Dale Partridge - Do Men Need to Go to Seminary to Pastor a House Church？

00:00:00.000 Hey, everyone, and welcome to How We Do House Church, the official podcast of Reformation

00:00:12.320 Seminary and the Reformation Fellowship Network of Church Planters. My name is Dr. Jason Barker,

00:00:18.400 and I have the privilege of serving as the academic dean at Reformation Seminary. And

00:00:23.180 I'm joined today by my friend and our seminary's founder and president, Dale Partridge. Dale,

00:00:27.740 How's it going?

00:00:28.340 Well, I'm excited for this episode.

00:00:30.200 I'm well, by the way.

00:00:31.140 Good.

00:00:32.340 The discussion around, should we go to seminary?

00:00:36.600 Should pastors go to seminary?

00:00:38.440 Should house church pastors specifically go to seminary?

00:00:43.420 We're going to have a fun discussion about this because this is what we do.

00:00:46.220 Yeah, I remember going to seminary.

00:00:48.880 It's been decades, eons ago now.

00:00:52.320 But going to seminary and very good, well-intentioned people coming to me and saying, don't go to seminary.

00:00:59.860 That'll ruin you.

00:01:00.920 You'll learn too much theology.

00:01:02.400 They called it cemetery.

00:01:03.980 Cemetery, yes.

00:01:04.860 And so I think what makes this question even more interesting is that people tend to view house church at having somewhat lower standards almost than maybe a traditional church.

00:01:18.840 And so, people might even be more surprised that house church planting pastors go to seminary.

00:01:23.280 So, let's talk about this then, Dale.

00:01:25.240 Does a man need to go to seminary to pastor a house church? 0.83

00:01:30.580 Yeah.

00:01:30.780 So, the answer in short is they don't need to, but they should want to.

00:01:37.820 Okay.

00:01:38.320 And they don't need to in the sense that it's not a requirement of scripture.

00:01:43.940 However, it is in principle a requirement to be trained.

00:01:49.260 We don't see Jesus sending out the 12 after three months of training.

00:01:57.020 No, it's three years of 24-7 training with the Messiah himself before Jesus sends them out to do ministry.

00:02:08.500 We also know that Jesus chooses men who are actually not starting at ground zero, meaning that I think about Peter as he's sitting on the roof and the vision of animals becoming clean.

00:02:23.660 He sees this vision of all these things and he says, you know, the spirit of the Lord has taken and eat these things.

00:02:29.620 And Peter's response is, Lord, I have never eaten an unclean thing in my life.

00:02:34.780 Okay. This implies that you have a man, Peter, who has lived according to the law. He is well aware of the law. He is well aware of the Torah. He understands the narrative of scripture pointing to a Messiah.

00:02:54.160 um this is not a man who is like just a fisherman who doesn't know anything about the bible

00:03:00.620 so we got guys that are already biblically informed then they're spending three years

00:03:07.700 before they go out into ministry we also have an example of paul who gets converted

00:03:13.860 in damascus on the road to damascus and i don't know specifically i wish i researched this before

00:03:21.080 but I believe it was 10 years before he started his first missionary journey.

00:03:26.840 And it talks about him being trained by the Spirit of God in Arabia. I mean, there's obviously some

00:03:32.680 discussion to be around there, but he didn't go conversion into mission work. It was an

00:03:40.600 absolute training period. We also know that Paul spent time at the school of Tyrannus

00:03:45.400 in the book of Acts, teaching daily.

00:03:50.760 We also know that God gave the church

00:03:54.640 apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers

00:03:58.720 and for the edification of the body.

00:04:01.900 So the idea of teaching is there

00:04:05.100 and it requires by in principle,

00:04:07.780 it implies to be informed before you can teach something.

00:04:11.880 So it's all over scripture.

00:04:12.940 the idea of being not only called to ministry, but trained. And there's a difference between

00:04:20.080 calling and training. There's a gap. Yes. I felt called. It didn't mean that I was ready

00:04:27.900 to be in ministry. Training really does that. And so what other, so I'm going to say this,

00:04:37.340 this is just a big deal. I think that pastors are like soul doctors and their scalpel is the

00:04:47.220 word of God. And what other profession, what other world or industry would you allow someone

00:04:59.180 to operate upon your physical body without training, to operate on your lawsuit without

00:05:06.180 training, to build your house without training. We require training, education, and extensive

00:05:15.280 training for areas that are very delicate, like the soul. Bad theology hurts people.

