Compare Classroom and Extension
Education
for Training New Christian Leaders
Copyright
© 2009 by George Patterson and Galen Currah
May be copied and published freely.
This document compares traditional classroom instruction with extension education that includes mentoring. Mentoring is defined as “training new leaders in the way that Jesus and his apostles did, by listening before instructing, planning for immediate application, assigning Bible and other readings to meet urgent needs of leaders' flocks, praying with them, and empowering them to train others in turn.”
Four urgent reasons to compare classroom with extension training include these:
1. In order to enable churches to multiply in a normal, biblical way, and to do all the ministries that the New Testament requires of a church, fields without churches and experienced leaders normally need some kind of extension training that includes mentoring for new pastors and cell leaders.
2. The comparison in this document shows why top educators seek an effective ratio between classroom and mentoring. This ratio varies as churches mature. To multiply churches or cells effectively, wise trainers use both methods.
Keep an Edifying
Ratio
Between both Kinds of Education
3. Both methods can impart the inspired Word, prepare leaders and exalt Christ. Both methods can prove to be essential, depending on current circumstances and the levels of development of churches and pastoral students.
4. Traditional theological education often exalts lecture so much that it overlooks mentoring, even when mentoring is sorely needed. Some educators lack experience in mentoring in the way Jesus and His apostles practiced it. This document creates awareness of the need to use both training methods.
1. Physical Educational Factors
Extension Training. Mentoring new leaders is time-consuming. Paul mentored Timothy and Titus by spending much time with them and giving them fatherly care. When they matured in the faith and outgrew their need for such intensive care, Paul left them in key cities to train other leaders. They passed on what they had learned from Paul to newer leaders. Just as newborn babies need much personal attention, new leaders and new churches need mentoring until they are doing what the New Testament requires for them.
Classroom Training. Classroom teaching is time-effective in that an instructor can teach more people at a time. It works well for mature leaders who no longer need intensive care, and whose flocks are already doing the things the New Testament requires of a church. Few churches ever reach this level of maturity without receiving some mentoring from an experienced pastor or instructor.
Extension Training. Location is not important as long as participants maintain two-way communication.
Classroom Training. Teachers often deal with a large group of students and prefer a classroom designed for one-way communication.
Extension Training. Trainees form a circle or some other arrangement that allows good interaction. When modeling skills, participants walk or ride together, or they sit around a table as at the Last Supper.
Classroom Training. Students often all face the same way, seeing mainly the backs of other students’ heads.
Extension Training. Where mentoring is the primary method of training new leaders, such as among those who use Train And Multiply® or Paul-Timothy studies, sessions are held less frequently, and students do more reading and fieldwork between sessions. Sometimes, mentoring sessions are held every two weeks or so. Participants who lead very new churches meet more often, and those who live far away, or for whom transportation is difficult, meet less often.
Classroom Training. Classes are often held daily for regular students in institutional degree programs. In a particular academic course, sessions are commonly held two or three times a week.
2. General Acceptance and Enrollment
Extension Training. Mentoring has limited acceptance as a vital part of Evangelical theological education. Relatively few educators mentor in a disciplined way or teach the value of mentoring. Fortunately, a healthy trend is moving toward mentoring the way Jesus and His apostles practiced it. Observation reveals that in movements where churches multiply, someone mentors new leaders in some way, often informally, as need arises.
Classroom Training. For training mature leaders, classroom instruction is normally accepted as the main method.
2b. Requirements for Enrollment and Field Work:
Extension Training. Instructors train potential leaders who meet biblical qualifications for ‘elders’ who are spiritually mature and who, for example, keep their children in order. Instructors normally do not add prerequisites to biblical requirements, lest they deny pastoral training to some to whom God has given the pastoral gift. Normally, a mentor’s trainees lead a flock of some kind or have a definite, current ministry. In a pioneer field, a flock may begin with one’s family and grow into a church or cell. Trainees put into practice immediately, with their flock or ministry group, what their instructors help them plan and prepare.
Classroom Training. Often, in traditional Bible Institutes in mission fields, educators enroll single young people who are not proven in service and, thus fail to meet a biblical requirement for a shepherding elder. They are not mature enough to start a church or lead a group that includes mature heads of families. Graduates become pastors, because they have studied a certain number of years for a diploma that affirms little more than that they could repeat memorized material for examinations.
