The Trouble with Seminaries

 

Let’s get one thing straight—I am pro-seminary, I’m always encouraging students and pastors to go to seminary. I think it should be required for full life-long ordination in the modern world. We no longer get doctors and lawyers from college, and we should quit be satisfied with college kids as pastors. However, that does not mean I think seminaries are doing ministerial education right. I think there’s a lot wrong with seminary education that ought to be addressed in the coming years.  Here is some of what I think is “the trouble with seminaries:”

 

1. Focus on the disciplines instead of pastoring.

In most seminaries the disciplines reign supreme—Bible, Theology, Church History or Practical Theology—instead of pastoring being at the center. A Bible scholar, for instance, eventually forgets what pastors need from the Bible and places their discipline central. Students are challenged to study to know rather than study to use. Eventually knowing is its own objective. The fact that knowing some things has little use in the actual work of ministry is not even addressed. When this happens, the professors are most proud of those graduates who go on for their PhDs and become effective professors. The grads who became effective pastors are overlooked or considered second-tier students. Seminaries eventually forget they are supposed to be educating pastors not making professors. The ideal seminary in my opinion would make pastoring central to everything it did. When an occasional student slipped through, got get their PhD and came to replace existing seminary professors it would not be front page news, but buried on page 6. In the ideal seminary, the cover stories would all be reserved for graduates who were effective pastors.

2. Fragmented study of the disciplines.

Seminaries divide study into the disciplines and assume the students will integrate stuff from the different disciplines. This lets professors off the integration hook.  While the four major disciplines of study are important to pastoring, why have so few seminaries figured out how to integrate them at the teaching level? One seminary prof says, “I teach Greek—it is your job to figure out why it’s relevant.” Really?  Look it from the student’s perspective. He or she studies Greek in one course, pre-second temple Judaism in another, theology of Augustine in a third and pastoral counseling in the fourth. None of these professors attempts to integrate their content with the other courses (or the actual work of pastoring). Seminary professors simply assume the students will integrate all these separate courses into a comprehensive approach to pastoral work. The seminary professors don’t (or can’t?) do it—yet they expect students to do it?  Assuming students do the integration lets the professors off the hook and they continually bury themselves deeper and deeper in their isolated discipline, “knowing more and more about less and less until they know almost everything about almost nothing.”  Something’s wrong here. In the ideal world, I think every seminary course would focus on the actual work of ministry (preaching, discipleship, leading, outreach, worship etc.) then integrate into that course all the necessary foundational elements from Bible, Theology, Church History or whatever else is foundational to accomplishing the actual work of a minister.  Such a curriculum would have to be integrated by its very design and taught by an “integrated professor.” If knowledge tidbits from a foundational discipline can’t be shown to be related to the work of a minister, it should be left to specialized courses or for a few introductory survey courses.  Most of the learning in an ideal seminary should not be learning for learning’s sake but learning for the ministry’s sake.

 

3. Marginally relevant courses.

Most seminaries have a core curriculum designed before automobiles were invented, let alone before the advent of the Internet. While some practical courses have been updated, the foundational courses are almost identical to our grandfather’s.  The argument goes, “an educated pastor needs to know these things.” Since the seminary cartel is controlled by people committed to their discipline, and this cartel virtually controls the standing of all other seminaries, innovation comes slowly. Most pastors today in real churches admit they go weeks (years?) without writing an exegesis paper or parsing Greek verbs in their actual work. They are glad they know these things, like a math student who knows how to use a slide rule, but they complain that much was left out of their seminary curriculum.  That’s the problem. It is not that every course a professor can think up can’t be shown to be worthwhile; it is just that the “opportunity cost” of including this course means other more relevant courses are left out.  In an ideal seminary, a person who was actually pastoring while attending seminary would see the direct integrated relevance of every course to their pastoral work. Few courses would focus on esoteric subjects that were marginally relevant to actual work in the ministry.

 

4. Isolation from the local church.

While most seminaries require some sort of practicum or internship experiences these are often the weakest links in the learning chain. In fact, for years “going to seminary” meant “leaving the local church.” In an ideal world, I think a seminary student wouldn’t leave the seminary each week to do practical work in a church; they’d leave the church each week to give time to seminary. Seminaries are good at educating ministers, but only local churches can train them. When a student works 20 hours a week or so in an actual local church they have a place to try out their learning. It gives them a “malarkey meter” to use in measuring which assignments are marginally relevant and which are actually relevant to the actual work of a minister. In an ideal seminary, I think the assignments would often involve the whole church, not just academic “pretend work” done in the student’s mind. A seminary should require the student to gather five real people from their own real church and negotiate among them a new approach to worship (rather than invent their own dream plan for a church that doesn’t exist). In such a seminary the student would “take their church to seminary” with them. The whole church would experience many of the assignments, and the entire church would be better for it. Seminary students often say in their first church after school, “I learned more in the first month than all three years in seminary.” What they mean is they got more training in their first month. Seminaries are good at education, only local churches can do training. In an ideal seminary the students would be required to work maybe 20 hours a week in a real local church while they were studying—that way they’d get both their education and their training all at once.

