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

This post was originally published on 15 April 2013.

Southern Baptist: By Conviction, by Culture, by Determination.

Midwestern Seminary’s vision is simple, yet full: she exists for the Church. This purpose both defines our institutional to-be list, and it drives our institutional to-do list. To exist for the Church, however, does not quite tell the whole story. Midwestern Seminary does not simply exist for the Church generically, but for Southern Baptist churches, specifically.

The overarching vision of Midwestern Seminary is to train gospel ministers to serve Christ within the context of Southern Baptist churches. While Midwestern, like all six Southern Baptist seminaries, happily receives students from the broader evangelical world, there is no question as to who is our core constituency. As an entity of the Southern Baptist Convention, we bend our entire program of theological education toward SBC churches. This determination to serve the churches of our denomination is a happy acknowledgement of our ownership and a contented submission to our statement of faith, but it is also a confident and winsome resolve to own and project our Southern Baptist identity.

To be sure, as a denomination we have idiosyncrasies and unseemly moments, but embarrassment or cynicism must never set in. Ours is a great denomination, and the call to serve its churches is a noble one. Southern Baptist Convention churches have entrusted their six seminaries with a precious stewardship: to train their pastors, ministers, and missionaries.

As referenced in For the Church III: Guard the Truth, the determination to serve Southern Baptist churches begins with ironclad confessional integrity, but it is much more than that. This commitment should also form a seminary’s culture, shaping its ethos and pathos.

Appreciating our Southern Baptist Heritage

In The Vindication of Tradition, Jaroslav Pelikan famously observed that tradition is the living faith of the dead, while traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. As Southern Baptists, we should eschew traditionalism, but happily embrace our tradition, for it is rich indeed. To fawn for a denominational golden era is unhelpful nostalgia, and the seminary or church that determines to live in the past will soon be relegated to history itself. However, to neglect our heritage is a ruinous form of denominational amnesia that exhibits a most strident form of ingratitude. Southern Baptists’ blood, toil, tears, sweat—and yes, money—founded, built, maintained, and recovered our institutions. We both honor our Baptist forebears and inform and strengthen our present witness when we appreciate our Southern Baptist heritage. In other words, we need to keep the faith, but pass on our tradition.

In this regard, though we have little influence over whom the churches send to seminary, we do have much influence over the type of graduates we send back to them. Increasingly, students arrive at seminary from un-churched backgrounds or from churches of marginal SBC affiliation. The phrase “Cooperative Program” means little to them and names like Lottie Moon and Annie Armstrong even less.

The frequent discontinuity between students and the denomination is regrettable, but not inalterable. As an SBC seminary, Midwestern bears a missiological and moral imperative to instill within our students knowledge of and appreciation for the Southern Baptist Convention. While in seminary, a student’s ministerial formation is often caught as much as it is taught. The culture of a seminary can impact a student as much as the curriculum or classroom experience. To this end, as the culture of a seminary pulsates with an affection for the SBC, graduates will depart more attuned to the denomination and more desirous of partnering with it.

A Seminary for the Entire SBC

Midwestern Seminary’s identity as a Southern Baptist seminary means she is committed to training students for the entire convention. Midwestern is not called to focus on a niche group. Southern Baptists are a diverse lot—generationally, geographically, ethnically, theologically, and methodologically. Midwestern Seminary intentionally seeks to serve all of these different currents within our denomination, under the purview of the Baptist Faith & Message 2000.

There is a sense in which the Southern Baptist Convention is both a family and a neighborhood. As a family, we share overarching passions for the Word of God, the Great Commission, and Baptist distinctives. However, we also are like a neighborhood, in proximity to one another, but not in the exact location on many secondary issues. Midwestern Seminary is committed to serving the entire neighborhood known as the Southern Baptist Convention, with the BF&M 2000 fencing the property.

Graduated and Ready to Serve

To serve Southern Baptist churches means we graduate ministers who are well positioned to serve in them. One practical aspect of our seminary’s stewardship is to keep tuition as low as possible so students will graduate as expeditiously and as unencumbered as possible. Most seminarians manage through their schooling by juggling multiple jobs and cobbling together just enough resources to get by. Such circumstances often protract their time of study, delaying their deployment into the local church. Even worse, some students graduate with burdensome debt, which will prove difficult to repay on a minister’s salary. We therefore have a missiological obligation to make theological education as affordable as possible and a moral obligation to discourage student indebtedness. Whether graduating to serve the church locally as a pastor or minister or internationally as a missionary, the financial constraints associated with such ministry posts could stymie God’s call on one’s life, if not preclude it altogether.

By conviction, by culture, and by determination, Midwestern Seminary exists to train students for the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention. Yet, the primary way Midwestern serves SBC churches is by meeting their most pressing—and most manifestly biblical—need: to train pastors, ministers, and evangelists for the church. I will address this topic next Monday in For the Church V, entitled First Things First: Training Pastors, Ministers, and Evangelists.

