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 years to finish, this could be quite a long post.)

What a Good Seminary Is

• A Place to Begin Learning “Book Knowledge.” Few places amass the amount of biblical “book knowledge” – in classes and in print – that a seminary has to offer.  Used rightly, seminary can whet your taste for deeper studies.
• A Time to Begin Studying Harder. Let’s be honest – most of us don’t naturally think too deeply about Christ and His Lordship over all of life until someone prods us to do so.  Seminary could be a good place to begin this lifelong practice.
• A Venue to Begin Asking Hard Questions. Whether spoken in class, written down for further study, or discussed with friends, good questions are often the offspring of seminary studies.  Again, however, seminary can just be one of many starting places of what must be a lifelong practice for the Christian – asking and answering the hardest of questions.
• A Good Place to Begin Learning Hebrew and Greek. There truly is no substitute for time spent in class learning Hebrew and Greek.  Can it be done on your own? Yes.  Is it much harder than just going to class? No question.  Imagine having a world-class biblical language scholar to teach you Greek.  Would you pass that up for just a book?
• A Good Assembly of Mature Biblical Scholars. There are many places in the world in which you couldn’t find these kind of scholars for hundreds, possibly thousands of miles, so to have them all in one place is truly a blessing of God.

What Seminary Is Not

• Your Local Church. Too many students still come to seminary and try to find their deepest fellowship between other students and professors.  Too many students still come and waste time trying to find “just the right fit” at a local church.  Not to be harsh, but just go and find a good one, get joined to that body, and watch God work in lives.  It doesn’t happen at seminary, because seminary is not the local church.
• Your Ticket into the Gospel Ministry. To dispel another rumor, just because you have your M.Div. doesn’t mean that churches will come out of the woodwork to offer you multiple jobs.  The gospel ministry isn’t a job anyway – it’s the highest and holiest calling from God.  Your local church should be doing the calling, equipping, and sending.
• The Only Place to Learn, Study, and Ask Hard Questions. There are many other ways to learn and practice deep, difficult, delightful study in a community of learners, and the foremost of which is your local church.  The discussions I’ve had with 2 or 3 brothers around a table at Bojangle’s dwarf seminary discussions by a longshot.
• The Only Way to Learn the Languages. Again, if your church has someone gifted by God in Hebrew and/or Greek, he and your church can offer you many advantages over learning the languages in seminary.  Of course, you can learn the languages and still keep your learning plugged in to your church, but you may find it easier to do it all in one context.
• The Only Available Assembly of Mature Biblical Scholars. You never know until you look, but your local church may have more mature, more fatherly biblical scholars in it than your local seminary.  And it may even be that these men already know you better, and you them, than could ever happen in a seminary setting.  Count this a blessing.  Utilize the library and the bookstore, too, since their shelves should be full of biblical scholars, both alive and dead.  Read them and discuss them with your church.
• Necessary. Loving your wife and children is absolutely necessary; the seminary is not. The local church is absolutely necessary; the seminary is not.  Loving the lost peoples of the world is absolutely necessary; seminary is not.  Getting further training for the gospel ministry is necessary, but seminary isn’t the only way to do it.  In fact, the local church can be far better.

Questions to Ask Yourself (and Your Wife):

1. How will seminary serve to increase happiness in Christ for me, my wife and children, my local church, my neighbors, and the peoples of the world? Do I think about this time of study and learning as working more joy, so that it may then flow out from me into others, or is it just to puff my head up?
2. Why do I want to go to seminary? What is my goal?  Is it to love Jesus more, or to get another credential to put on my business card?
3. What do I expect to learn at seminary? Do my expectations line up with reality?  Does this school even teach what I want to learn?
4. What is my plan for starting, working through it, and finishing? If I don’t have one, am I okay with that?  Will I be okay going for six years instead of three?

Questions to Ask of Your Church Family:

1. How has God gifted me to love and serve others? In what ways has God created and grown me to love people in our church well?  Are there any supposed giftings in which I may be deceiving myself?
2. Do you see God’s grace at work to send me to seminary? If so, how so?  If not, why not?  Over what changes in my life should I pray for God’s help?
3. Do you see God’s grace at work to sustain me through seminary? This isn’t a question of “Can God sustain me through it?” but rather, “Is seminary the best idea for me right now, considering my life situation?”  Many of us falter at this question.