00:05:23.760 I mean, it just hurts people. And so to operate on someone's soul with the truth or lies,

00:05:30.720 we should demand that men are trained.

00:05:35.300 Now, the only people who told me to not go to seminary

00:05:37.940 are the people who never went to seminary.

00:05:40.340 People who went to seminary have never told me,

00:05:42.920 don't go to seminary.

00:05:44.340 I spent five years in seminary.

00:05:46.020 You spent seven years in seminary.

00:05:47.640 I'm still doing some more seminary.

00:05:49.960 And so seminary is just a wonderful place

00:05:52.620 to continue this ongoing training

00:05:56.680 of theological depth.

00:06:00.720 And so why should a house church pastor be trained?

00:06:05.560 Because you're shepherding souls.

00:06:08.960 And if you don't understand the basics of hermeneutics,

00:06:15.720 how to properly interpret scripture,

00:06:18.580 exegesis, how to extract the meaning of the text.

00:06:21.600 If you don't understand biblical theology

00:06:23.360 and how the Old Testament prepares us for

00:06:25.560 and points us to Christ.

00:06:27.320 If you don't understand a biblical theological concept

00:06:30.480 of the scriptures

00:06:32.440 or a systematic theological concept

00:06:34.540 of the scriptures,

00:06:35.660 that you're seeing salvation

00:06:36.740 from Genesis to Revelation,

00:06:38.160 you're seeing the church

00:06:40.020 from Genesis to Revelation,

00:06:41.500 or you're seeing God's sovereignty

00:06:44.700 or theology proper

00:06:46.180 or God's omniscience.

00:06:47.400 If you don't understand these concepts,

00:06:48.740 if you don't understand church history,

00:06:50.560 understanding when someone

00:06:51.680 comes into your church

00:06:52.400 and says that they were raised Anglican

00:06:54.360 and his wife's Lutheran

00:06:55.480 and they really are having a debate

00:06:57.100 over communion right now,

00:06:58.340 but they'd like to join

00:06:59.280 your Baptist house church.

00:07:00.340 You need to understand what all of that means so that you can navigate those doctrinal matters.

00:07:06.640 If you don't understand how to preach and how to homiletically, that is to prepare and deliver a compelling and persuasive and accurate sermon.

00:07:18.540 If you don't understand what it means to be an elder and the qualifications there.

00:07:22.320 If you don't understand biblical counseling and shepherding and how to shepherd people with scripture, you're not ready to care for the souls of others. This is essential. We need to realize that it is a huge, it's a work of great gravity to shepherd souls and to preach truth. And without training, it's a dangerous endeavor.

00:07:50.620 Right. Now, in theory, you can get this training in churches. You can get this in different places. There is something very structured and I hate to use the word efficient, but efficient and effective about a seminary education.

00:08:06.980 And if you think about it, you mentioned the idea of the weight of the work that we do.

00:08:13.020 One of my professors, preaching professors, often said, before you get up in the pulpit and say, thus saith the Lord, you better make sure that's what he saith.

00:08:23.140 And that is the weight, because as pastors, as preachers, biblical house church planting preachers, you are speaking on behalf of the Lord.

00:08:33.480 There's something special about that preaching dynamic.

00:08:35.660 And so, you want to make sure that you've been trained as effectively as possible. Seminary is a great way of doing that. Talk to us a little bit then, Dale, about Reformation Seminary. What are some of the distinctives of it? What's the program like? And so on.

00:08:49.940 So my experience is with seminary is that there was a gap. There was either guy who read his entire Bible and is a lay leader in the church, elder, knows the Lord, has some decent theology, mature.

00:09:07.080 the next stop on the continuum of training is like an mdiv which is in reality a three to five

00:09:15.320 year program and almost a heart attack right in terms of you know memorization of greek and hebrew

00:09:22.440 but yeah yes yeah you're doing better than i did so in every other industry when you have an

00:09:28.440 education continuum you basically have for example in the medical industry you would have say emt

00:09:36.780 paramedic, nurse, nurse practitioner, doctor, surgeon, brain surgeon, neurosurgeon, right?

