Knowledge Is Not Life
One of the dangers of seminary to your spiritual life is that so much emphasis and time is spent on the expansion of your knowledge base. Hidden within the academic environment is the deadly assumption that knowledge is what qualifies you for ministry. It’s not. What qualifies you for ministry is the life of God [...]
Category: Spiritual life
Seminary DOES prepare you for ministry
Let’s start by stating the obvious. If you go to seminary you should learn the Bible, Christian doctrine, ethics, church history, Greek and Hebrew. This is really important work, the very heart of ministry preparation. There are things people serving in ministry need to know, and know well. Ignorant Christians in leadership are an embarrassment [...]
Category: Time Management
Seminary does not prepare you for ministry
Ok, time for an ugly reality check. Seminary does not prepare you for ministry. Or, at least, it does not prepare you in all the important ways you need to be prepared. How many times have you heard pastors remark about some issue they’re facing, “They didn’t teach us that in seminary?” You’ll be saying [...]
Category: General
You must learn 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 [...]
Category: Time Management
Welcome to Seminary Survival Guide
Do you want to survive seminary? We hope you will. Frankly, we want you not just to survive seminary, but to survive ministry, too. But the statistics aren’t good. Half of all seminary students drop out before they complete their degrees. The protestant clergy divorce rate equals that of the general population. The average seminarian [...]
Category: General
