Archive for Seminary

13 Reasons Why (Traditional) Seminaries are Irrelevant (For Church Leaders): Part 1

By Matt · Comments (16)
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009
This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series Seminary

The other day Jake Belder linked to a post about 5 Reasons Seminary is Relevant. As someone who is in seminary and also interested in how to best train and equip church leaders I found this post interesting while at the same time disagreeing profoundly. Below is my response, but first I should qualify that I define traditional seminary programs as full-time residential programs that require someone to relocate themselves to a brick-and-mortar institution for a period of 2-5 years. I believe these programs are becoming increasingly irrelevant and unhelpful.

Also, my limited seminary and professional experience has been in the mainline church, specifically the ELCA. So, some of the following critiques might not apply to evangelical seminaries, but I believe that most will.

With that, here is why I think traditional seminary programs are irrelevant for church leaders:

  1. Seminaries remove people from ministry contexts. The traditional seminary model has certain values that undermine local gatherings and remove people unnecessarily from their faith communities. Yes, I know that your fellow seminarians create a community, but there is a significant difference between a gathering of idealistic budding theologians and the average person in a congregation. Much discourse in academic settings is very pie-in-the-sky and not well grounded in reality.
  2. The process of seminary is no longer effective in preparing for ministry. When the dominant church model was oral proclamation, reasoned argument, and apologetics, perhaps sitting in classrooms studying the minutiae of supralapsarianism, practicing speaking skills, and honing rhetoric was helpful. Today, however, we are moving past such a model and moving towards organic, relational, flat models of ecclesiology and mission, making the seminary model less relevant.
  3. Denominations are becoming a thing of the past. Many seminaries are bastions of denominational conformity and preservation. Unfortunately for them, today’s younger generation could care less about denominations. Denominations did not arise in force until the 1800s. If they haven’t always been, then it is likely they won’t always be. Denominational seminaries might be the first to go.
  4. The future of ecclesiology is the priesthood of all believers. Many future church leaders will be bivocational, making a dedicated graduate degree impossible. Dedicating full-time graduate level study to something that doesn’t pay the bills is not a practical option.
  5. Seminaries are about credentialing as much as training. My school, Luther Seminary, had to (and continues to have to) jump through all sorts of hoops to get the Association of Theological Schools to accredit their innovative Distributive Learning Program, which, to the surprise of the old guard, has been wildly successful in providing church leaders with quality training. We continue to be restricted by ATS from doing certain things that might be helpful in our education. This is all because we are caught up with being accredited, which has nothing to do with the gospel or training church leaders. (I say Luther should consider making the bold move of becoming the first major seminary to break with the ATS in order to do what we need to do to train people for the church. I know it’s complicated and all, but we should at least be considering it.)
  6. The process of seminary is personally damaging. Maybe this is not happening across the board, but Luther Seminary is doing some research into what happens to the spiritual lives of seminarians between the time they enter seminary and the time they graduate. The results are not encouraging (sorry I don’t have a citation because the results are not published). Not only is ministry effectiveness questionable, but at a personal level seminarians are coming out less healthy than when they matriculated. My hypothesis is that seminary asks deep and profound questions that need to be wrestled with in the context of a constant, steady, familiar worshipping community in order to not inflict the damage that it does. The role of the Spirit is diminished by taking people out of their church community.

You can read reasons 7-13 here. I look forward to some lively conversation.

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13 Reasons Why (Traditional) Seminaries are Irrelevant (For Church Leaders): Part 2

By Matt · Comments (10)
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
This entry is part 2 of 4 in the series Seminary

Read Part 1 with the first six reasons.

  1. The cost is too high. Especially in mainline churches where churches are shrinking, our churches are less financially viable and pastors are coming out of seminary with more and more debt, such a trend is not sustainable. We are bankrupting our churches by making them pay for pastors’ debt burdens.
  2. Seminaries create unhelpful hierarchies in churches. By having degreed, credentialed church leaders a dichotomy is drawn between the haves and the have-nots. Especially as churches are becoming serious about the priesthood of all believers, this division will become increasingly frowned upon.
  3. Seminaries have crossed the line into institutional preservation. Especially now that we are in an economic downturn, many seminaries are in institutional survival mode. Whenever you are in survival mode the continuation of the institution becomes primary, not the mission. Seminaries are thinking less about how to train church leaders and more about how to keep the doors open (Our churches often face the same problem).
  4. Resources are becoming available for little to no cost. The open-source movement is beginning to catch on in areas other than software. Blogs are offering high quality content at no cost. Resources for ministry are offered for free download. Academic journals can be found online for free. This trend will eventually mean that the best scholarship and ministry resources will be published for the world to see for free, making it very difficult to convince someone to pay thousands of dollars for access to cutting-edge thinking and research.
  5. Technology has made brick-and-mortar institutions less important. With the advent of broadband internet and it’s related technologies we are not bound by geography when it comes to learning and training. Workshops, seminars, online conferences, and whole semester-long classes can be done over the internet. Relocating to do such a thing makes less and less sense as time goes on.
  6. You learn too much too quickly. Think about it: you hole yourself up in a classroom for a few years trying to soak in a bunch of information and then you are thrust into a congregation to try and put it all to use. In addition to that, you are used to being able to dedicate yourself to your studies full-time. In a congregation you have bulletins to update, newsletter articles to write, people to visit, events to plan, sermons to write, and more. How are you ever going to find time to keep learning? A program that is concurrent with ministry in a local congregation and spread over a longer period of time has two advantages. One, you can focus on and implement a few ideas at a time without being overwhelmed. Take a class, implement it; take another class, implement it; this is a much more sustainable model. Two, learning to budget yourself to have time for ministry and a learning program will better enable you to become a lifelong learner because you are forced to make yourself do both at the same time. This will set you up for being able to continue learning even after your program is over.
  7. Seminaries usurp the role of the church. This is my biggest problem with seminary programs. Why do we have to go off somewhere for 2-4 years to study theology? What are our churches doing? Shouldn’t the church be the place where people are taught, trained, and released for ministry? The fact that training has been outsourced to the seminaries is a sign of a failure of the church. The future ecclesiology that sees churches as places of equipping their congregations for mission will change this and make seminaries ultimately irrelevant for training church leaders.

Now, the above is quite forward-looking. Maybe seminaries are not completely irrelevant today, but at the very least, seminary is becoming irrelevant, quickly. The seminaries that see this coming and adapt might survive and be able to adjust. But those who stay stuck in a model that is 150 years old are bound to fail.

As I referenced in the last post, Luther Seminary is one of the institutions that is taking innovative steps to adjust to the changing world with their Distributed Learning program and by offering Online Seminars to average church leaders. However, I think they are taking the first baby steps to really helping people rethink what it means to train church leaders. I hope they and others will continue to push the envelope and not get behind the curve of cultural and ecclesiological development.

Lastly, I put in parentheses that seminaries are irrelevant for church leaders. However, it would be a tragedy for there to be no form of Christian scholarship. I hope there are always places for people to get Ph.D.’s in the various fields of study, but I believe that the future of equipping and training people for local congregational ministry has already begun the shift away from the brick-and-mortar institutions towards the local church.

[Update: I have written a postscript on these two posts. Read it here.]

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Why Seminaries are Irrelevant: A Postscript

By Matt · Comments (1)
Thursday, April 30th, 2009
This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Seminary

The last two days I wrote a two-part series giving 13 reasons why I think seminaries are becoming irrelevant for training church leaders (read Part 1 and Part 2). However, when reading through the comments, I think I need to make a few clarifications and assertions:

  • I love academia. This has nothing to do with bad experiences I’ve had in academic settings. I have an undergraduate degree in youth ministry with a minor in Bible. My favorite classes were the theoretical, philosophical, and historical classes: church history, theology classes, general philosophy, Christian philosophy (where we studied Augustine in depth). I have presented two papers at uptight, boring, stereotypical research conferences (and kind of enjoyed it). If I could be a student for the rest of my life, I just might do that. So, this has nothing to do with a personal vendetta against academics.
  • I love the church more. One of the things that keeps me from seriously considering a fast-track to a Ph.D. is that I do not believe the hope of the world is found in seminaries, but in local churches. Yes, I know that seminaries train church leaders, who in turn serve in local churches. But my ecclesiology and pneumatology put more emphasis on these local bodies than academic factories that decontextualize and depersonalize the learning process.
  • We still need leaders and they still need to be trained and educated. However, I think that a same or higher quality education can be gained within local networks, without nearly as high of a cost, and while still within a concrete ministry context. By approaching education this way, laypeople are more able to participate in the same kind of educational process as pastors and other leaders without having to leave their careers.
  • This will take time. I don’t expect seminaries to become obsolete tomorrow. It will take people who do have academic credentials and who do have careers in seminaries to make a break and forge a new path. There has to be a bridge, an intermediate step, that will legitimize a new form of training church leaders. I don’t want our church leaders trained by a bunch of dunces any more than you do.
  • A new process will place spiritual formation on the same level as academics. In my experience, when a professor in an academic setting tries to integrate spiritual formation into the classroom there is quite a bit of backlash. Students think their time (and money) is being wasted and that the professor is just giving them fluff work, so they don’t take it seriously. That our Christian universities and seminaries are not places who take spiritual formation seriously is a tragedy. But the problem is with the model. As long as professors are judged and rewarded on research, publishing, pedagogy, and academic rigor spiritual formation will always be an afterthought. To train church leaders without serious attention to spiritual formation is to produce spiritually anemic leaders. A new model of training can put spiritual formation back where it belongs.
  • My approach to education is highly influenced by my current seminary program. As I’ve said before, I am part of Luther Seminary’s Distributed Learning Program. It is a Masters of Arts in Youth and Family Ministry that takes 18 courses to complete, nine classes online and nine on-campus classes in intensive courses (one or two week classes). Without a program structured as this one is, I would not be continuing my education right now. I got into this program out of necessity–I wanted to go to seminary and I thought this was the best program (regardless of denomination) for youth ministry that would allow me to keep my full-time job. But now that I am in such a program I am seeing the high value of a non-traditional program, and it is causing me to totally rethink how we might go about training church leaders in the future.

 

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Seminary: Have we Lost our Imagination?

By Matt · Comments (4)
Tuesday, May 12th, 2009
This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series Seminary

My posts a couple of weeks ago that talked about the increasing irrelevance of traditional seminaries got picked up by Jake Belder of GoingtoSeminary.com. I rewrote the first two posts a bit and condensed them down into a single post for the Going to Seminary site. The post ran yesterday morning and has generated a little bit of discussion, and I expect it to generate quite a bit more. Based off of some of the discussion going on speaking against my perspective, I wonder if the church has lost its imagination in how we train church leaders.

In my posts, I am simply suggesting that the future of training church leaders might not look like it does right now as we send people off to brick-and-mortar institutions for a few years of intense classroom training. Most of the responses disagreeing with me seem to suggest that the way we train church leaders right now is the best way to train church leaders.

Yes, seminaries might be adequate for today’s church. But is it the best model? And when we come to come sort of consensus about the nature of the church in 50-100 years, will we not have rethought things like ordination, seminary, and denominationalism? What ever happened to semper reformada? I don’t think that our educational institutions are are beyond reform. Especially as we are starting to ask questions like, What does it mean to be the church? (which, in my opinion is the real core question of both the emerging church and missional movements), to think that we will just leave the training and education of our leaders the way we’ve been doing it for the last 100 years seems a bit short-sighted. We need to begin the exercise of re-imagining some new possibilities.

I also wonder if some of the resistance against my suggestions is because I have a different ecclesiological perspective than others. I must admit, my ideas about the future of seminaries are rooted in what is just now beginning to take place in movements like the emerging church, new monasticism, and missional Christianity. Phyllis Tickle seems to think that we are on the verge of a huge shift in Christianity (check out her book, The Great Emergence), and I think she is right. My assumptions about the future are based on the prediction that the current trends will continue to gain influence and reshape the future of the church.

Thankfully, I likely won’t know if I’m right until at least fifty years down the road, at the earliest. And if I’m wrong, no one will remember little old me. But based off of some shifts that are happening culturally and ecclesiologically, I believe that the changing future of the church will necessitate corresponding changes in training and educating church leaders.

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Categories : Seminary

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