Successful Seminarians

Some­where I heard that most of today’s best-known pas­tors did­n’t go to sem­i­nary. As I recall, this obser­va­tion was brought up in the con­text of crit­i­ciz­ing the very con­cept of grad­u­ate-lev­el min­is­te­r­i­al train­ing. The impli­ca­tion was that the time spent learn­ing about the Bible would have been bet­ter spent learn­ing about mar­ket­ing (or the inter­net or psy­chol­o­gy or some­thing prac­ti­cal).

This crit­i­cism did­n’t have a lot of weight for me — I just knew sem­i­nary had been good for me and I con­tin­ued to rec­om­mend it to any min­is­ter who loved learn­ing.

But I real­ized this morn­ing that the alle­ga­tion was untrue. Not only have lots of the big-name pas­tors gone to sem­i­nary, I would say that the major­i­ty of those that we first think of are sem­i­nar­i­ans.

• Andy Stan­ley — Dal­las The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary
• Craig Groeschel — Phillips The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary
• Rob Bell — Fuller The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary
• John Ort­berg — Fuller The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary
• John Piper — Fuller and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Munich (Ph.D.)
• Tim Keller — Gor­don Con­well and West­min­ster The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary (Ph.D.)
• Rick War­ren — Fuller The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary

There are sev­er­al who haven’t. Bill Hybels has­n’t gone to sem­i­nary, for exam­ple. I don’t think Ed Young, Jr. has, either. Joel Osteen has­n’t. Mark Driscoll is, I believe, fin­ish­ing up a sem­i­nary degree right now.

But from what I can tell the major­i­ty of nation­al­ly-known Chris­t­ian pas­tors have gone to sem­i­nary.

I’m not say­ing that going to sem­i­nary will guar­an­tee you a numer­i­cal­ly fruit­ful min­istry — but I can guar­an­tee you that it won’t pre­vent you from build­ing a numer­i­cal­ly fruit­ful min­istry, either. And you’ll be a bet­ter per­son for hav­ing gone.

In an age when sem­i­nary gets a lot of knocks, I thought that was worth shar­ing.