Extension Training. Instructors keep their training sessions small enough to listen and respond to each trainee. They help each one plan what his flock will do the next few weeks. Christ occasionally took three of the twelve apart for special counsel.
Classroom Training. Teachers normally seek larger classes. Floor space sometimes determines class size rather than effective learning dynamics.
2d. Duration of Training done by Instructors:
Extension Training. Trainers continue mentoring until new leaders and churches no longer need it. The interaction is too time-consuming to continue indefinitely. Christ phased out of training the twelve, as Paul did with Titus whom he left in Crete to instruct others (Titus 1:5). Paul also left Timothy in Ephesus to do the same (2 Tim. 2:2). Once a leader can carry on ministry without a mentor’s help, or once a church is functioning well, mentors phase out their personal interaction. Further training may take the form of lectures or workshops. Mentoring may be resumed to deal with a special need such as a change in ministry, or a personal situation such as when Paul wrote Philemon, a house church leader, about a matter of slavery.
Classroom Training. Degree and course requirements, class schedules and semester calendars determine the duration of the teaching, often without reference to the maturity of a student’s church or ministry development.
3. Relationships and Organization
3a. Relationship between Instructor and Student:
Extension Training. A good mentor shows loving care and interest for each trainee. Paul shed tears for new leaders in training (Acts 20:31).
Classroom Training. An instructor’s main concern is normally less personal, focusing on how well students grasp subject matter.
3b. Relationships between Students:
Extension Training. As seen among Jesus’ disciples and in Paul’s apostolic bands, wise instructors enable interaction between trainees who serve one another and participate together in ministry. Students should not work alone. They should travel by twos or in small groups to minister while they learn.
Classroom Training. Instructors give only minor attention to interactive conversation except for occasional questions, special events and to keep order.
3c. Interaction with Churches:
Extension Training. Instructors train leaders as part of normal church life. After Pentecost, leaders trained new leaders while raising up and shepherding congregations. Apostolic bands trained new workers while traveling to sow the seed in new areas. Wherever the apostles made disciples, churches multiplied. Students can lead cells that are little churches within bigger ones. In New Testament times, churches met in homes and were part of an interactive, citywide ‘church’ that was a network of tiny house churches or cells.
Classroom Training. Education easily becomes ingrown and lacks balance, when instructors teach in an institution isolated from the rest of the Body of Christ. Even when held in a church building, classroom teaching can be quite disconnected from the life of church members.
3d. Interaction with the Larger Community and Society in General:
Extension Training. Instructors keep new leaders in touch with current events that affect their work. John the Baptist’s imprisonment and death, for example, profoundly affected Jesus’ disciples. Paul’s companions were constantly affected by community events such as the riot in Ephesus. Instructors make sure that their students’ deal immediately with community matters that relate to their faith and morals.
Classroom Training. Traditional instructors often shield students from outside influences. Thus, pastors-in-training have little or no involvement with outside society, and prepare only for ministry in the far future, often with only a vague idea of how they will apply God’s Word.
3e. Trainer’s View of Students:
Extension Training. A trainer’s image of a leader-in-training includes hands to serve, feet to spread the gospel and heart to obey Jesus in love, that is, a balanced body. Instructors consider trainees to be “student-workers” or “apprentice pastors” who serve in a ministry from the beginning of their training. Instructors help trainees take on more and more responsibility, as Paul did, while they grow in knowledge and skill.
Classroom Training. Traditional Bible Institutes and seminaries often give more attention to scholarship. Instructors expect their trainees to be good students, but not necessarily servant-leaders. Teaching sometimes aims exclusively at students’ ears and brains.
Extension Training. Mentoring can be done informally and spontaneously, or in a highly formal manner with scheduled sessions and policies as firmly structured as those of classroom training. To label mentoring or extension training always as “non-formal” gives an erroneous impression.
In some extension programs, pastors receive formal training by being mentored for two or three years, or until their churches are doing all the ministries that the New Testament requires. Instructors sometimes consult a menu of core modules focusing on essential church activities, choosing subjects in any order that a new church needs them. A mentor can use such a menu to monitor both the student’s and his church’s progress, and can award certificates for specified levels of church development.
