Transformative Learning and Ministry Formation

Abstract

This article discusses the theory and practice of transformative learning in the particular context of ministry formation. Parochial ministry is exceedingly complex, it accesses and presses in on matters to do with selfhood, identity, vocation, relationships, life and death, celebrations and crises, leadership, service, spirituality, and religious forms and emphases. These issues of being can become tools for transformative learning. The article argues for a specialised form of training for curates such that they can become critically reflective learners, open to discourse and with genuine desire to negotiate new frames of reference for the sake of those to whom they minister and for their own religious and spiritual development. This work proposes that application of transformative learning theory, and in particular a hermeneutical model of transformative learning, can provide the specialised form of training necessary to form and train effective ministers for the Church of England.

keywords:

• transformative learning
• Mezirow
• curacy training
• hermeneutical model
• humility

Notes on contributor

Neville Emslie has been Ministry Development Officer in the diocese of Canterbury since 2008. Previously he was Principal of the School of Ministry Knox College in Dunedin, New Zealand. He is presently writing a PhD dissertation on ‘Emotional Intelligence and Anglican Clergy’ through Warwick University.

Notes

1 “Experience” here is an undelineated or undefined event, a general happening.

2 “Text” here is part of the experience that is circumscribed for analysis, personal interaction and critical reflection.

3 Innumerable blogs indicate many curates see themselves as “apprentice” ministers, presumably this is the message they receive through their initial theological education.

4 So Tilley et al.; “the classic Anglican model is for the newly ordained deacon to be located within a training parish and to be licensed as a curate to learn from working alongside a training incumbent … the apprenticeship model of clergy training” (2011, 289).