Excellence is contextual

Author: Joel Liechty

Intuitively, we know it yet often I've failed to articulate it. 

Success in one context may look differently than another. 

What it looks like to be an excellent preacher in front of 5000 people may look very different than a sermon delivered in a nursing home. 

Leadership in a micro church may look different than leading a C-suite team in the corporate office. 

Overlap is common yet distinction in what success looks like is crucial to how we imagine theological education. 

Often, in our curriculum design process, we imagine a definition of success in our heads. Perhaps its the suburban church we grew up in or the church we heard about at last year's leadership conference. Or maybe it was the multi-ethnic church in the urban center. Imagining these are helpful in designing our school's curriculum. Many an educator has sat in a curriculum design meeting with a half dozen or more photos of students (real or imagined) with stories behind each one. These are meant to keep our design work focused on the real needs of students and what will help them. As we make decisions of what classes to design or what books to read or what assignments to put into our syallabi, we constantly keep these students, their contexts, and what success looks like in them in mind. Doing this ensures we are respecting a variety of contexts and what it means (or will mean) for our students to be well-equipped to fourish in their vocations as followers of Christ. 

We intuitively, implicitly and even explicitly recognize that we must teach to a broad audience of students and the various contexts they inhabit and serve.