Does God Really Care how You Worship? | Ligon Duncan

We are back with another episode of Room for Nuance. I'm Sean DeMars.

And I'm Lick Duncan.

And didn't we just do this?

We did just do this. We were at the Cross Conference in January.

Yes, and the reason why we're doing it again is because we thought we only had you for a very limited window. And then I foolishly failed to pick up on the social cues that said that we actually had much more time.

So we let you go. And then I beat myself up for the next two days. Like I can't believe I let Lick go when I didn't have to. And then I very kindly asked you, would you be willing to do round two? And you said, yes.

So thank you, brother.

I'm glad to be here.

Would you mind praying and opening us up?

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for the opportunity to talk again. Thank you for the conversation that we had last time. And we pray that our conversation would be equally edifying and glorifying to you this time.

We ask this in Jesus' name, amen.

Amen. So I think the first question is probably the most important question. Did we really go to the moon?

I think we did.

Good.

Okay, we're off to a good start. No, last time Luke was very kind. He was very gracious. He did not get onto me about the fact that we did not talk at all about the regulative principle stuff. And that was the only thing he was like, please talk to Lick about the regulative principle stuff.

Your book on the regulative principle, the name of which is?

Yeah.

The short book, the excerpt for the big book.

The big book is called?

Give Praise to God.

That's right.

And it was edited by Phil Reichen and Derek Thomas and yours truly. And it was a festschrift, a posthumous festschrift in honor of James Montgomery Boyce. It's still available today and it's a great book.

There are lots of things in that book that I don't cover in the short book. The short book is essentially an edited version of my first two chapters, which just make a case for the regulative principle of worship.

And that changed Luke's life.

Yeah.

Luke used to be a music guy at a big 3000 member church where every Sunday it was a show and lights and fog and all that stuff. Read that book, send him on a trajectory and completely changed his life.

The regulative principle has changed my life. But I remember the regulative principle was one of those terms. It was kind of like Calvinism. The first time I heard that word, somebody said, are you a Calvinist?

And I was like, shoot, I don't know. Like, am I and should I be? Is that bad? Is it good? And then I only ever heard that term used as a pejorative. And then when I heard the regulative principle, I only ever heard it used as a pejorative.

So can you do us a favor? Tell us what are some mischaracterizations of the regulative principle and then give us a good biblical definition for the regulative principle.

A lot of people will identify the regulative principle with proscribing or disallowing things that they like. So for instance, during the time of the worship wars, when the main debate was traditional worship versus contemporary worship, very often people that wanted the church to utilize more contemporary forms would identify the regulative principle with a repressive instinct that's culturally bound, that keeps people from being able to be creative in the way that God made them to be.

And so it was sort of pitched as a traditionalist thing over against this more biblical, liberated, free sort of Christian expression of public worship. When you get to define the other side, that way you can easily define yourself into victory.

And let me quickly say the regulative principle is probably a relatively new term. It's probably a 19th century or so term that came around to express something that had been around since the Protestant reformers in the 16th century.

And in the 16th century, the Protestant reformers were especially thinking about the Roman Catholic Church and its practice of worship. So way back in the 1530s when Calvin wrote his little pamphlet on the necessity of reforming the church, he identified the number one reason why we need a reformation is because of the idolatrous worship of the Roman Catholic Church.

The way that the Roman Catholic Church was doing worship, Calvin argued, actually forces all its members to engage in idolatry because the worship is not in accordance with God's word. And so Calvin was very concerned that we worship publicly in a way that is in accord with Scripture.

And the regulative principle came to mean this, and you asked for a definition, here it is. It is that our public worship must be warranted by Scripture.

Guessing that word warranted is very particular.

It is very particular. In other words, you don't have to have an express command for every discreet thing that you do in worship. But there has to be a biblical justification for it. And biblical justifications come in more than just direct commands.

By way of implication.

Correct, so good and necessary consequence. And so for many things, we do have direct commands. We're directly commanded by Paul, for instance, in 1 Timothy, to read and to preach the Scripture in public worship.

But what about taking an offering? We can go through various things that are legitimate to do in public worship where there is not an express command, but there is warrant in Scripture for us to do it.

So in Corinthians, the Corinthians laid aside on the first day of the week in order to give to the needy Christians in Jerusalem. And so there's some things that you can learn by way of emulating what the early Christians did where there is not a direct command.

