This post begins a four-part series on calling to ministry. Not everyone is supposed to be in ministry. Not everyone is supposed to be in seminary. This may seem a little insulting as a starting point, but hang with me for a bit. Your true fitness for a life of ministry will be tested. It’s [...]
I’m happy to announce the public roll-out today of SeminarySurvivalGuide.com. Welcome to all of you who are being referred here by friends or other blogs. We’ve been live for a week or so now. I waited on the launch to get my web stuff configured right, and also to put enough posts up for you [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
