Dale Partridge - Real Christianity #107： Should Pastors be Required to go to Seminary？

00:00:00.000 Welcome to this episode of Real Christianity. My name is Dale Partridge, where each week

00:00:13.120 I offer 15-20 minute answers to tough theological and pastoral questions. This is a 100% listener

00:00:20.600 supported audio ministry of relearn.org. And for those who don't know, our mission at relearn.org

00:00:27.500 is to educate and equip ordinary Christians to plant biblical, confessional, and missional

00:00:33.380 house churches.

00:00:34.520 For more information, just visit relearn.org forward slash house.

00:00:40.420 All right, so what's your perspective on seminary?

00:00:45.180 Lots of Christians argue that seminary is a waste of time and a distraction from the

00:00:51.120 real kingdom work that God has before them.

00:00:53.600 They say that nobody in the Bible had a degree, and nowhere in the Bible requires a degree.

00:00:59.760 So why have we built this system?

00:01:02.000 That implies that it does.

00:01:03.920 Ultimately, the question is, is seminary biblical, or is it a distraction in the church?

00:01:09.740 So we're going to be discussing all of this and more.

00:01:12.080 But before we dive into that, I just want to take just a minute to make two quick announcements.

00:01:17.740 The first is, you know that our core ministry at relearn.org is educating and equipping folks

00:01:25.120 to find and plant biblical house churches, but a healthy church is simply only healthy church

00:01:32.360 members, meaning that if you don't have healthy church members, you can't have a healthy church.

00:01:36.340 And for that reason, we developed a program for marriages at ultimatemarriage.com and a program

00:01:40.860 for quittingpornography at standinvictory.org. And I want to talk about this just for a second.

00:01:48.340 Did you guys know that six out of 10 self-identified Christian men look at pornography at least

00:01:52.940 two times per month? Did you know that four out of 10 self-identified Christian women

00:01:57.700 look at pornography at least once per month? Pornography, you know, use is really attached

00:02:04.500 to all types of church-related trouble.

00:02:08.980 And if you're looking at pornography

00:02:09.980 and you're ready to be set free,

00:02:12.380 I want you to check out a powerful gospel-centered course

00:02:15.600 that I put together at our companion ministry,

00:02:18.140 standinvictory.org.

00:02:20.180 It's short, it's cheap,

00:02:21.860 and it's changed literally hundreds of lives,

00:02:24.160 not through my words,

00:02:25.760 but through the words of the gospel,

00:02:27.460 the words of the Bible,

00:02:28.340 and the words of truth.

00:02:29.740 Again, go ahead and you can enroll over there today

00:02:32.480 at standinvictory.org. The second thing is, do you follow our ministry on social media?

00:02:41.020 We post powerful, useful content for Christians really living in confusing times, especially now.

00:02:48.800 And we are active there each week on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Just search for

00:02:55.340 relearn.org on any of those platforms and you'll find our community. And we have a great community

00:03:01.560 of biblical Christians. And so it's just a good place on the internet to find great content for

00:03:06.720 us to connect with each other. So again, please join us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and

00:03:11.500 YouTube. So today's question is from Christina in Asheville, North Carolina. She asks,

00:03:19.520 Hey, Pastor Dale, I've been attending my church for several years, but recently noticed my pastor

00:03:24.880 delivers very shallow sermons that tend to be more like motivational messages rather than a

00:03:32.580 breaking down of the biblical text. I began to realize that the pastors I admired online

00:03:39.280 tend to have seminary degrees or some sort of rigorous theological training. Unfortunately,

00:03:46.980 my pastor did not go to seminary. Dale, do you believe that men should be required to go to 0.96

00:03:53.380 seminary before pastoring a church? All right, Christina, this is actually a really great

00:03:57.760 question. I think that I can answer it objectively, and here's why. About eight years ago, I created

00:04:05.140 a video titled Four Brilliant Reasons to Not Go to College. It's been since removed from the

00:04:10.380 internet, but it had probably 100,000 views on it. But I was the most anti-higher education guy

00:04:16.640 out there. And some of my reasons in that video are still valid. College for many people is a bad

00:04:23.960 idea. You know, I never went to college and I don't have an undergrad degree, but we're not

00:04:30.300 talking about college. We're talking about seminary. And so let me first, just before we

00:04:35.420 begin, let me explain the difference between college and seminary. Lots of Christians have

00:04:40.480 gone to what's called Bible college, or maybe they majored or minored in theology at a Christian

00:04:46.180 University. However, this can't be confused with seminary. Seminary is different. Seminary is a

