The Organic Intellectual

Why the Pastor-Contextual-Theologian is the Future of Church Leadership in N. America

Reading this interview with Sarah Coakley, from a decade ago (available HERE), reminds me of the changing role of intellectual leadership in transitional times. When the social world is in flux, institutions do not adapt easily and their leaders seek to preserve the institution. Seeking to hold onto positions of power, the institution’s intellectual leaders get caught up in the prior intellectual habits. As a result, they do not address the new cultural situation from other than a place of “power over,” even if they have lost the positional power in the culture. Meanwhile, on the ground, in the daily struggles of life, intellectuals emerge who are forced to think through issues as they encounter them in the daily life of congregations. Living in the trenches, they are forced to address new questions and sort out new ideas on the fly from the place of struggle. It is from here, where we have no choice, that we must forge ahead into the new challenges.

The famed Italian Marxist political theorist Antonio Gramsci called these new thinker/leaders “organic intellectuals.” An organic intellectual, according to Gramsci, is less a contemplative thinker than an organizer, constructor, permanent persuader, who actively participates in social life and helps bring to theoretical articulation the moves needed to go forward (Terry Eagleton’s summary of Gramsci on this in Ideology:An Introduction is helpful pp116-123). In the words of Gramsci, they enable the emerging social classes to form some homogenous self-consciousness from which to move forward (Selections from Prison Notebooks 1971 3-23).

The N. American church, in my opinion, is in a time where we need these new kind of organic intellectuals. I’ll call them pastor contextual theologians.

If we take a casual look around the internet, social media, popular church conferences, or the attendance at an AAR academic meeting, we see that our church leaders have generally defaulted to being:

1.) Overly Pragmatic and Devoid of Theological Reflection. Often the people leading our churches are developing ideas and calling for practice that is devoid of theological testing. Therefore the solutions are imbalanced and not formed from historical wisdom (many times repeating the mistakes of the past). These leaders have little access to “peer review” discussions. The dominance of publishing houses in the education of Christian leaders, versus schools of training for theology, and the loss of ecclesial structure around many churches has exacerbated the proclivity of such pragmatic leaders.

OR:

2.) “Ivory Tower” Centric – Deep into Theological Reflection but unfortunately held captive to the previous regime – Christendom and its structures. Many of our best thinkers have been in the academic system from the time they were undergrads. They get employed at an academic institution and become part of the academic bubble. They are not involved in the daily struggles of ministry and congregational formation. They become highly specialized in their work. And although they can help us, they often lack the on the ground experience in church life amidst the organic struggles of Christian life and witness in a culture.

I argue we need pastoral theologians who have their feet in both worlds and take the best of 1.) and 2.) and produce theology that can move practice forward towards the challenges of the social situation emerging. These pastor contextual theologians are in the best sense the organic intellectuals for the church moving forward.

Such pastor contextual theologians will need or be characterized by the following:

a.) We Will Not Leave the Work of Church Life. We will do the work of theology, but we will remain in day to day leadership of churches from whence our theological work shall emerge.

b.) We Will Be Generalists. We will not be specialists ala Ph.D’s but instead have a broad enough academic training to be able to work cross the disciplines within theology to organically speak to the situations as they arise in our church context. To me this should be the role of the doctoral programs in seminaries.

c.). Grace and respect for each other. There is no place for the intellectual snobbery/arrogance of the academy or the anti-intellectualism that sometimes inhabits the pastorate.

d.) Publishing Outlets. We need places to publish which escape the specialist syndrome of some academic journals. Yet we need recognizable places for good pastoral scholarship, peer review and publishing. There are some of these places emerging, even among denominations. This is promising.

e. Theological forums. We need forums to seriously engage issues confronting us from our local contexts which denominations and/or publishing houses have been too reticent to address because of political/financial pressures. Such forums will make space for presenting of papers and productive pastor-theologian interaction.  

f.  Pastoral Theologians staying put in their cities and towns. We certainly need pastoral/contextual theologians in the seminaries, especially the seminary of the future. But we also need such contextual thinkers leading and training leaders in context in every city and town.  This is where the future shall be birthed. These can be extension sites of seminaries, training cohorts for denominations, or just engaged churches as local centers for leadership training.

g. New Kinds of Educational Programs. The Ph.D. is a valuable degree but has its limits. It over specializes. It is built for academic track. The typical D Min has not been rigorous enough. We need bridging degrees. I see my own Doctorate program at Northern Seminary (see it HERE)  as filling this role. There are others as well. We take someone at the level of a Masters degree and train for engaging organic issues, in their church and neighborhood, for a contextual extending of the gospel.

The times they are a-changing (thanks professor Bob Dylan). The landscape of clergy education, pastor training, seminaries, are all changing and adjusting on the fly. We need a new kind of leader in our churches, denominations and seminaries doing the work of engaging the context faithfully with the gospel of Jesus Christ. What say you?