(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 [...]

Seminary will give you plenty of practice writing papers. By the time I graduated with my M.Div, I could easily write ten pages about nothing. (Some would allege that my sermons are exactly that…but I digress.) Writing papers on the scale that seminary requires can be daunting if you haven’t done it before. Ten page [...]

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 [...]

One of your most common assignments at any seminary is going to be the sometimes joyful, often tedious, yet always necessary book review. While every seminary will have different requirements for their book reviews, nearly all fall into a fairly similar mold. How can you attack this task in such a way as to do [...]

I worked four years in a church staff position during and after college before deciding I needed to further my education by going to seminary. Those years were invaluable to my development, because I experienced ministry and discovered what I didn’t know and needed to learn before starting my studies. I wish all incoming students [...]