THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION OF THE NIGERIAN BAPTIST CONVENTION

THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION IN NIGERIAN BAPTIST CONVENTION;
A NEED FOR PARADIGM SHIFT.
[By Revd. Oladele Kolade, Pastor Barnawa Baptist Church Kaduna]
The Nigerian Baptist convention is considered the second largest Baptist convention affiliating with the Baptist world alliance and the 3rd largest in the world after the Southern Baptist convention USA and National Baptist convention USA. More than 6million people/parishioners are estimated to be regularly worshipping in the various local churches of the NBC across Nigeria. To provide adequate leadership for this parishioners, the NBC operates 9 theological training centers for pastors, the largest being the Nigerian Baptist seminary in Ogbomosho which grants 1st degree, masters and doctoral degree. Ogbomosho seminary has been in existence for more than 100 years and is at the forefront of providing theological training for Christian leaders in Nigeria and beyond. As laudable as this vision of the NBC to provide quality theological education for her pastors is, it will be a serious error for the Baptist family in Nigeria not to re-evaluate the vision.
This paper is therefore an attempt to open an evaluatary conversation on our theological education, encouraging the whole convention family to look at this aspect of our ministry work in retrospect and prospect. In doing this, I want to define the confine of this exercise, setting this conversation in four blocks, namely:
 The concern of our theological education.
 The content of our theological education.
 The context of our theological education.
 The challenges of our theological education.
Evaluating our theological education system, within these four blocks, I will attempt this investigation using 4As model of anecdote, analysis, application and action.
CONCERN: After more than 100 years of offering theological training /education, we should be able to sit down and ask ourselves our focus, purpose, and ministry agenda for offering the various theological courses that we are offering in our various theological training centers. Does the education we foster lead learners and their teachers on the spiritual journey? Have we collected data on leaders we’ve produced so far from our theological training centers? Does what we see in the lives and ministries of our product in tandem with our concerns and purposes? Have we not joined the post – modernity generation in the acceptance of “whatever”? Can we say that our students are spiritually different because of their learning experience? “Teaching is about making some kind of dent in the world so the world is different than it was before we practice our craft. Knowing clearly what kind of dent you want to make in the world means you must continuously ask yourself the most fundamental evaluative question of all what effect am I having on students and their learning?” (Brookfield 1990, 18 – 19). With my own observation, what I consider as a part of the dilemma is the reality that we lack clarity in terms of what we really want to produce. We have played to the clamoring audience who has told us what our students must be and so we have shaped our teaching by lesser values. The focus of our theological training should be a congruence of the mind, the heart and the spirit. Our focus and purpose should be the theological education that seeks to provide integration, spiritual formation, and communal formation. Prof. Fred Casmir says “if we educate man’s mind and improve his intellect with all the scientific knowledge men have discovered and do not educate the heart in bringing it under the influence of God’s word, the man is dangerous” (Casmir 1995 73 – 80). The spiritual formation is as much a dimension of other aspects of theological education as a specific focus of concern. It is not enough for our seminaries to institute specific program to speak to the increasing demand for personal transformation on occasional basis, it is possible to see personal spiritual formation as “capstone” of every part of our teaching. Just as Palmer posits that “to learn is to face transformation and to know the truth we must follow it with our lives” (Palmer 1993 40 -43).
Again, is the fact that our theological education must seek to produce denominational leaders who are not only spiritually formed but also communally formed. We must produce leaders who will see themselves as God’s gift to the covenantal community in learning to value the needs and contribution of others and think theologically about togetherness. One of the reasons why we see a lot of our leaders not embracing cooperative programs of the convention is the lack of communal formation right from the time of their theological training. If we set a dichotomy between rational, effective and volitional education and the spiritual formation, then we dis- engage the earlier from the central source of learning.
CONTENT - It is our concern that will determine our content. We need to critically examine our theological content to see if they are truly sound and relevant to the contemporary needs of our churches. The content of our theological program must not be detached from the needs of our congregation. The seminary must collaborate with the local churches in developing curriculum for our theological program. If we are not just after academic excellence, we need to unpack our content and reorganize a lot of them to make them address real issues on the field. I really don’t know how the current content of our theological education adequately addresses the issues of spiritual warfare, socio, economic, and political needs and situation of our time, environmental/ climate changes, the challenges of Information Technology, globalization, urbanization, and the global problem of HIV/AIDS, global social, economic and political environment and the threats of post modernism?
CONTEXT: If there is any thing we are to seriously look into, I think it is the aspect of how to relate our theological understanding to the environment of our ministry. Theology must be done in a particular socio, economic and political context. To be relevant in ministry I must be able to understand the place/environment of ministry and to be able to address existential issues affecting my people. Our theological institution must show the way by first making the seminary learning environment a mini community of faith where there is conscious attempt to help student rightly understand the environment and integrate themselves well into it.
