While the biblical qualifications for eldership include things like “able to teach” (1 Tim 3:2) and “able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it” (Titus 1:9), which are certainly things formal theological education can inform, the majority of the qualifications focus on areas of character, disposition, and temperament. These qualities are certainly not divorced from sound doctrine and theology, but as the fruit of Christlikeness, they require a more intensive cultivation than even the best academic institutions can provide. What they require is personal shepherding.

Formation Over Education

It takes more than academic success and excellence in ministerial skills to produce pastors. That’s because the biblical qualifications for the pastorate are matters of spiritual maturity and Christlike character, and an academic institution can only do so much—by design—to influence and assess such things.

It has become cliché at this point to hear from ministers the laundry list of things they “didn’t learn in seminary.” When churches everywhere were navigating the confusion of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was a familiar refrain. “They didn’t teach us about this in seminary!” Church leaders have become accustomed to saying this about lots of things that pop up in regular ministerial life.

The truth is, seminaries could improve in exposing pastoral aspirants to more of the practicalities of ministry. We could do more to minimize the theoretical, especially as it pertains to practical theology and pastoral ministry courses. I try to do that very thing in my own pastoral ministry classes. But if seminaries added everything ministers ought to know in order to be fully prepared for the challenge of serving a church, the MDiv degree would be hundreds of credit hours long, and nobody would go!

The solution is not to go to seminary. These days, theological education is more available and, in some cases, more affordable than it has ever been. I encourage any young man aspiring to pastoral ministry to get a seminary education, if he is able. For many—though not for all—foregoing seminary training would be poor stewardship of their mind and even of their finances. The academy can’t meet every need, but it can be a sound investment that pays lifelong dividends.

No, the solution is not to get rid of academic training—but we can’t expect from academic training what only pastoral mentoring can provide.

In teaching my pastoral ministry class, I spend more time on matters of the heart—the fruit of the Spirit, pastoral disposition, and personal holiness—than on the practicalities at hand. My students spend more time rehearsing the pastoral implications of assessing baptismal candidates than physically practicing how to baptize somebody. (I always say to my students that if they can’t figure out how to put somebody under water, they’re probably too dumb to be in a Baptist seminary anyway!) And I definitely spend more time in the classroom reinforcing gospel-centrality as a unifying biblical theme and as an urgent and necessary ministry philosophy than I do teaching them how to officiate weddings and funerals (though we spend some time on those things too). In the exams I administer and the papers I assign, I am far more interested in whether a student can substantively and thoughtfully reflect on the biblical emphases for ministry than in whether they can regurgitate things they’ve memorized in the readings.

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