Not Your Father’s Seminary: Reinventing Pastoral Training

The Gospel Coalition recently asked four well-known seminary professors and presidents, “What one thing would you change about seminary?” After a vigorous exchange of new ideas by Al Mohler, D. A. Carson, Jeff Louie, and Richard Pratt, the Gospel Coalition then posted a follow-up article by Ric Cannada, Chancellor of Reformed Theological Seminary.

Most of the ideas shared in these two posts pointed to the future. Few seminaries are currently doing the cutting-edge work envisioned by these five seminary leaders.

Faith Bible Seminary provides an intriguing exception. So I sat down with Rob Green, Pastor of Counseling and Seminary Ministries at Faith Baptist Church in Lafayette, Indiana, to learn more. Listen in on our conversation to travel “back to the future” to learn a new way to train pastors.

RPM Ministries: Rob, I know you read the recent blog posts on the GC site about changing seminary education. What were your thoughts and how does Faith Bible Seminary fit into the discussion?

Rob Green: While each scholar offered his own thoughts, many of the answers spoke of the importance of the local church and the practical ministry experience that many seminarians fail to get during their academic pursuit. You will not recognize us. We’re not a well-established seminary with hundreds of students, nor do we have nationally known professors. But we do have a very different way of offering seminary training.  

RPM Ministries: Tell our readers about the paradigm shift you’ve initiated in seminary education.

Rob Green: Our paradigm shift began in 2007 when our Sr. Pastor, Steve Viars, and our congregation began a revised version of seminary training. Our church wanted to minimize three basic challenges with the current seminary structure.

• The high cost of seminary training resulting in some students graduating with significant debt.

• A lack of practical ministry experience.

• The significant pressures on any wives or children due to the heavy seminary and job workload.

RPM Ministries: Those are significant issues. So what’s your new approach look like in action?

Rob Green: In order to minimize these weaknesses, Faith Bible Seminary created a three-year intern-based M.Div. program. Each student in the program must either be a pastor in full-time vocational ministry or a paid intern in a church. This requirement allows every student to be directly involved in various aspects of pastoral ministry during their entire training. Interns at our church are required to spend about 20 hours per week being part of the ministry (counseling, discipleship, teaching preparation, pastoral staff meeting, deacon meetings, etc.). Our classes meet one day per week with some one-week modules occasionally built into the system to allow students from surrounding communities to participate.

RPM Ministries: And how have you addressed the cost issues?

Rob Green: The cost challenge was minimized by providing the tuition free-of-charge for students involved in an internship at a local church. In our church’s view, since our partnering churches are providing paid internships for three years, it would have been very burdensome to expect them to pay tuition. Our church family covers the overhead costs with contributions and graciously allowing our pastors, who either have terminal degrees or are candidates for terminal degrees, to dedicate their time to training students.

RPM Ministries: How have these changes impacted your course offerings compared to the “traditional” seminary?

Rob Green: This model also allows a very structured curriculum to develop. Instead of students taking classes that most easily fit into their schedules, the entire three-year curriculum, semester-by-semester, is already set by the institution. The advantage to the structured curriculum is that both biblical languages can be taught in the first year allowing for more opportunities to focus on the original languages in both exegesis and biblical theology classes.

RPM Ministries: You’ve been at this a few years now Rob, what are some of the results you’ve experienced?

Rob Green: In 2007, Faith Bible Seminary enrolled 14 men and in 2010, ten of those men graduated. Of the 10 men who received their diplomas this June, 8 are placed in full-time vocational ministry including one serving in as a pastor in England, one in the church planting network with Harvest Bible Chapel, one in pastoral ministry in Brazil, one working for a Christian school, and four others in pastoral ministry in the States. Our 2010 class began this week with 19 students.

RPM Ministries: What final thoughts do you have about seminary education?

Rob Green: FBS does not have a long track record, nor thousands of graduates like the larger schools. Time will tell whether this system is sustainable for the long term. In addition, this model has weaknesses and challenges of its own. Maybe, however, it can be an encouragement to other churches that have been challenged by articles such as the one published by The Gospel Coalition or by their own convictions to help strengthen seminary education. Finally, it may be that in the scope of seminary training there might be several models that can seek to help prepare men to glorify God by serving in the church of Jesus Christ.

