When was the last time you ate cotton candy (candy floss for my British friends)?
Here’s the thing about cotton candy: at a fair or carnival, it looks irresistible. Maybe it’s nostalgia. Maybe it’s groupthink. Either way, it works. You take a bite and sugar hits your veins like a freight train. For a few minutes, life feels pretty good.
Then comes the crash.
Over the years, I’ve listened to leaders in small board rooms, classrooms, conferences, churches, and arenas holding fifteen thousand people. If there’s one thing I’ve grown weary of, it’s what I call “cotton candy leadership.”
Messages full of pithy one-liners. Emotionally-charged language. Big reactions. Very little substance.
Heads nod. People shout “Amen.” Notes get taken. Clips get reposted online. But once the emotional high wears off, there is often very little left to sustain a person spiritually, intellectually, or practically.
No depth.
At best, shallow application disconnected from the broader story of Scripture. At worst, leadership built almost entirely on personality, platform, and performance.
If that sounds critical, it’s because it is.
The Church does not need more shallow leaders.
One of the great tensions in modern theological education is the tension between accessibility and depth.
On one hand, I am deeply encouraged by how accessible education has become. A pastor can study theology from a deployment location overseas. A bivocational ministry leader can attend class after putting kids to bed. Church leaders serving in rural communities, global cities, military contexts, and hard places can now access training that would have been nearly impossible a generation ago.
I’ve said all of this before, but it’s worth repeating. Accessibility matters because people matter. At the same time, accessibility alone is not enough. The Church does not merely need more content. It needs deeply formed leaders. That tension has become increasingly visible in a highly networked church world. We live in a culture shaped by speed. Fast communication. Fast opinions. Fast platforms. Fast reactions. Naturally, many ministry environments feel the pressure to produce leaders quickly as well.
Churches need pastors. Ministries need workers. Communities need leaders. The harvest is plentiful, and there is real urgency attached to preparing people for Kingdom work. However, urgency can create unintended problems.
When speed becomes the dominant value, formation often becomes secondary, and shallow formation eventually reveals itself under pressure.
That is what makes this difficult.
A leader can appear effective for quite some time while lacking theological depth, emotional maturity, historical awareness, or spiritual stability. In fact, modern platforms can sometimes reward charisma faster than character.
Eventually, pressure exposes what speed concealed.
Conflict reveals depth. Suffering reveals depth. Complexity reveals depth. Ambiguity reveals depth. This is one of the reasons I keep returning to the language of formation in conversations about biblical higher education.
Yet, theological education today faces enormous pressure to accelerate everything. Shorter timelines. Faster credentials. Condensed pathways. Instant scalability.
Again, I understand why. Some of these innovations are genuinely helpful. Technology has created incredible opportunities for global access to theological education. I believe strongly in leveraging those tools responsibly. In many ways, they are allowing us to serve leaders who would otherwise never have access to training at all.
However, access alone does not guarantee formation. Watching lectures is not the same as being discipled. Consuming information is not the same as developing wisdom. Having a platform and microphone is not the same as having roots.
We have become incredibly efficient at distributing information while often struggling to cultivate depth, which brings me back to cotton candy.
Cotton candy is exciting for a moment, but nobody walks around a fair saying, “You know what really sustained me today? That pile of spun sugar.” It disappears almost as quickly as it arrives.
The danger is that theological education and leadership development can drift in the same direction. In our attempt to move quickly, scale broadly, and keep people engaged, we can unintentionally prioritize what is immediate over what is lasting. We can produce leaders who know how to generate attention, but struggle to sustain people through suffering, complexity, ambiguity, and real discipleship.
The Church needs more than emotionally charged moments and recycled one-liners. It needs leaders with enough theological depth, spiritual maturity, historical awareness, and rootedness to help people remain faithful over the long haul.
That kind of formation is slower. It requires mentorship, accountability, discipline, community, and time. But unlike cotton candy, it can actually sustain people when life gets hard.
Dr. Carlo A. Serrano, President