Sometimes people will say, “There is no seminary in the Bible,” or “The Bible does not require us to go to seminary.” Of course, I understand that. There are other ways that you can equip and prepare people to serve in the church. What you will find in both the Old Testament and the New Testament is that everybody in ministry has to go through a process of preparation.
Seminary brings together mentorship, study, education, and spiritual formation.Before the Apostle Paul became a minister in the church, the church sent him to study for several years before he launched into his public ministry. Jesus himself spent years before he entered into his public ministry. All of those years were times of preparation. He prepared his own disciples for three years before he unleashed them on their public ministry.
Priests and prophets in the Old Testament had to go through preparation before they entered into public ministry. There has always been preparation for public ministry. The question is: how?
What a seminary does is bring together mentorship, study, education, rigorous academic training, and spiritual formation. It concentrates it over a shorter period of time so that we can equip more comprehensively and more rapidly the kingdom workers of the next generation.
In our day and time, pastors do not need to know less. They need to know more.
We live in a time that is very skeptical of Christianity and of the truth claims of the gospel and of the Bible. If we do not know more than our skeptics know, we will be compromised in our ability to speak the gospel forcefully, powerfully, and persuasively to this very cynical culture. That is one of the reasons why I think seminary training, along with the kind of practical work and experience that you get from working in the local church, is necessary. Those two things together are the best possible way I think to prepare people to do ministry in our day in time.