Some instructors prefer the term “coaching” to the word “mentoring.” Both words imply hands-on training. Jesus and Paul did not train new leaders in the same way they taught the public. Once Jesus taught the crowds by the sea where His classroom was a beach and his platform was a boat. However, immediately afterwards, he mentored a smaller group of new leaders on a hill they climbed and where he sat with them to converse.
Some educators have assumed that that mentoring is for students who have a problem, or only to be an occasional, unscheduled chat in a teacher’s office or in a hallway. The fact that mentoring emphasizes immediate, practical application of what one learns should not lead anyone to assume that mentoring must be less formal than classroom instruction.
Classroom Training. Formality is consistent; classrooms and degrees require a formal, fixed approach to education. More emphasis is put on cognitive content and standard examinations than on application in an actual church or cell.
Extension Training. Participants try to serve in harmony as a team or interactive body, as Scripture requires in 1 Corinthians 12, Romans 12 and Ephesians 4:11-16. A mentor serves those who have other spiritual gifts while they serve him. Normally instructors work closely with a church or network of churches, or an educational arm of the churches or mission agency focused on churches.
Classroom Training. Educators are organized in departments for the sake of specialization. Imbalance can occur if they isolate their teaching from other New Testament ministries, or if they isolate their educational institution from churches.
3h. Churches’ Participation in Curriculum Development and Learning Activities:
Extension Training. Instructors seek to help the congregations that provide an arena for training leaders. In New Testament times, churches sent out apostles to make disciples in neglected areas, training the new leaders in the process. Their pastoral training curriculum was integrated with dynamic church life.
Classroom Training. Church participation in a seminary or Bible Institute’s classroom training is usually nil or perfunctory, especially if educators ask pastors merely to recommend a theological student. Educators also weaken their students’ application of material, if they wait too long to implement internships with a church.
Extension Training. Educators view team ministry as the New Testament norm, not merely an option. Every passage that describes how to use spiritual gifts requires cooperation. Trainers ask other mentors to help students with special needs. A trainer and students serve as a team. Teams are temporary and task-focused, not permanent; no permanent apostolic team appears in the New Testament.
Classroom Training. Instructors seldom teach as a team, and seldom require teamwork by students as they prepare lessons or do ministry.
4. Recognition of Students’ Work
4a. Recognition of Achievement:
Extension Training. Educators recognize pastoral or evangelistic achievement. Assessment of learning depends mainly on results in ministry. Teaching is said to have been good only if the students do good ministry. Paul the apostle did not rely on written credentials; neither did he condemn them.
Classroom Training. Instructors praise students who do well on tests and acknowledge achievement with diplomas, degrees, certificates or public honors.
Extension Training. Instructors help students to aim for effective service for Christ and His church by obeying Him in love (John 14:15; Heb. 13:17).
Classroom Training. Instructors urge students to aim for good grades and, although inadvertently, to compete for honors. Competition can also lead to rivalry, which is listed in Scripture as a wicked work of the flesh (Gal. 5:19-21).
Extension Training. Educators normally are not concerned with professional credentials. Field practitioners who value results higher than formal credentials seek first to recognize skill acquisition.
Classroom Training. Institutional recognition opens doors for paid positions by conferring credentials that are widely accepted. Mentoring, even when producing excellent results, often goes unrecognized by educational institutions.
5. Objectives,
Commitments
and Responsibility for Training Leaders
5a. Vision and Long Range Purpose:
Extension Training. Instructors aim for the same results as the apostles had; wherever the apostles mentored new leaders, churches multiplied.
Classroom Training. Educators often aim for such ideals as academic excellence, increased enrollment, growth of the institution and its positive image.
Extension Training. Student-leaders commit to shepherding a ministry from the outset of their training. They shepherd at least their own families, often forming the core of a new cell group or church. Mentors require them to have a ministry from the beginning, but only require that they do what their level of training allows. For example, students may not preach sermons while still taking child’s steps as new leaders.
Classroom Training. Students normally commit themselves consciously to completing units of study or a degree program. In some programs, they commit to internships that are quite disconnected from classroom learning.