00:09:47.320 You have this huge continuum of training. What I realized that there was really not that

00:09:53.980 continuum in the seminary world. And the vast majority of seminary training is not absolutely

00:10:01.280 essential. I mean, for example, in the MDiv program, which I was a part of, they're training

00:10:09.800 you to really be a scholar. I mean, sure, the people, the seminarians will say, well, that's

00:10:15.200 a PhD program. That's a scholar program. But the reality is, is that when you get done

00:10:20.580 with three or four semesters of Hebrew and Greek and exegetical Hebrew and Greek and

00:10:27.900 27 other classes

00:10:32.160 over a five-year period,

00:10:34.740 writing probably over a thousand pages of work,

00:10:38.480 reading probably 10 million words,

00:10:42.860 you're entering into that scholarly level,

00:10:45.480 which if you're going to be a professor,

00:10:47.840 if you're going to write theological literature,

00:10:49.860 it's a really great training to have.

00:10:53.620 For preaching at a house church 0.95

00:10:56.320 and shepherding,

00:10:57.160 there is, I would say, less of a need for that scholarly level of training. However,

00:11:05.380 my experience has been that guys that go through seminary, our program is one year.

00:11:10.040 So instead of it being three years or five years, it's one year, but there's no breaks.

00:11:14.480 So there's no semesters off. And there is three in-person intensives. It's about half of a

00:11:22.980 master's degree program. It's a graduate level training. But these individuals are pre-qualified

00:11:31.100 as elder candidates already before they start. They've already read the entire Bible. These are

00:11:35.600 men who, when you look to 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, you see that in these men. These are already

00:11:40.620 men who are married for usually 10 plus years, have children, have done some sort of ministry

00:11:47.820 in the past. We're not starting from ground zero. And then in addition, these are men who are

00:11:55.380 likely not going to stop reading when seminary is over. So these are guys that will go on to have

00:12:02.520 further study, maybe even jump into Greek and Hebrew, maybe jump into some of those deeper

00:12:07.580 systematic theologies. But we wanted to produce a program that was accessible for the average

00:12:14.880 dad, father, husband, full-time worker. Because try going to seminary at 36 years old

00:12:23.260 with four kids, a wife, and a full-time job. It'll take you seven years. And so we wanted

00:12:31.160 to create a program that was accessible and go, hey, let's jump in for five to 12 hours a week,

00:12:36.880 depending on the week, and go full-blown for one year, train you up with a community of other men

00:12:45.160 who are on the same mission as you, with a passion for the house church, with a passion for the gospel

00:12:49.960 and evangelism, with accountability and structure. And our program really has five core elements,

00:12:57.780 which is a book to read, a lecture to watch, a paper to write, a quiz to take, and an exercise

00:13:04.100 to do now you know jason seminaries are great at making honest men into liars

00:13:09.560 yeah that's a good way of putting it yeah so it's you have these programs that you're like

00:13:16.580 a class it's like you have to read six books for this class yeah and you're like no human being

00:13:24.660 if i was a single man no can read six books in addition to my other classes that have six books

00:13:30.220 We call that a seminary read, which is, you know, major headings, first couple of sentences,

00:13:37.360 you're moving on to the next page to basically get the gist of it.

00:13:40.300 Yes. And it's, you feel like gross. You're just like, I can't do all this stuff. And I just go,

00:13:48.040 there's something wrong with that educational curriculum design there. So we designed our

00:13:53.120 program that you can actually finish everything without compromising your family. And that's

00:14:00.200 was essential. So it's basically a 12-month program, one module per month for 12 months.

00:14:07.320 And it ends with you actually planting a biblical house church. In fact, you can't graduate

00:14:13.960 unless you plant. And so we do a full graduation ceremony. We do ordination for those men who are

00:14:22.040 qualified for that. You get a full diploma, graduate studies diploma. We have intensive

00:14:27.240 times here doing block diagramming and exegetical layouts and outlines and, and preaching workshops

00:14:32.660 and, and house church culture and house church multiplication and church history and, and

00:14:38.060 hermeneutics and, and all of the things. And so it's a wonderful time and we get to get

00:14:44.660 really close. We get to become friends. We talk a lot and it's just a wonderful time

00:14:50.700 to be with the men. We actually have group four in town right now.

