Lecture 18-3: Redesigning Theological Education around Formation

Galatians 4:19 — "My little children, of whom I am again in travail until Christ is formed in you—" (World English Bible)

Mark 3:14 — "He appointed twelve, that they might be with him, and that he might send them out to preach," (WEB)

Proverbs 27:17 — "Iron sharpens iron; so a man sharpens his friend's countenance." (WEB)

3.1 Why "add formation" is not the answer

A common, understandable first response to the crisis named in 18-1 is to add: add a chapel requirement, add a spiritual-formation elective, add a mentoring hour, while leaving the existing content-delivery curriculum otherwise intact and treating formation as a supplementary track running alongside it. This lecture argues that response, however well intentioned, mistakes the actual problem. If the curriculum's structural center — where the bulk of a student's time, assessment, and institutional attention actually goes — remains organized around content mastery, an added formation elective communicates, more loudly than its own content can counteract, that formation is a secondary concern the curriculum accommodates rather than the concern the curriculum exists to serve. Robert Banks makes essentially this point against what he calls the prevailing "academic" model of theological education: adding pastoral or spiritual components to a curriculum whose basic shape remains that of a graduate research program does not change the curriculum's actual center of gravity, because students correctly read what an institution treats as central by what it spends the most structured time and the most consequential grading on, not by what it lists in a mission statement.

The redesign this lecture proposes is therefore not additive but structural: formation has to become what the curriculum's time, relationships, and assessment are actually organized around, with academic content integrated into that structure rather than the reverse.

3.2 Mentored practice, integrated rather than appended

The first structural move is placing supervised ministry practice throughout a student's course of study, in ongoing relationship with an experienced mentor, rather than confined to a single field-education or internship term positioned as a practical supplement to an otherwise classroom-based degree. A student preaching, counseling, leading a small group, or administering a ministry task under a mentor's ongoing observation and feedback from the first year onward has continuous opportunity to have classroom content tested, corrected, and internalized in actual practice — and, just as importantly, has continuous opportunity for the mentor to observe and speak into the student's character and pastoral judgment as they actually show up in ministry situations, not merely as they are described in a paper.

This move directly answers a limitation named in 18-1: AI can transfer content about how to counsel a grieving parishioner; it cannot supervise a student's actual attempt to do so and give the kind of correction that comes from having watched the attempt happen. Mentored practice is, definitionally, a service only a person embedded in ongoing relationship with a student can provide, which makes it exactly the kind of curricular investment AI's rise argues for expanding rather than treating as expendable overhead a leaner, more content-efficient curriculum could trim.

3.3 Shared communal life between students and faculty

The second move is structural investment in students and faculty occupying real shared life, not only shared classroom time: common meals, shared prayer, faculty involved in students' lives outside formal instruction, and cohort structures that keep the same group of students together across years rather than recombining by course enrollment each semester. This is a harder and more expensive structural commitment than curriculum redesign alone, because it asks faculty time and institutional resources to be spent on relationship-building that does not show up as credit hours or graded content — precisely the kind of investment a content-delivery model, optimizing for efficient information transfer, has every incentive to minimize.

The argument for spending it anyway follows directly from 18-1's diagnosis: if formation, not information, is the actual product, and if formation happens through relationship and shared life rather than through information receipt (a claim chapter 14 already argued at length regarding discipleship generally), then shared communal life is not a cost theological education incurs alongside its real work; it is a necessary condition of the real work itself. A seminary that cuts communal structures to fund more efficient content delivery, exactly backward from what 18-1's argument requires, has optimized for the part of its function that AI has already begun to make redundant.

3.4 Character and spiritual disciplines taught alongside content, not assumed from it

The third move addresses a quiet and common assumption worth naming explicitly: that sound doctrine reliably produces sound character as an automatic byproduct, so that a curriculum need only teach the doctrine correctly and character will follow. This lecture argues that assumption is not well supported and should not be relied upon as the curriculum's only mechanism for character formation. Correct theological content and personal character are related but not identical goods, and a student can master the former without meaningfully advancing in the latter — precisely the gap 18-1's reading of 1 Corinthians 8:1 named as a live risk even before AI entered the picture.

The proposed response is deliberate, taught attention to spiritual disciplines (prayer, fasting, confession, Sabbath, solitude) and character formation as an explicit curricular component — assessed, mentored, and given real institutional time — rather than an assumed byproduct of doctrinal instruction or an individual student's private responsibility to pursue unaided. This does not mean grading a student's private devotional life, which would be both impractical and theologically suspect (echoing Matthew 6's own caution, addressed in 18-2, against turning devotion into a performance for reward); it means the curriculum treats the cultivation of these practices as curricular business worth structured attention, mentorship, and honest conversation, not merely private business a busy content-heavy schedule leaves no room to attend to.

