Author Archive: Mark
Mark Warnock is the founder and General Editor of Seminary Survival Guide.com. He serves as Associate Pastor of First Baptist Church of Columbia, Illinois, and is a Ph.D student in Christian Philosophy at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is working with Ed Eubanks on a book on how to survive seminary.
Stumbling at Seminary: Cheating
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 of others as your [...]
Tim Keller on Time Priorities
This is definitely worth two minutes of your time. (RSS readers: embedded video) If you manage your time and priorities right, people will be mad at you. Get used to it. HT: Chris Gensheer
Category: General
A Little Seminary Is A Dangerous Thing
Beginning seminary students are often flush with excitement of the prospect of learning the deep things of God. With a legitimate hunger for God’s word, we tackle our language and theology study with great rigor, and begin having conversations with our fellow students, challenging each other’s understanding of the scriptures. A little knowledge, however, is [...]
Master Your Seminary’s Required Reading in Half the Time (or Less)
Seminary requires a massive amount of reading. Often the workload for even a single course can go over a thousand pages. Multiply that by four or five, and it becomes daunting, especially if you’re not a natural reader. The numbers of people who struggle with reading seems to be growing, and I’m sure that’s the [...]
Live Off Campus
Seminary housing is often more affordable than comparable accommodations in surrounding communities, and it is definitely more convenient. However, there is a snare associated with it. Seminary is not the real world. It is a bubble, insulated both physically and ideologically from the lost culture in which it stands. In one sense, this is good. [...]
You’re a Victim of Triage (and upcoming posts!)
Regular readers of Seminary Survival Guide have noticed that my posting has been slow of late. My explanation is that I’ve been practicing what I preach. One key concept I believe it’s critical for Christian leaders to master is triage: knowing how to sort through a welter of urgent demands and determine what is truly [...]
Category: Time Management
Avoid the “Seminary Church”
Particularly around larger seminaries, you’ll find what I call the “seminary church.” It’s almost always a large church. Often it’s close to the campus. Many professors and students attend it. The culture and theology of the seminary often bleeds over into the church. For seminary students, it’s a comfy place to be. There were a [...]
“Learn to…” Series Summary
To tide you over as I’m traveling the next few weeks, here’s our completed contributions so far to the series, Things that you should learn while in Seminary that Seminary will not teach you: Learn to Pray Learn to Share Your Faith Learn to Submit to Authority Learn to Love People Learn to Exercise Learn [...]
DTS Bloggers United!
I was happy to see that John Saddington, a 3rd year Dallas Theological Seminary student, has started an aggregator site for DTS bloggers. You can find it at theologyblogs.com.
Category: Links
Going to Seminary
If you haven’t yet checked out goingtoseminary.com, it’s a great resource for current and future seminary students. They have several current seminarians writing for the site. You can find lots of good counsel on a variety of subjects, and a engaging community, to boot. Ryan, the GTS webmaster, has been very helpful to me personally [...]
Category: Links
