4 Surprising Benefits of Seminary

There’s a small printed card in the seminary cafeteria, in front of the apple basket: “Take only one apple. God is watching.” Another (hastily handwritten) card sits in front of the chocolate chip cookies. It reads: “Take as many as you want. God is watching the apples.”

That’s the way I heard the joke, anyway. And for a season in my life, that joke was how I thought about seminarians—they were witty, often used God in their witticisms, and loved to outsmart others.

The church where I spent most of my formative years didn’t have a high view of seminary. We thought it was for ivory-tower types who lacked the grit and urgency to do real-world ministry right now.

My views shifted during my undergrad years at a Christian liberal arts college and three years as a youth pastor working for a senior pastor with an M.Div. I vividly remember hearing a classmate in a biblical literature class say, “I don’t need to get grades. I’m going into youth ministry.”

If we’re to 'love the Lord your God with all your mind' and to be 'transformed by the renewing of our mind,' and if the mind is a gift, then one must steward it like anything else of value.

Something in my gut snapped. If we’re to “love the Lord your God with all your mind” and to be “transformed by the renewing of our mind,” and if the mind is a gift, then one must steward it like anything else of value. I needed a plan to develop my thinking, whether in a formal environment or not.

About six years later, as a young church planter, I had a conversation with a friend in our congregation. He graduated from Harvard law school and was working for an esteemed consulting firm. If I wanted to reach young professionals in Detroit, he said, there was value in going back to school. After all, white collar people considering the claims of the gospel want to believe their church leader has put at least as much energy into his or her professional craft as they have. So in the interest of being a better steward and evangelist, I enrolled in a degree program.

I wasn’t a traditional student. Over 15 years, I enrolled in four different degree programs and managed to complete two. Aside from a crazy summer where I lived on campus and took five intensive courses in eight weeks, I wasn’t a resident student. When the seminary launched a distance learning M.A. for students who wanted to remain in the ministry roles, I jumped. I would commute to the campus in L.A. a few times a year, taking the rest of my courses online.

Here are four lessons I learned in seminary that have been oh-so-valuable for me as a church leader:

Take your calling, but not yourself, seriously.

I was sitting in a lecture hall for my systematic theology summer intensive and was feverishly scrambling to get my prof’s every word down in my notes. This stuff was, after all, foundational for Christian thought and needed to be captured accurately. But the prof said something that caught me off guard: “Don’t worry about getting it all down. After all, your systematic theology notes will end up somewhere like mine did. In a box in the attic.”

It disarmed me. He wasn’t self-important or over-inflated; he believed in his work and had certainly mastered the content. It’s important for students to have a general grasp of systematics and know where to go if they have further questions, but he also had a keen sense of the reality of life and ministry.

The best ministry leaders I know rank high in self-awareness. They believe strongly in what they’re doing and why. But they don’t have an inflated view of themselves. They’ve surrounded themselves with people who tell them the truth and keep them anchored. Their vocation is a part of their lives, but not the totality of it. When you don’t take yourself too seriously, you can embrace weakness and acknowledge foibles.

Yes, lurking somewhere beneath the surface, every ministry leader is wrestling with past hurts, deferred dreams, and terminal insecurities. And we carry all of these into the pulpit and the church parking lot. But when we take the work more seriously than ourselves, we spare our congregants from unwittingly feeding our approval addiction. When our identity is firmly located in Christ, we can come to our roles, in the words of Ken Davis, with “nothing to prove, nothing to hide, and nothing to lose.”

Local church ministry happens in specific locale. Know it well.

There’s a difference between knowing our church’s address and knowing its location. I had one professor write that whenever he came to speak at a church he’d arrive early and spend some time walking the neighborhood around the church building to get a sense for the church’s context, so he could speak to its people about where it was—their challenges and opportunities. In today’s commuter culture, not every leader lives in the immediate area of the church. If we’re not careful, we’ll fail to do our due diligence about what our ministry context demands of us.

In my M.A. in Global Leadership cohort, I had the privilege of tackling issues of ministry context with men and women from a variety of denominational and racial backgrounds. They challenged me, both directly and indirectly, to think about the different people groups, or “tribes,” who lived within our church’s sphere of influence.

I was reading Acts 3 this week and appreciated again that Peter and John had patterns hardwired into their lives that allowed them connect with the people they were trying to reach. They weren’t encumbered by budgets or boards or buildings; they were free to take the message directly to the people they longed to reach. And because those people went to the temple every day at 3 p.m., that’s what they did too.

As a church leader, if I long to engage anyone other than church people, maybe it’s time to go for a walk.