Extension Training. Instructors listen or in some other way learn first what a student is doing with his church or people, to detect current needs and ministry opportunities. Mentoring includes modeling the corresponding skills. Wise trainers integrate fieldwork with teaching the Word, history, doctrine and other relevant disciplines. A wise mentor also works in cooperation with other instructors who have skills in areas that he lacks. Mentors help students plan activities for their churches or ministry groups, and hold them accountable to follow through.
Classroom Training. Teachers are generally more committed to preparing thoroughly their lessons, assign ample reading that is relevant to the subject, and communicate in a way that ensures understanding. They feel satisfied when their students get good grades.
Extension Training. Inexperienced leaders benefit greatly from mentoring. Also, extension training is particularly useful for those who have responsibilities that hinder studying full time, who are making a career change or who are launching a ministry or project for which they lack experience.
Classroom Training. Institutional education is most effective for those who require mastery of vast amounts of systematic knowledge.
5e. Ability to Resist False Doctrine:
Extension Training. Training new leaders by mentoring is more common in newer mission fields where movements of church reproduction take place spontaneously, without extensive financial help and control from outsiders, also in churches in which small groups reproduce spontaneously. A fervent faith in Christ, awareness of the work of the Holy Spirit in people’s lives, and devotion to the Word of God almost universally characterize such movements. Mentoring in such contexts has an almost universal record of raising up faithful, Christ-centered teachers who are filled with the Holy Spirit. In such movements, the only common false doctrine is legalism, which is characteristic of such church planting movements no matter how new leaders are trained, because appreciation of God’s grace requires a degree of maturity and a working knowledge of His Word. In animistic cultures, it also takes time to abandon fetishes and superstitions, but no more time than what is common under traditionally trained leaders.
Classroom Training. Historically, traditional, academic, theological institutions have bred far more false doctrines that are non-biblical, excessively rationalistic, and dishonoring to Christ. In some countries, few seminaries teach the authority of the Word of God and fail to focus strongly on Jesus Christ. Especially in older seminaries and Christian colleges, teachers often spend much of their time correcting the errors of the previous generation of professors.
5f. The Kind of Leadership Expected of Trainees:
Extension Training. Good extension instructors evaluate leaders from their churches’ view. Instructors consider students to be leaders only if those students lead others. Simply teaching is not leading. A leader must move people from one point to another. This movement includes growth in Christ-like character and a corresponding increase in ministry involvement, serving others in a practical way. Good leaders initiate and continually improve the ministries that the New Testament requires of a church, and bring a high percentage of the members of a congregation into active service.
Classroom Training. Students who receive only classroom instruction often confuse leading with merely teaching. Therefore they lead few people in their churches into active ministry.
5g. Multiplication of Churches, Cells and the Mentoring Process Itself
Extension Training. Where the greatest need is to multiply churches or cells, instructors train in a way that new student-workers can imitate and pass on at once, training others who train others also. Jesus commanded His disciples to do only what they had seen Him do first in a way that they could easily imitate. Paul told the Corinthians to be imitators of him as he imitated Christ (1 Cor. 11.1). He trained Timothy and Titus in a chain reaction; one trained others who immediately began training still others (2 Tim. 2:2; Tit. 1:5). New leaders should begin almost from the beginning to train newer leaders in newer churches or cells. Jethro advised Moses in Exodus 18 along similar lines. Wise mentors “lower” theological education standards until they are simply biblical enough to enable healthy churches and cells to multiply.
Classroom Training. Multiplication in the 2 Timothy 2:2 sense is seldom a conscious purpose of one’s teaching. Thus, institutional training almost never integrates instruction with church multiplication, and often causes unhealthy, sterile churches as a result.
5h. Adaptation to Political and Economic Conditions:
Extension Training. For political reasons, roughly one-third of the world’s population has little or no access to institutional, pastoral training, so trainers must mentor them in secret.
Classroom Training. Institutional theological education adapts better to the following conditions. 1) Sufficient affluence to build campuses and pay salaries and tuition. 2) High enough student educational level to assimilate intensive input. 3) Enough well-established, well-financed churches to employ and benefit from professionally-trained clergy.
Extension Training. Mentoring new leaders is not usually a profitable source of income for instructors. Instructors rarely view mentoring by itself as a professional vocation; rather they regard it as one of several duties required of leaders by the New Testament. Pastors trained by mentoring normally consider mentoring newer pastors to be a normal, biblical, pastoral duty, the same as preaching, giving member care or serving Communion, for which they charge no fee.
