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 devoted to it.
- Mike Breen (a leader in discipleship and the missional church) and the 3DM folks have a website called The Future of Theological Education.
- Patheos ran a huge Online Symposium over the Future of Seminary Education.
- Tony Jones, David Fitch, A.J. Swoboda, and Dave Kludt have weighed in.
All the recent talk has made me start thinking about this topic again, so over the next few days (or maybe weeks), I’m going to try to post some constructive thoughts about where seminary education needs to move from here. Seminaries are currently products of a certain kind of underlying ecclesiology, so it stands to reason that if our ecclesiology is shifting, then seminaries must follow suit.
If you have thoughts about the future of seminary, post a comment or write your own blog post and drop me a comment with the link (yes, I’m telling you to promote yourself!). I want to know what other great ideas are floating out there.
Leave a Reply