Seminary: It’s Not Just for Pastors Anymore
A while back we had a brief discussion here over a plea for a “new kind of seminary” from Dr. John Frame (formerly of WTS, now at RTS Orlando). In that essay, Frame traced the history of modern seminaries back to the 19th century, where respectable American Protestants wanted to have a proper professional school for their pastors just as they expected for their doctors and lawyers. Until the last generation seminaries were, by-and-large, exactly that exclusively. In the last couple decades, though, there has been an increasing number of students at most seminaries, WTS included, who have no intention of entering traditional pastoral ministry. They are there for various reasons: to train for work in parachurch ministries, as Christian school teachers, as counselors, or just to become more educated lay persons. Some come just to sort out their own spiritual problems or curiosities.
Over on the Reformation21 blog this week they’ve been decrying what they see as a failing in the seminaries to stick with their original mission. Pastor Phil Ryken blames the seminaries for not insisting that anyone they admit have a clear call confirmed by their local church.
I think we’re not going to get that genie back in the bottle. Far too many of us (and I say “us” because my wife and I both are among those non-pastoral students) have discovered that seminary can be an incredibly valuable opportunity to bring theology and biblical study into whatever calling the Lord takes us to. Perhaps the answer is not to try to return seminaries to the good old days, but rather to rethink our pastoral preparation process altogether. What if churches saw a stint in seminary as only one part of a pastor’s preparation before being installed in a church*? One practical way I would implement this is by abolishing Westminster’s present Mentored Ministry program in favor of a required time of internship in a church following one’s pastoral degree from the seminary.
* I am aware that there are churches that already do operate this way, but I believe that far too many are simply willing to accept a seminary degree as proof enough that a young person is ready for pastoral ministry.
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March 23rd, 2006 at 1:43 am
They are there for various reasons: to train for work in parachurch ministries, as Christian school teachers, as counselors, or just to become more educated lay persons. Some come just to sort out their own spiritual problems or curiosities.
I think they should be encouraging more of that then pushing for only those who have a ‘clear call confirmed by their church’ (?). Theology is for the community of God, not just ministers. I love the dynamic at WTS of people who are going into different careers after seminary.
Missed you at church this Sunday!
March 23rd, 2006 at 6:43 am
“respectable American Protestants wanted to have a proper professional school for their pastors just as they expected for their doctors and lawyers.”
The parallel to medicine caught my eye. One thing that has always intrigued me is that the study of medicine has the same sort of tensions - the actual practice of medicine with those who are gravely ill demands skills that go far beyond what can be learned through formal classroom instruction. At the same time, no one would claim that formal classroom instruction could be dispensed with. And also, no one would claim that the practice of medicine in the everyday environment would be better served by eliminating the scholarship and medical research done by specialists at medical schools who never see patients.
The solution is that no one who simply graduated from medical school is ready to be a doctor. There is a residency period required, in which they actually work in a hospital/clinic alongside experienced doctors. It strikes me that this is similar to what Mark is describing above as a rigorous pastoral internship.
I find it hard to be sympathetic with Frame’s article or Ryken’s comment. I am just too persuaded of the value of a theologically trained laity (imagine what a help that would be to pastors who want qualified elders in their congregations! Imagine if pastors didn’t have to reinvent the wheel each time they assume a pulpit!) and of Christian scholarship (most of the lexicons, commentaries, and systematic theologies pastors rush to for sermon preparation are not simply compilations of past sermons, but the product of meticulous scholarship, and often by people working in the very sort of academic environment that is being decried here. In fact, I’d imagine if a pastor attempted to make this kind of scholarship part of his routine, he would incur criticism that he was neglecting his flock). Pastors are only too glad when either of these two resources are available to them, and yet this article would criticize the very thing that allows for those resources.
