Comments on: Classes Worth Taking

By: A Seminary Survival Guide Sampler | Said at Southern

A Seminary Survival Guide Sampler | Said at Southern — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 10:57:30 +0000

[...] Classes Worth Taking [...]

By: » Sucking out the marrow (and spitting out the pits) SeminarySurvivalGuide.com

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 11:06:47 +0000

[...] observations in hindsight about which classes are valuable are all fine, but they’re not helpful BEFORE you take a given [...]

By: D.Beirne

D.Beirne — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 22:07:29 +0000

Biggest benefit to me of seminary was not a particular class but the whole lifestyle that prepared me for ministry:
1. meeting impossible deadlines while every prof thought theirs was the only class I had prepares one for the unreasonable expectations a church will place on you.
2. managing my meager money to eat, pay for school, keep the heat on (it’s good to be single in seminary) prepares you for the pay scale.
3. the discipline to juggle school, part-time job, part-time ministry–ministry is multitasking.
4. learning that some classes benefit just you, not your ministry–cause when you’re in ministry you have to learn to feed yourself and not just study for sermons/lessons. Personal growth will lead to professional growth.

I think the 80/20 holds up. I’d love to have gone to seminary in an online world (class of 88), boy I’d do a lot of independent study and online courses to get them useless ones out of the way.

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 17:20:45 +0000

Eric,

I appreciate your pointing out the distinction between class experiences that are practical versus those which are transformative. The truth is that some classes will be way more helpful than others in practical terms. I found that the transformative effect for me was in the entire experience of seminary, both the amazing experiences and the drudgery, too.

It’s easiest to make the 80/20 determination in retrospect, but I do have some thoughts about how to identify the classes with most value ahead of time.

I should probably re-emphasize that the purpose of this series of posts is not to come up with ways to blow things off or “Get through seminary the easy way.” Far from it. My fundamental assumption is triage: you can’t do everything well, and some things will have to go, simply because we’re finite creatures. So if we have to cut back at seminary for the sake of our sanity or our marriage, I’m saying that there are ways you can do that without robbing yourself of the greatest value of the experience.

By: Eric Messelt

Eric Messelt — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 15:02:40 +0000

So far, in my seminary career (about 2/3 toward an M.Div.), it’s hard to pick out the courses with the most leverage as it’s hard to distinguish between those classes with the most lasting traction from those classes that I enjoyed most from those classes that caused me to transform my mind or spirit.

My theology courses were very engaging and the prof helped us to see the relevance to the issues that we confront on the street-level. We have a “Spiritual Formation” track and those courses were exactly congruent with why I went to seminary: to make me spiritually “fit” for ministry. My Bible courses helped me to dig in to the text and maked my eventual preaching more about ‘preaching the Word’ rather than ‘preaching what I think this text says to me.’

So the 80/20 principle is true for me; it just applies itself differently in different spheres of my life.