Seminary Survival Guide.com

Feature Article #1

Don’t Be Lazy

In the face of all the multiple demands at seminary, the temptation to laziness can be acute.  I’ve spoken with a number of students who succumb to laziness, to their own hurt.  They have much to get done, but cannot get themselves to do it. Often laziness will show up as procrastination; or choosing to [...]

Mark | August 23rd, 2010 | Continued

Feature Article #2

Start the Semester Off Smart

The first week of seminary is over, and looming ahead are due dates for reading, papers and tests. You know this because you should have a syllabus for each class, which contains all the assignments you’ll need to complete this semester and their due dates. This is awesome. It’s a time management bonanza. If you [...]

Mark | August 20th, 2010 | Continued

Feature Article #3

Ministry Is For Broken People

The true reasons people go into ministry are manifold.  We’ve written at length about the need for divine calling.  But not surprisingly, there are human factors as well. One major human factor that is widely unacknowledged is personal brokenness.  I’ve never met anyone in ministry who didn’t have some level of emotional wounding in their [...]

Mark | August 16th, 2010 | Continued

Feature Article #4

Survival Skill # 1: Triage

Triage (`tree-ozh), from French, “to sort.” 1. A process for sorting injured people into groups based on their need for or likely benefit from immediate medical treatment. Triage is used in hospital emergency rooms, on battlefields, and at disaster sites when limited medical resources must be allocated. 2. A system used to allocate a scarce commodity, [...]

Mark | August 7th, 2010 | Continued

Feature Article #5

Stumbling at Seminary: Cheating

(From the archives. ) In an interview with the dean of students at a leading evangelical seminary, I asked about the most common reasons people did not complete seminary.  One of his answers was a shock to me: students get caught cheating. Seminary students have ample opportunity to cheat. You can plagiarize—representing the academic work [...]

Mark | May 4th, 2010 | Continued

About this Site

My name is Mark, and I’m the general editor for Seminary Survival Guide. I’m a graduate of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (M.Div, 1995) and I’m serving as associate pastor at First Baptist Church of Columbia, Illinois. I got the idea for this lying in bed praying one morning. Our church has several seminary students, and [...]