I am sympathetic with Mark’s comments at the end. Rather than reframing the way seminaries operate, why not simply modify our expectations about what formal seminary training does? It does not automatically qualify one for pastoral ministry. But it is probably foolish to have expected that it could. How could someone be qualified for pastoral ministry in the church without being thoroughly immersed in the church first? I think some kind of pastoral residency (if I can borrow the concept from the medical field)in a church under competent pastors is where the gap between seminary graduation and pastoral readiness should be filled. That seems much wiser than eliminating non-pastoral students and the academic work of Christian scholarship from seminaries in order to try to fill that gap.
March 23rd, 2006 at 7:31 am
Art:
We were visiting my mother in Scranton this past Sunday. Nice to be missed!
Karyn came up with that very same idea of a pastoral “residency” several months ago. I was in conversation with Al Groves about it before he became ill. The idea grew out of our concern over what we perceived as the ineffectiveness and possibly negative results of the present Mentored Ministry program. (Which is not to say that there aren’t those who benefit from that program.) For those outside the WTS community, Mentored Ministry is a requirement on every M.Div. student that he or she complete 400 hours of supervised internship in a church or para-church ministry before completing the degree program. With the modern reality that most seminarians have families and outside work, this becomes a huge burden rather than a blessing. Simply to survive the extreme academic rigors of a WTS education (while not losing one’s marriage/family and while working a job to pay for WTS), most MDiv’s that we know feel like they endure their MM; it becomes one more thing to check off the card so you can graduate.
Karyn’s proposal, similar to yours, would be the med school model. Allow pastoral seminary students to fully concentrate on their studies for the 3-4 years they are in seminary. After completing the academic requirements, defer graduation (and the diploma) until at least one year of full-time internship in a ministry has been completed. We see that as a win-win all around.
March 23rd, 2006 at 8:30 am
I agree with the comments above concerning the need for a residency or internship, post-graduation, for pastoral canditates. Incidentally –you mentioned counseling as a vocation not falling under traditional pastoral ministry (”traditional” being the operative word, I know), but I have come to realize this year, after so many discussions in my counseling classes about counseling as “soul care,” that a counseling ministry really is a pastoral ministry. Perhaps that makes some men uncomfortable, but it has been a huge eye-opener to me in terms of how I should think about my own calling. I’m not delivering sermons from a pulpit, but I am seeking to shepherd my counselees and to exegete the Scriptures in a way that intersects with real life.
As I look at graduation, I recognize my own desperate need for mentored practice in these things, which is why I am applying for the CCEF internship– something which I think every counseling student should be able to do after graduating. Sadly, they are only able to award 4-6 interships each year, due to various contraints on the CCEF staff. If that could be got around, I think the residency program we are discussing should extend to the counseling department, as well.
March 23rd, 2006 at 10:32 am
Understood, Rachel, and affirmed. I was using “pastoral” in the narrowly defined way most conservative Presbyterians would recongnize: the specific office of pastor as preacher/teacher to a local congregation
March 23rd, 2006 at 11:27 am
Mark, on a logistical note, I think that your proposal to ditch mentored ministry requirements won’t work because the 400 hour thing is required by the associations that accredit theological schools. Lose the Mentored Ministry, lose your accreditation (I think).
On a “bad church, bad church” note, I think that most pastors are less than skilled at training other folks how to be pastors. Maybe a residency would be helpful–but how would it be any better than taking an assistant/associate job and learning on the job in that way (which would, supposedly, be under the insight of a senior minister)?
March 23rd, 2006 at 11:31 am
Mark,
What a great(!) discussion. I have been thinking about this a lot over the last few years at WTS. So here goes:
First, what is the scriptural basis for a church or pastor saying that seminaries should be the one training ministers for pastoral ministry. I would say that Dr. Ryken is seeing that there is a need for pastors to train the next generation; however, I do not see that seminaries are entailed necessarily in that scenario.
Second, the great confusion over whether the seminary is the church is quite strange. Seminary is simply not the church and the sooner we can all get this through our heads the better off we’ll all be. It has absolutely no bearing on orthodoxy.
