? What were your thoughts and feelings in that situation? In what ways have your interpretation of the passage been conrmed, challenged, or revised? (Correlate the heart of the matter with the Christian heritage); 4) What do you see in the passage now that you did not see before? In what ways do you hear its message differently now? What will you take with you from this reection to your daily life? (Identify new truths and meanings for life). With this instructional strategy I was able to lead the students through an example of a Bible study that would be useful in their ministerial practice, while deepening their reection about their own lives in relation to the wisdom of their Christian religious heritage. Thus, the process of theological reection attempts to develop a dialogical process integrating personal and communal experience and religious tradition. The goal is to train leaders who are able to have a deep identity of self within their Christian tradition so as to serve it more faithfully and effectively. Every religious community needs leaders who know who they are, know what community has shaped and continues to shape them, and know how to use with intellectual and emotional agility all of their academic knowledge, practical wisdom, and grounding in religious faith for service to the community and the larger world. An integrative educational process for leadership development, like that of theological reection, has the potential to help train such leaders. More importantly, it can help those leaders engage other religious traditions more openly. It is only when we are secure in our understanding of who we are and
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tioning those feelings may spark an insight, which potentially leads to action. Theological reection then is the intentional attempt to incorporate the wisdom of the Christian tradition into the process of meaningmaking. The authors note that ones ideological standpoint inuences the quality and trustworthiness of the theological reection. A standpoint of dogmatic certitude, for example, does not allow personal experience to challenge the religious tradition; rather, one is controlled by a pre-established religious interpretive framework. At the opposite extreme, a standpoint of absolute self-assurance does not allow the religious tradition to challenge ones understanding of personal experience; one is controlled by self-interpretation. Genuine theological reection takes place with the standpoint of exploration, which allows one to be open to the wisdom of both experience and religious tradition. Here one is open to the possibility that ones interpretive framework is in need of revision and will be changed by reection and experience. The Killen-de Beer process of theological reection develops an understanding of the movement toward insight in three major ways: expanding the concept of experience, determining on what to reect, and deliberately incorporating religious heritage into the reection. In order to make experience manageable for reection, the authors distinguish among several sources that categorize experience. One source is action, that is, the lived narrative or life story of a person. Another source is tradition, that is, the authoritative scriptures, doctrinal teachings, church history, and stories of the communitys inspirational persons. Culture is a third source of experience. This includes the ideas, social structures, and ecological environments of a people. A fourth source of experience is the category of positions, or the attitudes, opinions, beliefs, and convictions that one holds and is willing to defend. To determine on what to reect one must pay attention to feelings so that images arise. The combination of feeling with image directs reection to the central issue in an event. The authors refer to this signicant event as the heart of the matter, or the central question, tension, issue, theme, problematic, or wonderment involved. This involves careful spiritual listening and discernment of the movement of Gods wisdom in the event. Next, the minister puts what he or she understands to be the heart of the matter in conversation with the wisdom of the Christian heritage in the intentional activity of correlation. This movement deliberately creates a correlation between experience and the wisdom of the religious heritage. Thus the framework of theological reection for Killen and de Beer, which provides a structured process, consists of four basic steps:

Educational Strategy where our religious boundaries begin and end that we can engage in genuine dialogue rather than defensive debate with those who are religiously different. A secure, integrated ministerial identity has the potential to open ministers up to encountering difference, while an insecure, compartmentalized ministerial identity has the potential to ignore difference or judge it prematurely.

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Assessing a Curriculum in Ministerial Formation

In my own work in training leaders for Christian religious communities over the years, I struggled to understand how to incorporate holistically and authentically in the curriculum the multi-religious reality of the North American context. While I was pleased with the ways in which the curriculum, based in the process of theological reection, trained students for ministry in Christian communities, I felt its severe limitations in helping seminarians engage the wider religious world. Thus I would like to use the opportunity of this paper to reect briey upon the curriculum I developed for ministerial formation to understand the ways in which it might be made more open to engaging religious diversity. The curriculum was developed at an ecumenical Christian graduate theological seminary. Students represented a widely diverse section of Liberal Protestant, Evangelical Protestant, and Roman Catholic backgrounds. Many were also religious seekers attempting to nd their faith home through study and experience in religious communities. The majority of the students in the program were seeking to be trained as ordained ministers in their Christian tradition. Some sought to work in lay professional capacity in church-related ministries in denominational bureaucracies, hospitals, social service agencies, and church education programs. Others sought to use religious training to bring a particular value orientation and vision into the disciplines of law, public policy, medicine, and publishing. For this diverse group I sought to design an educational process that would (1) move students toward a process of creating an integrated ministerial identity, through (2) creating a deeper integration between their development of self, reection upon ministerial experiences, and the knowledge gained in other academic courses in their seminary curriculum. The experientially based curriculum required 1215 hours per week in an approved eld site, including one hour of conversation with an approved eld site supervisor. The program simultaneously required a 2-hour integration seminar each week in which the students would reect upon cases from their eld experience and engage specic topics in ministry that were essential for their ministerial development. Thus the course functioned as a com 2006 The Author Journal compilation 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

bination eld education, reection seminar, and introduction to ministry course. The conceptual logic of the course was based on taking students through a process over contiguous semesters in an academic year of a pastoral circle. This process is a classic ministerial model, developed by Joe Holland and Peter Henriot, which emerged out of Latin American theologies of liberation. In this model ministers move from centering themselves in the lived experience of individuals and communities (insertion), to understanding those experiences in the larger social context (social analysis), to understanding both more broadly and with greater depth the analyzed experience in correlation with Christian faith, scriptures, and tradition (theological reection), nally to decision and action, which is the purpose of the pastoral circle (pastoral planning) (Holland and Henriot 1983, 7 10). From this conceptual spine I developed both questions for case reection from the eld site and topics for ministerial development that corresponded to these stages of action and reection. To engage students immersion into community, the curriculum focused on vocation, understanding it as a reality that is both formed in our community of origin and shaped in the communities in which we serve. To engage social analysis they created a picture of the social context of their eld site and of themselves within it. To engage in a theological understanding of their eld site and experiences therein, they examined the theology of ministry used by the community and the tradition. To understand theologically their role in the work, they discerned professional ethics appropriate to their position. To understand the pastoral action necessary for effective ministry they articulated their personal theology of ministry. The process of theological reection was the instructional strategy for each lesson that tied all of the pieces together into a coherent experience. Thus over the course of the academic year, both in reecting upon their eld site experiences and in studying topics for professional formation, they were challenged to ask themselves the following questions:

