Send them to Seminary

Jack is not going to seminary. He has a good job, he is settled in his local church, and he wants to minister in his home state, preferably his hometown. Staying put permits him to help in his local church and to build connections he’ll need in the future. Jack will get his book learning from online classes and his practical training from his local pastor. And isn’t this how things “used to be done” anyway, before the rise of seminaries?

Jack’s pastor champions this move. He may have first suggested it; he is at least not inclined to say anything against it. Indeed, one reason why fewer students are picking up and moving to seminary is that their pastor prefers they stay where they are. The pastor is encouraged to have a young man in the church who can speak about Jesus in complete sentences, set out chairs on a Sunday morning, and continue inviting to church young couples from the neighbourhood. The pastor also enjoys the challenge of mentoring a future minister. Looking ahead to his retirement, he already sees a possible transition plan in this young man.

There is an obvious plausibility to these plans. Distance education is not what it was twenty years ago. Online education has improved in quality. And online education may be the only option, or by far the best option, for students (a) who live in countries where freedoms to move and study are limited, or (b) who are not preparing for pastoral ministry, but simply wish to learn or become better equipped for service in their local church, or (c) who are ministers wishing to refresh their education or improve skills (such as counseling), or (d) who are active pastors but wish to receive a layer of Reformed education to add to their previously non-Reformed education.

But before one decides to avoid the alleged “ivory tower” of seminary, before one decides not to fight the battle of uprooting one’s self or family, we should count the costs.

One of the benefits of in-person seminary education is that it loosens our roots, and often transplants us. Basic as it may seem, the first plus of in-person education is that it gets the student not only out of his pajamas (so to speak?), and out of the house, but perhaps out of town. In-person classes usually require a move. And once someone has taken the baby-step of temporary relocation, they become a little more open -- and a little better prepared – to contemplate the giant step a campus ministry on the other side of the country, church planting in a needy state, missionary service on a foreign field. In their sacrifice, small or large, they’ve learned some life-lessons associated with all the faith, inconvenience, discomfort, and fundraising required to live in a place that is not their home. They’ve added more miles of ministry usefulness in fewer years of life experience. They will have expanded the number of people and churches who know them, love them, pray for them, and will perhaps support them financially. Those who choose to do otherwise lose these advantages.

In-person education also entails other-person education. What makes a good seminary is not simply the curriculum, or the professors, but the other students. Just as one doubles the usefulness of a sermon by discussing it over a Sunday lunch, so too the benefits of in-class experiences are multiplied in after-class conversations. Those who do not attend a seminary miss these useful moments, and the inevitable network of life-long friends and encouragers.

In-person education also enables the professor to call a student higher. When a professor knows his students, has welcomed them in his home and office, and has discussed life’s challenges and decisions, he can demand more of them. We can encourage them to press on, meet challenges, recalibrate priorities, and more. This essential work requires a personal relationship that can only exist in a truncated form in an online-only connection.

I am re-reading David Calhoun’s two volume history of Princeton seminary. These volumes remind me that another benefit of seminary education is the increased confidence that students will learn from men who have made it their life’s study to prepare others for their life’s work. Few pastors excel in a knowledge of biblical languages, exegesis, systematic theology, apologetics, counseling, and church history. Most students benefit from multiple models of evangelism, preaching, and pastoral ministry – in other words they benefit in adding to what they can learn from one man, or one pastoral team, by learning from their professors and from the pastors of the church where they attend and serve while in seminary.

Of course, churches at a distance from seminaries are often equipped to teach many of these essential ministry skills; they have an essential role to play. But they will best serve the church not by keeping seminarians at home, but by providing them with robust, paid, summer and year-long internships that give students abundant opportunities for hands-on ministry. Here the church in Podunkville has an advantage over the church in Seminaryville. The church near the seminary may have too many students to give them all the experience they need. The church at a distance can spend a summer or a year pouring itself into a ministry prospect, providing mid-seminary or post-seminary training that will reap a lifetime of benefit. If you are inviting your seminarian back for this training, it may keep the home-fires going. If you are welcoming a previously unknown seminarian, you will be opening them up to a new context for ministry, giving them insight into what the Lord is doing in another corner of his vast vineyard.

So send your best seminarians to seminary! By God’s grace and with much prayer and care, the seminary will return to you a more godly, studious, and better-equipped candidate for ministry.

Chad Van Dixhoorn is Professor of Church History and Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte.