From The Living Church-The difficulty that confronts ordinands is often due less to intellectual rigour than to experience and the imagination. Thanks to the cultural changes of the past 50 years, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and even Luther and Calvin reside in an unfamiliar world. Very often their concerns and commitments are almost unintelligible, if not repugnant, to late modern people. Over and over again, I’ve heard ordinands complain that Aquinas or Hooker or Tertullian isn’t relevant to today’s ministry. None of this is to suggest that ordinands today are dim or ill-educated. Rather, it points to what’s fundamentally lacking in the preparation of a great many of them: the imaginary.
Many ordinands haven’t had their imagination informed deeply by Scripture or by the experience of life within a worshipping community for a long period of time. Even fewer have grown up in the Church. So, while they may have tremendous faith — and it takes a great deal of faith to put oneself forward for the ministry in the Church of England these days — they often aren’t native to the Church. Their way of understanding themselves and the world is typically formed within the same culture as everybody else: late modern consumerism.
More here-
https://livingchurch.org/covenant/2018/02/28/schools-for-the-imagination/
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