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.

I grew up in South Florida. I was a native Floridian, which was pretty unusual. In my 9th grade class of 30 students, for instance, only two of us were actually born in Florida. The rest were transplants. Consequently, there wasn’t much of a unique Floridian cultural identity. Mix the Old South, Yankee transplants, immigrants from Mexico & the islands… it was a mish-mash culture, and not a particular source of pride for any of us.

Then I got to Texas. Sweet Moses, was it different! Texas pride-which I still fail to fully understand-was everywhere.

• “Everything’s bigger in Texas.”
• “Everything’s better in Texas.”
• “Texas is the best.”
• “I [heart] Texas.”

Everywhere you turned, there was this rampant Texas nationalism. I wasn’t really offended by it… I just didn’t get it. I looked around and thought to myself, “Yeah, this is nice and all, but c’mon, people.”

One of my Texas friends, a 300 pound air conditioning repairman, said to me once, (just imagine the accent):

“I don’t know why anyone would want to live anywhere else but Texas. Everything you want’s right here.”

I asked him, “Have you ever been anywhere else?”

He replied, “Well, I went to Arkansas once.”

Now, this is not meant to be an anti-Texas screed; I actually really enjoyed my time there. My point is that moving to seminary means moving. It means, in most cases, a different place with a different culture.

Now the consolation, for many, is that the move is temporary. In most cases, you’re not going to settle down and live there at seminary forever, though I’m sure that happens occasionally.

It was interesting to me to see how people responded to the (temporary) culture shift. There was a significant group of people-usually married-that did not really settle into living in Texas. Most notably, they didn’t make friends while they were there. They seemed to keep all their relationships intentionally superficial.

The attitude was: “I don’t like it here, but I’m living here because I have to. So I’m just going to bide my time for (insert timeline; 2-3 years) until I can go back home where people are (insert attitude: better, normal, smarter, etc.).” In my observation, it was more often not the seminary student with this attitude, but his or her spouse.

(I’m curious, incidentally, if that was just unique to my experience, or if students in other places see this happening. I’ll look for your comments below.)

So this brings me to this word of exhortation: while you’re at living at seminary, live! It may not be home for you, but your real home is in heaven anyway. (Philippians 3:20) Even in your hometown, you should be living as a stranger and an alien (1 Peter 2:11)

The exiles from Jerusalem didn’t enjoy living in Babylon (see for example Psalm 137!), but the command to them in Jeremiah 29 was to settle down, build houses and gardens, start families. In other words, live!

According to the scriptures, God “determines the times set for us and the exact places that we should live.” And he does this, the scriptures say, “so that men will reach out for him and perhaps find him.” I understand that to mean that as an agent of God’s kingdom, wherever I’m living, there are people God sovereignly puts in my relational sphere so I can influence them for His purposes, and vice versa.

So live while you’re at seminary. Settle into the local culture. Do all the things you would do to have a normal life… including making friends.

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.

It’s pretty simple:

• Reserve study blocks beginning about a week before the exam.
• Plan for multiple, short study times rather than longer blocks. Four blocks of 20 minutes each will probably make for better retention than a single two-hour marathon review.
• Reserve this time now, and plan around it.

If you have multiple exams in a single week, like around mid-terms or finals:

• Start a bit earlier.
• Schedule breaks in your study time. You can schedule shorter blocks of study time around other activities, or simply build a ten minute break into each hour of studying.

The point? Be proactive. (This is Habit #1 in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.) If you anticipate your needs ahead of time and provide for them, you won’t have to be reactive and frustrated at exam time.

Also consider these study ideas:

• Swap class notes with someone and read over your friend’s notes. This will help refresh your memory of lectures and pick up things you might have missed.
• If you’ve underlined and/or highlighted your class reading well, it should be relatively easy to review what you’ve read.
• Get a friend to quiz you on points you’ll be tested on. Iron sharpens iron, and it’s a good excuse to get coffee.

Writing papers on the scale that seminary requires can be daunting if you haven’t done it before. Ten page and fifteen page papers are pretty common; even twenty-five page papers aren’t unheard of. Most undergraduate work doesn’t require the level of writing that seminary requires.

I highly recommend creating a writing plan for each major paper you’ll write this semester. Here’s how.

