I first began taking seriously the Lord’s call to pastoral ministry during the summer of 2003. I still had two years of undergraduate study to complete, but this time would allow me to consider how I was to pursue the vocation to which I was being led. Looking back, I find it striking that I took for granted then what is increasingly questioned now in North America: I knew for sure that the next step was to enter residence at a theological college or seminary.
Now, there obviously were questions I had to address. For starters, what kind of seminary should I attend? I faced a choice between domestic (that is, American) and overseas (mostly British) theological institutions, the former more oriented toward breadth of study, the latter toward a greater depth of specialization. Next, I had to decide whether to attend a divinity school attached to a research university (like Yale or Duke) or instead a seminary devoted more toward formation of pastors and preachers than producing published research (like Dallas or Southern). Finally, would I prioritize a church denomination or theological tradition (like Covenant for the Presbyterians and Concordia for the Lutherans) or an interdenominational seminary that hoped to bridge those divides (like Fuller or Regent)? It took me many months to sift through these alternatives, seek expert, godly counsel, and then apply to the programs that seemed best to fit the decisions I made. And for the record: I have no regrets about my choice of seminary for my Masters degree (Westminster Seminary California class of 2009, in case you were curious!).
Still, while sorting through all these questions, I never once questioned the basic premise behind them: that I would have to relocate my life to a brick-and-mortar theological college and earn a graduate degree in divinity or theology to prepare for a lifetime of ministry.
Today in North America, that basic premise has largely gone out the window.
Seminary today: hard questions and real challenges
The people I speak to regarding our upcoming ministry teaching students from around the world routinely question the need for pastors to attend seminary – and even the idea of seminary itself. In fact, I am meeting more people in pastoral leadership who have not studied at a seminary, and many of those who have undertaken theological studies have done so part time, and often online.
Recent statistical trends (check out Ryan Burge and Ed Stetzer here and here on the 2026 data reported by the Association of Theological Schools) regarding those who do end up attending seminary bear my experience out: among graduate theological schools in North America, it is small, residential seminaries associated with a denominational identity or tradition that are more likely to be in decline, while large, interdenominational seminaries that permit coursework to be carried out entirely online are fully ascendent today.
What’s more, now that higher education is staring down the rise of a (so-called) Artificial Intelligence that can find, analyze and synthesize biblical and theological information at the push of a few buttons, the utility of a seminary degree and the necessity of the personal sacrifice required to pursue it can seem outdated, even illogical. Why not simply serve in one’s local church and turn to a nearby mentor – or the internet – for guidance?
This new environment can force professors and seminary staff onto their back foot, as it were, trying to justify their institutions to students and donors in North America. But for missionaries trying to make the case for offering a robust, in-person theological education to church leaders from all around the world, promoting this kind of a traditional seminary model can be a hard sell for donors and other new ministry partners. Why form leaders for the church in ways that demand so much time, money and human resources?
In what follows, I want to take some time and look at where seminaries came from, what they have to offer those who study in residence, and why they remain crucial for training leaders in the global church. Some of this might seem long (skip the next section if you want to avoid all the history!), but I think it’s really important to understand how seminaries were designed to be “seedbeds” for new ministers, and so also how new leaders lose out when they don’t have affordable access to this kind of formation.
Seminary in years past: the “seedbed” for new ministers
In his 2015 History of Theological Education, the venerable church historian Justo González observes that in early Christianity, theological education was not a specialty reserved for pastors and priests. Rather, the church saw its vocation in the world, at least in part, as theological and educational: as people came to faith in Christ, they were taught to study the scriptures, to speak of God and for God, to grow in Christian maturity as part of a larger community of disciples (apprentices) who were being trained by Jesus their Master. Yes, pastors were expected to have this formation – but so were all the faithful who had been baptized into Christ! For centuries, training in scripture, theology, and the church’s history was an activity of the whole church for the whole church.
However, as the Western Roman empire began crumbling in the fourth and fifth centuries, a period of societal chaos soon reigned in many parts of Europe. In this period, those who came together to obey Christ’s commandments while living in community assumed many of the roles that had been the responsibility of the whole church, including those of Christian thought and education. Monasteries and mendicants carried on the task of searching the scriptures and speaking well of God, and in time their books and universities spread out all over Europe. But these schools had little to do with the training of the average clergyman, who might have had a smattering of Latin and nothing more.
The Reformation in the sixteenth century seized on these universities to raise up generations of new preachers who were trained in God’s word. Combining a humanities curriculum offering training in the liberal arts and sciences with a theological curriculum dedicated to scripture, schools like Wittenberg in Germany or Cambridge in England produced not only well-rounded scholars but also faithful pastors who fanned out over Protestant Europe. And new, similar institutions were popping up around Switzerland, the Palatinate, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia – all with the same vision of integrating the academic study of scripture and theology with the practical care of souls.
As a reaction to the Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican insistence on formation in community, the Roman Catholics began what they referred to as “seedbeds” (seminaria): schools where a practical training in ministry would be combined with an education in philosophy, theology, and history. These Roman Catholic “seminaries” offered what Protestant colleges in Europe, and then evangelical seminaries in North America had on offer as well: a community of teachers and learners who would study scripture, doctrine, languages, and history, all the while living and worshiping together to prepare for ministry in the church.
Not all clergy attended their denomination’s seminary, of course, especially in the United States where pioneering families were often days away from a church, let alone from Harvard or Princeton. Nevertheless, as in many parts of the developing world today, a seminary education served to prepare senior church leaders while establishing a pattern to which other clergy were often expected to approximate, even if they hadn’t had the benefit of attending.