And so that's why the regular principle is best defined not as worshiping only as the Bible directly commands, but worshiping according to the warrant of Scripture. That's what we're after.

Let me get out ahead of a potential objection from someone listening to the way you've articulated the history of the development of the doctrine of the regular principle. That's a mouthful. When you say it's sort of rooted in the Reformation, someone might hear that and go, well, you know, Reformation here, there, whatever.

Like, I wanna know, is it biblical? What would you say to that?

I would say absolutely. The regular principle is trying to get us back to the way that worship was done in the Bible. And if you look at public worship in the Old and the New Testament, it all has the same basic components.

Whether there is a temple or whether there is a synagogue or whether the early church is just meeting in a home or in the open air somewhere, biblical worship always has these components. And you can go all the way back to Exodus 24 to see this, the very first public worship service in the Bible where the Bible is read is in Exodus chapter 24.

God gives Moses what is called the Book of the Covenant in Exodus 21 to 23. Moses writes it down. And then in Exodus 24, Moses reads that special revelation from God that has been written down. That's what scripture is, written special revelation.

He reads it to everybody out loud. And that's the beginning of the public reading of scripture in the worship of God's people in the Bible. From then on, whenever God's people meet, the Bible is read.

And you find this in Ezra and Nehemiah. You find the Bible read and then expounded. And of course, when you get to the Psalms, you hear the scripture, good truth about God, sung to God in praise in public worship.

Then you have prayer. In fact, the earliest description of public worship in the Book of Genesis is in terms of prayer. Then men began to call out upon the name of the Lord. What's the name of the form of Anglican worship that is done on Sundays where the Lord's Supper is not administered?

It's called morning prayer. Well, the Anglicans get that language from scripture because public prayer is such of the essence of public worship that sometimes you can actually refer to the whole act of public worship as prayer.

So there you have the reading of the Bible, the preaching of the Bible, the singing of biblical truth. You have prayer. What about the final element, the sacraments or the ordinances in the Baptist tradition?

We'll take it, thanks, brother.

By the way, both of those are good terms. You'll find both of those terms in the Westminster Confession of Faith, which was written mostly by Presbyterians and Anglicans and Independents. Ordinances and sacraments are both good terms, as long as you define them well.

We don't wanna have the dripping down of grace view of sacrament, right?

I won't go there right now.

Okay, all right, okay, okay.

In the Old Covenant, you had Passover and you had circumcision, both of which were signs of the promises of God to his people. In the New Covenant, you have baptism and the Lord's Supper. And when God's people gather, at least occasionally, those signs of God's promises are administered.

And that's a part of public worship. Augustine called them visible words. So sacraments actually illustrate a verbal promise of God to his people. And so all five of those elements, you will find trans-canonically.

Let's just do them, sing the word, pray the word, preach the word, read the word, and see the word.

There you go.

Now, talking about the regulative principle and the ordinances real quick, do you believe in just yes or no, not a preacher's answer, a short answer, images in worship, yes or no?

No.

Okay, except for, I think you would say

Baptism and the Lord's Supper.

Exactly, exactly, except for the images.

That the Lord himself has prescribed.

Divinely inspired drama in worship, baptism and the Lord's Supper.

The image that he gives us is the only acceptable image. We see one another when we sing, all of that stuff, okay. Okay, so going back to this idea of the word being fairly new, 19th century, so 1800s, right?

The word inerrancy is similarly, it's newer, and people have tried to weaponize that fact. The word inerrancy, B .B. Warfield, the Princeton theologians, they invented that. But we know that scripture itself speaks to its own inerrancy.

Would you also say that not only can we see a pattern throughout scripture of the regulative principle, but that scripture itself commands the regulative principle?

Yes, I do, and that's the case that I try to make in that little book, Does God Care How We Worship? And my premise is this, there are a lot of Bible-believing evangelicals out there who know that we need to worship God from the heart.

That is, we don't need to fake worship God. We really need to worship God from the depth of our being, and therefore, worship needs to be sincere. It doesn't need to be faked. It doesn't need to be pretended.

It needs to be something that's expressive of a reality that dominates the whole of our inner life expressed in our outward public worship. So they believe that worship needs to come from the heart, but they don't believe that God has said much about what we're to do outwardly when we're together.

But the Bible is very concerned with how we worship because it ties together two issues. Greg Beal wrote a book a number of years ago on idolatry in scripture, and it's called We Become What We Worship.