3.5 Mark 3:14: "that they might be with him," before being sent

Mark's account of the appointment of the Twelve supplies this lecture's governing image with unusual precision: "He appointed twelve, that they might be with him, and that he might send them out to preach" (Mark 3:14, WEB). The ordering in the verse is not incidental. Being sent to preach — the eventual content-delivery function these twelve would perform — is explicitly the second purpose, following and depending on the first: that they might be with him. Whatever theological and practical content the Twelve eventually needed to preach the kingdom, Mark records that Jesus's own method for producing preachers began with an extended period of simple, shared presence, not with a curriculum of content delivered in advance of relationship.

This lecture reads the ordering as instructive rather than merely descriptive: a curricular model that reversed Jesus's own sequence — maximizing content delivery efficiency first, hoping relational formation would somehow follow or be added later if time and budget permitted — would be attempting to produce something like what the Twelve became by a method Jesus himself did not use to produce it. This is not an argument that content and instruction are unimportant; the Gospels record Jesus teaching the Twelve extensively during the time they were with him. It is an argument about sequence and priority: being with him structured the content's reception and application, rather than the content structuring occasional access to his presence, and a seminary redesigning itself around formation should expect its own sequence to look more like Mark 3:14's than like a semester schedule organized purely around efficient content throughput.

3.6 Galatians 4:19: formation as travail, not instruction

Paul's language to the Galatians supplies the governing verb for this whole redesign, and its intensity is worth sitting with rather than smoothing over: "My little children, of whom I am again in travail until Christ is formed in you" (Galatians 4:19, WEB). Paul does not say he is again teaching them, or again explaining something to them; he describes his own labor on their behalf using the image of a woman's labor in childbirth, an image of costly, painful, involuntary process that cannot be shortcut by better information delivered more efficiently. The goal named, "Christ formed in you," uses the same verb family this lecture has used throughout for the chapter's central concern, and Paul's chosen image insists that this kind of formation is simply not the kind of thing produced by transferring correct information faster, however important correct information (which Paul has spent the rest of the letter supplying) remains along the way.

Applied to curricular redesign, Galatians 4:19 sets a sober expectation this lecture does not want to understate: a formation-centered seminary curriculum, taken seriously, will very likely be slower, harder to schedule efficiently, and harder to measure with a clean grade than a content-delivery curriculum, because travail is not a process that yields to the same kind of optimization that produces faster information transfer. A seminary evaluating its own redesign by asking whether it has made theological education more efficient has, on Galatians 4:19's own terms, likely misunderstood what it is attempting to produce.

3.7 Proverbs 27:17: peer community as curriculum, not byproduct

The final text this lecture engages addresses a structural resource easy to undervalue in curricular planning because it is not delivered by anyone in particular: the students' own community with one another. "Iron sharpens iron; so a man sharpens his friend's countenance" (Proverbs 27:17, WEB) describes an effect produced by sustained proximity and mutual friction between peers, not by an authority figure's instruction — iron is sharpened by contact with another piece of iron, not by a superior tool acting on it from outside.

This lecture argues cohort structures that keep the same group of students together across years, with real shared responsibility and accountability to one another, are not a pleasant social byproduct of a seminary's real curriculum but part of the curriculum in Proverbs 27:17's own sense: students form one another's character and pastoral judgment through the ordinary friction of sustained community — disagreement worked through, weakness disclosed and borne with, correction given and received among equals — in ways a faculty-to-student relationship, however good, cannot fully substitute for, precisely because peers occupy a position of mutual vulnerability faculty and students structurally do not share. A curriculum that recombines students into new groupings every semester for scheduling efficiency, optimizing again for the content-delivery logic 18-1 identified as the actual problem, forfeits this resource without appearing on any budget line as a loss.

3.8 What this proposal does not resolve

This lecture closes by naming honestly what a formation-centered redesign along these lines does not settle. It is more expensive in faculty time and harder to scale than a lecture-and-exam model, which raises a real question for institutions (including this one) operating with limited resources and a mandate to serve as many students as possible: how much of this design is achievable at scale without simply reproducing, at smaller scale, the same content-delivery incentives this lecture argues against. It is also harder to assess and credential in a way external bodies (denominations, accrediting agencies) can verify consistently, which is a genuine practical problem this lecture raises without solving. These are not objections this lecture treats as decisive against the proposal — Mark 3:14 and Galatians 4:19 do not become less true because a formation-centered curriculum is administratively harder to run — but a serious redesign has to reckon with them rather than assume Jesus's own method scales costlessly to an institution training hundreds of students with a handful of faculty.