This is a guest post by Joshua Lawson. He is a husband to Sarah and a father to Joshua, Hope, and Allison. Once upon a time he was a halfway decent basketball player, but his dream since becoming a father has gone from playing in the NBA to one day getting a full night’s sleep again. Joshua blogs at In Search of the City, and can also be contacted through Facebook and Twitter.
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It seems odd that throughout the Christian world the common practice of training people to be shepherds of God’s people is to remove them from the very setting where that service takes place and ship them off to a foreign land where very little of what they do for the next 2-4 years resembles life in the real world.
I speak, of course, of the seminary experience.
Granted, I don’t have any seminary experience myself of which to speak, only three years in a small Bible college. On top of that, the time I spent there was mostly beneficial to my spiritual life.
And yet.
Just because the Lord is able to make use of our generally limited apprehension of His will, and to work in and through all situations, institutions, programs, ect., this does not mean that “the way things are” necessarily reflect His ideal.
It may be easy to recognize that the New Testament contains no such insistence on a seminary education for those who would serve the Lord as we see throughout much of the evangelical world today. But who will go the distance and admit that in Century One we see nothing but the local church-which, generally speaking, encompassed the fellowship of all the saints in a particular city?
The local church.
Nothing more, nothing less. This is where believers were born, where disciples were raised up, and where ministers were trained. All the magic happened in the context of the local community of believers. And somehow this simple method worked!
Now, is there anything wrong with a formal education? Of course not. Should a person be discouraged from attending seminary? Not at all, if that is what they want to do. But at least let us stop to consider the glaring absence of any such insistence in scripture.
For instance, while his rabbinical peers were going to the Holy City to train under Pharisees and scribes, Jesus was living the life of a day-laborer, providing for his family by the sweat of his brow. Jesus, believe it or not, was a layman.
And Saul, one of those religious trainees who sat at the feet of such a teacher as Gamaliel, later repudiated his training as “rubbish” compared to the experience of knowing Christ in the Spirit.
This emphasis upon “higher education” as pre-requisite to serving God comes more from Christianity‘s Greek heritage than it does from Jesus and the apostles. We may then respectfully ask with Tertullian, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”
Personally, for all that I benefited from Bible school, there was a certain amount of “unreality” to it that failed to equip me for life in the real world even as it made me into a more polished Christian minister. Upon returning home there was much I had to unlearn in order to become a normal person able to relate to other normal people again.
All the servants of Christ in the new Testament were trained for their service in the context of the local church. Beyond that, there were those who went along on apostolic journeys to experience the life of a spiritual soldier on the front lines as part of their training as well. If you would like to restore that practice of training for ministry, be my guest. But nobody can say there is anything like our modern-day Christian seminary contained in the example of scripture.
To sum up, consider this interesting allusion from the life of Abraham. When Abram’s cousin Lot was taken captive after the battle of the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah, the story goes:
Then one who had escaped came and told Abram the Hebrew… When Abram heard that his kinsman had been taken captive, he led forth his trained men, born in his house… and went in pursuit as far as Dan. And he… defeated them… and pursued them… Then he brought back all the possessions, and also brought back his kinsman Lot with his possessions, and the women and the people (Gen. 14:13-16).
He led forth his trained men, born in his house
There were certain men of Abram’s tribe who had been born into his household, who grew up under his government, and who received training in that context to be workers and warriors together with him. This is a striking picture of God’s design for the local church-His own spiritual house in which disciples are born and raised and trained to fight against the enemy for His purpose in the earth.
This is the pattern of the first-century churches. Every community was a training ground for ministers who would bring life and deliverance to others who had been taken captive by the enemy. The local church, above all else, is the place where theology comes to life.
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