 

5. Only one way to attend.

To go to seminary in the past you had to pack up and move to campus for three years, usually exchanging your active job in a church for a less serious “practicum” assignment. That’s how I went to seminary—I packed up, left my church, and moved into monastery life for a while. I still prefer the idea of studying in community and still heavily favor a resident seminary over other models for people in their 20s. But I also am a realist and know that won’t work for most pastors already out there over 30. My denomination (The Wesleyan Church) doesn’t require seminary—we ordain people after only four years of college (or even less!). If you go to seminary in my denomination, you are going “above and beyond the minimum” requirements. This is why less than 20% of our ministers are seminary-trained. I was satisfied with a college-student trained ministry when most of the members were only high school graduates. Now, many of my denomination’s churches are packed with college graduates and even plenty of members who attended grad school. Such members expect their surgeon to be more than a chiropractor and they expect their pastor to be more than a college grad. If my denomination is going to increase the number of seminary-educated ministers there will have to be more than one way to attend seminary—live in, online, drive-in, one-week modules, plus all kinds of blended delivery programs. Luckily, seminaries are already moving this way… slowly. However, the dirty little secret is that these seminaries usually don’t give their best professors to these innovative programs but toss them off to adjuncts. I think the ideal seminary would be designed so everyone could attend and get exposed to all the best profs—a 22 year old freshly graduated unmarried college student with no church experience should be able to move on campus, a 26 year old married couple who have been working in the church for five years and now wants to go to seminary while still working in a church should be able to attend. And a 51 year old pastor who realizes his Bible school degree from 35 years ago needs updated who lives 1700 miles away should be able to attend. And a pastor in Sudan who finished college and wants advanced training should be able to attend. In an ideal seminary all of these could find a delivery option suitable for them to get their seminary education. Is that too much to ask? The biggest market for seminary in the future won’t be for 20something college graduates but middle aged pastors who realize their training form 30 years ago needs freshened.

 

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Will it happen? Maybe. It would be best if the traditional seminaries could reinvent themselves to meet the changing needs of seminary education. I’ve have been hoping that for two decades. Some have started. But change comes slowly in education (and slower yet in seminaries). How can you change a faculty member’s approach who has been teaching the same foundational content for 30 years?  How can you negotiate through the “turf battles” at seminaries which so jealously guard against any attempt to change requirements as they scrap with each other with Alamo tenacity?  This is why seminaries often give up reforming the core and just fiddle with new delivery systems (online, modules) using the same old curriculum. Addressing the core problems of the seminary curriculum is a complicated business.  Some progress is occurring, but it is coming as slowly as drums and guitars to retirement center worship.

 

I suspect the sort of changes above will more likely come through newly founded seminaries in the coming decade that will start from blank paper designing a new seminary—a “nexsem” approach (see Leonard Sweet in current issue of REV. Magazine). These nextsem designers can’t be just “professors protecting turf” but will have to be people who really care about the local church and the ongoing work of a minister—people who want to marshal seminary education to make stronger pastors and local churches, not just build their own scholarly kingdoms. Will they be scholars? You bet!  In fact, this sort of seminary will require a new kind of scholar, one able to integrate their own discipline with the others and most of all, to integrate learning with the practical work of a minister, showing why it is relevant to pastoring, not just forcing learning with a grading club. They will have to love pastoring so much that their greatest joy is producing pastors not reproducing professors. I suspect some of these nexsem institutions will rise in the coming decade. Maybe a few traditional seminaries will reinvent themselves like this too, but I bet these changes will only be seen fully when a handful of brand new seminaries get founded in the coming decade. If local church boards, District Superintendents, senior pastors and current and recent seminary students really prefer what they say they want, then students will flock to these new kinds of seminaries and they will flourish. That will rattle the entire seminary world, and probably will trigger all kinds of catch-up changes in the more traditional approaches. IN 20 years all surviving seminaries will be different—and better. It will be exciting to watch!

 

So, what do you think?

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Keith Drury March 11, 2008

www.TuesdayColumn.com

Keith Drury is Associate Professor of Religion at Indiana Wesleyan University