Canter Bridge

Some human endeavors run stubbornly against statistical probability. Fishing, for example, or standing in to the batter’s box. Or training a Labrador puppy.

Reflecting this Autumn morning on the education of the biblical Daniel, I wince more strongly than ever at the short-horizoned pragmatism that pervades our view of preparation for Christian leadership today. A thoughtless consensus seems to make hay with the expense in terms of time and money of preparing such leaders through formal means. We think we ought to be batting about .950—though no one ever says that—and so we grow resentful and dismissive at, say, a solid .310.

Take the human and economic cost of an M.Div, the bread-and-butter professional degree for ordained Christian clergy in North America. Or the Ph.D. that elusive, left-brained tilting at windmills that produces the women and men who write the commentaries, theologies, and newspaper columns that will shape the way we think about our world and act in it for a generation or two.

Have we failed if one out of four—I am shooting low here for the sake of the argument—finds her voice, articulates a vision, and leads a community or two forward into its honorable future?

Would that be a bad investment, one that any clear-eyed strategist would discard in favor of training sixteen workers in basic, relevant skills that in the turning of one technological and cultural dawn will have become obsolete and passé?

Our pragmatic, bottom-line calculations—themselves a time-bound grid and an idol-in-waiting—would never makes us a Daniel, not even a Shadrac, a Meshac, or an Abed-Nego. Those eventual saviors of a nation were schooled long and hard in the language and literature of Babylon. They were scholar-athletes in whom their own people and then a benighted pagan empire invested untold resources. There were doubtless more of them than the Book names.

One of them was present when everything was at stake.

We’d prefer to have no Daniels. They take too long to polish, stumble too often, consume resources that could be better invested in quick-and-dirty practical seminars that would produce, so we say, large numbers of practical folks and, we don’t say this part, leave enough at the margins for a couple of wide-screen TVs.

If we won’t school our Daniels, do we deserve a future?

I think not.