The Evangel Dean Basic Training Resource Handbook

148 • T HE E VANGEL D EAN B ASIC T RAINING R ESOURCE H ANDBOOK

Evangelical missiologist Ralph Winter has written extensively about how many of the monastic missionary orders in medieval Catholicism emerged as a specific response to “home” and “foreign” mission. He reminds us that in these orders:

There weren’t just monks who were celibate but they had secondary and tertiary orders as well as all kinds of laymen . . . . After the barbarian invasions swirled through what is modern Spain, France, and Italy for a couple of hundred years . . . . there may have been 2,000 to 3,000 students from the continent studying the Bible in these . . . [Irish] monasteries (Winter, 1969, p. 300). In the American experience of the early 1900’s, the evangelical church found that it could not train leaders rapidly enough to respond to the groundswell of new converts among the urban poor at home or to the emerging opportunities among new mission fields abroad. The new “Bible Institutes” were created in order that “leaders might be equipped for better service in their churches, and in the slums and destitute places of our great cities (Cook 1930, 1) as well as to become a source of training for the emerging interdenominational foreign missions movement (see Carpenter, 1990, 92-132). What began with an emphasis on equipping primarily the laity for service quickly shifted to also being a new means of “training men and women for ‘full-time’ Christian service as pastors or missionaries” (Daniel 1980, 333). Since the 1950’s, the evangelical church has recognized that the traditional seminaries which serve established churches and denominations so well often are not fully capable of meeting the same needs for emerging missions churches or for movements among those who culturally or economically stand at the margins of a society. Theological Education by Extension (TEE) emerged as an innovative means of educating leaders for ministry and mission in these contexts. TEE can be defined as:

A form of theological education which is characterized by these three essential elements: self-study materials, practical work in the student’s own congregation, and regular encounters or seminars with students and professors (Ross Kinsler).