Reimagining Faith Formation: Communal Discernment for Missional Engagement

I have been reflecting on Christian education and faith formation in different congregations, missions, or chaplaincy contexts. Critiquing the inherited norms of practice we have embodied can be challenging. Sometimes, these norms help nurture faith development. Other times, our Christ-shaped ministry and mission can feel like an aging relic, clinging to relevance in a rapidly changing cultural landscape. Faithfully engaging in worship, witness, and service is challenging for all in ministry.

In theological formation for ministry, there has been significant focus and critique regarding the whole theological education and formation project. In a series called Theological Education Between the Times, I am keen to introduce you to two noteworthy voices in this conversation; Willie Jennings and Ted A Smith. Jennings’ After Whiteness challenges - “a way of being in the world and seeing the world that forms cognitive and affective structures able to seduce people into its habitation and its meaning-making.” In essence, Jennings highlights how a “white way of knowing” can override, suppress and marginalise other ways of knowing and being. Here in our Synod, we have committed to becoming an intercultural church, striving to downplay cultural supremacy so we can more faithfully embody the Gospel of Christ—one that both emerges from and within and yet transcends all cultures, with a liberation-theological edge moving us beyond oppressive or exclusive cultural frameworks. In The End of Theological Education, Smith identifies three key periods that have significantly shaped our understanding of ministry, discipleship, and the church. The first period, known as “Standing Orders,” occurred within established churches supported by the state, where ministers held clear civic roles and responsibilities. The second period saw the rise of strong volunteer associations—especially in the United States and Australia—driven by diverse national backgrounds, mixed denominational traditions, and the emergence of new religious movements in colonised lands. Both of these periods helped define the minister’s professional role.

Today, we are in a third period marked by growing individualisation and the unravelling of communal, role-based, and volunteer-based frameworks for discipleship, ministry, and mission. This shift also challenges traditional models of theological education, particularly its professional and credentialing structures.

Further to the inherited models, David Kelsey, in his exploration of theological education, identifies two contrasting and ultimately irreconcilable types of formation in the Western tradition. He first calls paideia—an ancient form of education (metaphorically “Athens”) that aimed to form virtuous citizens through immersion in texts and cultural practices, shaping moral character for wise public engagement. The second is Wissenschaft (metaphorically “Berlin”), marked by systematic, critical inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge through disciplined research. Edward Farley subsequently observed a third stream focused on the pragmatic skills of ministry—what we might call “Detroit.” Together, these three paradigms—Athens (virtue/character-based), Berlin (critical-rational), and Detroit (skills-driven)—have profoundly influenced Western theological education and, as a consequence, what we mean by Christian faith formation and growth. Many of us, lay and ordained, have been shaped by these frameworks, as reflected in the Uniting Churches Standards for Ministry.

While these approaches have made important contributions, they can overshadow the reality that all faith formation is culturally situated, including white, but also Pacifica and Asian cultural faith formation. This prompts a vital question for our Uniting Church in Australia congregations: What kind of faith formation do we foster, especially with our commitment to be an intercultural church? The Uniting Church articulates and seeks to practise a framework of communal discernment for ministry and missional engagement, emphasising that faith formation requires more than personal virtue, critical thinking, or ministry skills alone; culturally bound and situated within each culture differently. It involves a shared process of listening to God and to one another in context. Here faith formation is a gift of God, first and foremost, and will be an incarnational expression of ministry and mission that may or may not conform to the paradigms of Athens, Berlin, or Detroit within the community of Christ. At some point, this approach may resist an individual’s character, intellect, or skillset alone for a communal discernment that interweaves these gifts and other wisdoms into a tapestry of shared ministry and missional formation.

Such an orientation contrasts the ever-increasing secular pressure toward individual self-actualisation, often accompanied by the commodification of personal growth (at all costs and of only value). Communal discernment reminds us that faith formation is not merely for ourselves but for the sake of the world God loves. In an era that prizes personal success above all, cultivating an attentive, communal spirituality is countercultural—yet it aligns with the wisdom we glean from diverse cultural expressions, including Indigenous, Pasifika, and Asian traditions, let alone the biblical witness. My recent challenge, however, has been to not react to the individualist approach as just an extension of the commodification of all things or the problem that needs to be addressed, but to take this paradigm seriously, to foster collaborative partnerships and not just challenging and trying to bring back previous modes of church and faith formation, with a valuing but not idolatrising the strong authentic self-drive and the place of Christian faith, but to work with this with Gospel hope in a participating together in the life and witness of Christ, individually and as church.

As you and I continue to share leadership within the Uniting Church, this renewed emphasis calls us to look and discern beyond the horizons of our cultural basis to participate in God's becoming work in us more fully: How do we listen together for God’s call in our local neighbourhoods? How do we honour individual gifts while ensuring they serve the flourishing of the wider community? By de-centering formation paradigms like Athens, Berlin, and Detroit and their individualist self-sufficiencies myths to provide leadership to an unravelling volunteering association paradigm of church, we open space for a richly contextual dialogue, intercultural, and missional faith formation for everyone, one that encounters Christ as gift—one that can also honour communal discernment, worship, witness and service as a whole people of God— attuned to the emergence of communities in which, individually, we are all found in Christ's incarnation, salvific death and resurrection to be with God as creatures of creation. Fresh Expressions of church, church planting, focused local or solidarity justice networks of individual members, and the growth of institutional embodying worship witness and service within Prisons, Schools, Age Care, Hospitals and workplaces will play a much greater role in faith formation. Taking seriously but not idolatrizing this moment of individualization, with the invitation to be found in the love and grace and communion of God in Christ, so as to continue to participate in God's liberating salvific way for all creation, in worship witness and service. 

What kind of faith formation do we foster, especially with our commitment to be an intercultural church?