Too many seminaries are turning out graduates who are good preachers and can serve as the resident theologians of their churches, instead of graduating ministers whose heart and passion is to start new churches to help further the Kingdom of God.

That was part of the message that Rev. Carl Bosma, assistant professor of Old Testament at Calvin Theological Seminary, gave this week during CTC’s convocation ceremony, welcoming new students as well as veteran students back from the summer.

In a talk titled “Church Planters or Undertakers?” Bosma pointed out that the Christian church, for the most part, is not growing in the United States. Except for a few exciting new church plants, the religious landscape of the U.S. is not expanding, said Bosma.

Bosma said he raised the question of “Church Planters or Undertakers?” for the CTS faculty, including himself, as well as to incoming and returning students, because of its far-reaching implications.

“I raise the question, first of all, for us as a faculty. What should be the end product of our three-year M.Div. program? Academic theologians? Good preachers? Or good theologians and preachers that can plant new churches?” Bosma said.

Studies show across the board that traditional churches are not growing very much, if at all. Ones that are growing are churches such as Granite Springs CRC, pastored by Rev. Kevin Adams in California. Another good example is New Life Church planted by CTS president-elect Julius Mendenblik in New Lenox, Ill.

Both of these are churches that have shown a significant interest in evangelizing their communities and developing accessible programs to teach the power of the gospel to their own members as well as to those whom the evangelists—lay and ordained—have reached.

“This situation suggests that it is high time to focus our attention on evangelism and church planting,” said Bosma. The church needs to accept the fact that “the continual planting of new congregations is the single most crucial strategy for the numerical growth of the body of Christ, the renewal of existing churches, and the overall impact of the church on the culture of any city.”

To feel the urgency of the question, he said, consider data from the Pew Research Center that shows 71 percent of all Christians in the world lived in Europe at the start of the 20th Century. Today, that number has plummeted to 28 percent.

“As a result of this drastic demise, European theological faculties are closing or merging into faculties of religion,” said Bosma, adding that if denominational membership of the CRC continues to drop, “what will it mean for us?”
Meanwhile, those who are starting the liveliest and largest new churches are ministers who consider Christ’s “Great Commission”—to reach all nations for God—a very high priority. Many of these young preachers are finding seminary education, as it is currently constituted, irrelevant.

“Given this sad state of affairs, we as a faculty shouldn’t be surprised that, according to a recent survey, 53 percent of pastors in the U.S. had not personally shared the gospel with anyone in the previous six months,” said Bosma.

To read a transcript of Bosma’s presentation, visit Pdf file.

Source: http://www.crcna.org/news.cfm?newsid=2186&section=1 [Editor’s note: the original URL (link) referenced is no longer valid, so the link has been removed.]