So good.

And it is a very important book. Ray Ortland has written on a very similar theme in his book. It's a tough title, whoredom, where it's the picture of God's people going after idols, which is spiritual adultery, and it's a similar kind of theme.

But the point is this. What you worship, you become like what you worship, and this is an argument that goes all the way back to the prophets, and the prophets would say, you worship stone and sticks, and you'll become like that.

Can't speak, can't see, can't move. You'll become captive to your idols. But the Bible also makes it clear that you become like how you worship because how you worship will determine who you worship. In other words, if worship is not a response to divine self-disclosure, if it's not a response to God telling us how to worship him, we will end up worshiping a God made in our own image.

And so worship has to be response to divine special self-revelation, and that means it's gotta be in accordance with scripture, or else we'll worship God wrongly, and then we'll end up worshiping the wrong God.

We'll worship a God that's made according to our ideas, to the thoughts of our minds, as opposed to thinking God's thoughts after him as revealed in the Word. And so worship becomes really, really important.

And another factor is this. Public worship, no matter how you do it, disciples people. The way you worship disciples people. So what I tell people is when I walk into the public worship in your church, no matter where it is, it might be a burned down building, it might be a storefront somewhere, it might be a beautiful colonial space, wherever it is, it's my hope and prayer that it will be filled with scripture, that there will not be anywhere that you can turn in that public service of worship and not hear God's Word being read to you, preached to you, prayed back to God, sung in praise to God, and then visibly seen in the administration of baptism in the Lord's Supper.

When I was on sabbatical in 2009, I took my family to an area megachurch. And when I walked out of the church, my daughter who was, I don't know, she was maybe 12, 13 years old, she said, Dad, never bring me here again.

It was every caricature of a megachurch that you can imagine. Now the pastor is a Bible-believing brother. I mean, I know him, he loves scripture, he believes in the doctrines of grace, he preaches for the conversion of sinners.

He wasn't there that day, the preaching loosely called that day was basically a Rotary Club talk. But the best part of the public worship service was the administration of baptism. It was a baptistic church, and during the baptism, not only did they get great brief testimonies of saving grace from the people that are being baptized, but the man who was administering the baptism explained the gospel.

It was the only gospel I got in the public worship that day. I wanna see the gospel and scripture everywhere in public worship, not just in an incidental place stuck off in the corner. So we want our public worship to be filled and formed by scripture.

And that's vital because you disciple people that way. If the scripture is incidental to their discipleship, their discipleship will be stunted. If the scripture is essential and necessary to their discipleship, their discipleship will flourish.

That's gotta show in public worship.

Because the word is the only thing that works, right?

Exactly.

Okay, now on a spectrum, you have the regulative principle over here for Protestants, you have the regulative principle over here, what's the name of the other principle on the other side?

Well, there have been other names that have been developed. People will call the Lutheran principle the normative principle as opposed to the regulative principle and then the Roman Catholic principle is that the Roman church has the right and authority as it is the successor of the apostles and thus is invested with the authority of Peter.

It may make rules that are not found in the Bible for its people to practice in public worship. So I don't even know what you call that, but that's sort of the spectrum that people will describe.

So one of the things that I heard from Mark that I thought was helpful a number of years ago is he says, you know, we're regulative principle guys, but the one thing we can appreciate about the normative principle guys is that we're both really still on the same biblical spectrum of trying to go to God's word to figure out how we should worship his holy name.

We disagree about how to do that, but at least we're both trying to do that. Whereas the Roman Catholics say, you know, scripture plus tradition and that just puts us in different categories. Yeah, the reformers, a big part of, have you read Ian Murray's yellow book?

It's like a compilation of all these documents from church history. Fantastic, I don't remember what it's called, but.

It's like documents of the reformation or documents of the reformed confession. I can't, I know exactly what you're talking about.

Halfway decent Googler, you can find it. I was struck by how much of their complaints were in some way connected to the regulative principle. You know, the investment controversy, this, that, or the third.

And I've also been struck recently, one of our pastors talks a lot about how, whether it's smells and bells on biblical stuff over here in Anglican churches or lights and laser shows over here, they're really doing the same thing.

One is just doing a highbrow version. One is doing kind of a Walmart version. But neither one of those is appropriate according to the clear commands of scripture.

