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 [...]
August 23rd, 2010 | Mark | 0 comments | ContinuedArchive for Mark
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 [...]
August 20th, 2010 | Mark | 0 comments | Continued
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 [...]
August 16th, 2010 | Mark | 3 comments | Continued
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, [...]
August 7th, 2010 | Mark | 0 comments | Continued
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 [...]
May 4th, 2010 | Mark | 0 comments | ContinuedDating At Seminary
So what’s it like to date at seminary? Ed and I are working on the relationships section of the book and realized we needed to hear from more perspectives than just ours. So how about it? Have any thoughts or perspectives on seminary dating life you think would be valuable for other seminary students? You [...]
May 4th, 2010 | Mark | 2 comments | ContinuedQuick Update
Seminary Survival Guide.com has been fairly inactive, as you may have noticed. I’ve been busy with lots of good things going at church: we’re attempting to relocate, and lots of people are coming to faith. The challenges are many and they are good. Next week, however, I’ll be taking a couple of days away to [...]
April 24th, 2010 | Mark | 4 comments | Continued
Reflections on Graduating Seminary
by Britt Treece A week before Christmas, after six long years of study, I graduated from seminary. Looking back, I’ve had a lot of thoughts, questions, comments, and recommendations, so I thought that organizing some of them would be helpful both for me and for past, present, and future seminarians. (Since it took me six [...]
January 8th, 2010 | Mark | 1 comment | Continued
Attending Seminary Means Living In a Foreign Land
When I went to seminary, it entailed a move from Florida to Texas. There was a shift in geography, but there was also a shift in culture-a pretty dramatic shift, as anyone who’s moved to Texas will probably tell you. I grew up in South Florida. I was a native Floridian, which was pretty unusual. [...]
September 28th, 2009 | Mark | 6 comments | Continued
My First Semester Shock, or Seminarians Without Chests
I approached seminary with many of the common illusions seminary students have. I thought it would be a spiritually vibrant and intense time, full of people who were overflowing with passion for Christ. Boy was I surprised. My first semester, I enrolled in Hebrew class, like many beginning M.Div.-ers. I made friends with some other [...]
September 21st, 2009 | Mark | 14 comments | Continued



