Do Pastors Have to Go to Seminary?

Is it necessary that a pastor go to seminary? That's what we're gonna talk about today on Conversations with a Calvinist, which begins right now.

Welcome back to Conversations with a Calvinist.

My name is Keith Boske, and I am a Calvinist.

Today in the studio with me, I have one of my best friends in the whole world, Pastor Aaron Bell.

Hi Aaron, how are you? Hey Keith, I'm good, how are you? I'm very good, and I'm excited to have you on the program.

Even though I will say I've been doing this for over a year, and this is the first time you've been willing, as one of my best friends, to actually come on the program.

I got people that don't even like me that have been on the program more than you.

You know, I'm not sure what I have of value to add to the conversation, but we'll see.

No, no, no, no, no, I'm excited.

And Aaron is the pastor of Redeemer Church, Redeemer Community Church in Yulee, Florida, and he was formerly the worship leader at an amazing church.

Phenomenal church.

At our church.

He was the worship leader at Sovereign Grace Family Church for several years, and God called him into ministry.

And when Aaron felt God calling him in that direction, we got together, we talked, we prayed about it, we went through a time of, you know, discussing what it was gonna be like, and how it was gonna change his life, because before then, you actually had a pretty successful career in the automobile industry.

Yep, absolutely, I worked in service and parts in the automobile industry.

Yep, and so you came to me, and I wanna go into ministry, and the first thing I said was, you understand this is gonna be a major financial life change.

And am I correct? Yeah, absolutely.

Because, you know, only, well, I was gonna say nobody goes in the ministry to get rich.

There are those who do go in the ministry to get rich, but typically they're not true shepherds.

A true shepherd is not going into the ministry to get rich.

He's going in the ministry because God calls him to that, and he has the purpose in his life to proclaim the gospel and to teach and to preach and to shepherd lives.

And that may not be something that has a lot of financial rewards on this side of glory, but certainly we have the Lord, and he is our great reward.

So, but I did, you know, I had an opportunity when you got ordained, I think that was one of the things that I told you, was, you know, this is a life of service, and it's a life of sacrifice, but I'm thankful to have you as a brother in arms, and to have been, played a small part in your life in that regard, so thankful.

So what we're gonna discuss today is the concept of seminary, and I think as a listener to this program, you probably know what I mean when I say the word seminary, but just in case that's a foreign term or maybe something you're not familiar with, a seminary is basically a college for pastors, and seminary usually comes after a time in college, like a doctor who's going as a medical doctor would have to do his degree and then go into medical school.

A pastor would normally do his degree in a Bible college of some kind, and then go into seminary, seminary being the postgraduate work, or graduate and postgraduate work.

So you went for your MDiv.

Correct.

Which is a, what kind of, because that's not a standard, that's not one, people are used to hearing about an MBA or something like that, what's an MDiv? So an MDiv is a Master of Divinity degree, and at most seminaries, it's about a three-year-long program.

So when you think of a master's degree, a lot of times that's an MBA, which is 18 months typically, so it's about twice as long as most other master's degrees, but it's the step before a doctorate degree in ministry work.

And in a lot of ways, I think it's very close to what other doctorates would have to do.

I mean, would you? In some ways, yes.

Some seminaries will require an MDiv candidate to finish like a thesis and have a, similar to how you'd present a doctoral dissertation, a little bit shorter in scale, but certainly it is probably more challenging than average master's degree, but less than a full doctorate.

Gotcha, gotcha.

Now, when you first came, and we talked about you going to seminary, I'm gonna, I'll tell the world.

I was actually, I tried to get you to stay here and do the seminary through the correspondence, which I guess now is an online correspondence, so even correspondence is probably not even the right term anymore, to do it online, because I wanted to work with you and I wanted you to work here, but you felt very strongly about going, and I don't have any hard feelings, just in case that sounds like it's got, just in case that's a- We're over it now, we're better.

Yes, we're, okay, no.

I loved working with you.

I still, again, enjoy our friendship and our opportunities like today to just sit and talk together, and you were a wonderful worship leader, but you felt like going was of great value to you, and can you tell me, I'm gonna ask this in two parts.

First, can you tell me what was the draw that you go, and after you went, do you feel like you, do you feel like it did what you thought it would do? Yeah, so you remember the process was really complicated.

I mean, we talked together for over a year about me knowing that God had been calling me to more into full-time or to vocational ministry and started looking at seminary, wasn't sure what the options would be.

