Few men have shaped the 21st-century church more than John Piper, and few of his books have proven more helpful than his Brothers, We are not Professionals. Piper was right. Ministers are not to be professionals, and his call for radical, sacrificial, selfless ministry is spot on. Yet, when it comes to ministerial service, we are not called to be amateurs either. Read more

This post was originally published 28 May 2013.

To the Ends of the Earth: Midwestern Seminary and the Great Commission

Midwestern Seminary exists for the Church, and to serve the church means we share the church’s most urgent commitment: the gathering in of the nations for the glory of Christ through the proclamation of the gospel to all people.

Jesus’ Great Commission is an abiding and authoritative charge to every Christian in every age. While faithful seminaries can differ over degrees offered, curricular choices, ministry preparation emphases, and other important but not ultimate considerations, theological faithfulness leaves no room for a seminary to negotiate over the exclusivity of salvation through conscious faith in Jesus Christ, the urgency of spreading the gospel, or the necessity of every seminary—and every seminarian—to minister under a Great Commission mandate.

This series of essays has sought to present, in both theoretical and practical terms, what it means for a seminary to exist for the Church. In conclusion, this essay series has built toward this final installment, where the mission of Midwestern Seminary and the local church most manifestly—and directly—intersect: the fulfilling of the Great Commission.

Our Great Commission Moment

For Southern Baptists, before us is what International Mission Board President Tom Elliff calls our “Great Commission moment.” This Great Commission moment arrives with the alignment of two dramatic realities. First, the world is marked by a vast and accelerating lostness—a lostness that is simply daunting when one considers the billions of people yet reached and by their apparent decreasing openness to the gospel. Yet, juxtaposed alongside this lostness are conduits for gospel advancement not known by prior generations. Modern technologies, including advances in communications, travel, accessibility, and linguistic and translation progress, all position the church with ripened Great Commission opportunity.

In a very real sense, before this generation is the opportunity to eradicate the phrase “unreached people group.” Currently, more than 3,000 unreached people groups—a defined group of people with no current access to the gospel—exist. As Midwestern Seminary faithfully co-labors with both the churches and the mission boards of the Southern Baptist Convention, we can hasten the day when the expression “unreached people group” is anachronistic, belonging to a previous era.

Denominational Expectation & Institutional Pedigree

As Midwestern Seminary serves as a Great Commission institution, it upholds the Southern Baptist Convention’s raison d’etre. Since its founding in 1845, the Southern Baptist Convention has existed first and foremost as a collection of Great Commission churches partnering together to reach the world for Christ. As a denomination, we are a Great Commission people, and every entity or initiative the convention owns or undertakes in some way is and should be a Great Commission endeavor.

Moreover, when the Southern Baptist Convention founded Midwestern Seminary in 1957, the expressed rationale was to further the gospel’s reach into the Midwest and pioneer region, which was, and is, under-reached with the gospel and underserved by evangelical churches. Promisingly, this region is once again at the forefront of the SBC’s imagination with the North American Mission Board’s designation of Kansas City as a Send City. What is more, the consciences of Southern Baptists seem to be kindled afresh to church planting and international mission work.

These renewed denominational interests intersect with Midwestern Seminary’s pedigree and geographical location, but, more importantly, they intersect with our institutional passions. Midwestern Seminary is for the Church: the church planted, established, revitalized; the church domestic and the church international.

A Metric of Midwestern Seminary’s Faithfulness

In his Lectures to My Students Spurgeon argues, “In order further to prove a man’s call, after a little exercise of his gifts . . . he must see a measure of conversion-work going on under his efforts . . .” For Spurgeon, conversions occurring under one’s ministry proved not only a sign for ministry effectiveness, but also a confirmation of one’s call to ministry. Similarly, the passion and effectiveness whereby an institution’s graduates share the gospel is an appropriate benchmark by which to measure a seminary’s faithfulness.

An institution that graduates students eager to preach Christ, plant churches, and disembark to the mission field is an institution that is doing something right. Conversely, an institution that sends forth graduates apathetic about the Great Commission and unburdened for the lost is an institution that has lost its way. Midwestern Seminary must settle for nothing less than training a generation of ministers burdened over the lost and zealous for the Great Commission.

From an institution’s vantage point, this is indeed a high metric of faithfulness. It is an appropriate metric, though. The gravity of this challenge is all the more sensed when one considers the context of ministry in the 21st century. Materialism, Western comforts, unsupportive family members, and more can subtly undermine God’s call to the mission field. To combat this, we must give a robust and sustained call for this generation of seminarians to answer the call to go to the ends of the earth. The call to the Great Commission is, in a sense, a radical call, but the recurring declaration of its urgency should vanquish complacency from hearts and fortify our Great Commission resolve.

