Christianity Today has an article entitled "What Is the Biggest Change Evangelical Seminaries Need to Make Right Now?" with three responses by as many writers.
The first response is given by Dan Kimball who contemplates that "If seminary professors could teach preaching and other skills more passionately, seminary students would more completely develop a passion for evangelism" without adversely affecting academic excellence. This is all fine and good, but passion and academics without truth make a seminarian twice the child of hell as the professors.
The second response is given by Cheryl Sanders who posits that seminaries need to be more innovative with the idea of building a more ethnically diverse student body. I agree that changes have and can be made to brick-and-mortar schools to take advantage of technologies and financing. Be creative with academic offerings to instruct those who want the education but have difficulty with traditional course structure because of real world constraints. Leave ethnic diversity out of this. When that becomes the goal, the seminary can quickly become entangled in the mess created by Affirmative Action legislation with minimum demographic requirements. The goal is teach how to handle the word of God. If the student population is diverse, so much the better, but do not force an issue where none exists.
The final response is by Winfield Bevins who reminds us:
If these three are examples of the mindset that can be found in seminaries and Bible colleges amongst the faculty and staff, the church is causing its own problems. I do not disagree that evangelical seminaries could use an upgrade—even a complete overhaul—but those improvements should begin with Christ and the gospel, not dance around them.
The first response is given by Dan Kimball who contemplates that "If seminary professors could teach preaching and other skills more passionately, seminary students would more completely develop a passion for evangelism" without adversely affecting academic excellence. This is all fine and good, but passion and academics without truth make a seminarian twice the child of hell as the professors.
The second response is given by Cheryl Sanders who posits that seminaries need to be more innovative with the idea of building a more ethnically diverse student body. I agree that changes have and can be made to brick-and-mortar schools to take advantage of technologies and financing. Be creative with academic offerings to instruct those who want the education but have difficulty with traditional course structure because of real world constraints. Leave ethnic diversity out of this. When that becomes the goal, the seminary can quickly become entangled in the mess created by Affirmative Action legislation with minimum demographic requirements. The goal is teach how to handle the word of God. If the student population is diverse, so much the better, but do not force an issue where none exists.
The final response is by Winfield Bevins who reminds us:
But what good is it if you know everything about theology and the Bible yet don't know about the one thing the resurrected Jesus called us to do: make disciples?The discipleship model he proposes is that used by the ancient Celtic monastic orders, especially Saint Patrick. I greatly appreciate his call for seminaries to have more of a discipling focus, but why go to the Celts? I bear no ill will against Patrick or any who spread the gospel in that area, but would we not have better examples in someone like Peter or Paul or other names I could give? Not that those people found in the Bible are any more holy or less sinful than Patrick or anybody else who spread the gospel over the centuries, but what we have of the apostles' exploits are retold by the guiding hand of the Holy Spirit, and that counts for something
If these three are examples of the mindset that can be found in seminaries and Bible colleges amongst the faculty and staff, the church is causing its own problems. I do not disagree that evangelical seminaries could use an upgrade—even a complete overhaul—but those improvements should begin with Christ and the gospel, not dance around them.
1 comment:
These three people are definitely part of the problem. The main problem is that seminaries seem to be jumping on the bandwagon of every wind of doctrine coming down the pipes, and they are teaching their students to do the same.
We all need to get back to the Bible.
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