Classroom Training. Because instructors often view teaching as the main duty of a salaried Christian leader, many consider teaching to be a viable source of income.
5j. Primary Responsibility for Training New Pastors:
Extension Training. Instructors aim for pastors or shepherding elders to take the main responsibility and initiative to train new leaders, including “apostles” who extend the movement into neglected areas (Eph. 4:11-12). A mission agency or educational program may provide guidelines, tools and some instructors, but should not take the primary training responsibility away from pastors.
Classroom Training. Faculty members of a traditional educational institution tend to assume the main responsibility for preparing mature Christian leaders. Sometimes Bible Institute and seminary faculty members lack pastoral gifting, and therefore produce preachers that are not pastors. Their students teach well but do not shepherd their flocks by leading them into the gift-based ministries required by the New Testament.
6. Teaching Methods and Equipment
6a. Criteria for Using Technology to Communicate:
Extension Training. Mentors model pastoral skills and other activities that new leaders can imitate and model for others, using only equipment that is available to trainees. Rapid church multiplication requires a “light baton.” Especially when training workers for a pioneer field, instructors use only those equipment and materials that provide an affordable and reproducible model.
Classroom Training. For training mature leaders, instructors often seek the latest and highest technology that budgets allow. The primary concern for selecting equipment is effective classroom communication, usually without considering whether the method is transferable to others in the students’ future ministry field.
Extension Training. Instructors emphasize modeling on-the-job pastoral skills, discipline and character. They respond at once to students’ ministry needs and opportunities, by observing, listening, encouraging and demonstrating skills. Such demonstration, if not possible in a church context, can take the form of role-plays. Jesus did not simply lecture, and did not teach leaders-in-training what they could learn for themselves. For example, He answered questions with questions such as “What do you read in the Law?” Interaction is evident in much of Jesus’ teaching, as He responded to questions and comments. Such interaction between instructor and student is especially important, if the student’s ministry or church is new.
Classroom Training. While lecturing, instructors do not normally encourage much interaction with or between students. Consequently, students lecture in their churches.
Extension Training. Training includes the modeling of skills and the holding of discussion sessions. In discussion sessions instructors normally do six things.
1. Pray for guidance.
2. Listen to each student’s report on work done and the condition of those whom they are mentoring, pastoring, discipling or serving in some other way.
3. Plan. Normally, a student’s plans flow from his report as the instructors asks him what he plans to do with the people he is serving and — often more importantly — what those folks will do. Plans are usually specific things to be done in the next week or two. Mentors often consult a menu that lists ministry options to facilitate planning.
4. Review studies completed.
5. Assign new studies. Normally these correspond to a student’s plans.
6. Pray for power to carry out the specific plans.
Classroom Training. Research and subject mastery, lesson objectives, organization of material and choice of learning exercises precede delivery. Instructors give more importance to their responsibility to communicate knowledge than to the student’s ability to pass it on immediately to others.
6d. Preparation of Teaching Content
Extension Training. Extensive preparation by the instructor often takes place after listening to a student’s report instead of before the training session. Thus, the instructor can deal with current needs of a student’s church or ministry opportunities.
An instructor can consult a menu and so teach in response to current needs of students or their churches. The trainer listens as students relate their church’s progress, and asks questions. Then, over the next week or two, the trainer often prepares studies to deal with the needs and ministry opportunities that students have reported.
Classroom Training. Instructors normally prepare class material and outlines before entering the classroom.
7. Applying Lesson
Content
and Order of Presentation
7a. Application of What Is Taught:
Extension Training. Instructors expect new leaders to apply their learning immediately to a life, family, society, cell or church.
Classroom Training. Instructors expect application but not immediately. They seldom apply their teaching to immediate ministry opportunities that students currently face. Often both students and teachers look forward only to a vague and far future application.
7b. Curriculum Taxonomy and Order in which Items Are Taught:
Extension Training. Instructors often categorize truths under verbs, and their module titles urge action. Mentors integrate their teaching content with church, community or family activities. Teaching modules balance action with abstraction. Instructors present doctrinal truths together with plans to edify the church body at its current stage of growth. They link abstract content to preparation for immediate tasks such as when Christ gave instruction to the 70 to evangelize Judean villages (Luke 10).