Questions to Ask of Your Seminary:

1. What are their basic beliefs? Closely consult their statement of faith.  Doctrines like the Trinity, Christ’s humanity and divinity, the sufficiency and authority of Scripture, the perfect saving work of Christ, the doctrine of salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone to the glory of God alone, the primacy of the local church, and the importance of the family – to name just a few – are non-negotiables.
2. Do they understand the gospel of Christ? When the gospel is preached at this seminary, is it more about man’s duty or God’s finished work on the cross?  When the ministry is discussed here, is it more about man’s clever designs or about God’s gloriously good news?
3. What classes and types of classes are emphasized? This is easy to learn by simply looking at the required curriculum.  Many seminaries require classes and sections of classes that are superfluous and peripheral to the gospel ministry.  Does this seminary require you to take needless classes?  If so, are you prepared to deal with them and learn anyway?

Finally, if you, your wife, and your church family decide that seminary is the best option for you, here are two categories of recommendations.

Life Recommendations:

1. Get and stay deeply immersed in the Word of God and prayer. Not only is the Bible for study and for teaching, it is for all of our life our only source of pure truth, our only kindling for pure joy, our only testimony of the perfect Christ, and the only source of the glorious good news.  It is easy to treat the Bible as a teaching tool; remember to approach it more often for your own enjoyment, faith, hope, love, and satisfaction in God.  Only humility and prayer can do this.
2. Get and stay tightly woven into your local church during seminary. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again – there is no way to live, eat, or breathe Christ for very long without the local church.  This doesn’t mean you need a building; it means you need Christians in and through and around your life, holding you up in prayer and loving you and being loved by you.  Don’t think of them as a checklist during seminary; think of them as family.
3. Start killing and continue to kill sin by the Holy Spirit. The absence of the first two – communion with God in the Word and in the church – often creates a terrible situation with sin.  Instead of being a time of growth in holiness for life, seminary can often be a time of growing, cancerous sin for death.  Get serious about murdering your own flesh.
4. Get and keep your priorities straight. Don’t put seminary first.  Never put seminary first.  There is no conceivable life situation in which seminary comes first.  As one of my pastors said, “Your priorities are in order when each priority honors the one above it.”  This means that if school comes before wife, you’ve got it very wrong.

Class Recommendations

1. “Find out who the best professors are and take only them.  Professors can make or break your seminary experience.” This advice was given to me by my college pastor, and it may have been the best piece of class-taking advice I received.  You can’t always keep it – things like scheduling, time, and work may get in the way – but, as much as possible, try to take only the best professors.
2. Find others who’ve gone before you. Ask them who the best professors are.  Ask them what each professor believes and why his class is “good” or “not good.”  See if these observations line up with Scripture.
3. Love the languages. Luther may have put it best when he said that the languages are the sheath from which we pull out God’s Holy Sword – the Word.  Too many seminarians think that they’ll just “get Hebrew and Greek out of the way” and forget that the Christian ministry is fundamentally one of preaching the gospel of God’s Son straight out of God’s Word (Acts 6:2-4, Acts 20:27, Romans 10:17, 1 Corinthians 1:17, Galatians 3:2-5, etc.).

Britt Treece is a new graduate of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina. He blogs at http://crossonmyback.wordpress.com.

Boy was I surprised. My first semester, I enrolled in Hebrew class, like many beginning M.Div.-ers. I made friends with some other young single guys in the class, and we got together to study. I lived off campus, but they lived in the men’s dorm on campus, so I went over and hung out with them.

One day a group of us got in a conversation about scriptural interpretation. A prominent church leader had shared (in chapel I think) how he had made a major life decision based on a particular verse of scripture…and by the rules we were studying at the time, we agreed that he’d not interpreted the scripture correctly. So we were batting that around.

Somewhere in that conversation one of the guys made a remark I’ll never forget. He said, “Interpreting the Bible properly is so difficult and such hard work, that I don’t even bother to read my Bible devotionally any more.”

This gave me pause. I asked for clarification. I got way more.

I agreed with him about the challenges of proper interpretation, but then I asked him, “You mean to tell me that Farmer Jones out in East Texas can’t sit down with his Bible and his morning coffee, pray that God will speak to him through it and expect reliably to hear from God?”

He said, “No, that’s not possible.”

He went on to say that God could speak just as well through the “funnies” in the newspaper as he could through the Bible.

Wow.