00:04:53.640 theological school specifically designed to produce doctrinally sound church leaders. And

00:05:00.120 think about pastors, missionaries, church planters, and maybe biblical counselors. A seminary is also

00:05:07.740 it's usually, it's not undergraduate, it's graduate and postgraduate work. And historically,

00:05:14.600 they were for men who were going to be in full-time ministry. Now, most of you know that I

00:05:21.640 personally have gone to seminary. I finished my two-year graduate studies program at Western

00:05:26.860 Theological Seminary in Oregon. And since I didn't have an undergrad degree, I was accepted

00:05:31.720 under what's called an academic exception by way of ministry experience. And I had to pass a class

00:05:37.360 or an exam called the GRE. It's the graduate record exam. But nevertheless, I did attend

00:05:42.860 seminary. In fact, I was actually recently accepted at the Master's Seminary in Los Angeles under the

00:05:49.780 teaching of men like John MacArthur and Dr. Stephen Lawson to finish my Master of Divinity degree,

00:05:57.080 which, by the way, is not a master's degree in the common sense. It's about double the length

00:06:04.360 of a master's degree, and it's a four-year graduate study program. Luckily, I'll be able

00:06:10.780 to transfer some credit and cut a few years off of that from my previous seminary experience.

00:06:15.860 But all that to say, I'm absolutely pro-seminary. But Christina, your question, I want to

00:06:22.020 specifically answer because it's important. I think I have a strong biblical case for what

00:06:29.580 I'm about to say. And you asked, do you believe men should be required to go to seminary before

00:06:35.800 pastoring a church. So I'm going to answer that with another question. Do we like that doctors

00:06:41.380 go to school before they work on our bodies? Do we like that lawyers go to school before

00:06:48.220 representing us in legal matters? Do we believe the souls and hearts of human beings are more

00:06:56.440 valuable than our bodies or the laws of our land? Well, I hope so. Pastors are soul doctors.

00:07:05.800 we deal with the most delicate part of the human body or human condition.

00:07:12.060 Also, let me ask another question.

00:07:15.100 Can a lack of theological and pastoral training put you at a higher risk of hurting or harming the hearts of others?

00:07:23.460 Absolutely, right?

00:07:24.620 This is probably my number one reason for why I am so pro-education when it comes to pastoral ministry.

00:07:32.480 Every young pastor, including myself, can look back to a time where his undeveloped theology

00:07:38.700 and ignorance to pastoral wisdom has harmed somebody.

00:07:43.200 Now, notice that I said harmed and not hurt.

00:07:45.940 Okay, good theology can hurt people.

00:07:48.580 The Bible says that some of these true things are going to be difficult for us to understand.

00:07:54.460 They're hard.

00:07:55.460 They hurt our flesh.

00:07:57.020 But just because they hurt us, the scriptures will never harm us.

00:08:01.640 Bad theology can hurt and harm us, and that's why pastors have to be willing to become

00:08:07.960 exhaustive students of scripture.

00:08:10.500 Just like doctors, our motto should really be, do no harm.

00:08:15.060 And I believe strong, rigorous theological and pastoral training, like what's offered

00:08:21.200 at a seminary, is a great place to get that.

00:08:25.160 Now, do I believe seminary should be required?

00:08:29.480 No, absolutely not.

00:08:30.960 Charles Spurgeon never had a seminary degree.

00:08:34.840 A.W. Tozer never had a seminary degree.

00:08:38.280 But I do believe rigorous academic and theological education and training is required prior to

00:08:45.900 going into ministry.

00:08:47.120 And I believe I can offer you a biblical case for that in just a moment.

00:08:53.260 But I need to, before that, I need to make a rant, okay?

00:08:57.420 So will you guys just bear with me for a second?

00:08:59.500 Because I really need to rant on something.

00:09:02.180 In Matthew 22, 37, Jesus said that the first and greatest commandment is you shall love

00:09:08.920 the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.

00:09:13.460 Okay, the modern church does the heart and the soul thing pretty well.

00:09:19.000 But sadly, we do the mind thing quite poorly.

00:09:22.440 For about 100 years, the Western church has like this pendulum swung experience from the

00:09:28.960 scholastical and enlightenment eras of the church to today's simpleton era.

00:09:34.260 And we wanted the gospel to be simple, accessible, approachable.

00:09:38.740 So we shortened it up.

00:09:40.380 We watered it down.

00:09:41.500 We diluted it and discounted it.

00:09:43.560 We stripped intellectual reasoning from it.

00:09:46.040 We peddled it to people's emotions.

