Always reforming part II
Just as universities continuously seek academic improvement, the church requires review and reform.
Last month, I talked about my involvement in quality control at our public universities. I am a member of the Audit Committee of the Quality Council. At universities, each academic program undergoes a review every eight years by external academic experts to ensure that it stays up-to-date and continuously seeks to improve the quality of its teaching. This process is governed by the university’s Institutional Quality Assurance Process (IQAP).
In addition, every eight years, the university itself is audited to ensure it follows its IQAP. Three members of the Audit Committee evaluate several program reviews and new program proposals to ensure the IQAP is being followed. We ask questions like these: Are proposals and program self-studies complete and do they look at all learning outcomes? Are external reviewers indeed at arm’s length to the program? Will reviewers’ suggestions result in improvement? Are the plans monitored to ensure they are implemented? The audit results in a report with recommendations that the university must act on, suggestions that might be helpful and commendations on what the university is doing well. A forward-looking desire to ensure the student learning experience is constantly improving is at the heart of all these processes.
Church quality control
When I look at what could be called “quality control” in our Reformed church family, I see similar processes. The local church council is charged with overseeing pastors. Classis uses church visitors to make sure local churches are faithful to their God-given responsibilities. At the classis level many acts, like approving candidates for ministry, require concurrent approval from synodical deputies. If an individual sees a place where our church processes or doctrines appear inconsistent with Scripture, multiple layers of overtures can lead to a change.
Ongoing revelation
One critical difference between the university quality processes and those we have in our Reformed polity is that while the university processes are focused on ongoing improvements, our church circles seem to be directed at maintaining past practices. The church processes seem to assume that we have articulated the main formulations of the truth of Scripture in the past and that our task now is to stay as close as possible to the truth that the Reformers uncovered.
This focus on the past misses that our knowledge of the world has increased. In universities, teaching must always be informed by our increasing understanding of God’s general revelation. In the same way, the Spirit continues to guide us to a renewed and fuller knowledge of Scripture. Our reading of Scripture changes as we learn more about its history and how it was intended to collbe understood by the people it was written for, and how it should be understood by us today. We need to be more open to the ongoing leading of the Spirit towards the New Jerusalem as we read and interpret God’s special revelation.
