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 […]
Reinventing 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 […]
Defending My Seminary Stance: Introduction
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 […]
Seminary: Have we Lost our Imagination?
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 […]
Why Seminaries are Irrelevant: A Postscript
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 […]
13 Reasons Why (Traditional) Seminaries are Irrelevant (For Church Leaders): Part 2
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 […]
13 Reasons Why (Traditional) Seminaries are Irrelevant (For Church Leaders): Part 1
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 […]
Want a Free Theological Resource for Ministry?
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 […]
Theodicy and Hurricane Katrina
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 […]
On Seminary Education
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 […]