Our theological educators must update their teaching methodology and make their teaching practically relevant to today’s needs and challenges. I want to propose that our theological educators themselves should have some amount of pastoral experience. Sometimes some of the theological propositions in the classrooms do not work in the field. The person that will teach you what you are to apply in your church must have practicalised his theological, administrative or counseling idea on a concrete local church situation before. Our educators should know what is going on in our local assembly so as to be able to help their students in a more practical, realistic way. Our students must also be developed through relationship of care and mentoring. Our teaching should not just focus on developing academic competencies but rather fostering of personal development within the communal setting. A surrounding supportive and safe “people environment” is integral to learner’s transformation. All phases of learning process are nurtured by corporate care setting. Our seminaries should develop mentoring system where alongside with academic programs student can be mentored by faculty members and “successful” senior pastors from the larger faith community.
There are also real issues from our ministry environment we need to understand as denominational leaders and these must be factored into our theological understanding and conversation. Our theology must deal with concrete situations. We have to understand the socio, political and economic situations of our people and time. We have to understand our national setting within the global happenings. Our teaching and preaching must address important issues of life like HIV/AIDS, politics, economic issues, environmental issues like pollution, deforestation etc, globalization, information technology (e.g. internet saga), and cultural issues e.t.c.
Our theology, in order to be contextually relevant, must address issues of culture, identity, social, gender, economic and political issues. How can we forge theology that can adequately deal with our context in which the social, economic and political structures are in a state of disarray, unable to close the gap between the rich and the poor and to solve the problems created by economic and technological dependence? Unfortunately, the way I look at our theology today, it seem it’s seriously detached from all these realities of our time and instead seriously concentrating on “vague”, irrelevant issues that does not rightly address our people’s real problem. Our “orthodoxy” must address transcendental, metaphysical issues of eternity; it must also speak to the existential practical issues of our time and setting. Rene Padilla says “The only theology that the bible knows is a functional theology, that is to say, a theology in dialogue with the concrete reality, a theology in the service of praxis. The only way to live an authentic Christian life is to take seriously Jesus Christ’s incarnation” (In Torres in Fabella, eds; 1978:213).
CHALLENGES: we can not run away from the fact that we are grappling with a number of challenges threatening ministry delivery of ours theological institutions. We need a bold approach to deal with these multifaceted challenges. The Baptist family of the NBC must come together and proffer unbiased, objective and realistic solutions to the problems our theological institutions are facing.
Funding – Bulk of the money generated by the convention goes into funding our theological training centers. I must admit that no amount of money invested in leadership development can be too much. I must also here state that funding leadership development at the expense of the other core mission works will also be a misplaced priority. We currently have 9 theological institutions spread across Nigeria. I will propose that we employ the tactics of economy of large scale by reducing the number of our theological institutions to 3[spreading them across our geo-political zones] and transforming the other campuses to other ministry projects that can equally benefit the communities like hospitals or mini campuses for the Bowen University. Our theological institutions must also come up with pragmatic approach to internally generate their own fund so that they do not too much on what the convention will give. There are international funding agencies that can assist theological institutions on a number of project ranging from scholarship to development of library. We need a more aggressive approach to generating fund to run our seminaries. It is very unfortunate that in this age of information technology, most of our theological institution do not have functional, and up to date website to project what they are doing to the international community. The theological institutions should also intensify their effort more on partnering with the local churches and the Baptist professionals in funding of the theological institutions. Seminary training is the work of all of us.
Brain Drain – It is observed that we don’t have enough qualified faculty members. Most of our great theologians will not want to work at our theological institutions partly because of very poor incentives. If we trim down the number of our institutions, we can enlarge the faculty, reduce the running cost and improve the incentives given to the lecturers. The theological lecturers must be fairly treated like their secular counterparts teaching at the universities. We must frankly ask ourselves how much a PhD holder in our seminaries is earning compared with their counterpart at the Bowen University.
Accreditation – I remember while in Ghana doing my degree program, the seminary lecturers at Ghana Baptist Theological who graduated from Ogbomosho Seminary had the shock of their lives when the National Accreditation Board of Ghana refused to recognize their master degree from Ogbomosho. They had to do another degree with the Spurgeon College. This was so because we failed to update the accreditation of our seminary. I think only very few theological institutions in African can match our seminary in terms of structure, library and faculty. So what is making us to be far behind in the issue of accreditation?
Detachment from the local church – The Seminary seem detached from the local churches. The seminary must seek to partner with the local churches around in meaningful, practical, ministry interaction. Our supervised ministry program is “outdated”. We need to better engage our churches and pastors in fully developing our students. Most of the students are sent to village churches where they can not be properly supervised and some unfortunately wrecked their faith in the process. What is then the essence of the supervised ministry when the student is largely on his own experimenting on innocent villagers? For those serving in the city centers, proper feed back is not gotten from the pastors under whom they are serving.
Disconnect – We have 9 theological institutions across Nigeria with common purpose and agenda but I do not know the relationship between them. With my observation, our theological institutions are not relating well with one another. How can we have 9 theological institutions that are not cross breeding ideas? It is even alleged that the graduates from Kaduna seminary are not admitted for masters degree programs of the Ogbomosho Seminary. This problem of disconnect among our theological institutions should be a matter of great concern to us all.
It is high time we sit up and forge a better approach to training our denominational leaders. The various issues raised here should be looked at objectively by the entire convention family. I pray that the Lord will give us wisdom and courage to do the right thing about bettering the structure and the delivery of our theological educational system.