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Reinventing Seminary: The Goal

Last Updated January 26, 2012 by Matt 6 Comments

This entry is part 6 of 6 in the series Seminary

What is seminary for, really? It seems to me that the typical goals have been things like: maintain accreditation with Association of Theological Schools (ATS), hire world-famous faculty, be a leader in scholarship, maintain denominational standards of indoctrination, and have a beautiful campus. These must be the goals because seminaries seem to do these things […]

Filed Under: Seminary

Reinventing Seminary

Last Updated January 24, 2012 by Matt Leave a Comment

This entry is part 5 of 6 in the series Seminary

About two years ago, I wrote a little series of posts about why seminary is irrelevant, and it was mostly a critique without a lot of constructive thoughts. Since then, there are a lot of significant voices weighing in on the subject recently trying to discern a way forward: Fuller Seminary has a whole website […]

Filed Under: Seminary

Defending My Seminary Stance: Introduction

Last Updated May 14, 2009 by Matt 1 Comment

As can be expected, many people don’t like some of the assertions I’ve made about the future of seminaries. That’s no surprise. What bothers me a little bit is that I feel like I am being misunderstood. If people disagree with me on substance, that’s fine, but I don’t like being misunderstood. Honestly, there is […]

Filed Under: Ecclesiology, Seminary

Seminary: Have we Lost our Imagination?

Last Updated May 12, 2009 by Matt 4 Comments

This entry is part 4 of 6 in the series Seminary

My posts a couple of weeks ago that talked about the increasing irrelevance of traditional seminaries got picked up by Jake Belder of GoingtoSeminary.com. I rewrote the first two posts a bit and condensed them down into a single post for the Going to Seminary site. The post ran yesterday morning and has generated a […]

Filed Under: Seminary

Why Seminaries are Irrelevant: A Postscript

Last Updated April 30, 2009 by Matt 1 Comment

This entry is part 3 of 6 in the series Seminary

The last two days I wrote a two-part series giving 13 reasons why I think seminaries are becoming irrelevant for training church leaders (read Part 1 and Part 2). However, when reading through the comments, I think I need to make a few clarifications and assertions: I love academia. This has nothing to do with […]

Filed Under: Seminary Tagged With: academics, distributed learning, luther seminary

13 Reasons Why (Traditional) Seminaries are Irrelevant (For Church Leaders): Part 2

Last Updated April 29, 2009 by Matt 11 Comments

This entry is part 2 of 6 in the series Seminary

Read Part 1 with the first six reasons. The cost is too high. Especially in mainline churches where churches are shrinking, our churches are less financially viable and pastors are coming out of seminary with more and more debt, such a trend is not sustainable. We are bankrupting our churches by making them pay for […]

Filed Under: Seminary Tagged With: distributed learning, luther seminary

13 Reasons Why (Traditional) Seminaries are Irrelevant (For Church Leaders): Part 1

Last Updated April 28, 2009 by Matt 16 Comments

This entry is part 1 of 6 in the series Seminary

The other day Jake Belder linked to a post about 5 Reasons Seminary is Relevant. As someone who is in seminary and also interested in how to best train and equip church leaders I found this post interesting while at the same time disagreeing profoundly. Below is my response, but first I should qualify that […]

Filed Under: Featured, Seminary Tagged With: association of theological schools, distributed learning, luther seminary

Want a Free Theological Resource for Ministry?

Last Updated April 14, 2009 by Matt 4 Comments

Free Resource Suggest an idea in the comments for a free theological ministry resource My current online course at Luther Seminary is “Overview of Christian Teaching,” an introductory theology class. As part of our final project we can either take an exam, write a 9-12 page paper, or do some project that can be used […]

Filed Under: Seminary, Theology, Youth Ministry Tagged With: free, resource

Theodicy and Hurricane Katrina

Last Updated April 1, 2009 by Matt Leave a Comment

We had an interesting exercise in my seminary class last week, and I thought I would post it. The class is Overview of Christian Teachings, a basic theology class. we were studying the nature of providence and the professor provided the following prompt. My response is below. “The editor of Faith & Values has called […]

Filed Under: Seminary, Theology Tagged With: hurricane katrina, theodicy

On Seminary Education

Last Updated January 14, 2009 by Matt 14 Comments

When I was at Solomon’s Porch on Sunday night, Doug Pagitt said something to the effect that when he was going to seminary he was being trained for an industry that was dying and would likely cease to exist (and that those of us in seminary should think about that). He compared it to being […]

Filed Under: Ecclesiology, emerging church, Seminary

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Best Youth Ministry Books

These are the books that will completely change the way you think about youth ministry, for the better. Links are to my reviews of each book.

Teen 2.0 by Robert Epstein

A psychologist makes you question every assumption you have about adolescence.

Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry by Andrew Root

Why build relationships? Root’s answer will surprise you.

Best Youth Ministry Books: Youth Ministry 3.0 by Mark Ostreicher

Yesterday I finally read Youth Ministry 3.0 by Mark Ostreicher, and since I’m one of the latecomers to the conversation I won’t summarize the book too much. Marko has linked to tons of reviews on his blog if you are interested in more in-depth summaries. If you are fairly in-tune with a lot of the […]

Best Youth Ministry Books: Postmodern Youth Ministry

Postmodern Youth Ministry by Tony Jones is the book I would recommend to youth ministers if they could just read one youth ministry book. I first read the book in my Foundations and Practices of Youth Ministry class at John Brown University. After the preface to the book there is a page titled, “The Day […]

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