Third, it is absolutely appropriate given our pastor-scholar paradigm to have our pastors go off and study in the academy for 4 years. The Catholic church sends their priests off for 9 years and they don’t have any pretention about whether or not it is best for a priest to teach them philosophy or not. For that matter they are not hung up on whether their professors must be men! They want the best possible professors for their priests and are happy to have top female scholars in most cases teach their priests. Karen Jobes would be a great illustration of a missed opportunity for pastoral candidates studying at WTS in my opinion. Given that the Bible is clear about eldership being for qualified men, such a “pastoral candidates only” policy would serve to bar all women from seminary. What a complete disservice to the church!
So if as Reformed types we do not see a sacred-secular distinction (and are not Theonomists) then what’s the problem with saying that there is an academic aspect to a potential pastor’s preparation and that the church will then teach the application of those things en medias res upon the candidates call?
The hang up might seem to be that our church growth models don’t allow pastors sufficient time to groom candidates for the ministry in the personal way to which Ryken is right to aspire. Further, the world we live in now, as most of us who did not have a private classical Puritan based education are quite aware, is post-Christian if not anti-Christian. If we want accountants and biologist rocking the financial and scientific worlds for Christ let them come to seminary if the desire and can. If we want theology to again be the foundation of philosophy, you are going to have to let philosophers enter seminary so that they can ingest the very thing that will save their philosophy. Tradition that is nostalgic is deadly because it ignores its eschatological destination. Let someone else lead the way back, I am marching on to Jesus.
Just thoughts…
March 23rd, 2006 at 11:34 am
Let me clarify and ambiguous statement from my previous post:
Seminary has every bearing upon orthodoxy. It is where we learn to express orthodox statements and to discern hetrodoxy. However, whether or not seminary is the church or not has no bearing on orthodoxy.
March 23rd, 2006 at 12:51 pm
Way to forestall my “United Methodists don’t just take every seminary graduate” comment with your footnote, Mark. The UMC’s Ministry Inquiry Process takes years. I think that’s good, on the whole; it forces the irrationally exuberant [especially me!] to think about it long and hard before starting down the path.
March 23rd, 2006 at 1:38 pm
I believe that any kind of training for Born-Again Christians can be dangerous. Especially if it is for women. I commend Philip Ryken, my Protestant brother, in his efforts to keep the Protestant laity unskilled with the Bible and Christian theology - better grounds then for us to pick from!
March 23rd, 2006 at 4:50 pm
I have found great encouragement in these words by Edmund Clowney, from his 1964 book “Called to the Ministry,” page 83:
Contrast Clowney with these words from Phil Ryken:
So I came to WTS for what Ryken regards as poor reasons. In addition to spiritual and personal questions, I also had academic questions. If it weren’t for WTS, I might have gone the way of Bart Ehrmann (assuming I had the intellectual ability). But now I am strongly heading toward pastoral ministry, after all! God doesn’t always work according to Ryken’s idea. Or Clowney’s, since we now have women at Westminster.
March 23rd, 2006 at 7:47 pm
Thanks again for the excellent comments from one and all.
Daniel: I’ve also heard that MM is required by the accreditors, though I’ve not confirmed that. Also, I don’t know how rigidly defined their requirements are. I wonder if a well thought out program of post-study residency, with no diploma given without its completion, might be something that could be negotiated with the accreditors.
Karyn came up with a good idea this morning that could help take this out of the realm of “it would be nice in an ideal world, but…” She suggested that the post-seminary residency be made voluntary. You could do that or do the present MM program. This would allow for students who want an M.Div. but have no plans for a pastoral career, or those who do not have a cooperating church. Furthermore, in response to your concerns, Daniel, I would propose that the residency program be set up with selected, pre-qualified churches. The seminary could provide training and oversight to the staffs of churches participating. Karyn also suggested that there be occassional required short-term seminars where those in the residency program return to the seminary to share experiences and receive accountability.
