I needed to raise money to meet the church’s budget, and I had never had a class on that. I wanted to try to grow the church numerically by reaching out to the unchurched, and my coursework had never touched on it. I had a problem with a combative and disagreeable deacon, and I searched through my seminary notes and found nothing. I found I needed to be in the office for administration, in my study to prepare my talks, in people’s lives to stay connected to the community, and in my home to raise my family—and there hadn’t been any instruction on how to manage that.
It was becoming painfully clear how little my seminary education had actually prepared me for the day-in, day-out responsibilities of leading a church.
I knew about the Council of Nicaea, but no one had ever told me how to lead my own council meeting. I knew about the Barth-Brunner debate but not how to handle the breakdown between two Sunday school teachers when one was asked to start a new class, for the same age group, from the existing class. I knew the significance of the aorist verb but not how to parse the culture to know how best to communicate. I could tell you the leading theologians of the 16th century but not about leading and managing a staff.
This is why so many people look back on their seminary education with a critical eye. It’s why pastors will go to a two-day leadership conference headlined by seasoned pastors passing on their insights for effective ministry and feel like they gained more in those two days than they did in their entire three years of seminary education. It’s why quickly after graduation, Melanchthon gets dropped for Maxwell, Luther for Lucado, and the seminary’s continuing education program for pastors for the latest megachurch conference.
Like so many others, I had gone to seminary to prepare for ministry, and I was not prepared for ministry. I was prepared academically to begin a life of teaching, which is, of course, invaluable. But in terms of the vocation of ministry beyond teaching? And even in regard to teaching, how to teach effectively? Not so much. Even worse was how ignorant I was about the life of ministry. I did not know how to manage my time, care for myself spiritually, nor raise my kids in a way that was sane.
In other words, I never learned to do the things that I would actually have to be doing every day for the rest of my life.
We need seminary. But in fairness to a seminary education, there are certain things it will never be able to impart, even if it tries. God bless professors, but most of them have never been the pastor of a church. They may have been interim pastors or had a short-term pastorate while in seminary, but they are, in truth, academics. They are not practitioners. We need them, and we need the academic education they give us. But we also need what they don’t teach you in seminary. We need insights and wisdom on leadership and relationships, emotional survival and communication, hiring and firing, sexual fences and our struggle with envying the pastor across town. We need best principles about money and time, decision making and church growth.
And we need it from someone who has done it. We need the raw street smarts that can only come from someone who has been educated in the trenches.
As I re-read those words now, they seem more prescient than ever.
This article originally appeared here and is used by permission.