Conclusion

As Midwestern Seminary labors for the Church, we do so with the assurance that Christ is building his church, but we also do this with a sense of custodial stewardship. Christ is building his church through pastors, teachers, and evangelists, whom we train.

In the ever-changing world of theological education, Midwestern Seminary owns a never-changing mission, to exist for the Church. Our mission to exist for the Church is interconnected with the church’s mission itself, the Great Commission.

Midwestern most effectively labors for the Church when it labors with the church, and we must serve with and for the church in our combined Great Commission efforts until the end of the age, when “The Kingdom of the world shall become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ. And he shall reign forever and ever.”

Ultimately, as Midwestern Seminary proves faithful to the Great Commission, we will prove ourselves worthy of our institutional designation: for the Church.

Part I // Part II // Part III // Part IV // Part V // Part VI // Part VII // Part VIII

This post was originally published on 20 May 2013.

Teach these Things to Faithful Men who Will Be Able to Teach Others Also

A call to ministry is a call to be equipped to minister. To be sure, one need not possess a seminary degree to have a faithful ministry. Many preachers lacking formal theological training have served the church, and served the church well, but they are the exception, not the rule. In fact, preparation for ministry is an established biblical pattern, referenced throughout the New Testament and succinctly expressed in II Timothy 2:2, “Teach these things to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also.”

Though a seminary experience should be short-lived, its effect on students is long-lasting. Both by what is taught and what is neglected, the seminary experience shapes students, for better or worse, for the duration of their ministries. The stakes are high in theological education because the calling to serve the church is high and the needs of the church are great.

Much like the value of a meal is dependent upon the nutritional content therein, so the benefits of a seminary education are contingent upon the strength of the institution. If one is called to serve the church, then one should attend a seminary that will intentionally equip one for such service.

The seminary that will most effectively train pastors, teachers, and evangelists for the Church will not do it unwittingly. Rather, a seminary must intentionally aim its three pedagogical touch-points—curriculum, faculty, and campus culture—toward this end.

The Curriculum

When evaluating a seminary’s academic value-system, the curriculum is the right place to start. A seminary’s curriculum—what degrees it offers and the requisite coursework required to complete those degrees—reveals an institution’s priorities and demonstrates its convictions related to theological education.

The curriculum must be geared towards local-church needs and expectations, with a special emphasis on the preaching and teaching ministries of the church. The curriculum must be comprehensively evaluated and positioned to equip pastors, teachers, and evangelists to serve the church.

Theological education in the twenty-first century evidences a myriad of degree options packaged in numerous delivery vehicles. Descriptors such as residential, non-residential, extension, online, and hybrid, to name a few, remind us of the ever-changing formats of theological education. Moreover, the modern seminary offers a plethora of degree options, with scores of sub-specializations and niche focuses. Academic expansion can be good so long as it does not become synonymous with institutional mission creep. Expanded academic offerings must serve to amplify and strengthen the seminary’s service to the church, not undermine it by diluting institutional focus and resources.

A curriculum is to a seminary’s instructional efforts what the skeleton is to the human body. It provides essential structure and form, but for life and health much more is required. If the curriculum is the skeleton, the faculty is the organs of the seminary’s academic program.

The Faculty

No single factor influences the curriculum more than the composition of the faculty. At the formal level, the faculty approves and monitors the curriculum. Most importantly though, the faculty embodies and personifies the curriculum in their respective classrooms. In the classroom, to be for the Church means every course and every lecture must be envisioned in light of the question, “How does the subject matter intersect with the church, how will it prove to strengthen the church?” If courses do not naturally align with the needs of the churches the seminary serves, then the course should be culled from the curriculum or reconfigured so as to serve the church.

More specifically, each class ought to have a direct line from the syllabus to the church. Ethics is taught as bringing the Word of God to bear in the milieu of cultural challenges the church faces. Counseling is taught, first and foremost, as soul care for those in the church. Church history is taught through the prism of what God has done throughout time to redeem, preserve, and build his church. Personal evangelism is taught as part of enlarging the church. Missions is taught as God’s plan for his church to undertake the Great Commission so that his church may be comprised of every kindred, tongue, and tribe. Leadership and administration courses should present how to structure, lead, and administer rightly ordered churches. Pastoral ministry must be taught so that churches might be appropriately shepherded. Theology is taught to equip the members of the church in sound doctrine. Language and exegesis classes are taught so that ministers may divide rightly the word of truth for the church. Apologetics classes are taught so that the church can defend the truth, the church’s foundation. Preaching classes equip students to exposit God’s word, to strengthen the saints in the church, and to win the lost for the church. The list goes on, but all courses can and should be taught with an eye toward the church.

Yet, even more important than what the faculty teach, is who they are. A seminary should expect from its faculty, in amplified form, what it desires its graduates to believe, exemplify, and practice. Students must find in faculty members not merely a professor from which they learn, but also a person with whom they study and grow. Most especially, when students look to faculty, they must see churchmen, who by their teaching, personal disposition, and demonstrated service to their own local church clearly perceive their ministry as one given to Christ’s church.

The Culture

Transformative ministry preparation experience takes place in the midst of healthy campus communities. Ministry preparation is as much caught as it is taught. It is as much overheard as it is heard. Often times the seminary community and culture impacts the student as much as the curriculum or classroom. This is to say, the whole spiritual momentum and kingdom impact of a seminary should be far greater than the sum of its form and academic parts. Therefore, cultivating a campus community that values, honors, and humbly serves the church will serve to instill an ethos of church service in the students.

As a family, my wife and I determined long ago never to criticize our church—or people in it—in front of our children. We desire our children to grow up loving, serving, trusting, and admiring God’s people known as the church. Likewise, though lamentable trends and saddening occurrences in the modern church exist, attitudinally, the seminary culture must point students to love, serve, and honor the church.

Too many seminarians want to put the church in the dock—criticizing, assessing, and bemoaning perceived deficiencies or errors in local congregations. It is not a seminarian’s, or seminary’s, role to put the church in the dock. The seminary does not sit in judgment of the church; the church sits in judgment of the seminary.

Thus, the seminary community that best equips students to serve the church when they graduate is the seminary that has a pathos and ethos to honor and serve the church in students before they graduate.

Conclusion

For Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, its vision to exist for the Church serves as both a compass and a catalyst. For the Church directs our institutional efforts, pointing our way forward. For the Church also provides institutional velocity, energizing our efforts to most optimally train students accordingly.

The seminary that will train students for the Church intentionally will bend its three pedagogical influencers—curriculum, faculty, and campus culture—for the Church.

Part I // Part II // Part III // Part IV // Part V // Part VI // Part VII // Part VIII

This post was originally published 13 May 2013.

The Proof Is in the Graduates

How does one determine a seminary’s effectiveness? Modern institutional benchmarks include endowment size, capital projects initiated and completed, enrollment growth, campus attractiveness, and other such pragmatic and aesthetic indicators. While these standards are not irrelevant, they are not paramount either. If a seminary exists for the Church, the most appropriate benchmark of effectiveness is how purposed and equipped its graduates are to serve the church.

Though the quality of a seminary’s graduates is directly linked to the quality of students the churches send them, a seminary still exercises profound influence over the students it trains. A seminary is not a spiritual or ministerial panacea, but there is, at least to some degree, a correlation between the type of minister a seminary seeks to equip and the type of graduate a seminary ultimately produces.

To this end, theological education must be a holistic endeavor that seeks to nurture and equip the whole minister for service in the church. When a church calls a minister, they do not call a portion of him. The church calls the total person for a ministry assignment that will prove wholly demanding. Therefore, a seminary must influence all four aspects of the seminarian: heart, mind, hand, and soul.

Impassioned Hearts

Ministry preparation, though primarily given to instructing the mind, is initiated in the heart. Students arrive at seminary to learn, but only because first they have perceived, and their churches have affirmed, God’s ministry calling on their life.

Ministry convictions and passions are baked into the soul over the course of a student’s time on campus. To be sure, a seminary education is not an all-purpose spiritual disinfectant or a holy cure-all for students. But students should nonetheless graduate more in love with Christ, not less; more committed to the Great Commission, not less; and more resolute in their calling to serve the local church, not less than when they first arrived.

As Paul exhorted Timothy to kindle afresh his call to ministry, so at seminary students’ love for the ministry should be deepened and fortified. Moreover, the call to ministry should be nurtured and cultivated to produce graduates with the Pauline aspiration of not only imparting the Word, but also their very lives to the congregations they are called to serve.

Renewed Minds

Theological education, like other forms of Christian discipleship, begins with the mind. Due to Adam’s sin, and the resulting noetic consequences of the fall, to be a Christian is to be engaged in a life-long pursuit of renewing the mind. In fact, Paul makes the renewing of the mind integral to sanctification, writing: “Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed, by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:2).