There were certainly weaknesses to this model for forming new ministers, chief among them the seminary “bubble” that isolated students from local churches and places to engage in ministry. And space does not permit me to discuss how the rise of the German research university contributed to this divide between the specialized theological “sciences” divorced from piety and the practice of Christian ministry among the people. However, despite these concerns, many churches shared vision for ministry formation that set out a holistic ideal for preparing the church’s leaders. This ideal prioritized 1) corporate worship, 2) community fellowship, 3) in-person mentorship, 4) leisure to study, and 5) mastery of God’s word and the shared inheritance of the Christian church.
So, why make attending a seminary a priority today?
This ideal of the “seedbed” remains my preferred way to prepare leaders for the church all around the world. Like González, I hesitate to draw a line between our catechesis and our colleges, between Sunday School and seminary studies: the whole church is called to explore the things of God and make him better known!
But we live in a time when the average Christian has not been formed well at home or in the pew, and certainly not well enough to take the reins of a church and lead Christ’s flock as a shepherd in his name.
Most people who are called to ministry need extra study, extra exposure to the Word of God, extra time spent in worship with others who are preparing. This means having access not only to professors to guide these studies, and not only to libraries whose contents can challenge and awaken us to new ideas, but also to the freedom that comes from having other obligations and responsibilities taken off of our vocational plates. Perhaps not everyone in the church is called to spend the time and money to receive this kind of maximalized education, but some are – and above all, those who are called to lead.
Along those same lines, so few of us who have come up in the church have experienced living together with other Christians in this kind of intentional community. All seminaries – even the Protestant ones! – used to be set up as a kind of monastic fellowship, devoted both to a common mission and to one’s fellow missioners. And the “life together” that happens as we prepare to serve Christ’s church is (as Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds us) supremely difficult, painful, bewildering, and yet –above all – profoundly sanctifying. While a fantastic local church should offer us the opportunity to go deeply into this kind of Christian fellowship and intentional community, the vast majority simply don’t. For most of us, our first experience of being a part of a daily fellowship of worshipers, students, and (above all) servants of Jesus Christ takes place when we arrive at seminary.
I know that this conventional seminary model of preparing leaders for the church has shortcomings: not only are they expensive to run without the old monastic vows of poverty, but the strain of study can deprive students of the leisure and space required to absorb the ideas and skills being fostered, not to mention the time to “touch grass” (as the kids are calling it) with people who aren’t theological weirdos. No, really, I do get it: there’s a reason for the old joke about seminaries being “cemeteries” rather than “seedbeds” of ministers!
But the models of ministry formation that are increasingly replacing the old residential seminary model of academic rigor and community life cannot – at least in the aggregate – measure up to the older ideals of relational mentorship and skillful mastery. The new models for pastoral training may be necessary, at least for economic reasons: after all, these days very few seminary professors are taking monastic vows of poverty, and fewer and fewer churches are feeling called to send away their best young people to receive their education far from home with little chance of their returning. Better, perhaps, to train them in-house for free, or to send them online for asynchronous coursework or AI-assisted queries than to pay for at least three years of study living at a college somewhere else around the world.
However, I am convinced that the Lord honors what we give away with no expectation of a return on the congregation’s investment. Planting a young person in a “seedbed” far away is to store up treasures in heaven rather than build the kingdom on earth, to cast one’s bread upon the water in hope that it will somehow return. I myself have witnessed the Lord bless the (Baptist) church that first encouraged me to go to seminary, and I have seen the Lord prosper those in the (Anglican) church who helped sustain me while I was studying at a (Presbyterian) seminary. Which is to say, to commission a seminarian to study is a collective effort, not unlike sending a missionary to unknown lands. In both cases, we should be confident that obedience to Christ’s command and trust in his promises will yield a plentiful harvest of righteousness that will redound to those who scattered those seeds.
Seminary life and the call to global mission today
I see these two streams coming together in my own life, as I look forward as a missionary to teaching at Tyndale Theological Seminary, a theological college that is equipping new missionaries to serve Christ around the world by giving them full access to an affordable postgraduate education.
Most of my missionary work until this point has been in contexts that lacked affordable access to this “seedbed” model of ministry formation. While God was certainly at work in these communities and churches – and in incredible ways! – my wife and I also witnessed the effects of this lack. Whether in South America, Central America, or the Caribbean, it was hard for cash-strapped families and churches to place a candidate for ministry in a seminary far away from home.
For some – Anglicans, traditional Protestants, and Roman Catholics, among others – this difficulty meant that fewer people were sent to train for ministry, and so smaller and more rural churches (like ours) rarely enjoyed clergy residing in the parish and depended instead on lay ministers to teach the Word and care for the flock. For others – most notably Pentecostals and non-denominational churches – this meant that many ordained pastors never received the fuller formation that seminaries were set up to provide. In this latter case, beyond the risk of unintended error in doctrine, we found that under-equipped leaders were at greater risk of emotional burnout and vocational shipwreck.
As missionaries, we came away from these experiences with the conviction that while a seminary education is not the only path to effective ministry, and while there can be disadvantages to depending on these schools for formation, they are ordinarily still the best way to equip Christians to serve Jesus Christ by leading his church.
And this is one of the reasons we are so excited about serving at Tyndale! I love telling people how this old-school curriculum in biblical studies, systematic theology, and church history flows into the practical ministry of our students in Africa, Asia, and Europe, and how their sacrifices are enabling faithful pastoral ministry throughout the church.
I intend in a future Muddling to go into more detail about the coursework that a seminary like this requires. But in the meantime, if you have doubts about the relevance of this ministry of the church – of preparing its leaders by guiding them in community through scripture and the church’s tradition – I encourage you to pray about it, and reach out to me if you’re interested in speaking more.