Dear Mr. Webber,
Some friends of mine came home very excited after they attended a seminar you gave on your “Build the Designer” approach to leadership development. They gave me the literature they’d picked up and urged me to read it. When I settled in my easy chair it was with an attitude of “OK., let me get my mind around this model as it clearly excites some of us”.
First of all, I appreciate your humility when describing actual results to date. I understand you are utilizing this model in your church and, according to my friends’ reports, it is being utilized by some in such diverse places as Iran and China. However, you did not actually claim that the model has proven to be more successful than other models. You are also very right when you state that “leadership development is highly complex and very little understood”.
Having said that, however, I’m afraid that your paper left me disappointed, and that for the following reasons:
Please don’t build your model in contradistinction to a straw man
Your “4 P” characterization of academic institutions consists of little more than sloganeering and sharp contrasts. You state, for instance, that the old goal of education was “academic capacity” by teaching courses related to biblical knowledge, something you dismiss rather cavalierly: “Of course this did not prepare students well for the practical demands of ministry”, in contradistinction to your “new goal” of “building the whole person”. In truth, all the institutions where I was trained (both Christian and secular ones) sought much more than “academic capacity”, something you yourself admit: “Many seminaries and Bible schools have recognized this (i.e., that information transfer by itself does not build spiritual life, character and practical ministry capacity) and are complementing their classroom agendas (information) with a variety of intentional spiritual relational and experiential dynamics (transformational).” You then go on to describe your “new paradigm” of spiritual, relational, experiential and instructional balance. My question is, “where is the genuinely “new” element?”
Allow me to share an old, 1970s paradigm of teaching. When I was a student at Prairie Bible College we had to attend classes, to be sure. However, there were also daily prayer and intersession sessions for the world at large (where I received my call to the Middle East). There was one-on-one mentoring/discipling by faculty members. We went on regular visits with staff members to do street and prison ministry. Various staff families took it upon themselves to be “surrogate parents” for lonely students. The school organized internships with churches—my internship featured hugely in my decision NOT to go into the pastorate. If that little Bible school operated that way back in the 1970s what, I repeat, is the essentially “new” element in your model?
Please don’t think that Prairie is unique. None of the schools of higher education I have attended in the West (6, not including 2 universities in the Middle East) nor any of the institutions where I currently teach (5) have “mere information” as their goal. All share your goals of multiplication, holistic development, giving the right people the right training, the provision of flexible options, close liaison with local churches, life-long learning, and effective evaluation. To suggest otherwise is simply not true.
Please don’t give me simplistic, unsubstantiated analysis
The fact that Wales today, in spite of its revival over a century ago, is “one of the most secular countries in Europe” (is that even true? Proof please!) really due to some kind of leadership problem? Are you actually suggesting that if the Welch had had the opportunity to embrace your “new model” the revival would still be rocking Wales?
You state that your approach is “a clear and accurate biblical model” of leadership training. However, your claim that, “biblically, the primary unit of leader development is the local church or cluster of churches” is completely unsubstantiated, as is virtually everything else you say.
You makes much of the fact that yours is, in fact, the model Jesus Christ used—and is thus ideal model. The anachronism seems lost on you, inasmuch as the church was not founded until Pentecost. A much stronger case could be made for Paul’s roving missionary team. I don’t, in fact, understand why you don’t use him as your model, as the peripatetic apostle seems to fit your paradigm better than our Lord. As for me, I see multiple models of leadership training in the Bible.
Your statement that the only three things Jesus came to do while here on earth was to die on the cross, to proclaim the kingdom and reveal the Father, and to build a team of emerging leaders (“And that’s all he did”) is so simplistic, I urge you to take a course in Christology. Could it be that Christ was as much–possibly even more–interested in fulfilling the law on our behalf during the course of his life than in “leadership development”?
Another interesting-sounding, yet unsubstantiated claim or yours is your intriguing “law of decreasing relearns” which you describe in your parody of the “train the trainer” approach as follows: “the effectiveness of the training decreases, often quickly and dramatically with each passing on”.
I can personally attest that this is not necessarily so. I happen to be involved internationally in the training of trainers in the area of language acquisition. Some of those I have trained have turned out to be better trainers than I am, just as I am better in some areas of applied linguistics than some of those who trained me. By encouraging the trainers to take my constantly evolving material, apply it to their context and develop it further (including dropping what doesn’t work in their world) my own material has been hugely enriched.
And how accurate are your claims about the current “crisis in the quantity and quality of leaders” we are supposedly experiencing? Could things actually be getting worse in certain places and better elsewhere? What are the trends? Local statistics please! Please don’t make wide-ranging claims for your model on the basis of unsubstantiated generalities.
Furthermore, to suggest that in more traditional methods of teaching/learning leaders are not taught to design but taught to repeat and that their own developmental processes are not nurtured “so that they turn disillusioned to the next outsider who comes along promoting his new and improved” method is an insulting parody.
And that leads me to my next point:
Please don’t insult me
You insinuate that leaders who went through more traditional training programs did not turn out healthy (“we must build healthy leaders” italics in original; “A new goal – the healthy Christian leader” ). You also suggest that many leaders trained in the old ways “may accomplish much but never amount to much”.
Of course we are all acquainted with major failures in leadership. Nevertheless, your caricatures are pretty off-putting for someone who has had the privilege of working with lots of wonderful, often older, godly Christian leaders—men in academia, the pastorate, mission leaders—healthy in body, soul and spirit, men who have amounted to much, whom I greatly respect and who were trained in very traditional ways. Sadly, you appear not to have had the joy of meeting such men.
Your paragraph on vertical and lateral thinking is also quite insulting. None of the numerous teaching institution I have attended or the various schools where I am an adjunct faculty just keep “digging deeper and deeper to make it a better hole”. We are constantly reevaluating and rethinking content, delivery, student-facilitator interaction, internships, etc. All are as interested as you are in providing a wholistic spiritual environment, an experiential context and a relational web—and are quite intentional as to how they get there. ( Note: I recently asked my daughter why she would repeat her year at Prairie Bible College if she had to. Answer: “Because of the wonderful sense of community…”).
You, however, seem keen to use the most derogatory terms when referring to more traditional forms of education: they are “disconnected academic institutions” with “inherent limitations” who “indoctrinate in training materials” people whom “we are likely to seat in neat rows behind desk and lecture interminably” using “merely a set of curriculum along with preformed implementation strategies” with “some token attention” paid to other things. And when all is said and done, we may even “forbid the poor indigenous leader from ever changing the program, requiring them to teach exactly the same thing exactly the same way”. Please don’t compare the best of yourself with the worst of others…
You go so far as to suggest that other forms of training don’t provide those “Aha” moments as students suddenly realize the relevance of something or other to their situation.
Please don’t feed me your holier-than-thou saccharine spirituality
“In the new paradigm, union with Christ, the cross, suffering, holiness and dependency on the Holy Spirit are at the center of all our leader development. The Person of Jesus Christ is the Beginning and End of all Christian leadership and leader development”. Mr. Webber, please give me a break…
I, for one, will need much more from you before I am prepared to place your notions on personal interaction, mutual exploration, coaching, “resourcing”, networking, development, etc. on the same page as the printing press.
Forgive me for asking: did you have a bad seminary experience that you haven’t gotten over yet?
Sincerely,
Peter Pikkert