Renewing the mind by instilling sound doctrine is the sine qua non of faithful theological education. To be a disciple is to be a learner, and to make disciples is to teach learners. In its most distilled form, theological education is the mere fulfillment of II Timothy 2:2, one disciple teaching another so that he can teach others also, thus preserving continuity of biblical truth and sound doctrine for the church.

A seminary education should be more than an intellectual experience, but it must never be anything less. In an age marked by the dumbing-down of academic standards, the seminary that best serves the church maintains a commitment to teaching the original languages, the full body of divinity, and the classic, timeless disciplines of ministry preparation.

Equipped Hands

The lion’s share of a seminary’s curriculum ought to be perennial, unchanging from generation to generation, and fixed, even in light of changing contexts and cultures. This does not negate, however, the need to train ministers with an eye toward the contextual and practical as well. Cultural considerations, contemporary methodologies, and an awareness of current ministry opportunities and seasonal local-church needs shape and facilitate, not abrogate, the conveyance of timeless truths of Scripture. After all, the goal of theological education is not merely to graduate “seminoids,” young theologs with encyclopedic doctrinal knowledge, but detached from local church expectations and congregational needs.

Moreover, too many aspiring pastors have graduated from seminary without a proper understanding of how to coordinate and lead a funeral service, officiate a wedding, administer the ordinances, or rightly engage in crisis counseling. Theological education must not be an abstract endeavor; a mere clinical transmittal of ministerial theory is insufficient. Real students must receive real preparation for real ministries in real local churches.

Enriched Souls

Finally, a seminary must intentionally seek to strengthen the spiritual health of its students. A gifted minister may gain a position of notoriety, but if he does not have biblical character he will not stay there. Residing in every graduate is a measure of the glory of God. When a minister is faithful to the gospel and lives a life above reproach, the church is strengthened and Christ is glorified. When, tragically, a minister is struck by scandal, not only is his life ruined and the church harmed, but the glory of Christ is tarnished.

As Robert Murray McCheyne, noted, a minister is “a chosen vessel unto him to bear his name. In great measure, according to the purity and perfection of the instrument, will be the success. It is not great talents God blesses so much as likeness to Jesus. A holy minister is an awful weapon in the hand of God.” McCheyne therefore concluded, “The greatest need of my people is my personal holiness.”

Furthermore, in his Lectures to My Students, Charles Spurgeon writes, “We must cultivate the highest degree of godliness because our work imperatively requires it. The labour of the Christian ministry is well performed in exact proportion to the vigour of our renewed nature. Our work is only well done when it is well with ourselves. As is the workman, such will the work be.” Thankfully, the building and prevailing of Christ’s church is ultimately not dependent upon the righteousness of his servants, but he has called his servants, as they serve his church, to be holy as he is holy.

Conclusion

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Warren Buffett famously referenced the irresponsibility of excessively leveraged businesses, remarking, “It is only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked.” Similarly, it is often not until a seminary graduate is in the rough and tumble of local church service that he fully knows how helpful—or unhelpful—was his seminary experience. The faithful seminary endeavors to train the whole person for the variegated ministry opportunities and challenges before him. Midwestern Seminary intends to produce such graduates—proven, equipped and resolved to serve for the Church.

A seminary will not rightly impact a student’s heart, mind, hand, and soul coincidentally. Rather, a seminary must be intentionally seek to influence these four areas, and in next week’s for the Church essay, we shall consider how an institution’s culture, curriculum, and classroom experience can purpose to affect these four dimensions of a minister.

Part I // Part II // Part III // Part IV // Part V // Part VI // Part VII // Part VIII

This post was originally published on 22 April 2013.

First Things First: Training Pastors, Teachers & Evangelists for the Church.

Harvard University stands as one of America’s truly elite universities. Founded in 1636, Harvard is America’s oldest institution of higher learning, and also its most storied. Boasting a corpus of more than $32 billion, it enjoys, by far, the nation’s largest endowment. It has produced more United States presidents, congressmen, and members of the judiciary than any other college or university, thus buttressing its claim to be America’s most prestigious and influential university.

Yet when founded, Harvard declared an even loftier goal: to train faithful ministers of the gospel. In fact, emblazoned upon Harvard’s historic entranceway, the Johnson Gate, the Puritans’ founding intent remains ensconced, “After God had carried us safe to New England and we had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God’s worship, and settled the civil government, one of the next things we longed for and looked after was to advance learning and to perpetuate it to our posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.”

Harvard has come a long way since its founding, and its confessional and missiological reorientation is one of the most visible, and lamentable, shifts of any institution in the history of higher education. The lesson is clear: confessional integrity is paramount, but it is not enough. Confessional integrity must be coupled with missiological intentionality.

Midwestern Seminary’s mission is crystal-clear: we exist for the Church, and we train pastors, teachers, and evangelists accordingly. Most especially, given the New Testament imperative, current denominational need, and Great Commission urgencies, Midwestern Seminary will unapologetically give its best energies and resources to training pastors for the Church.

A New Testament Imperative

The Puritan emphasis on training pastors was first a Pauline emphasis. As the apostle reminded the church at Ephesus, “He [Christ] gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ.” In a sense, the specified offices of Ephesians 4 are tangible fulfillments of Christ’s promise in Matthew 16 to build his church. In many ways, the remainder of the New Testament corpus is given to documenting the fulfillment of Christ’s promise to build his church and to defining and defending the church’s doctrine and practice.

Never are the expectations of the pastoral office more clearly presented than in I Timothy 3:1–7. Herein, the distinguishing mark between the pastoral and diaconal offices is that the former must be “able to teach.” To be sure, not every call to ministry is a call to preach, but every call to ministry is a call to a ministry of the Word—the Word preached, taught, shared, or counseled. One can argue that every formal, ordainable ministerial position, in some way or another, has at its core a ministry of God’s Word, and that the candidate to that office must demonstrate at least some level of proficiency therewith.

Therefore, a seminary must make sure priority one is strengthening the preaching and teaching capabilities of the people it trains. So goes the pulpit, so goes the church; and so goes the ministry of the Word, so goes the equipping of the saints for the service of the church. At the institutional level, we can add that so goes the intentionality of training for these offices, so goes the competence of the graduates and the resulting health of the church.

A Denominational Need

The Southern Baptist Convention’s central expectation of its seminaries is that we train pastors and missionaries for the church. After all, in its most distilled form, this is precisely what the SBC is—a confederation of churches, with pastors (and often no other vocational ministers), partnering to win the world for Christ by collectively funding and sending missionaries abroad. These are the two irreducible components of our denomination and the two irreducible positions for which the seminary must equip.

Looking to denominational demographics accentuates the need to train pastors and missionaries for the churches. The median age of pastors within the SBC continues to drift upward, with an increasing percentage of pastors approaching retirement. A dearth of pastors looms on the horizon and, in a sense, is already here. If churches do not call out pastors and seminaries do not train them, from whence will they come? The churches of the Southern Baptist Convention expect much from their six seminaries, but they expect nothing less than we make our first priority training pastors for their churches and preparing missionaries for the world.

A Great Commission Urgency

Finally, it is impossible to contemplate the role of the seminary without considering how the effectiveness with which it prepares ministers intersects with how aggressively the gospel is spread. As Paul reminded the church at Rome, “‘Whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved.’ How will they call on Him in whom they have not believed? How will they believe in whom they have not heard? And how will they hear without a preacher? How will they preach unless they are sent? Just as it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news of good things.’”

Inherent in the call to train pastors is the call to train evangelists/missionaries. At its heart, to be a missionary that is planting a church is simply to be a pastor in another culture. Moreover, the complexity of modern ministry and the accompanying Great Commission challenges due to cultural decadence and multicultural complexities serve as a reminder to double-down on the ministerial mainstays. This does not negate contextual and cultural considerations, but it does abridge them. Though it may be counterintuitive, the more complex ministry becomes, the simpler we must make it. It is still the preaching and teaching of the Word that God blesses, the power of the gospel that changes lives, and the health of the church, as a counter-cultural, ever-present witness that the world needs.

Therefore, the irreducible work of a seminary is to train pastors, evangelists, and teachers for the church. We then fling these graduates out as workers of the harvest, and watch with joy and satisfaction as Jesus builds his church and reaches the nations through them.

Conclusion

Many seminaries—even evangelical seminaries—function like shopping malls, offering a myriad of course options in an attempt to cobble together a sufficient enrollment to justify and facilitate their existence. This dilution of energies might in the short-term help pay the bills, but in the long run it jeopardizes the mission and rationale of the institution. It may also inadvertently undermine the ministries of the churches the seminary ostensibly serves.

If Southern Baptist seminaries do not intentionally train the next generation of pastors, then from whence will they come? Seminaries are not indispensable, but under the auspices of Christ’s plan to build his church, the pastoral office is indispensable. While Midwestern Seminary does many things, and many things well, we unapologetically minister under an Ephesians 4 mandate, giving our best energies to training to pastors, ministers, and evangelists for the Church.

Part I // Part II // Part III // Part IV // Part V // Part VI // Part VII // Part VIII