Classroom Training. Instructors often categorize truth under titles that use static, abstract nouns. They present material in a logical and analytical order, comparing similar concepts and listing them together. For example, a teaching unit might deal with all of God’s attributes, rather than focusing on one of them and using it to define tomorrow’s work plans, applying it at once to people’s lives.
Extension Training. Instructors integrate widely different disciplines and applications, focusing them all on the edification of a person, a project or a church body. Each of Paul’s epistles taught a variety of doctrines bundled together but related to the current life of a congregation or individual. Instructors verify first what a particular student’s church or ministry requires to be learned.
Classroom Training. Instructors limit instruction normally to an area that is well-defined in analytical and logical terms. They relate a subject to other disciplines only when a logical presentation requires it. Focus from an intellectual viewpoint is often sharper because it is limited to one area.
Extension Training. A decentralized structure’s greater flexibility facilitates holistic education tied closely to field ministry. Instructors deal in the same session with whatever disciplines help to edify students and their churches or whomever they serve.
Classroom Training. Sessions tend to focus on one area of cognitive truth.
7e. Method of Selecting Content:
Extension Training. Instructors often consult a menu. Students select content from different sources as required by current situations. Jesus said that a good teacher in the Kingdom of God is like a householder who brings forth treasures from his storehouse, things both new and old (Matt. 13:52). Extensive preparation of material often follows a session, in response to students’ reports of needs or ministry opportunities.
Classroom Training. Instructors prepare material ahead of class time and normally limit it to one subject, following closely a logical outline.
8. Materials and Sources
Extension Training. Instructors use any relevant material. If instructors write, edit or compile materials, they often present these in a menu format, so that new leaders can easily select options that will edify their flock at its current stage of development and need. For example, the 65 small textbooks of the Train & Multiply® pastoral training program is keyed to a menu, so that students and trainers can easily select material written specifically for a current need, problem or ministry opportunity of a student’s new church or cell.
Classroom Training. An instructor’s teaching and reading assignments often follow one or more textbooks written specifically for the subject, with little emphasis on options.
8b. Authority and Foundations:
Extension Training. Mentoring is a way of making disciples of leaders, because instructors base training on the divine authority of our Lord Jesus Christ and of His apostles. Jesus commanded His followers explicitly in Matthew 28:18-20 to make disciples by teaching them to obey His specific commands. The first New Testament church, according to Acts 2, exhibited this obedience by obeying all of Jesus’ basic commands. He commanded many things, which can be summarized in the seven basic commands that the first disciples obeyed (Acts 2:37-47): repentance and faith, baptism, breaking of bread, loving fellowship, prayer, giving and making disciples. Jesus’ commands form the foundation for all ministries, for He is the Rock. Building upon the Rock means obeying His words (Matt. 7:24-27). Bible doctrine as such is not the foundation; rather Christ and our relationship with Him are what we build on. Instructors establish first a relationship of loving, childlike obedience to Jesus (John 14:15; 15:14). This is foundational, ground floor of the ‘building.’ The written Word and doctrine are the second and third stories and on up. For all eternity, the redeemed will be learning more and more about God. New Testament curriculum builds upon the commands of Jesus and His apostles, such that students’ churches soon practice all ministries that God requires of them.
Classroom Training. Instructors recognize the authority of Scripture, but give less attention to building ministry on the foundation of obedience to the specific commands of Jesus. Since teachers in traditional Bible Institutes and seminaries often fail to balance abstract doctrine with obedience to Jesus’ commands, their students may overlook submission to the living Word, Jesus Christ. Instructors often consider the foundation of theological education to be only knowledge of the written Word expressed in abstract propositions.
Extension Training. Instructors use the Bible, especially the New Testament, not only as content for teaching but also as the norm for how to practice evangelism, confirm repentance, organize churches, conduct worship, relate to other congregations, train leaders and deploy missionaries.
Classroom Training. Instructors in some bible institutes and seminaries use the Bible extensively as content for their teaching, but seldom as the norm for the way to practice many of the activities, including that of teaching, which the New Testament requires.