BLOG 7/29/15. WHAT ABOUT A THEOLOGICAL UN-SEMINARY

I’ve just finished reading Dale Stephens’ fascinating book: Hacking Your Education: Ditch the Lectures, Save Tens of Thousands, and Learn More Than You Peers Ever Will. Here’s an entrepreneurial young guy who starts college and then decides that there’s got to be a better way. Who wants to spend tons of money, wind up in deep debt and still not be able to get a job? So the book. Traditional colleges have been in place for centuries, and most of us have been taught that the route to a successful life is a college degree, … only to find in recent years that (as Stephens discerned) it is enormously expensive, and there has got to be an alternative way.

So here I am looking at the phenomenon that is accepted by so much of the church in the West today, that the route into church leadership (mistakenly designated as: ‘full-time Christian service’) is a degree from a theological seminary. As I read Dale Stephens, with my sixty-year background in church leadership, and a ten-year stint as the director of seminary ministries for a denominational organization, I will raise the same question that Stephens does. There is something that doesn’t fit as one looks at the New Testament pattern for its formation to be the communal form of the mission of God, and then at our present systekm. We have a system in which we may have well-meaning young women and men who want to have meaningful lives and want to somehow serve God, and so decide to ‘go into the ministry’ even though they have no track record for being fruitful in making disciples, or creating other reproductive believers in Christ, but mistakenly assume that an M.Div. degree will equip them for such, …or we take a fruitful disciple, a model of Christian maturity and community leadership, and isolate him or her into the ethos of a theological institution for several years where he or she only associates with other who aspire to be clergy, where all too often they become strangers to the very laity whom they, ostensibly, are to be forming into the image of Christ. (… I know that’s a long and confusing sentence, but you catch my drift.)

This is not to denigrate the enormous blessing of minds and lives formed by good Biblical teaching, and mature Christian thinking, but it is to challenge how this is to take place. Here we are in a digital culture in which one can access almost anything on line, where one can take on-line courses, where there is asynchronous opportunities that allow busy people to absorb information at their own pace and with their own schedule. There are actually seminaries offering many on-line courses, but it needs to become more accessible to more people.

Stephens founded UN-COLLEGE to make all of the opportunities and resources available to those who wanted to get the education without the expense and hassle of debt and impossible schedules. My question is: Why not an UN-SEMINARY whereby fruitful and spiritually hungry believers with significant roles in both church communities and professions can pursue their quest for Christian understanding and praxis without uprooting and disrupting their fruitful involvement in their local church community? Or their families from their relationships?

Personally, I’m frank to say that I spent my time in seminary, and have a degree in divinity, but my real growth came from engagement with real Christian communities, with reading, with struggles in the application of Christian faith with all of the difficult expressions of the local culture, and with actually spending significant time as a big-brother and mentor to many and diverse inquirers and younger believers.

The riches of Biblical understanding and the church’s treasures of theology will never be un-necessary, but it is possible that theological seminaries that assume that church leadership is attained by an academic degree are an obsolete and counter-productive concept.

And now I’m in trouble with all of my seminary friends. So be it.