The importance of a 'learned ministry'

With the recent relocation of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) to Canada from Chicagoland, there have been many conversations spurred about the future of seminary training and theological education for ministry.

Anecdotally, there are reports of students increasingly finding the financial burden of a full-time on campus M.Div. seminary education exorbitant.

Institutions, like Southern Theological Seminary, that have very significant denominational financial backing are able to offer more incentives. But non-denominational, or multi-denominational, seminaries like TEDS have evidently found it harder to attract the kind of enrolment that is sustainable.

It appears also to be more common for pastors to mix their training while also full time working at a church.

It is interesting, and important no doubt too, to step back from some of the current changing dynamics and ask the question: what is the best way to position entrusting the truth to reliable men who will also be able to teach others (2 Timothy 2:2) in the 21st century?

Certainly, the seminary education model has not always been preponderant. In the early days of colonial America, Jonathan Edwards trained up a cohort of young pastors by housing some in his house and enabling them for future productivity by intellectually challenging mentorship and personal educational.

But we can look to the roots of theological training in England too, with the older Cambridge and Oxford colleges having beginnings in theological training. My own college, Emmanuel College, was set up as a Puritan training college – because Christ’s College, its next door neighbour, was thought to be going liberal.

Theological training... and practical experience

I would be fascinated to discourse with others on this topic, but I was grateful that the Lord impressed on me a key principle for my own training: get as deep a theological training as you can, while at the same time getting as much practical experience as you can. The one (practical experience) informs the other (theological training) and vice versa.

Could it be that a more church-based model of training in the future will not be a lesser option, but a greater?

The trick (if I may put it like that) is how to have sufficiently intellectual training while also practical experience, and relational mentoring. That’s the secret sauce of training a pastor – knowledge of the Bible and theology at a high enough academic level to be able to do expository preaching and apologetics in an ever-changing world; character formation through life-on-life mentoring; and practical tools of ministry leadership.

With the greater availability of online training tools, other models may emerge – as long as they're also combined with mentoring and practical boots-on-the-ground training.

This is no small matter. The Puritans were determined to have a “learned ministry.” And if church history is any guide, the lack of such “learning” is what led to a devolution of Bible confidence in pastors, which evacuated the pulpit of substance, and eviscerated the church of theological credibility, and at times orthodoxy, too.

We must trust the truth to reliable men who are qualified to train others. It may be time for some new models to accomplish ancient callings.