The idea, in other words, would be to slowly build a network of churches who work in partnership with the seminary for the on-the-job training portion of the pastor’s preparation.
March 23rd, 2006 at 11:08 pm
I think it might be possible that what Ryken has in mind is that perhaps future pastors would do their “residency” before seminary. The benefits of this is that seminarians would have something close to an external call before stepping foot on campus. Students would be sent, to seminary instead of choosing to go just as an independent decision they arrived at on their own.
This is a place where I admire aspects the Roman Catholic practice. Last year I became acquainted with a few Roman Catholic seminarians from St. Charles Boromeo in Philadelphia. They were all under supervision of a bishop and they were at seminary with the clear vision of returning to their diocese. The whole process was much more churchly and less like graduate school.
But I am wary of shoe-horning everyone into one mold. In my mind the best way to work toward change is to work in our local churches so that they won’t leave the work of pastoral training up to the seminaries.
March 23rd, 2006 at 11:15 pm
Good stuff, Kyle. Interesting to hear about the RC approach. I’m all about having the pastoral call come out of a church context. Definitely think it should be tested and approved there before you bother coming to seminary. If the people who know you best and have seen you serve don’t recognize a call in you, you really ought to question if it’s for real.
March 24th, 2006 at 10:19 am
Many of us early-twentiers who come straight out of college are a confused bunch, and do come partly to sort out personal and spiritual problems. (Indicative of our generation? Maybe.) But everyone I’ve met in this stage of life has an ultimate goal of serving the church in some way, even if we are not quite sure what that exactly looks like, clergy or laity. The seminary environment (classes, people, events, and all) has been and still continues to be a wonderful blessing as a place to work out the specifics of the Gospel calling. I hope it stays a blessing in this sense.
March 24th, 2006 at 1:04 pm
On the Roman Catholic approach it is also worth noting that out of the 9 years that they are required to study, year 5 is spent as a supervised practicum. They are also required to take 36 hours of philosophy in addition to their theology and of course they tend to know their Church History quite well.
Interesting stuff. I hope we can think about how we can improve not only pastoral care for Christ’s sheep, but also the certainty of both inward and outward calling.
Mark thanks for posting this.
March 24th, 2006 at 2:20 pm
First off, the RCC priest I know did not have to study for 9 years…not nearly that long.
Secondly, I think that Ryken makes a good point personally. What about the danger presented by people trained in seminary who have no desire to do ministry in the church but rather simply cause division and strife among the body by flaunting their knowledge/training and arguing over little things.
I bet we have all seen this happen. This has to be taken into account.
I personally find it very frightening that so few seminarians (the vast minority at WTS) want to go into pastoral ministry. Trueman, Ryken, and Phillips’ comments at Ref 21 are very helpful and pertinent I think.
March 24th, 2006 at 3:00 pm
Luke,
Thanks for your interaction on this. Please see my comments below.
Different priestly orders most likely. I should have qualified my statement above to reflect this. Please forgive that oversight. The priests at the University of Dallas for certain have to train for nine years.
This would seem to be a non sequitor. Some pastors are just as divisive. Vocation has nothing to do with whether or not one is divisive, nor does education. Divisiveness has to do with a sinful disposition rather than office or vocation.
Think of it this way. These men and women who are not going to be vocational pastors and who are trained at WTS are going to be much better Ruling Elders (in the case of the men who pursue that office) and if not that all have the potential to be much more productive and sharpening elements in the church body. A pastor cannot and should not try and do and teach everything. With trained laity the ability to both delegate to and cultivate your leaders is heightened for the pastor.
Another thought here for you is that much of the ministy of Christians is done outside of the paramters of church meetings and worship. That means, there are business people who are meeting with other business people with whom you and I as pastors would never have the opportunity to minister. The same is true for philosophy professors, pastors and peace officers, for example. The point is that the Semiary influences people academically and we should be very excited about that.
March 24th, 2006 at 9:30 pm
William, I concur completely with your response. And join you in thanking Luke for expressing the position of the “loyal opposition.”