So I chalked it up to him being one of those weird students that you’re bound to run into anywhere. I found out he went to one of the loopier, left-leaning churches in the area, so I figured he was an exception, a little nutty. I’m still pretty sure I was right about this.

But after a while, the others left the room, and I was talking with another friend, one more stable, more normal, more conservative, more in the mainstream of what I considered seminary students to be. The kind of guy you’d want to be on church staff with you.

I was bemoaning the weird guy’s (I thought) abandonment of God, and he said, “Well, to be honest with you, I don’t read my Bible devotionally either.”

He paused.

“And neither does John, or Keith, or….” He went on to name about six guys from his floor that he knew for a fact had abandoned daily time in prayer and in the scriptures.

I was amazed. We talked more. He had been very faithful in personal devotion in college, but somehow just stopped.

These guys, in this atmosphere of saturation of study of the word of God, had abandoned a devotional pursuit of God. They started studying God and stopped loving Him.

I went on to discover that this is very common among seminary students. In all honesty, I struggled very much with this during seminary. By God’s mercy, I managed to keep my habits of prayer maintained, but seminary was a dry and difficult time.

Philosophical riff:

It reminded me of C. S. Lewis’ lament in The Abolition of Man
that the modern world produces men without chests: heavy on reason (the head) and heavy on animal appetites(the belly) but without sentiment (the chest), that ennobling blend of emotion and truth that warms the aridity of cold reason and ennobles the raw impulses of the body. The head, reason, makes us like God; the belly, our appetites, make us like animals. The chest is the mediator that brings them together and makes us really human.

It’s no accident that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord our God. The basic duty of man to the Lord is worship: an activity of the chest—of the heart—if ever there was one.

The modern man, Lewis said, has a big head and no chest. So apparently, did some of my fellow seminarians.

Conclusion:

Seminary is a dry time for devotion. The easy way out is to blame the seminary: the modern institution produces modern men. I don’t buy it. You and I are responsible for our own growth. In the midst of all your study, be sure you are loving God well.

About four years ago my wife and I moved from the south to the not-quite-north. The move had lots of factors… FAR too many to go into here. But we packed the car and headed on the journey with a couple thousand dollars in the bank and an apartment waiting for us. We were young, newly married, and the risk factor wasn’t very high… because if all else failed we could still move in with our parents. The main reason we ended up in our city of choice was because of a pastor and friend who had recently started a church was there and had mentioned that, at some point, there might be a job for me.

So, my wife and I started working odd jobs and just scraping by. After about a year I spoke with the pastor and discussed my desire to return to full time campus ministry (that is what I had been doing in the south for the 3 years prior to the move). We agreed that it was good timing and started to work towards me coming on staff. The one catch is that, as a campus minister, I had to go out and raise a financial partnership team. Some of you know what I’m talking about… for those who don’t, basically I went to lots of people and explained my passion to see college students impacted with the gospel. I then asked if they wanted to partner with me financially. And, lo and behold, some did.

Now, the problem was that I was REALLY bad at the whole process. While I managed by God’s grace to get enough money to live, it was always tight and difficult… then we added our son Little Man… then a house… then Sweet Pea… then a mini van… over the years our expenses increased, yet income didn’t quite keep up. I was forced to work second jobs and long hours. It was always stressful… We were getting by, but we weren’t sure how long we could keep it up.

Finally, last summer we spent some serious time asking God what we needed to do. I could not see spending another year working 60-70 hours a week to just scrape by… not knowing if it would be a “good” month or a “bad” month. We felt like the grace might be up for this season of life. So, we asked God, “if not this… then what?”

Seminary.

It seemed like an odd answer. We can’t pay the bills now, how will we pay them there? How could this work?

Well, we prayed, talked to friends and family, and thought about it a lot. After about three months of consideration… I quit my job. Now, that sounds harsh, and it really wasn’t. My pastor was very supportive and agreed that this seems like the right thing at the right time.

So, here we are… six months later… We’ve sold our house, moved 800 miles from home, and I’ll be starting my first semester as a residential student in February. It has been and will continue to be a wild adventure… but with God we trust that He who called us will sustain us through it all and, in the end, we’ll be shaped and formed more into the image of his son… or be crushed and die… but we’re hoping for the first one…

Anyway, I’d be happy to link to your blog from Seminary Survival Guide.com. Just leave a comment, and I’ll add you to the blogroll.

Also, you’ve read a couple of stories about my seminary and ministry experiences. I know hearing about me all the time is quickly going to get old.

