CBTE Must Count the Full Cost of Formation

Competency-Based Theological Education is often presented as a more accessible way to form ministers where they already live and serve. Learners may remain in their communities, build evidence through ministry and progress by demonstrated competence rather than by completing a fixed amount of classroom time. Those possibilities matter deeply in Africa, where distance, employment, family responsibility, language, ministry and uneven digital infrastructure shape who can study.

But flexibility does not remove cost. It relocates cost. A lecture timetable may give way to individual learning plans; examinations may give way to observed ministry and portfolios; one lecturer may give way to a team of academic, ministry and formation mentors. Each change requires time, skill, records, supervision and governance. If these resources are not budgeted institutionally, they do not disappear. They are absorbed by learners, households, churches, volunteer mentors and communities whose lives become part of the evidence.

CBTE means Competency-Based Theological Education and remains distinct from Kenya's general occupational Competency-Based Education and Training, or CBET. The focus here is contextual, mentored and demonstrable formation in Bible colleges and church-based ministry. Its promise of access becomes credible only when the full cost of formation is made visible.

A mixed-methods study published on 16 September 2026 examined competency-based education implementation in seventeen public junior schools in Ijara Sub-County. It involved seventeen head teachers, ninety teachers and seventeen parent-association…