“I knew about the Council of Nicea, but no one had ever told me how to lead my own council meeting”

This is the complaint so many of us have of our seminary training, despite the fact that most of us deeply loved our time in the academia’s longest master’s program. From James Emery White:

Toward the end of my seminary degree, just before I started my doctoral work, I received a call from a church near the school asking me to consider coming as their interim pastor. It was an established denominational church in a county seat town near the seminary. The interim turned into a full-fledged invitation to serve as their senior pastor.

Yet when I, as a new pastor, was asked to officiate my first wedding, my first funeral, my first baptism, and my first communion, I was totally clueless. So why did they ask me to be a pastor? It was assumed that since I was nearing my graduation from seminary, I knew what I was doing.

I didn’t.

It didn’t get any better.

I needed to raise money to meet the church’s budget, and there had never been a class on that.

I wanted to try and grow the church numerically by reaching out to the unchurched, and my coursework had never touched on it.

I had a problem with a combative and disagreeable deacon, and I searched through my seminary notes and found nothing.

I found I needed to be in the office for administration, in my study to prepare my talks, in people’s lives to stay connected to the community, and in my home to raise my family – and there hadn’t been any instruction on how to manage that.

It was becoming painfully clear how little my seminary education was actually preparing me for the day-in, day-out responsibilities of leading a church.

I knew about the Council of Nicea, but no one had ever told me how to lead my own council meeting.

I knew about the Barth-Brunner debate, but not how to handle the breakdown between two Sunday school teachers when one was asked to start a new class, for the same age-group, from the existing class.

I knew the significance of the aorist verb, but not how to parse the culture to know how best to communicate.

I could tell you the leading theologians of the 16th century, but not about leading and managing a staff.

This is why so many people look back on their seminary education with a critical eye.

It’s why pastors will go to a two-day leadership conference headlined by seasoned leaders passing on their insights for effective ministry, and feel like they gained more in those two days than they had in their entire three years of seminary education.

It’s why quickly after graduation, Melanchthon gets dropped for Maxwell, Luther for Lucado, and the seminary’s continuing education program for the latest Catalyst event.

We need seminary. We don’t want to lose the necessary academic side of things. But we also need seminaries to realize they do not exist to serve the academy, but to serve the church.

The rest.