One of my frustrations with seminary was the overlap between my undergrad and seminary classes. I know now everyone had Bible and Church history before coming to seminary. But for those of us who did, it would be nice to not have a whole bunch of hoops to jump through. Maybe some seminaries handle this better.

Looking back at my seminary experience (M.Div.), the best part of those years was that I was serving at a church at the same time as pursuing my degree. I would say that I have learned at least as much–if not more–about being a pastor by serving in a local church than I did in seminary. I don’t think that getting rid of classes is the answer by any means. After all, I am a much better preacher and teacher because of my Hebrew and Greek classes, and there’s no way I would have learned those skills on my own outside a classroom. However, I would say that a handful of classes were not helpful to me at all, and that 1/3 to 1/2 of them were useful, but didn’t need to be taught in a seminary setting. (The remainder I would say were best done in a classroom, such as apologetics, languages, history, etc.)

If I had to venture a guess, I would say that the future of pastoral training lies in network-based (or denominational-based) non-accredited training programs. I think that while some seminaries will survive–and will do good work in training leaders–as it becomes more and more difficult to earn a living as a pastor in our culture, grass roots movements will find better, cheaper ways to train leaders, and graduating from an ATS-accredited seminary or theological school will become less important and less common.