Who am I in my spiritual journey on community/ies?

To what am I called? What biblical themes/images, theological/moral concepts, or historical experiences ground my understanding of my call? Who is the community? Who am I in relation to the community? What are the biblical, theological, ethical, historical, and pastoral inuences in the site? What does the particular Christian community of your tradition understand ministry to be? What themes, concepts or events from the tradition ground a Christian theology of ministry? Who am I in this role in the community? What are the appropriate rights and responsibilities of this pro-

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Talvacchia from being overwhelming to the learner also serves to keep it separate and not integrated into the formation process. Finally, the formation program might be expanded to a three semester curriculum, team-taught with representatives of several religious traditions, in which time is taken with the topics to engage each one thoroughly from various religious perspectives while giving special attention to the Christian formation necessary to train leaders for their communities. The goal of this plan would be a Christian ministerial formation that works toward multi-religious understanding. This approach has the potential advantage of bringing the variety of religious perspectives into a genuine dialogue. Its disadvantage is that, in addition to being possibly costprohibitive, it could create an unconscious hierarchy of religions in which other religious traditions are judged by the standards of Christianity, thus defeating the purpose of training for a multi-religious ministerial context. Each possibility has potential; each also carries serious risks. However, what is absolutely clear is the need for Christian seminaries to do a better job of engaging the multifaith reality of our world. This can only be done, I believe, when religious leaders are trained in an integrative way that allows them to create a secure identity that allows them to engage religious difference.

fessional role? What are its appropriate boundaries? What are the biblical, theological, pastoral, and historical concepts that support this ethical stance? In order to be faithful to the person I am, and to what I am called, what must I do? What are the biblical, theological, pastoral, and historical concepts that support this action stance? While a full articulation of a new curriculum is beyond the scope of this paper, it seems to me that there are at least three distinct ways that this Christian seminary curriculum might be improved to make it more responsive to leadership training that takes seriously the reality of a multi-religious ministerial context. Fundamentally, it would require the intentional inclusion of other religious traditions into the ministerial formation process rather than merely adding interfaith diversity into the curriculum. The overall goal of the curriculum would be the training of religious leaders who are grounded in their own Christian tradition and competent in their knowledge of at least one other religious tradition so as to be effective ministers in multifaith contexts. First, such a curriculum could be team-taught by a practical theologian and a religion scholar who understood the leadership training aspect of a different tradition so that the topics of the course could be examined from an interfaith perspective. In this plan, various perspectives would be in conversation on the given topic; although, as Berling notes, much of the success of this type of dialogue course depends on the successful working relationship of the two instructors (Berling 2004, 94). This would work for the students who come into the course with a solid sense of themselves in their tradition and who have an ease and comfort with Christian ecumenism. Those students without those prerequisites, however, might struggle with this approach. It is possible that they would feel pushed and pulled in the challenge of difference, and would not be educationally prepared for the stretching that would be required. Another way to make the curriculum more responsive to a multi-religious communal reality could be including a required course in world religions. That is, students would take the ministry formation course simultaneously with a course focusing on another religious tradition. In this case professors from both courses would work together to design class work and assignments that would intentionally speak to each courses concerns and realities. The positive aspect of this plan would be its ability to both connect ministry formation with learning another religion while keeping some distance between them. This would assist those students who were not yet ready for the integration and allow those who are ready to move forward. Yet, its positive aspect is also its negative; the space that keeps it

References
Berling, Judith A. 2004. Understanding Other Religious Worlds: A Guide for Interreligious Education. Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Farley, Edward. 1983. Theologia: The Fragmentation and Unity of Theological Education. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. . 1988. The Fragility of Knowledge: Theological Education in the Church and in the University. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Holland, Joe and Henriot, Peter. 1983. Social Analysis: Linking Faith and Justice. Rev. ed. Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Kelsey, David H. 1992. To Understand God Truly: Whats Theological about a Theological School? Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. . 1993. Between Athens and Berlin: The Theological Education Debate. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Killen, Patricia OConnell and de Beer, John. 1994. The Art of Theological Reection. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company. Kinast, Robert L. 2000. What Are They Saying About Theological Reection? Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press. Talvacchia, Kathleen T. 1998. Finding God Experientially in the Tradition: Theological Reection as Spiritual Formation, New Theology Review 11, no. 4:4352.
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. 2003. Critical Minds and Discerning Hearts: A Spirituality of Multicultural Teaching. St. Louis, Mo.: Chalice Press. Wheeler, Barbara G. and Farley, Edward (Ed.). 1991. Shifting Boundaries: Contextual Approaches to the Structure of Theological Education. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press.

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Whitehead, James D. and Whitehead, Evelyn Eaton. 1995. Method in Ministry: Theological Reection and Christian Ministry. Rev. ed. Kansas City, Mo.: Sheed and Ward. Wood, Charles M. 1985. Vision and Discernment: An Orientation in Theological Study. Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press.

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