So if you have a story of an experience at seminary or in ministry—yours or someone else’s—that you think will be helpful to others, send me an email at mark -at- seminary survival guide (dot) com. I’d like to post some of those here for our common benefit.

Stories should be true, and be 600 words or less. I can’t promise I’ll post every story I get, but I have a hunch that there are some that would be really helpful. I’ll try to find a modest way to reward authors I post.

The M. Div. is the standard ministry degree, but it also takes 3 ½ – 4 years or more to complete. By comparison, many seminaries offer shorter Master of Arts in biblical studies, theology or Christian education. Think very strategically about this: Is the value of the M. Div. sufficiently high that you want to spend and extra 1-2 years of your life to get it?

A seminary degree is valuable in two ways: 1. in how it prepares you for ministry, and 2. in providing you with a credential that testifies to your qualification for ministry work.

Ministry Preparation

Compare the shorter degree to the longer one. Put the curriculum lists side by side, and see what you’d be missing. Ask fellow students about the value of the courses on the longer degree. Will you really be better prepared for ministry with the extra classes? Or are they needless hurdles for you to jump through?

Credentials

For many churches, the fact that you get a degree from seminary is all that matters. They don’t care what the degree is. Other churches may be particular about it. Think ahead to your ministry work. If you can spend two years less and get the same credential without sacrificing real value in ministry preparation, then you might seriously consider a shorter program. You can save a lot of money that way, too.

When I was in seminary, I seriously considered a shorter program, the M.A. in Theology. Ultimately, however, I decided to stick with the M. Div. For me, it was the right choice, mainly because I went into seminary straight out of college. It was not so much the case that I needed all the additional coursework in the M. Div, what I really needed was time to mature both personally and spiritually, and to gain ministry experience.

So often the time management mantra is: save time, save time. You’ll hear that a lot from me, for sure. But sometimes the wisest thing you can do is spend time. My maturity could not be rushed, and was worth spending the time on.

But I did reject the Master of Music degree on curriculum grounds. As a future worship pastor, some found it odd that I was studying for an M. Div. instead of a music degree. I had looked at the Master of Music curriculum and faculty, and quickly determined that for my purposes, it would have been a complete waste of my time. Most of the coursework on the music degree I’d already taken as an undergrad at a very respectable school of music; the rest I was uninterested in. I felt like God wanted me grounded in Him and his Word, and the theology-rich M.Div. was the right answer for me.

Most importantly: pray on it. For all my urgings for you to be wise, do remember that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. God knows your future and which path is best for you. Seek Him on it and obey.

Bottom line: don’t just pick a default degree just because it’s tradition or everyone does it. Give it serious, intentional thought and prayer.

I greatly benefited from the counsel of a group like this when I was trying to find a church right out of seminary. I had interviewed with a church in Chicago that I really liked, but when I prayed about it, I felt strongly I was not to go. I was upset with God, but I obeyed. Months later, I was in view of a call at a church in Alabama. On Saturday night before my big trial Sunday, I sat up in bed I the middle of the night with this church from Chicago on my mind. The next day, the Alabama church voted to extend a call to me, but with a substantial minority of “no” votes. I went home confused. I gathered a group of people who knew me well and knew God well, to pray and talk it through. So we started by praying together, and then they started asking me questions. Penetrating questions. At the end of our time together, it was clear that I was to tell the Alabama church no, and then re-contact the church in Chicago, tell them what happened, and trust God with the outcome.

I did. The result? The church in Chicago voted unanimously to call me, and I enjoyed 6 ½ years of ministry there. The pastor of the church in Alabama left the church abruptly two weeks after I turned them down. He called me later to tell me the story and to tell me about the serious problems and un-health in the church. Finally, once I was on the field in Chicago, a dear old saint who had been praying diligently during their search told me she was convinced the first time that I was the one who was supposed to be there. She and some other prayer warriors prayed that I would return. Her assessment at the conclusion was that had I come the first time I interviewed with them, the church would not have been ready for me.

God’s speaking to me in that way was an awesome relief and encouragement. You and I need the insight of others to verify our callings, both general and specific.   Tomorrow, I’ll publish a two-page assessment you can use to help you with this.

For more on this from a source far more authoritative than I, see Richard Foster’s excellent book, Celebration of Discipline. He has an entire chapter on the discipline of guidance.

Make Sure You’re Supposed to Be Here,
Part one
Part two
Part three