What Do We Need from Seminaries?

Lyle Schaller, the Methodist church growth consultant of the past generation, wrote an article about several years ago about the gap between seminaries and local churches. Whenever a church calls a seminary and asks for a recommendation for a pastor, the seminary will send over the best student. This student makes good grades, turns all their assignments in on time and politely sits on the front row of the lecture hall.

This student may or may not have any people skills, may or may not understand how the finances of a church work and in short, may not be a very good pastor at all. The best pastor, according to Schaller, is playing ball in the gym. This student makes pretty good grades, eventually gets their papers in and attends most of their classes, but if a good ball game is on, they’re just as likely to watch the game rather than attend class.

Seminary professors will talk to the second student about wasting potential and lacking focus. The student will promise to do better but probably won’t. The second student will end up being the better pastor. They’ll have stronger people skills, better entrepreneurial skills and be able to lead teams to accomplish shared goals.

There is a growing gap between our seminaries and our churches. We’ve seen this developing over the past few decades. More than one book has been written on the subject. I’m not the first to point this out. First, let me begin by stating my working assumptions. My assumption has always been that the difference between a seminary and a divinity school is that the seminary has a connection to a local church. Divinity schools are free to search and debate the great mysteries of God and His kingdom without worrying about having a real-life connection to how those great truths are lived out in the real lives of everyday people.

According to what I’ve seen over my career, more and more seminaries are morphing into divinity schools. That is, they have less understanding and therefore connection to the local church. More and more graduates of our seminaries will graduate having never preached a sermon outside of their preaching class. They will begin leading a church without ever having sat through a finance committee’s meeting or having a church budget explained to them.

I was fortunate. My father owned a television and appliance store, and I was the pick-up and delivery guy. I learned about cash flow, the difference between net and gross profit, and the importance of keeping promises. I also learned how to deal with customers, especially angry and disappointed customers. I would use these same skills when dealing with church members. Growing up in a family business was the best training for working in a local church.

My father was a local politician and watching him work with all kinds of people to get things done was some of the best training I ever had. My dad taught me to listen and then, use the other person’s language to respond in an effort to show how deeply you understand the point they were trying to make. Without my dad, I would have been lost when it came to trying to lead a local church.

The fundamental question is - What do we need or desire from our seminaries? Do we need academics? Theologians? Or practitioners? That’s the first question we must address. What does the church need from its seminaries for this time in our history?

The reason I have such a sense of urgency is we don’t have enough younger pastors in our leadership pipelines. Right now, it’s a crisis. If we don’t address this shortage, we’ll soon have an ecclesiastical disaster. We can’t wait seven years (four years of college and three years of seminary) to identify, train, and deploy our new pastors.

We don’t do anything the way we did fifty years ago. We don’t do our banking, shopping, or even consult our doctors the way we did fifty years ago, twenty years ago, even ten years ago. We can’t keep training our ministers the way we did fifty years ago and expect them to be able to lead a church in our postmodern world.

This essay was first posted in Scot McKnight’s newsletter.