Right, that's right. Again, there are things that can make worship feel holy. Whether it's a high mysticism or whether it's sort of a consumer Disney-fied mysticism that give you the feeling that you're closer to God rather than appeal to what scripture says makes you closer to God or what scripture says matures you in Christ.

And all of us are looking for some sort of silver bullet or a red pill that we can take that can get us closer to God. And the mystic sort of Anglo-Catholic Roman Catholic high traditionalist sort of thing, or whether it's the clowns and otters in the megachurch scene.

Honestly, that would be pretty cool.

And what we have to do is not listen to the siren sound of either of those things, but say, I believe that the Spirit works through His word. And I think that that and pragmatism, I wrote the introduction to Matt Merker's excellent little book on corporate worship.

And in that I said, one of the things that Matt highlighted to me as I read that manuscript was, wow, one of the big things that we fight as evangelicals is simply the consumer mindset. Our people tend to view public worship services as customers view a service being provided to them by a business.

And they sort of pick and choose what they like because what's the rule? The customer is always right. And what happens is ministers will accede to that by saying, give them what they want. And when you adopt that consumer mindset, either as a worshiper going to church or as a minister, a pragmatist, I'm just gonna give them what they want, you've already given away the store.

Because God is the one who says, no, no, I decide how you approach me. You do not decide how you approach me. I decide how you approach me. And public worship needs to, it needs to scream from the rooftops, you come only by Christ.

That is the only way in. He is the temple. He is the one by whom you come to God. He is the sacrifice. He is the one, I love the phrase that in public worship, God is the one who determines how we approach him.

And he alone is the one who makes it possible. So he not only says it's only by Christ, he provides Christ. And he says, come to me by Christ. And our public worship needs to say that loud and clear to our people.

Wow, yeah. Let's talk a little bit about Uzzah. Because I think that the main takeaway, well, there's a lot there, there's a lot to unpack. But one of the main takeaways is that good intentions are not enough, right?

I'm gonna keep the arc from hitting the ground. I think Shai Lin in one of his songs says,. Uzzah thought that his sinful hands were cleaner than the dirt. So I think a lot of times we give our brothers a pass on unbiblical worship because he's a good brother, his heart's in the right place.

And that's not wrong, you wanna be gracious, you wanna be, yeah, you wanna give people the benefit of the doubt. But at the end of the day, if God is the one who has made it possible, and if he is the one who has told us how we should approach him, there is a measure of, you better be careful here.

Because you're leading God's people and you're proclaiming his name. And if you do it in a way that he hasn't prescribed, you're on shaky ground, you're in a dangerous place. Elaborate on that?

Well, I only want, amen to everything you just said. And one thing to add, when I look at that, the whole flow of that passage in 2 Samuel 5, 6, 7, you're getting ready for the arc to be moved to its final central location in Jerusalem next to the king's palace.

And so it indicates that in Israel, God is going to rule. And if God is gonna rule, he's gonna rule by his word. And it is very clear to me that David knows why Uzzah was struck down. Because the next time, after they are taking the arc in on the cart and it falls, David pouts for a while about it.

And then the next time you see the arc coming into Jerusalem is coming in on pulse. And remember, the king had to write down the law, his own copy of the law. So David knew the law. The law is the Levites carry it and they carry it on pulse.

The next time you see it, it's on pulse. So David knows why Uzzah is struck down. It's no mystery to David. David had not insisted that it be done according to God's word. And disaster happened. And God has a reason for why he commands what he commands.

And so the Puritans would say about that, I think it is true that God gives us all kinds of latitude and mercy that we don't deserve. That should never lead us to presumption, however. And there was presumption there.

And no question, God meant to send David a message. And the message is, if I'm really going to rule this people, it's gonna be by my word. And if the king won't pay attention to my word, who will? And so I think that whole scene is about God ruling his people by his word and in the very central issue of worship and the art did what?

It symbolized the special presence of God with his people. If you're not gonna treat that with respect, what are you gonna treat with respect?

And just, I can't help but hear that story through the lens of being a pastor and just thinking, if I mess this up, people get hurt. This isn't a game. This is not theoretical. David's failure led to someone dying.

Hopefully that doesn't happen at Sixth Avenue, even if we mess up. It probably won't.

Well again, but again, as a pastor, you know you wanna be careful with the word of God. I remember as a youth director in St. Louis in the mid 1980s, teaching on a Wednesday night and looking at some of my students writing notes in the margins of their Bibles based on my little lesson that I was teaching that Wednesday night to high school age kids and it struck me like thunder.