First, Break It Down.

To create a writing plan, begin by breaking down the project into manageable tasks. Make a list of everything you’ll need to do:

• Assess topic choices
• Choose a topic
• Get topic approved by your professor
• Find sources
• Research your sources and take notes on them
• Formulate a thesis
• Create an outline
• Write first draft
• Revise, and write final draft
• Format and print the paper
• Proofread
• Reprint if necessary and submit

The level of detail you choose is partly a function of how you think about the project, and how big the assignment is.

Second, Estimate the Time

Second, estimate how much actual clock time will be needed for each task in the breakdown, and write it down. For instance,

• Assess topic choices (15 minutes)
• Choose a topic (5 minutes)
• Get topic approved by your professor (5 minutes)
• Find sources (3 hours)
• Research your sources and take notes on them. (6 hours)
• Formulate a thesis (20 minutes)
• Create an outline (20 minutes)
• Write first draft (4 hours)
• Revise, and write final draft. (3 hours)
• Proofread. (30 minutes)

Your time estimates will vary depending on the size of each project and the pace at which you work. Watch yourself as you make your first estimates about how long each task will take. Very often, our estimates prove to be way off, in either direction. As you make note of how long these tasks actually take, you’ll be able to make more precise plans for future writing projects.

Third, Reserve the Time Now

Finally-this is important-reserve a block of time in your calendar for each task of the paper. You’ll want to begin anywhere from one to four weeks before the due date. I’d suggest that you plan to finish at least a couple of days before the due date. This will give some leeway if you fall behind schedule.

If possible, start the paper early. In some classes, you have to cover a certain amount of material before you’re prepared to write some papers, but not always.

There may be some classes you can read ahead in more easily.

Look over your assigned reading, and decide which reading will be more challenging and which is more accessible. You may want to wade through the difficult stuff early, or breeze through the easy stuff first. Either way. Just get a jump on it.

Use this reading method for faster comprehension, if you’re not asked to account for your eyes touching every word of your reading.

Even if you can only get an extra six hours or so of reading in during the first few weeks, that will give you six hours you can use later when it’s crunch time.

Extra:

Have trouble with procrastination? Try this.

This is awesome. It’s a time management bonanza. If you take a few moments to plan well, it can make the semester much easier for you. Carpe Diem!

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Get your calendar. You should have only one calendar, because you have only one life. (Be sure you coordinate well with your spouse and kids.)

2. Note all the dates of your papers and exams.

3. To the best of your ability keep your schedule clear in the week before each exam, and two weeks before each paper due date

4. Schedule recovery time. Be sure to schedule some down time right after mid-terms, and after big assignments are due. Plan to relax a bit. If you schedule a day trip, a date, or some fun activity just after the crunch, it will give you something to look forward to after the big project.

5. Make a note of when the worst crunch times are. Then, if your job allows for any scheduling leeway, let your boss know early. If you’re a valuable employee, she just might work with you.

Following these suggestions should only take an hour or two, and should save you time and frustration all semester long.

I have a lot of respect for Daryl Eldridge, the founder of Rockbridge Seminary. The traditional seminary has its strengths, but I think there is a lot about online seminary that merits serious consideration.

From the Rockbridge website:

Are you thinking about going to seminary, know someone who is, or someone who should be?

Rockbridge Seminary is waiving tuition for all new students who begin studies in the September term.

Experience Rockbridge for just the $25 application fee and the cost of books (about $50) with no commitment or tuition cost.

Take part in the life changing course: Developing the Focused Life
Connect with students and faculty from all over the world
Experience high quality online learning- this is not a distance ed course!

The application deadline for the September term is August 24.
Apply now to take advantage of this $1,000 savings in tuition.

Make Sure You’re Supposed to Be Here

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Sounding the Call

Part Four

The Calling to Ministry Self-Assessment (pdf)

And as a bonus:

Is “Calling” a Biblical Idea?

(Video not working? try here)

This is a pretty important distinction. In particular, I’ve seen people go into youth ministry because they love working with youth. Then they become full-time ministers and realize that the administration and equipping tasks are something they’re not cut out for.

Thanks to pastor James for good wisdom on this!

HT: Harvest Blog