Join the Conversation

What is your vision for the seminary preparation of pastors?

Note: For Rob’s first-hand thoughts on this issue, visit his post Attempting a Paradigm Shift in Seminary Education.

Pastor Rob Green

Tags: Al Mohler, D. A. Carson, Faith Bible Seminary, Gospel Coalition, Pastoral Training, Rob Green, Seminary Education

A Conversation about Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity

Responding to Brian McLaren’s Question # 6: The Church Question

Welcome: You’re reading Part 8 of my blog series responding to Brian McLaren’s book A New Kind of Christianity (read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and Part 7). Many have engaged Brian’s thinking by focusing on a systematic theology response (visit here for a boatload of links). My focus is on pastoral theology or practical theology. As a pastor, counselor, and professor who equips the church for biblical counseling and spiritual formation, I’m asking: “What difference does our response to each question make for how we care like Christ (biblical counseling) and for how we live like Christ (spiritual formation)?”

What Is the Church Here For?

In addressing the church issue, Brian asks a series of important questions. “Around what grand endeavor can we rally? What one great danger do people need to be saved from and, more positively, what one great purpose do they need to be saved for? Around what melody can we harmonize without trying to homogenize?” (p. 164).

In response, Brian believes that we must “rethink our core mission” (p. 165). Brian’s rethinking is motivated by his belief that the church has lost touch with “normal” people and that preachers have forgotten how to speak their language. He’s also motivated by his perception that the church is living within an isolated or withdrawn religious subculture, or spiritual country club.

I’m not sure what churches Brian is visiting, but I agree with him—I wouldn’t applaud those churches either. I find it ironic that Brian uses the “spiritual country club” imagery for the churches he’s against. It seems to me that an exorbitant percentage of young Emergent church leaders are all coincidentally called to minister in churches filled with cool, trendy, well-educated, philosophically-inclined, upwardly-mobile, suburban, white-collar types. Isn’t God calling any young Emergent leaders to minister to blue-collar, high-school-educated, rural, or urban people?

A Church Of Biblical Counseling

Brian also seems to think that only he and his fellow Emergent church leaders are ministering in the mess and muck of life, and that only they are speaking the language of the people. The truth is, non-Emergent churches are in the trenches, on the front lines providing ministries based upon truth and love.

Faith Baptist Church in Lafayette, Indiana, under the direction of Pastor Steve Viars, is a prime example. They’re staunchly conservative Evangelical in theology and cutting-edge in ministry practice and outreach. They’re a church of biblical counseling, not just a church with biblical counseling. Their biblical counseling ministry is not just within their congregation, it is to their community.

Every week over 100 community members receive free biblical counseling from Faith Biblical Counseling Ministries. Their waiting list is seemingly endless. Someone must believe they are speaking their language.

As part of Faith Community Ministries, the church built a community center…not for the congregation, but for the…community. The list of need-meeting ministries is amazing, such as Big Brothers/Big Sisters, Community Blood Drives, Community Foster Car, Habitat for Humanity, Red Cross Disaster Shelter, Court Appointed Special Advocates, Clothing Closet, Food Pantry, etc. As part of this ministry, Faith also built a state-of-the-art outdoor skate board park. Many of these “Skaters” end up in church…with their skate boards and their torn jeans to hear exegetical, expository, biblical preaching every Sunday. These young Skaters believe Faith is speaking their language.

Faith’s Vision of Hope residential treatment center offers faith-based treatment for girls age 14-28 who are struggling with unplanned pregnancy, alcohol or drug abuse, eating disorders, or self-harm. State agencies and the court system regularly refer girls to Vision of Hope—with the full knowledge that the program is based upon biblical counseling. Someone realizes they are speaking their language.

Faith Bible Seminary combines the traditional M.Div. emphasis in theology, the original languages, and pastoral training within a mentoring environment in partnership with area local churches. Students gain first-hand experience with Faith Biblical Counseling, Vision of Hope, and other unique ministries. They have no problem attracting students nor do their graduates have any problem finding local church placement. People know they are speaking their language.