00:09:47.600 We took off our suits and ties and traded it for a t-shirt pastor in a rock band where

00:09:53.400 the pastor has a heart for people and for God, but he's never been theologically trained.

00:09:57.900 And people, this is a big deal. 0.96

00:10:00.600 When Christians have sloppy theology, you get sloppy churches. 1.00

00:10:05.700 In fact, I've seen this before too. 0.98

00:10:08.140 You begin to birth church cultures who are anti-intellectual and anti-theological.

00:10:14.520 and they say things like theology and doctrine are divisive, to which I know men like John

00:10:20.920 MacArthur would respond, yeah, theology and doctrine are divisive. They divide truth from

00:10:28.660 error. Basically, what I'm saying is that we have way too many churches and pastors who

00:10:35.040 are detached from historic evangelical theology, and it's evident now more than ever. The Western

00:10:42.880 church is sleepy, fat, and lazy, and the average Christian couldn't complete the kindergarten 0.99

00:10:48.860 catechism for children in the 1700s. As a result, we have pastors and Christians who grab their 1.00

00:10:57.000 Bibles and interpret a passage in isolation from the rest of the scriptures, build an entire

00:11:02.000 doctrinal position from it, a position that they are unaware has historically actually been called

00:11:06.760 a heresy, but in their ignorance, they build an entire church community around it, and this is

00:11:11.140 exactly what's happened in the health and wealth prosperity gospel movement here in America.

00:11:15.220 It's a bunch of untrained pastors preaching an unbiblical theology that's man-centered and

00:11:20.440 pleasure-focused, and then they yell at the seminaries and say, you don't need a degree

00:11:24.020 to preach. Okay, so we have a problem here. There's something wrong here, and we need to

00:11:32.300 go back to not just a heart and soul and emotional relationship with God, but a mental

00:11:39.760 relationship with God and with his word. Now, I'm going to say this next statement with conviction.

00:11:46.740 In the Bible, false teaching is viewed as the most reckless and damaging of sins in the church.

00:11:53.940 Okay, Paul spent most of his time fighting off the false teachings of people who didn't have

00:12:01.380 a proper understanding of the scriptures. And the Bible strongly warns against this. Jesus in

00:12:07.860 Matthew 18.6 says, but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble, 0.72

00:12:12.360 it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned

00:12:17.460 in the depth of the sea. Now you can take this a few different ways here, but the idea is that 0.65

00:12:22.300 false teaching is absolutely a way to cause somebody to stumble, especially little ones

00:12:28.220 could be referred to as people who are young in the faith. So this is absolutely applicable 0.97

00:12:33.920 and principle to false teaching. Acts 20, 28, Luke records what Paul is saying to the elders

00:12:41.540 in Ephesus. He says, be careful, pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock of

00:12:47.060 God in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers to care for the church of God,

00:12:52.060 which he obtained with his own blood. It puts this sense of weight and magnitude on top of these

00:12:58.220 pastoral figures of that day to be careful. Watch out for the flock. Watch out for the wolves in

00:13:05.200 sheep's clothing who are going to bring you false ideas because this church is the very church that

00:13:10.600 Jesus died for. 2 Peter 2, 1-2, Peter warns the church. He says, but false prophets also

00:13:16.780 arose among the people, meaning the people of the Old Testament, just as there will be false

00:13:21.860 teachers among you, people of the New Testament, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, 0.75

00:13:27.320 even denying the master who brought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction, 0.90

00:13:32.240 and many will follow their sensuality. And because of them, the way of truth will be blasphemed.

00:13:38.160 This is big deal stuff. Colossians 2.8, it says,

00:13:41.500 See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human

00:13:46.360 tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.

00:13:51.400 2 Timothy 4, 3-4 says,

00:13:53.380 For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but have itching ears.

00:13:59.420 They will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions and desires and will turn

00:14:04.140 away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. Okay, so these are just some of the

00:14:11.660 Bible's warnings against false teaching. But I want you to just pay attention to this. And I'm

00:14:19.000 actually going to give you another really practical example of why training is so critical

00:14:26.240 and why we need to be willing to be trained, why we need to guard ourselves against false

00:14:32.080 doctrine and guard ourselves against heresy in the church. And I'm going to use an example that

00:14:37.760 I think is probably the best and most compelling biblical example for why pastors should be trained

00:14:44.340 before entering into ministry. And I want to look at Jesus, just real quick, Jesus and the 12

00:14:49.680 apostles. Okay. When did Jesus send them off? Right? Well, it wasn't in year one. Okay. He