00:14:53.740 Yeah. You know, I think the great thing about our program and this graduate diploma in ecclesiology is that we've catered it to the house church pastor and to his needs. And so you may be thinking, if you're, you know, tuning into this and you have some interest, well, how can I actually learn what I need to know if an MDiv is three years, how much are you actually teaching me in one year?

00:15:15.200 And what we've done, Dale, and you know this, is we've basically said, what do you need to know to pastor a house church?

00:15:22.340 And so things like church administration, Sunday school and small groups, kids ministry, youth ministry, leadership development, policy and procedure manuals, all of those things that are very pertinent and relevant to a traditional church that we don't really deal with in the house church.

00:15:40.620 we we've trimmed those out and we basically brought it down to to preaching uh and so even

00:15:47.120 as the program goes along those papers they morph into sermons so you're not writing papers anymore

00:15:51.640 you're writing sermons and you're delivering those sermons and you're getting critiqued on those

00:15:55.060 and so the the beauty of it really is that we have taken a master's level education catered it

00:16:02.580 specifically with one end in mind of producing house church planters and and you've told guys

00:16:07.960 this i've told guys this in those initial interviews that if if you want to go work at a

00:16:12.600 traditional church we're not the seminary for you yes because you're not going to learn the things

00:16:17.820 that you need to know to be successful but if you want to plant a house church this is the place for

00:16:22.540 you yeah i always tell people if you're gonna only come here if you're gonna plant a house church

00:16:29.080 if you're not sure don't come here we are a missionary training school we have every

00:16:35.340 expectation for men to come here to plant a house church. And to plant a house church in our network

00:16:42.960 at Reformation Fellowship, which you can see at reformationfellowship.org. And so

00:16:46.580 that is our mission and our goal. We'd love to have you guys come to seminary. And actually,

00:16:56.000 we're even developing more of a program of people moving here. It's a remote program. We have guys

00:17:02.060 international. We have guys all over the world. We have guys in Europe. We have guys in Australia.

00:17:08.180 We have guys in Canada. We have a guy in Jamaica. And so you can enroll anywhere. However, for those

00:17:16.140 that are domestic, if you want to come and move here to Sedona, Cottonwood, Arizona,

00:17:24.380 where our headquarters is at here, where we do all of our intensives here, you can move here

00:17:28.540 and actually get a discounted tuition and basically have a residential program, be a part of our house

00:17:35.580 church, get a chance to learn house church from us, be in our church. It's almost more of a work

00:17:40.860 study. It's a work situation. Yeah. And if your job allows you to do that, where you can work

00:17:45.200 remotely, come, be a part of what we're doing here. Or if you want to come and just be here,

00:17:50.900 be here with us and plant house churches and multiply here, we always invite people. Come,

00:17:54.460 be with us. We actually have several families that have moved here already. Not one of them

00:17:58.260 being Jason. I've been trying to convince this guy to move here for a while. But so we love

00:18:06.540 the seminary and the men, and we have 20 to 25 guys in every group. And we're in group four now.

00:18:14.240 We're enrolling for group five right now. And so Lord willing, if you're interested in doing this,

00:18:20.640 just go to reformationseminary.com. Yep. And speaking of group four, we got to meet these

00:18:25.780 guys real soon here this morning. We have lots of lectures and exercises on block diagramming to get

00:18:31.700 to today. So guys, thanks so much for tuning into this episode of how we do house church. As Dale

00:18:37.020 mentioned, if you have questions about how to receive training to be a biblical house church

00:18:41.660 planter, head to reformationseminary.com. If you're not quite ready to do that yet, and you

00:18:46.500 want to get some more information on biblical house churches, check out Dale's book, How We Do

00:18:50.780 House Church. This is the Doctrines and Convictions of the Reformation Fellowship Church Planting

00:18:56.140 Network. It'll give you all of the answers to the questions that you have about what is a house

00:19:02.000 church and what are some of the specifics of it. You can pick this up on Amazon. You can also,

00:19:06.980 Dale, get this at the Relearn store. Is that right? Yeah, Relearn.org store. You can buy it

00:19:11.200 there. And a little bit more profit comes to the ministry that way. Awesome. Well, hey,

00:19:17.060 thanks again for tuning in and we will see you guys next time.

Dale Partridge - October 03, 2022

Do Men Need to Go to Seminary to Pastor a House Church？

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