Spiritual Formation in Truth and Love

Brian offer’s his view of the new core mission of the church. We’re called to focus on communities that form Christlike people living as agents of transformation. “The church exists to form Christlike people, people of Christlike love. It exists to save them from the danger of wasting their lives” (p. 164). The meaning of those words depends upon how Brian answered his previous five questions. As Mike Wittmer notes:

“Brian’s shallow evaluation of our problem (no Fall, original sin, total depravity, or hell) produces a shallow understanding of salvation (love as much as you can and let God’s judgment burn your bad stuff away) which produces a shallow view of the church (it exists merely to stop people from wasting their lives).”

Brian wants to know, “How does spiritual formation in the way of Jesus differ from religious education in the way of Christianity?”(p. 170). Great question! Of course, to answer this we must go back to Who Jesus is and why He came. If Jesus is a community organizer Who came to usher in the “sacred ecosystem” (p. 165), then formation in Jesus looks like one thing. But if Jesus is the God-man Who came in Holy Love to justify, regenerate, reconcile, and redeem sinners, then it looks like quite another thing.

Brian traces the church’s problem to knowledge without love. I don’t know anyone who would argue that we should only have love or only have knowledge. But Brian seems to minimize the role of knowledge—truth, doctrine, theology. The same Paul he quotes in 1 Corinthians also says in Philippians 1:9-11 that our love must abound in knowledge and depth of insight. Paul is not pitting love against knowledge. Paul is saying that truth or love alone are never enough. Brian says the church should be a school of love (p. 170). I would say, and I believe it’s a crucial difference, that the church should be a school where love abounds in knowledge and depth of insight.

Brian also says that we need to be Spirit-saturated people. I agree. Of course, we have to ask and answer the question, “How does the Spirit saturate us?” In what ways and under what condition(s) does the Spirit enter a person’s life? I would say, through rebirth, through salvation—through justification, regeneration, reconciliation, and redemption. (See my response to Question # 5.)

Brian’s view of the Fall, of Christ, and of the Gospel all seem to call into question salvation as justification, regeneration, reconciliation, and redemption. In this chapter, Brian furthers states that the goal of the church is to save people from wasting their lives. That’s quite different from saving them from sin, depravity, and alienation from God. So, without salvation, how does the Spirit saturate a person?

I believe the Bible teaches that the goal of the church is to introduce people to Christ Who saves them. They are thus justified, regenerated, reconciled, redeemed, and indwelt by the Spirit and thus they are empowered to be formed into the image of Christ. Then, as new creations in Christ, together as the Body of Christ, we minister to one another (biblical counseling and spiritual formation) so that our inner lives increasingly reflect the inner life of Christ and so that our outer lives increasingly sacrificially minister Christ’s grace to hurting and hardened people. That’s certainly not a wasted life.

The Rest of the Story

In our next post, we respond to Brian’s answer to the sex question. He asks, “Can we find a way to address human sexuality without fighting about it?” What does biblical counseling have to say about addressing human sexuality?

Join the Conversation

What is the purpose of the church and how is it accomplished?

Tags: A New Kind of Christianity, Church, Emergent, Faith Baptist, McLaren, Viars

This Sunday I spoke at the three morning services at Faith Baptist Church in Lafayette, Indiana on 2 Corinthians 1:3-11. Before each message the song Held written by Krista Wells and performed by Natalie Grant was sung.

Here’s the link to the powerful song and here are the words themselves.

Two months is too little. They let him go. They had no sudden healing. To think that providence would Take a child from his mother while she prays Is appalling. Who told us we’d be rescued? What has changed and why should we be saved from nightmares? We’re asking why this happens To us who have died to live? It’s unfair. Chorus: This is what it means to be held. How it feels when the sacred is torn from your life And you survive. This is what it is to be loved. And to know that the promise was When everything fell we’d be held. This hand is bitterness. We want to taste it, let the hatred know our sorrow. The wise hands open slowly to lilies of the valley and tomorrow. (Chorus) This is what it means to be held. How it feels when the sacred is torn from your life And you survive. This is what it is to be loved. And to know that the promise was When everything fell we’d be held. Bridge: If hope is born of suffering. If this is only the beginning. Can we not wait for one hour watching for our Savior? (Chorus) This is what it means to be held. How it feels when the sacred is torn from your life And you survive. This is what it is to be loved. And to know that the promise was When everything fell we’d be held.