Seminaries provide specialists to ministers who need specialists on the topics of the day.Ħ. I am proud to say at Northern, the aim is for the professors to be both specialist enough to be able to work in the guild but who are shaping their lives toward pastors, toward ministry, and toward the church. One of the problems with seminaries is that they can take on the flavor of a research institution and its professors want to be left alone to do historical and technical research and write books and articles and monographs for the academic guild. It probably won’t happen without dedicated time.ĥ. Most pastors aren’t afforded the luxury to study in big chunks of time, so going to seminary, even if it is as a commuter, offers dedicated time. In sociological terms, seminary can be a time of encapsulation: you are isolated from your work, your church, and you are holed up in a class with other students and a professor, and you wander into quiet libraries and you study - it is that dedicated time that seminaries can offer. Let’s face it, to develop theologically as a minister you need time, and that’s what seminary does. Increasingly, seminaries are making spiritual formation - personal enhancement - a part of each course in the curriculum. There was a day when seminaries assumed seminary students would be praying and reading the Bible and practicing the disciplines and attending church … they assumed formation was already underway.
Students have the opportunity to study great theologians, and pity the seminary that assigns textbook-ish theology books, and I’m thinking here of Athanasius and Augustine, Aquinas and Anselm, Luther and Calvin (and the Anabaptists like Hubmaier), and then into the modern era with Barth and Moltmann.ģ. And, they already have a theology seminaries can enhance that theology, both by way of subtraction (getting rid of some careless ideas) and addition (adding better ideas). Seminary students will study the Bible, the whole Bible, and that will be a first for some. What seminaries do well is enhance gifts.Ģ. I have argued for years that seminaries work best when they are populated by ministers and not by folks who think or want, but aren’t sure, if they are gifted or called. Seminaries will not “gift” a person but seminaries can almost always enhance the gifts God has given to a person.
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