I better be telling them what the word of God is saying because they are writing notes in the margins. All of us as pastors ought to have that attitude. I wanna be careful what I do. These are God's people and they're to be ruled by God's word, not by my goofy ideas.

So I want everything I do to be in accordance with God's word.

Wow, also trying to picture you as a youth guy.

I really was, Sean.

Crazy haircut, ripped jeans.

Never had a crazy haircut, always wore khakis. I was the most uncool youth guy that ever existed, but I had really amazing kids.

You were faithful, that's all that matters, brother. Let's talk a little bit about beauty in relation to the regulative principle. I'll give you a little spiel and then you help me make it better or correct me.

So we're thinking about the rebuild of our church and a lot of people in our congregation, surprise, surprise, have strong opinions about how we should do this out of the third and our congregation's great, it's not a big deal.

We're not gonna split over the color of the carpet. But we did wanna say, okay, let's get ahead of this. Let's do some teaching. Even when it comes to the architecture of a church, we think that the Bible, although it doesn't give us an exact plan or layout for the building, has a lot to say.

So here's the main thing that we said in relation to beauty. We said that beauty in the Sunday morning gathering is what the people are doing in worship. The building itself is merely there to accommodate this divinely prescribed beautiful thing that's taking place.

And so Russell Berger, our assistant pastor, when he taught about it last Wednesday night, he said, our church building should be kind of like a building like a doctor's office. It should be nice, it should be well-kept, it shouldn't be distracting or so ugly people don't wanna go into it.

But it should basically, once you walk in, you should forget about it so that you immediately focus on that which you are there to do in a doctor's office. It would be your medical stuff. In the church, it's worship.

And so that's not to say that it's wrong to have a kind of beauty in your architecture, but the beauty in the architecture should not in any way be in competition with the beauty of the church. In addition to that, the beauty should not be such that we feel like we are, in any Roman Catholic sense, being led into the presence of anything.

Yeah, so basically that's our spiel on it. Anything you would add to or take away from that?

Well, that's a huge discussion deserving of an hour conversation, but here are a couple of thoughts. The minute that you build a building, that building sends messages whether you like it or not. And so what you need to be aware of are what are the unintended consequences of messages that you send.

Now, I think that the rule for Protestant architecture has always been if public worship is centered around God's word, the architecture should facilitate the communication of God's word. So Luther called the first Lutheran churches that were built in Germany, many of the Lutheran churches in Germany had been Roman Catholic churches.

So when they started

Pulpit off to the side, altar in the front.

So when they started to build Lutheran churches, he called them mouth houses. That is

It probably sounds better in German.

The design of the architecture was made to help the communication of the word of God in the public worship. Whereas many Catholic churches are built in such a way that it is almost impossible to hear the preaching of the word.

When I came to First Presbyterian Church in Jackson in 1996, the building that we were in had been built in 1952. The acoustics in that room were so good, it would seat about 750, that the pastor could preach and everyone in the room could hear without any acoustical amplification.

So the architecture had been designed to allow a person to raise his voice, not to a screaming level, but to raise his voice to a higher than normal conversational level and everybody in the room be able to hear it.

So I do think we need to think about acoustics. I do think that there should be a simple dignity to a Protestant church. And so there are gonna be degrees of beauty. I think maybe the most beautiful interior room that I have seen anywhere in the world in a Protestant church is Independent Presbyterian Church in Savannah, Georgia.

It is an absolutely beautiful room, but it is very, very simple. It is not ornate. You don't go in and think, wow, this is over the top, but it is a simple, gorgeous space for public worship. Now, there will be other places that are far less attractive than that, but if they facilitate the ministry of the word in all of its aspects, reading, preaching, praying, singing, and singing is something you have to think about.

Will the room help my congregation sing? So acoustics that keep the congregation from being able to hear itself will discourage congregational singing. So for instance, a man who was an engineer became the pastor of a church in St. Louis many years before I was the pastor there or on the pastoral staff there, and he wanted to deaden the room's acoustics, and so he actually painted over a portion of the room that had been designed to make the acoustics more lively for singing, and then after them, there was modifications to the room that altered that effect where the room once again became a much better room for singing, and I said, don't let anybody know what we've just done because it turned that congregation into a great singing congregation because they could hear themselves.

