CBTE Must Build Local Teaching Capacity, Not Borrow It Repeatedly

A visiting teacher arrives with experience, books, prepared lectures and an intensive timetable. Learners receive concentrated biblical and theological instruction. Local leaders gain contact with a wider scholarly and ecclesial world. The visit may be generous, rigorous and genuinely fruitful.

Then the teacher leaves.

Who helps learners apply the material in ministry? Who observes performance, accompanies spiritual formation, judges new evidence, moderates difficult decisions, supports a learner who has not yet demonstrated competence and revises the programme when the context changes? If those responsibilities leave with the visitor, the institution has received teaching without gaining educational capacity.

Competency-Based Theological Education (CBTE) links progression to demonstrated learning in theological understanding, formation and practice. This article focuses on Bible colleges and church-based ministerial formation. The approach also operates in higher education, including degree programmes; it should not be treated as identical to Kenya’s general occupational Competency-Based Education and Training (CBET). See ICETE’s CBTE standards.

CBTE must build local teaching capacity rather than borrow it repeatedly. External expertise should enlarge the people, practices and systems through which a community can form ministers for itself and contribute knowledge to the wider church.

Training Leaders International lists a teaching assignment at Evangelical Theological College in Addis Ababa from 31 July to 16 August 2026. The provider describes a modular Old Testament exegesis course on Genesis within a partnership with a…