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

Since Southern Baptists founded their first seminary in 1859, the denomination has experienced an uneasy relationship between her seminaries and the churches that own them. Though the year 2013 finds the seminaries very much in line with the denomination’s confessional statement—the Baptist Faith & Message 2000—such has not always been the case. Moreover, a survey of the history of theological education indicates the need for churches to keep an ever-vigilant eye on the seminaries they own. Read more

*This post was originally published on 1 April 2013.

No Man Can Serve Two Masters: Trustee Oversight, Financial Influence & a Seminary’s Resolve.

No man can serve two masters.

This is true, and never truer than in theological education. Individuals and groups compete for institutional influence, adding their voice and, if permitted, interjecting their hand, into a seminary’s affairs. The U.S. Department of Education, accreditation agencies, donors, alumni, and all aspects of an institution’s constituency exert some measure of influence. Most of this is unavoidable and much of this is good. Yet for a seminary to exist for the Church, it must filter through this cacophony of voices and train its ear on the churches it serves.

There is no better way to ensure a seminary serves the church than for the churches served to exercise absolute oversight of the seminary. Indeed, for a seminary to exist for the Church it must self-evidently demonstrate this commitment at every institutional pressure point of accountability. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, “trust, but verify” is an appropriate posture for churches to hold toward the seminaries they own.

Trustee Oversight

For Southern Baptist seminaries, local church oversight rests primarily in the trustee system. Elected by the Southern Baptist Convention, the seminary’s trustees act on behalf of the denomination’s churches to bear the governing and fiduciary responsibility for the institution.

At times, the Southern Baptist Convention trustee system reminds one of the Electoral College, with the same observers alternately defending or lamenting its peculiarities and function depending on their assessment of the board’s most recent decision rendered. Granted, it may even be true, to paraphrase Churchill, that the trustee system might be the worst form of institutional governance, save all other forms.

What is beyond dispute, however, is that without the trustee system the Southern Baptist Convention would not have been able to recover her entities during the Conservative Resurgence. The appointive power of the convention president, ultimately shaping the entities’ trustees, was the linchpin of the Conservative Resurgence.

Now with the trustee system, and especially in light of bylaw revisions, sole member designations and the ever-present lesson of our own denomination’s history, the trustee system is the best mechanism to perpetuate the denomination’s legal ownership and operational oversight of her seminaries. For Southern Baptists, the trustee system rightly honored and executed remains unsurpassed as the mechanism to accomplish church governance over the seminaries.

Financial Influence

Southern Baptists have proven themselves relentlessly generous in funding their seminaries. So much so, that currently the Cooperative Program supplies between 25 and 45 percent of each of the six seminaries’ budgets. In addition to being generous, this sacrificial support is also healthy. The surest way to maintain operational control over an institution is to continue to be its strongest financial supporter.

As Cooperative Program gifts become less of an institution’s operating budget, the temptation exists for a seminary to look elsewhere for funding and to succumb to external influence. As flowers grow towards light, institutions almost inexorably lean toward their sources of funding.

If one needs evidence, look to the many Baptist state colleges that have distanced themselves or altogether broken from their state conventions. For Southern Baptists, the pernicious taking of many of our state colleges and universities is one of the great tragedies in our denomination’s history. Those who engineer such moves bear judgment, and those who permit such moves bear little less. Though diminishing denominational support is a lamentable trend, it is not a permission slip to drift from denominational governance.

Whether the Cooperative Program supplies 100 percent of an SBC seminary’s budget or one percent, from an ownership standpoint, the amount is irrelevant. Southern Baptists have built, funded, and own their seminaries. Any cleavage between the seminaries and the churches that own them is a malicious act against which the denomination must guard.

As it relates to ownership and governance, the issue is not just current funding, but past funding and present ownership. This generation bears a moral stewardship to our Southern Baptist forebears who built six great seminaries. We honor them when we keep the six Southern Baptist seminaries faithful to the denomination.

A Seminary Responds

First, in order to be for the Church, Midwestern Seminary must be unambiguously committed to churches she serves. To this end, Midwestern Seminary is committed, even if it were to prove in some way to her own detriment, to serving under the accountability and scrupulous supervision of the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention. In addition to honoring the letter of her commitment, Midwestern Seminary is also determined to honor the spirit by seeking to meet the denomination’s needs, being sensitive to its concerns, and sharing its aspirations.

Second, the history of higher education is a history of institutions chasing and ultimately following the money. In the decades to come, revenue sources will either facilitate apostasy or ensure fidelity. We have it within our power to accomplish the latter. Midwestern Seminary, in order to ensure perennial faithfulness to the Southern Baptist Convention, will so contractually bind every endowment gift confessionally and denominationally that each fund will serve to provide perpetual accountability to the seminary’s confession of faith and the Southern Baptist Convention as a whole. To do so tosses to the wind conventional wisdom in higher education, which encourages institutions to word development memorandums of agreement for maximum institutional flexibility. However, institutional flexibility is not the goal. Institutional faithfulness is the goal.

Of course, the most consequential form of accountability a seminary maintains is its confessional accountability. Such confessional accountability will ensure that Midwestern Seminary’s identity and mission will remain for the Church. Confessional integrity demands hiring professors who share, without hesitation or mental reservation, the institution’s confessional commitments. This confessional accountability will be considered in the next essay: “Guard the Truth.”