00:15:00.180 sent them off at the great commission to enter into ministry. It was three years, even maybe a

00:15:06.980 little bit more, three years. That means that Jesus spent over a thousand days. This isn't like

00:15:13.300 an hour here, but he was with them all day long, a thousand days training these men before they

00:15:22.660 started preaching and shepherding. If that doesn't convince you that Jesus is pro-education and pro-

00:15:28.040 theological training prior to pastoral ministry, then I'm not sure what will. But our job, just to

00:15:35.080 kind of close up this episode, and I wish we could talk about these things forever, but there's lots

00:15:39.000 more to discuss, but we want to keep these episodes short. Our job as pastors is really

00:15:45.720 wrapped up nicely in 2 Timothy 2.15. It's a verse that I have memorized. It's a verse that I really

00:15:52.100 encourage other people who are called into ministry to memorize. It says, do your best

00:16:01.280 to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed,

00:16:08.800 rightly handling the word of truth. Some translation will say rightly dividing the

00:16:14.060 word of truth. Meaning, can you properly interpret the text? Can you exposit the text?

00:16:21.860 Are you stuck doing eisegesis where you're putting yourself into the Bible instead of doing

00:16:27.700 exegesis and pulling out the original intended meaning of the text and bringing out application

00:16:33.260 for the audience of today. There's a big difference there. And this is, again, in the

00:16:38.560 practice of hermeneutics, another thing that you learn in seminary of how to properly interpret

00:16:43.520 the text of scripture. But again, that's 2 Timothy 2.15, do your best to present yourself

00:16:48.280 approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.

00:16:55.020 So seminary, in my opinion, is a great place to accomplish that skill, to grab that experience, to prepare yourself before you're actually handling hearts and shepherding souls in a congregational context or in a missionary field.

00:17:12.140 It's such a great opportunity to take if you can take it before you enter into ministry.

00:17:17.320 So hopefully that answers your question, Christina.

00:17:20.340 I'm going to leave you guys with two resources that you can find on the post page for this

00:17:26.080 episode, the show notes, basically.

00:17:27.900 And you can find that at relearn.org.

00:17:29.540 If you just go and type in episode 107, the title of this episode, actually my even better

00:17:36.720 way to search for it is, Should Pastors Be Required to Go to Seminary?

00:17:41.140 The first resource I'm going to offer is I'm going to leave you guys a list of five trusted

00:17:47.240 and proven seminaries. For those of you who feel the call into ministry and want to get trained

00:17:53.740 before you do that, I was in ministry for a few years before I went to seminary.

00:17:58.560 So that could be you as well. I'm really glad that I have gone to seminary and I'm going to

00:18:03.980 enjoy the next several years of seminary as well. The second is an interview with Doug Wilson

00:18:11.320 titled Call to the Ministry, and this is a short video that'll help potential pastors

00:18:18.120 discern if they're actually called by God or not to go into the ministries.

00:18:26.840 All the scriptures for the show are also listed on the show notes of this episode, so if you

00:18:31.400 wanted to go back and reference some of those scriptures that I used today, you can do that.

00:18:35.520 They're beautifully laid out at relearn.org on the show notes for this episode.

00:18:40.680 If you're a regular listener to the show, we would just love it if you would leave us

00:18:44.180 a review.

00:18:44.740 You can just tap the stars in the podcast app.

00:18:47.440 You don't even need to write anything.

00:18:48.800 But if you do write something, I will absolutely read it.

00:18:52.360 We are encouraged and appreciative of those of you who have left something kind to say

00:18:57.640 or even a critique.

00:18:59.100 We read those as well.

00:19:00.600 My name is Dale Partridge, and we will see you guys next week.

00:19:05.460 Thank you for listening to this episode of Real Christianity.

00:19:08.340 If you're a regular listener to this show, would you prayerfully consider making a donation to

00:19:12.620 support our ministry efforts? Simply visit relearn.org forward slash donate. Again,

00:19:18.140 that's relearn.org forward slash donate. And for those looking to explore the idea of joining or

00:19:23.440 planting a church in your home, you can download our free PDF ebook titled The Basics of Biblical

00:19:28.500 House Church by visiting relearn.org forward slash house. Lastly, do you have a theological

00:19:34.100 question you would like answered on the show, submit your question at relearn.org forward slash

00:19:39.300 question. Thanks for joining us on this episode of Real Christianity. We'll see you next Wednesday.

Dale Partridge - August 19, 2020

Real Christianity #107： Should Pastors be Required to go to Seminary？

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript