Like Begets Like

When a man and a woman make a baby, what kind of baby do they make?

A human baby.

Frogs make more frogs, fish make more fish, and dragonflies make more dragonflies. Like begets like; you reproduce what you are.

The same is true in education. When I was learning to be a school bus driver, all my instructors were school bus drivers. When I went to massage therapy school, all my teachers without exception were massage therapists. You couldn’t even teach anatomy or business there, unless you were a massage therapist. If you were actually teaching massage, you had to have been in active practice for no less than three years (and my first massage teacher had been in practice for 40+ years–which was awesome!)

Makes sense, right?

So if you want to be a professor, it makes all the sense in the world to spend years of your life with professors. How else would you learn to be one? It takes a group of academics to make an academic; nothing else can.

Likewise, it takes practitioners to make practitioners. Nothing else can. It’s silly to think that you’d spend three to four years in classrooms with professors and emerge ready to be a ministry practitioner, just like that. In what other context would you accept such a ludicrous idea?

Here, you will spend your time alongside other practitioners, doing the thing. You aren’t going to dodge academic preparation, but you’re going to get that from other practitioners, too, and you’ll get it in the context of actual practice. We’ll make you take time apart for debriefing and reflection, but again, you’ll do that in company with practitioners. Because there’s no other way to become one–and you might as well start now.