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

*This post was originally published on 22 March 2013.

In Arthur Schlesinger’s award-winning biography of Franklin Roosevelt, he famously labeled the economic and political malaise of the 1920s and ’30s as “the crisis of the old order.” Schlesinger argued that political, cultural and economic norms were changing so rapidly that, coupled with government inaction, they coalesced to form a crisis of the entire American status quo—a crisis that would upend society and necessitate re-conceptualization of American economic and social policy. Current observers of higher education, including theological seminaries, likewise acknowledge a crisis exists in many of the seminaries and divinity schools in North America today. This crisis is so profound it is forcing institutions to re-conceptualize their model of education and their means of delivering it.

Admittedly, crisis is a tired word. We hear often of political, economic, geopolitical, and cultural crises. Yet, when subjected to careful review, theological education in North America must be deemed as in a state of crisis. This current distress evidences itself in at least three areas.

First, most theological institutions in America find themselves, at least to some degree, mired in a crisis of resources. The escalating costs of higher education, nagging questions about the value of advanced degrees, encroaching federal regulations, and persistent economic sluggishness present even the best-funded institutions with daunting operational challenges.

This crisis of resources has forced historic institutions to merge or close, and has left the remaining ones searching for a sustainable business model. These fiscal realities, and more, have been like a spiraling whirlpool, drawing almost every theological institution into its vortex. The persistent generosity of Southern Baptists through the Cooperative Program has proven to mitigate this fiscal challenge; however, even Southern Baptist seminaries are not immune to this struggle.

Sadly, the most urgent and consequential crisis in theological education is not one of funding. It is more fundamental and philosophical; the crisis is one of identity. What is a seminary to be? Stemming from and coupled with this crisis of identity is a crisis of mission. What is a seminary to do?

The answers to these questions of identity and mission are predetermined because a seminary is to be a pre-committed entity that looks to Scripture for its purpose and mission. When a seminary looks to Scripture for its identity, it will be drawn to one inescapable conclusion: a seminary must exist For the Church. When Christ promised in Matthew 16 to build his church, it was more than a reference to a secondary kingdom initiative. Rather, it was a prophetic word, a declaration, as to his redemptive and kingdom intent.

After all, Christ died for his church. He is the head of his church. He is the church’s bridegroom. He gifts his followers for service in the church. He calls out pastors, teachers, and evangelists to equip his church. When baptized, believers are baptized into his church. Christ is currently building his church, and he will one day return for his church. In fact, Christ is so personalized with his church that he identifies persecution against his church as persecution of himself.

Therefore, Christ’s preoccupation with his church must inform a seminary’s rationale and mission. His pledge to build his church is not only a promise to which a seminary should cling, but it is also a mandate a seminary should embrace. After all, Jesus has promised to build his church—not his seminary.

Though in the New Testament the form of a seminary is more overheard than heard, the function of a seminary—teaching, equipping, mentoring, and sending—is heard quite clearly. In many ways, the entire trajectory and contour of the New Testament points to Christ fulfilling his promise to build his church. Moreover, the New Testament Epistles read like a veritable manual of how to do and how not to do church, conveying the predominant concern of health, growth, and faithfulness for the local church.

Cleavage between the seminary and the church is to the detriment of the former because it undermines its rationale for existence. That same cleavage also robs the church of further equipping for the work of ministry. If a seminary drifts from the church, the church will drift from it; if the seminary stops serving the church, the church will—and should—stop supporting it.

Of all denominations, the Southern Baptist Convention is uniquely positioned to enjoy seminaries that exist for the church. After all, the Southern Baptist Convention is nothing more than a confederation of churches, structured with a denominational framework that exists by, for, and as part of her churches.

By New Testament mandate, denominational expectation, and self-imposed determination, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary stands without compromise in its commitment to serve the local church. Thankfully, there is no question of identity or mission. Trustees and donors are not being polled to inform the identity of Midwestern Seminary. Focus groups are not being assembled and queried as to what our market niche should be. Faculty and students are not being surveyed to find our mission. On the contrary, with appropriate self-confidence, Midwestern Seminary is unquestionably committed to serving the church and is unapologetically bending her resources and energies toward this end.

This is not to suggest that other SBC seminaries or institutions beyond our denomination are not serving the church and not serving the church well. Nor is it to suggest that Midwestern Seminary in her past has not served the church, and served it well. This is to say that regardless of what other institutions are or are not doing, and regardless of what Midwestern Seminary has or has not done, the future is certain: Midwestern Seminary exists for the Church. Every proposed event, initiative, class, program, personnel hire, or decision made will be subjugated to one over-arching question: How will this help Midwestern Seminary fulfill its mission to serve the church?

For the Church is a vision to be implemented over every square inch of Midwestern Seminary’s campus, and it is a message to be carried to every corner of this great denomination. In the essays that follow, I will flesh out what this vision means for Midwestern Seminary. In the meantime, know Midwestern Seminary’s identity and mission are clear: Midwestern Seminary exists for the Church. 

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