You are a part of global church. Act like it.

I started my M.A. program in the early stages of U.S. military engagement in Iraq. I was talking U.S. foreign policy with some American friends and, given my perspective at the time, was fairly jingoistic. One of my fellow students, David, was pastor from Jamaica, and he interjected with his concerns about where the war was going and its long-term implications. Up until that point, I’d never stopped to consider the perspective of my global brothers and sisters in Christ on issues like this.

Sure, I’d taken many a short-term trip as a student. In hindsight, however, the American missionaries from our denomination were the people who shaped my views on cross-cultural mission, not local ministry leaders. David’s objections challenged my historic view of “God & Country.” What happens when someone who embraces the gospel thinks differently about my country than I do? What happens if my country is engaged in policies that impact their ministry context in a negative way? What does it mean for my allegiance to be to Christ and his Kingdom? And how should that lens change the way I view the global church?

Then there was Stephen, a church planter from Indonesia. I remember him talking about traveling from unreached village to unreached village on motorbike. It didn’t sound easy or comfortable. This was no “career move.” Nevertheless, Stephen’s face is cemented in my mind as a hero of the faith. He, in a different way than my systematics prof, reminds me to take the call, but not myself, seriously.

Suffering is an unavoidable part of life. Bear witness in the storm.

I came from a rich Pentecostal tradition and am grateful for it. The beauty of it taught me faith and boldness and urgency. The downside is that we often talked more about how to escape suffering than to be steadfast in it. Dr. Goldingay helped crack that code for me. I only had him for a five week Pentateuch class in the summer of 1998, but the lecture of his life stays with me. In the analysis of Genesis 1:27, he asked this pointed question “What does it mean for people who are physically incapacitated to be made in the image of God?” This wasn’t an abstract theological exercise for John; it was personal. His wife, Ann, had multiple sclerosis and was confined to a wheelchair. He went on to explain that those with physical challenges help us grasp the majestic nature of the incarnation; a mighty God takes on limitation to identify with people in need.

One of his traditions was to host an evening pool party for his students at his apartment complex. That’s the first and only time I ever met Ann. She rolled right up to edge of the pool, so together she and John could converse and meet with students. The Goldingays didn’t use suffering as excuse to withdraw, to complain, to hunker down. In the midst of their trial, they bore witness to the faithfulness of God and seemed to celebrate every moment as gift. Yes, I know the Pentateuch better because John is a masterful lecturer and brilliant scholar. But I got a high level course in suffering well that I’ve carried with me ever since.

Sometimes the suffering comes in significantly smaller doses. One professor in my doctoral program inflicted no small amount of suffering himself. I think he asked me to rewrite Chapter 1 of my dissertation eight times. He was right to do so. In the midst of that ordeal he encouraged me to read “Mission from a Position of Weakness” by Paul Yonggap Jeong. (It lists on Amazon for $76.95. Why are some great books so expensive?) It wrecked me. I’m a product of my generation’s dominant evangelical subculture: straight, white, college-educated male.

Although I wasn’t conscious of it, I’d never done “mission” from anything other than privilege and strength. I’d never once stopped to consider what mission from the margins, from the perspective of an oppressed, colonialized people might look like. I’d (mistakenly) assumed a “winning” mentality to ministry. If you weren’t racking up obvious victories, if your numbers weren’t consistently up and to the right, you were doing something wrong. When I read this in print, of course, it looks absurd. But it’s been an ominous cloud over my understanding of local church ministry for decades.

Yes, we should seek freedom for people stuck in the quagmire of their hurts, habits, and hang-ups. Young people should dream God-sized dreams for their lives. People should be stunned by the throat-grabbing power of the gospel and shaken awake. And people should get mobilized to serve the poor and under-resourced, daily.

But “winning” isn’t always our lot. And if we’re connecting with people on the edges, we’ll have to learn how to do ministry from a position of weakness, a place where we can’t muscle or maneuver our way to the results we want. In the fight for justice, salvation, love, and character, there will be casualties. Someone on our team will have a moral failure. A family will be torn apart by addiction. Tragedy will strike. And in those times, we preach Isaiah’s vision of Messiah: the suffering servant. No, Jesus doesn’t appear disfigured and naked in our stained glass windows, but he does on the cross. And where people are hurting, we desperately need to be reminded of a Savior who meets us there.

I learned in seminary that ministry isn’t about having the all the answers. It’s about asking the right questions. Theology is personal. And that lesson has been ever-so-valuable as I pastor.

Steve Norman is a campus pastor of Kensington Church in Troy, Michigan.