March 26th, 2006 at 1:34 pm
William-
Points well taken. I agree that pastors can be divisive as well. But I do still think that there are some specific dangers that trained lay persons present to the body. Not that I don’t want trained laypeople…I like your points and I agree that it is wonderful to have trained ruling elders, and trained laypeople. Overall this is a very good thing.
I’m still thinking through a lot of this stuff, but thanks for your comments.
By the way Mark, the loyal opposition needs you to provide more interesting work for us to pillage…you’ve been regressing back to orthodoxy too much lately…:)
March 26th, 2006 at 1:34 pm
William-
Points well taken. I agree that pastors can be divisive as well. But I do still think that there are some specific dangers that trained lay persons present to the body. Not that I don’t want trained laypeople…I like your points and I agree that it is wonderful to have trained ruling elders, and trained laypeople. Overall this is a very good thing.
I’m still thinking through a lot of this stuff, but thanks for your comments.
By the way Mark, the loyal opposition needs you to provide more interesting work for us to pillage…you’ve been regressing back to orthodoxy too much lately…(just kidding)
March 26th, 2006 at 2:58 pm
Mark,
We are all working through this stuff. I am thrilled you’re engaged in the conversation. That is one of the great things about blogs.
I genuinely would like to know more from you on the following thought you posted. Unpack this a little more for me in terms of: 1) What you think the dangers are. 2) How knowledge or lack thereof would affect discipleship. I am using discipleship, perhaps in a simplistic way, but nevertheless as a good word that we may use to describe the work of the pastor.
In some ways this was the fear of the Reformation. If we put knowledge in the hands of the laity, or at least access to that knowledge of the Scriptures, then all kinds of disasters can happen. Many of them did. Some hundred thousand people were killed by the confusion created over the Peasant Revolt while Luther was in prison by order of Prince Fredrick. Personally I do think there were much better ways to bring reformation than the way that it came. At any rate, this may or may not be in the scope of your thoughts; however, I thought I would throw this out to let you in on some of the things about which our discussion leads me to think.
Yours,
Will
March 26th, 2006 at 3:00 pm
Well I forgot to quote you so here are the thoughts you said:
March 26th, 2006 at 3:28 pm
Um…that was Luke’s comment, not mine.
Luke: Sorry it’s gotten boring around here. I’m going to go dig out one of my volumes of Turretin and take up one of the heresies he was against that I can’t even spell let alone remember.
March 26th, 2006 at 3:33 pm
Sorry, Matthew. You guys with Gospel writer names get me all bungled.
March 26th, 2006 at 3:34 pm
Hey, you’re in the Bible, too, ya know….Will of God?
March 26th, 2006 at 3:39 pm
Alright, now you are really on the hetrodox path Mark. I do not think at an ordination exam I would get very far if they said tell us about yourself. And I said in reply, “I am the Will of God.”
I guess that we would be confusing word and concept if we got too ruffled about this and given that we are Westminster flavored seminarians that would really let the hermeneutics department down.
Yours,
Guillermo
March 27th, 2006 at 12:43 pm
Very thought-provoking. Seminary has been “calling my name” for some time, so I am continually drawn to such dialogues. Thanks!
Peace,
Jamie Arpin-Ricci
http://www.emergentvoyageurs.blog.com
March 27th, 2006 at 1:06 pm
This is a must read–absolutely hilarious and the “reasoning” sounds oh so familiar. (For TR’s only: This does not mean that I think that men should not be ordained–it is to say that I think it extremely funny and shows that “arguments” of this sort can go both ways).
(”Top Ten Reasons Why Men Should not Be Ordained“). HT to Ben Myers at “Faith and Theology” for pointing this out.
Edited by the Foolish Sage to fix link.
March 28th, 2006 at 7:35 am
Thanks, Cynthia. That was hysterical! Whatever one’ position on women’s ordination, that satire points out how ridiculous and stretched some of the popular supporting arguments against it are.