Contemporary Reformed Confessionality

Introduction  This is the fourth and final (and longest – sorry…) of my posts interacting with the observations Geoff Folland , national director of Power To Change Australia, made earlier this year about the opportunities and challenges facing the Australian evangelical Christian higher education sector.  My first post introduced the series and summarised the four institutional approaches to ministry formation which Geoff has observed within the Australian Christian higher education sector.  My second post reflected on how I think post-Christendom has affected the broad cultural context in which Christian leadership formation takes place.  My third post showed how I think Geoff describes three different patterns of theological and ministerial formation which reflect different assumptions about who possesses the authority to define effective Christian leadership therefore form Christian leaders.  I’m now going to try to apply all the above to my particular p...

This is the third of four posts interacting with Geoff Folland’s observations about the opportunities and challenges facing the Australian evangelical Christian higher education sector. My first post introduced the series and summarised the four institutional approaches to ministry formation which Geoff has observed within the Australian Christian higher education sector. My second post reflected on how I think post-Christendom has affected the broad cultural context in which Christian leadership formation takes place.  In this third (and so far longest – sorry…) post I’m going to show how Geoff ends up describing three different patterns of theological and ministerial formation which reflect different assumptions about the nature of responsible Christian ministry. I’m not convinced that “[t]he decisive divide is not primarily theological [but] economic” [1] and that “similar theological commitments can [therefore] produce very different institutional strategies.”  [2] ...

This is the second of four posts interacting with Geoff Folland’s observations about the opportunities and challenges facing the Australian evangelical Christian higher education sector. My first post introduced the series and summarised the four institutional approaches to ministry formation which Geoff has observed within the Australian Christian higher education sector. In this second post I will use Geoff’s insights to background for my own observations on how I think post-Christendom has affected the broad cultural context in which Christian leadership formation takes place.  Christendom stability  Australia, along with the ‘Western’ world, is now post-Christian. For this series I’m going to use the term ‘Christendom’ to highlight the way that Christian religious and moral assumptions used to dom inate Western social assumptions in ways they no longer do.  Under those social conditions, the prevalence of a (usually nominal and superficial) Christianity permitted Ch...

Introduction  In April 2026, Geoff Folland, national director of Power To Change Australia published a series of blog posts reflecting on his observations of the opportunities and challenges facing the evangelical Christian higher education sector. In the process he identified the ongoing ecosystemic impacts of post-Christendom on the sector. By ‘ecosystemic’ I mean:  The decline of Christian identity, social acceptance, and knowledge within Western society in general  Has affected all aspects of the Christian subculture – which may be considered a sub-ecosystem of interconnected elements which mutually nourish and shape each other  Of which Bible and theological colleges are a significant part, but only a part – they rely on other elements of the ecosystem.  I here present a series of responses to Geoff.  This first post will summarise the four approaches to ministry formation which Geoff documents.  My second post will present my observations on h...