So I think you do need to think about those sorts of factors. You will see these memes out on social media. Our Roman Catholic friends will post pictures of their building, and then they'll show the picture of the evangelical church in a strip mall between the Books a Million and the coffee shop, and ha, ha, ha, we build these beautiful places.

Well, there's a reason why evangelicals and why Protestants have been more functional in their approach to church architecture. It doesn't mean that we need to be indifferent to church architecture because again, once you start building a place for yourself, there are unintended consequences, both good and bad, that come along with whatever you do.

There's no perfect way to build a building. There are always gonna be some liabilities that come with that. We need to be aware of that. If you wanna read on this, Hughes Old has written about Protestant architecture.

There are people that have thought through the philosophy of Protestant architecture that would be good for all of us to read and think about.

Wow, thank you, brother. That was more than I could have hoped and or expected. Let's talk a little bit about seminary stuff. You're the seminary guy. We didn't talk really much about it at all last time.

What is your greatest encouragement at the moment regarding seminary education, we'll say in the United States, and then what is something on the horizon or maybe that you're seeing right now that you're discouraged or concerned about?

Something that your listeners will be interested to know that is encouraging, and given that we talked about complementarianism last time, worth mentioning, because complementarianism has been beat up pretty good.

The only growing seminaries in North America are inerrantist, reformed-leaning, complementarian seminaries.

Right, yeah.

So with all the blowback going out there on social media against all three of those things, from ex-evangelicals and deconstructionists and left-leaning, da-da-da, those are the only places growing in North America right now.

Those are accredited seminaries in the U .S. and Canada, and that is a very encouraging thing. Now, something that ought to worry us is the number of men going into ministry, even in the evangelical world, is dropping who are going through seminary, and we've wondered about that through the effects of the tensions of the last 12 years, through the pandemic, through the election of 2016, through all the pounding on men, toxic masculinity and all this kind of, and pastors are horrible hypocrites and terrible people.

Don't be a pastor. We've wondered, is that having an effect? Apparently so. There are fewer young men going to seminary and into the ministry through the route of seminary, and I think, in general, that's a bad thing, and if you look at a lot of the large evangelical seminaries, the majority of students are women, and one of the fascinating things

Sorry, how much of a majority?

I mean, sometimes it's huge. Sometimes it'll be 60 of the student body. It'll be female, but of course, the interesting thing is, even in the egalitarian world, the majority of pastors are not women, so if you take the PCUSA, it's a tiny proportion of lead pastors that are females, even though you have a very large number of women studying in seminaries, and so I had a friend of mine who taught at an undergraduate evangelical institution said it was very important to many of his women students that they be considered as potentially ordainable and potentially pastors, but they didn't wanna go into the ministry, and so the dropping of men going to seminary, that's a problem we need to keep our eyes on.

I'm very thankful God has been kind to us at RTS. 80 of our students are men, and the vast majority of those men are preparing for vocational ministry, and I wanna see that fostered everywhere in the evangelical world.

We need men that are ready to do the arduous but glorious work of the pastoral ministry, and that phrase comes from my friend Dan Doriani, who teaches at Covenant Seminary and is a fellow member of the board of the Gospel Coalition.

Dan feels like we've gotta send a message to young men. Yes, the ministry is hard, but it's also glorious, and it's worth it. It's worth the sacrifices. Yes, you're gonna have people that come after you in ministry.

Yes, you're gonna have people that betray you in ministry. Yes, you're gonna have your heart broken in ministry. Jesus is worth it, and his bride is worth it, and I wanna prepare my students to believe what they believe with such conviction and such comprehensiveness that it gets down to the level of their DNA so that they can survive the next 30, 40, 50 years of ministry and not become cynical and not become bitter and not become apathetic.

I want us to cross the finish line believing what we believe more than we started it, knowing that along the way, there are many dangers, toils, and snares, and so that's a concern I have is I do see an erosion of men.

Now, seminary's not the only way to prepare for ministry. There are other ways. Seminaries have been around for about 250 years, basically. Before that, the formal process of education of ministers was often through universities, which had been started to prepare people for ministry, like Harvard was started to prepare people for ministry in the Congregational Church in New England.

But what about before that? Let's go before Oxford, Cambridge. Let's just say first 500 years of church history, trying to do the Second Timothy to pass on. How were pastors trained and equipped?