In the battle to renew and rebuild the wobbling edifice of the Church in the 21st century, I’d put my money on the 30-something apprentice with an iPod, some business experience and a day job over the 20-something with a piece of paper and a huge load of debt every time.

My previous article, The Seminary Bubble, certainly hit a nerve—remarkably so, given that it appeared here at Forbes.com at the center of financial journalism and not one of the usual church discussion watering holes. Critics fell into one of three camps.

First is the gender cop camp. Self-described seminary instructor Sarah Morice-Brubaker writes, “Pssst. There are female seminarians. A lot of them. The fact that you fail to acknowledge this – and make it very clear that you have in mind hetero men when you think “seminarian” – simply makes everything else you say sound less informed and therefore less persuasive.”

Believe it or not, this was the most frequent criticism of my article, which tells me that things are worse than I thought. Liberal mainline seminaries appear to have turned into little gender police states whose denizens quietly tally your pronouns as you talk, calculating gender ratios.

Pssst, for the record, I did acknowledge female seminarians in paragraph four of the original article. Evangelical women who attend conservative seminaries which feed into denominations which are hostile to women’s ordination are among the worst victims of the seminary bubble. It’s tough to see everything in an article when one’s line of sight is blocked by a chip on one’s shoulder.

Does the fact that seminaries have succumbed to X chromosome/Y chromosome wars make them more attractive? It’s one thing to send me to a re-education camp; it’s something else entirely to try to charge me tuition for the experience.

Another common criticism is that enduring the financial privations of a seminary education is somehow a spiritual obligation. Some argue that pastoral service is a calling and that the called must ‘take up the cross’ and follow Him.

But every calling is a calling and I don’t see anyone arguing that career training in other areas ought to be rendered more expensive and burdensome than it needs to be. We don’t tell farmers not to use tractors because back breaking physical labor is spiritually beneficial. Sufficient unto the day is the trouble thereof: being a pastor is hard enough on its own; there is no need to tie heavy loads of debt onto the aspirants back and not lift a finger to help, all in the name of spirituality.

Besides, where precisely did Christ call His disciples to seminary?

Christ was not, Himself, a seminary graduate, nor did He establish an institution of higher learning. He certainly knew about such establishments. He grew up near a cultural center, the Hellenized city of Sepphoris. And almost certainly spent some of His formative years near an even greater center of Greek learning, the great library city of Alexandria (where else would one hide a little Hebrew boy in Egypt if not in the massive throngs of diaspora Jews?) He appears to have been not only a Hebrew and Aramaic speaker but a Greek and perhaps a Latin speaker as well. He quoted Aesop and Aeschylus. He knew about the Greek model of the Academy.

But he chose the Hebrew rabbinical model of teaching: apprenticeship.

Read More:

http://blogs.forbes.com/jerrybowyer/2011/05/11/bursting-the-seminary-bubble-part-ii/