Friday, April 22, 2011

Seminaries: Get Real

Forbes blogger Jerry Bowyer offers an incendiary, hyperbolic, borderline-prophetic analysis of seminary education in the United States. Conclusion: the prevailing model is doomed.

We quote the opening paragraph from this Molotov cocktail of an essay:

Imagine an institution that requires its leaders to attend not only college, but graduate school. Imagine that the graduate school in question is constitutionally forbidden from receiving any form of government aid, that it typically requires three years of full-time schooling for the diploma, that the nature of the schooling bears almost no resemblance to the job in question, and that the pay for graduates is far lower than other professions. You have just imagined the relationship between the Christian Church and her seminaries.

SWNID and his ilk are attempting to navigate the shoals of ecclesial expectations while eschewing the brokenness of the prevailing model. 'Tain't easy, but it's doubtless necessary. And we're trying to figure out the how to improve the approach to eschewing.

2 comments:

studyguy said...

i agree the current system is broken, but no one seems to know how to fix it. TCMI's model seems to work in Eastern Europe as students are active in ministry while also in graduate school. this gives real ministry experience to the classroom in ways our models do not.

Anonymous said...

Now that I've secured unrelated gainful employment, I'll go ahead and say it: pooling of resources.

Also, consider the example of what I consider to be America's most successful seminary (inasmuch as it can be replicated), Duke. If you let Dyke off his leash, he could be a more than adequate Hauerwas stand-in.