For training men for ministry of course! The mission statement for Southern Seminary, the flagship seminary of the Southern Baptist Convention and run by Albert Mohler has the following mission statement:
Under the lordship of Jesus Christ, the mission of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is to be totally committed to the Bible as the Word of God, to the Great Commission as our mandate, and to be a servant of the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention by training, educating, and preparing ministers of the gospel for more faithful service.
In a nutshell, the mission is training men to be ministers in Southern Baptist affiliated churches. Denominational names may change or be absent, but that is the basic purpose of most seminaries in America. It is assumed that seminaries are training men for vocational ministry (because not many men are going to invest three years and lots of money in a degree unless they plan on putting it to use).
A couple of interesting factoids.
According to Alan Cross at Downshore Drift, some 80% of seminary graduates are out of vocational ministry within five years. Another interesting set of numbers:
We have a little over 40,000 churches, over half with under 100 in attendance. So, 10,000 students, 40,000 churches (less that could afford them full-time), and little in the way of funding for church planting. It is no wonder that 80 percent do not continue in full-time ministry. Apart from the regular burn out and quitting that occurs, we can't place all of them. Yet, that does not keep seminaries from trying to attract MORE FULL-TIME students and asking for more and more money.
Again, these are numbers that not documented but I think the basic premise is indisputable. Survey after survey as well as anecdotal evidence bears out that there are a ton of men leaving vocational ministry every year and the men that are left are often frustrated, burned out and/or have a family life that suffers. So the SBC, by far the largest conservative denomination in America with the largest number of seminary students, is producing enough seminary grads to supply every church in its denomination with a pastor every few years. On the one hand, they are training men for ministry at ever increasing numbers and on the other hand men are leaving vocational ministry on the back end in droves.
What really got me thinking about this was a look at the cost of a seminary education. It is not like getting a seminary degree is free. If you are a Southern Baptist, tuition at Southern Seminary is about $18,000 for approx 90 credit hour in the M. Div program. Double that if you are not a Southern Baptist. Southeastern Baptist theological seminary is about $15,000 for an M. Div. That doesn’t take into account room and board, miscellaneous fees and books. I think it is reasonable when all is said and done to put the price tag at somewhere north of $25,000 for an M.Div. A seminary education is expensive, time consuming and as I will argue in a moment completely unnecessary to minister to God’s people or to preach the Gospel to the lost.
Meanwhile, men are leaving vocational ministry at an alarming pace with a very expensive seminary degree that is essentially meaningless in the private sector. There are lots of churches looking for ministers. There are lots of ministers looking for new churches. The problem is that there are a lot of churches in places that not many men want to go, and one of the reasons is that they are small and remote churches that don’t have much of a budget to support a vocational minister. What we are left with is a system that churns out a ton of men every year with a pretty spectacular failure rate. Add to that the absence of Biblical evidence for a professional clergy or the need for a formula education to be a minister of the Gospel, and the whole seminary system starts to become kind of questionable.
My big objection to the current seminary system are that we have created a “qualification” for men we see nowhere in Scripture. This is not true of every denomination or church, but in many of them it is at least considered desirable if not outright required that you have a seminary degree (often only at the proper seminary). I can’t see where you can look into the New Testament and make the case that a man you are considering as an elder must have a certain degree. In requiring this we create a legal requirement above and beyond that which Scripture mandates.
Maybe the problem is not that we don’t have enough seminary trained professional ministers. Maybe the problem is with the whole self-perpetuating system in the first place. I want to put in a disclaimer here, which no doubt will be skipped over by some who read this. This is not an attack on the seminary system or the clergy system. There are several men who are involved in teaching at the seminary level that I turn to when I have questions, men like Al Mohler, Dave Black and Alan Knox. I don’t necessarily agree with them on every issue all of the time, but I respect their opinions and scholarship. So asking questions like “Why do we have seminaries” is not just to be a theological malcontent and rabble rouser. But I also believe we can and should raise questions, and doing so in an honest way is far preferable to sticking our collective heads in the sands of tradition and pretending everything is as it should be. Is the “Young man feels called to serve the church, young man goes to seminary, young man gets hired as a pastor” model really healthy for the church? Is it healthy for the legions of young men who go to school, get into debt, move themselves and their families to a new town to minister to people they barely know and shoulder the overwhelming burden of ministering to a group of people who don’t want to minister to each other?
My concern is that the seminaries have become a system that has taken on a life of its own. Are they serving the local church or do they view the local church as a jobs program for their graduates?
What should the purpose of seminaries be? If you agree that professional vocational training is not required for ministry among the local gathering of the church, that ministry should not be subcontracted out to one or a few men, that having an advanced degree is not a qualification or a required quality in an elder, what should we do with seminaries? Shut them all down? Not hardly. Seminaries can play a vital role in the life of the church. Just perhaps not the role they play currently.
I do think we need a far fewer seminaries than we have now. There are an awful lot of them, and they are of pretty disparate quality ranging from highly respectable and academically rigorous to places that are flat out degree mills. If you get a "doctorate" from a correspondance school that has a bogus accredidation from some bogus institutiton in England or Timbuktu, what is the point? If we stop requiring an advanced seminary degree in the local church, the lesser schools will (and should) die out.
I would like to see seminaries focused on training the whole body of Christ, producing and providing material and training so that those who minister locally can stay where they are, minister where they are and in turn equip the body of Christ. So much effort is made to train pastors to minister to the local body. We should be spending at least that much effort to equip the local body for ministry. Think about theological conferences. Men come to speak to large audiences and I know from personal experience that many, many of the men in attendance are not pastors. There are many venues, from massive conferences like Together for the Gospel to small local groups like Reformation Society meetings, where Christians gather for fellowship and teaching. These are useful and valuable, and I would hope that when men in the local gathering of the church are called out to step up, we would see more than a few theology wonks showing up.
I also think that there is a place for academia in the church. I just happen to think that its place is not necessarily in the local gathering of the church. I absolutely love the work put out by men like Albert Mohler and Mark Dever and men like Alan Knox and Dave Black. Without the modern academy, we wouldn’t have things like the English Standard Version. We need men who can translate from the original languages and do scholarly work on major theological issues and in response to questionable teaching like the New Perspective on Paul. The average Christian is not equipped to deal with some of those issues and quite frankly probably doesn’t need to be. We have a hard enough time getting the basics of the Gospel down in spite of legions of seminary trained professional clerics.
Ultimately, we should ask how anything we do as the church is advancing the cause of equipping all believers for the work of ministry. Not a trickle-down where we teach one guy and he passes it on, but actually equipping the body. The arguments for a professionally trained and paid ministry boil down to pragmatism, we need these guys because no one else will do the work of ministry or the study of theology and doctrine that we need. That may be true now, but pragmatism is never a good reason for us to base a doctrine on and frankly as I have said a million times, if you keep doing everything for the men in the church, they will never get off their collectives duffs to do anything themselves.
I know I am kind of spitting into the wind here. Not much new there. The system we have in place is pretty entrenched. My hope as always is to stir us to thought and study, to not just accept the status quo based on religious traditions. Perhaps you give this some thought and study and decide that I am all wet. You think that seminaries provide an invaluable service by training men that are equipped to minister in local churches with a formal education. Or maybe you think my argument has merit. Like me and many others you decide to seek another path, not the tradition bound model nor the play golf on Sunday model, but instead seek to be part of the quiet revolution that really is not revolutionary at all but is instead restorative.
(By way of disclosure, I have taken a number of seminary class through Liberty in the distance program, about a year into the M. Div. program so I am somewhat familiar with the sort of study and coursework you get from a seminary degree. I don't appraoch this from an anti-intellectualism approach)
Under the lordship of Jesus Christ, the mission of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is to be totally committed to the Bible as the Word of God, to the Great Commission as our mandate, and to be a servant of the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention by training, educating, and preparing ministers of the gospel for more faithful service.
In a nutshell, the mission is training men to be ministers in Southern Baptist affiliated churches. Denominational names may change or be absent, but that is the basic purpose of most seminaries in America. It is assumed that seminaries are training men for vocational ministry (because not many men are going to invest three years and lots of money in a degree unless they plan on putting it to use).
A couple of interesting factoids.
According to Alan Cross at Downshore Drift, some 80% of seminary graduates are out of vocational ministry within five years. Another interesting set of numbers:
We have a little over 40,000 churches, over half with under 100 in attendance. So, 10,000 students, 40,000 churches (less that could afford them full-time), and little in the way of funding for church planting. It is no wonder that 80 percent do not continue in full-time ministry. Apart from the regular burn out and quitting that occurs, we can't place all of them. Yet, that does not keep seminaries from trying to attract MORE FULL-TIME students and asking for more and more money.
Again, these are numbers that not documented but I think the basic premise is indisputable. Survey after survey as well as anecdotal evidence bears out that there are a ton of men leaving vocational ministry every year and the men that are left are often frustrated, burned out and/or have a family life that suffers. So the SBC, by far the largest conservative denomination in America with the largest number of seminary students, is producing enough seminary grads to supply every church in its denomination with a pastor every few years. On the one hand, they are training men for ministry at ever increasing numbers and on the other hand men are leaving vocational ministry on the back end in droves.
What really got me thinking about this was a look at the cost of a seminary education. It is not like getting a seminary degree is free. If you are a Southern Baptist, tuition at Southern Seminary is about $18,000 for approx 90 credit hour in the M. Div program. Double that if you are not a Southern Baptist. Southeastern Baptist theological seminary is about $15,000 for an M. Div. That doesn’t take into account room and board, miscellaneous fees and books. I think it is reasonable when all is said and done to put the price tag at somewhere north of $25,000 for an M.Div. A seminary education is expensive, time consuming and as I will argue in a moment completely unnecessary to minister to God’s people or to preach the Gospel to the lost.
Meanwhile, men are leaving vocational ministry at an alarming pace with a very expensive seminary degree that is essentially meaningless in the private sector. There are lots of churches looking for ministers. There are lots of ministers looking for new churches. The problem is that there are a lot of churches in places that not many men want to go, and one of the reasons is that they are small and remote churches that don’t have much of a budget to support a vocational minister. What we are left with is a system that churns out a ton of men every year with a pretty spectacular failure rate. Add to that the absence of Biblical evidence for a professional clergy or the need for a formula education to be a minister of the Gospel, and the whole seminary system starts to become kind of questionable.
My big objection to the current seminary system are that we have created a “qualification” for men we see nowhere in Scripture. This is not true of every denomination or church, but in many of them it is at least considered desirable if not outright required that you have a seminary degree (often only at the proper seminary). I can’t see where you can look into the New Testament and make the case that a man you are considering as an elder must have a certain degree. In requiring this we create a legal requirement above and beyond that which Scripture mandates.
Maybe the problem is not that we don’t have enough seminary trained professional ministers. Maybe the problem is with the whole self-perpetuating system in the first place. I want to put in a disclaimer here, which no doubt will be skipped over by some who read this. This is not an attack on the seminary system or the clergy system. There are several men who are involved in teaching at the seminary level that I turn to when I have questions, men like Al Mohler, Dave Black and Alan Knox. I don’t necessarily agree with them on every issue all of the time, but I respect their opinions and scholarship. So asking questions like “Why do we have seminaries” is not just to be a theological malcontent and rabble rouser. But I also believe we can and should raise questions, and doing so in an honest way is far preferable to sticking our collective heads in the sands of tradition and pretending everything is as it should be. Is the “Young man feels called to serve the church, young man goes to seminary, young man gets hired as a pastor” model really healthy for the church? Is it healthy for the legions of young men who go to school, get into debt, move themselves and their families to a new town to minister to people they barely know and shoulder the overwhelming burden of ministering to a group of people who don’t want to minister to each other?
My concern is that the seminaries have become a system that has taken on a life of its own. Are they serving the local church or do they view the local church as a jobs program for their graduates?
What should the purpose of seminaries be? If you agree that professional vocational training is not required for ministry among the local gathering of the church, that ministry should not be subcontracted out to one or a few men, that having an advanced degree is not a qualification or a required quality in an elder, what should we do with seminaries? Shut them all down? Not hardly. Seminaries can play a vital role in the life of the church. Just perhaps not the role they play currently.
I do think we need a far fewer seminaries than we have now. There are an awful lot of them, and they are of pretty disparate quality ranging from highly respectable and academically rigorous to places that are flat out degree mills. If you get a "doctorate" from a correspondance school that has a bogus accredidation from some bogus institutiton in England or Timbuktu, what is the point? If we stop requiring an advanced seminary degree in the local church, the lesser schools will (and should) die out.
I would like to see seminaries focused on training the whole body of Christ, producing and providing material and training so that those who minister locally can stay where they are, minister where they are and in turn equip the body of Christ. So much effort is made to train pastors to minister to the local body. We should be spending at least that much effort to equip the local body for ministry. Think about theological conferences. Men come to speak to large audiences and I know from personal experience that many, many of the men in attendance are not pastors. There are many venues, from massive conferences like Together for the Gospel to small local groups like Reformation Society meetings, where Christians gather for fellowship and teaching. These are useful and valuable, and I would hope that when men in the local gathering of the church are called out to step up, we would see more than a few theology wonks showing up.
I also think that there is a place for academia in the church. I just happen to think that its place is not necessarily in the local gathering of the church. I absolutely love the work put out by men like Albert Mohler and Mark Dever and men like Alan Knox and Dave Black. Without the modern academy, we wouldn’t have things like the English Standard Version. We need men who can translate from the original languages and do scholarly work on major theological issues and in response to questionable teaching like the New Perspective on Paul. The average Christian is not equipped to deal with some of those issues and quite frankly probably doesn’t need to be. We have a hard enough time getting the basics of the Gospel down in spite of legions of seminary trained professional clerics.
Ultimately, we should ask how anything we do as the church is advancing the cause of equipping all believers for the work of ministry. Not a trickle-down where we teach one guy and he passes it on, but actually equipping the body. The arguments for a professionally trained and paid ministry boil down to pragmatism, we need these guys because no one else will do the work of ministry or the study of theology and doctrine that we need. That may be true now, but pragmatism is never a good reason for us to base a doctrine on and frankly as I have said a million times, if you keep doing everything for the men in the church, they will never get off their collectives duffs to do anything themselves.
I know I am kind of spitting into the wind here. Not much new there. The system we have in place is pretty entrenched. My hope as always is to stir us to thought and study, to not just accept the status quo based on religious traditions. Perhaps you give this some thought and study and decide that I am all wet. You think that seminaries provide an invaluable service by training men that are equipped to minister in local churches with a formal education. Or maybe you think my argument has merit. Like me and many others you decide to seek another path, not the tradition bound model nor the play golf on Sunday model, but instead seek to be part of the quiet revolution that really is not revolutionary at all but is instead restorative.
(By way of disclosure, I have taken a number of seminary class through Liberty in the distance program, about a year into the M. Div. program so I am somewhat familiar with the sort of study and coursework you get from a seminary degree. I don't appraoch this from an anti-intellectualism approach)
4 comments:
Arthur,
Of course we must have seminaries. Where else am I going to blow tens of thousands of dollars that I don't actually have, saddle myself with debt, and then experience hardship for the rest of my life as I try to climb out of this financial hole, all the while holding a (comparatively) low paying job? You make it sound as if this doesn't make sense.
Interesting questions and insights.
A question asked now is;
Is "The Whole Religious System"
for the past 1700 years,
totally corrupt?
Arthur,
This is a VERY sensitive issue to mention in my house, because in 2003 Paul and I moved to NC to go to SEBTS...
The results? Sure, we met a lot of great folks there! BUT, Paul did not finish his education there. The rent was so much higher there (than in MO), that he had to work almost 80 hours/week to make ends meet. It was that OR I could have worked. That's another issue I have with seminaries. So many women work to put their husbands through school! We saw it in so many families. And, most of these women resented their husbands!
Back on topic... first of all, if a man is going to go to seminary, he SHOULD HAVE ALL HIS DEBTS PAID BEFORE he goes! SEBTS knew of our outstanding debts, and still accepted us with open arms. Afterall, we were going to get a big church with a full-time salary to pay it all back with, right?
Nope, Paul was never interested in the big church setting. We went to a tiny country church that necessitated another source of income. That would be fine (I am all for bi-vocational ministers) BUT we had SO much debt that we could never get on top of it.
So, we left seminary in August 2005, and Paul left his church in August 2008. He left heartbroken, because he loves preaching. BUT, he knows that our current debt makes him unqualified for any kind of elder position. He aches every day, because he has left his first love - vocational ministry.
Now, I know that you and Alan will be quick to say that he can minister without being a preacher, and he does... but he longs to be back behind a pulpit.
How many other families are feeling this heartbreak?
I am not for throwing out the whole seminary system... yet. BUT, I think there is great room for improvement.
1- Do not let a man with debts into the school (unless he has a clear plan how to pay them off)
2- Do not let a man into the school if his plan to make it through seminary is contingent upon his wife working...
because, you know what? I hear from the same wives who worked to put their husbands through seminary... they are now at churches that cannot afford to pay their husbands full-time, so they are still working, just to make ends meet... and most of them still resent their husbands.
Bethany
Bethany, I think that is another issue with the vocation ministery, single pastor model. My wife will tell you that the pressure it puts on families and especially between husbands and wives can be enormous.
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