CBTE Must Protect the People Inside Its Evidence

A learner records a counselling conversation to demonstrate pastoral listening. Another uploads a sermon video in which congregants can be recognised. A ministry portfolio contains photographs of children, a testimony about domestic violence, a prayer request naming an illness and messages from a grieving family. A mentor forwards the material to an assessor through a personal account. The evidence may be authentic, but the people inside it may never have agreed to become assessment material.

Competency-Based Theological Education should be able to demonstrate ministry without consuming the community it exists to serve. CBTE means Competency-Based Theological Education and remains distinct from Kenya's general occupational Competency-Based Education and Training, or CBET.

The central principle is theological as well as educational: the neighbour is not an artefact. A person's face, voice, story, disability, religious belief, family conflict, location or safeguarding disclosure does not become institutional property because it appeared during a learner's ministry. Authentic assessment is valid only when the practice is real enough to reveal competence and governed well enough to protect the people affected by it.

California signed Assembly Bill 1159 into law on 10 September 2026. The bill author's official announcement describes strengthened privacy protection for students from early learning through university, including restrictions on the use of student information by digital service providers. This provides a comparative policy example; institutions should consult the…