CBTE Must Test Whether Competence Travels

A learner preaches faithfully in the congregation that already knows the learner's story, language and habits. A familiar mentor supplies timely prompts. The worship order is predictable, the theological questions are expected and the ministry team quietly covers weaknesses. The performance may be genuinely good. It may still tell us less than we think about what will happen in another congregation, a crisis, an intergenerational conflict or a community that does not share the same assumptions.

Competency-Based Theological Education must take this problem seriously. 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.

Context matters because ministry is embodied and relational. Competence is never displayed in a vacuum. But contextual formation becomes unreliable when one supportive setting is treated as proof of universal readiness. The governing question is therefore not only, Can this learner perform here? It is also, What remains dependable when the people, pressures, resources and expectations change?

A trustworthy answer requires neither a context-free examination nor endless testing. It requires purposeful variation, multiple observations, qualified judgement, protected community participation and recognition that every certification claim has limits.

Krarup and colleagues' study was first published on 8 June 2026; the publisher records a version-of-record update on 21 September 2026.…