I was in my 30s, I had a successful career, I had two sons at the time, and so packing up and moving away wasn't appealing in a lot of ways, and so we looked at the different options, and the opportunity came for me to go to Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, but we were still looking at going online and with what they call intensive courses where you do some online coursework, and then you go and you sit in lectures for one week solid, and you basically knock out all of the lectures for a course in a single week.

And so when I signed up, that's what I signed up to do because, like you said, we had a wonderful relationship.

You had been a tremendous mentor and guide to me.

I grew in my faith and in my ability to minister so many ways under your leadership, and neither of us wanted that to end.

So I signed up for two of those intensive courses, and the first time I went to Southern was in the middle of summer.

I took a class called Personal Spiritual Disciplines with Dr.

Don Whitney, and I took a class in Baptist history with Dr.

Tom Nettles, who had just really retired from full-time teaching.

He's still teaching in some capacity, but I took what was potentially one of his last Baptist history classes.

Nice.

And I got up there the first week and sat in class the first day, and it was so different than what I imagined.

I expected a very rigorous academic environment.

Obviously, Southern is a place where some of the best scholars of our day are serving, and so I knew that there'd be a lot to learn from those men.

I'd read some of their books.

I knew who they were.

What I did not recognize when I got there was these men were all very much pastors as well, and their teaching wasn't just teaching the academic side of things, but they were really making efforts to raise up men to the ministry, care for their souls, and so really the big thing I was afraid of losing when I left here was the relationship we had, and it gave me a lot of comfort to know that it wouldn't be a replacement for what you and I had, but I would be under the care of men who had the heart of shepherds, and I also knew instantly because I'd done some online coursework before that week.

There's such a vast difference between watching a video of someone, even with all the latest technology where it can be interactive versus sitting in the room with them, being able to converse with them one-on-one.

I mean, just like today, it's far better for us to be sitting here together than just connecting across Zoom.

Yeah, and that's part of the reason, and not to change subject, but that's part of the reason why we built the studio here so that we're able to do interviews like this.

Zoom is like Brady Bunch style.

You got everybody's face, and you're sort of who's talking, who's either looking around, so yeah, there's that, and then of course, I've talked about this.

We have an academy.

I'm gonna mention this later, but we have an academy here at the church, and people ask, well, can I do it online? I say, yes, you can, but it's not the same.

There really is.

Even if you're not necessarily interacting with the lecture, there's just a different feeling.

There's a different attentiveness when you're in the room versus, and this is the same goes for sermons as well.

People who talk about, well, I'm gonna, I'll catch the sermon online.

It's not the same.

It's never the same.

Brother Mike Collier, one of our elders, he talks about preaching as an event.

He says when we preach on Sunday morning, it's an event.

It's a moment in time that God is giving this grace for this moment.

That's not to say that the recorded message can't go forth and be used by God, but there is a time that God has set aside and a place and a purpose for that, and so not to necessarily equate what you do in the seminary class with what we do on Sunday morning, but there is a sense in which being there is very important.

It's really similar because you're grateful for the technology that allows us to do that, but it's not a replacement for being face-to-face.

Absolutely, absolutely.

So while you were in seminary, though, you were not not serving.

I know that's a double negative.

You can take that for what it's worth.

You felt the desire to serve at a church when you were in Louisville.

Did I say that wrong? People get real upset.

Listen, there's a huge debate about Louisville, Louisville.

Just don't call it Louisville, and you'll be okay.

Okay.

So yeah, we went to Louisville, Kentucky, and honestly didn't feel a desire to serve.

I had been working full-time outside of the church here, serving as worship leader, doing a lot of things, and we thought that we were gonna go to seminary and focus on the academic environment for several years and that we would settle into the background of a large, healthy church and focus on school, but God had really different plans for us, and it's hard for me to overstate how significant this was to my seminary experience, because as much as I loved Southern Seminary and the professors, really what shaped me most was I ended up meeting a guy the first week I was in Kentucky.

Brother Brad, right? Brad Walker, yep, and a few months after we met and a few months after I landed in a new place where I knew no one with my wife and children, we planted a church in Jeffersonville, Indiana, which is just across the river from Louisville, and we planted Redeemer Church there, and honestly, I may be jumping ahead, but it was borne out in my life, again, that seminaries cannot produce pastors.

They can teach and train a lot of important things, but pastors are made in churches, and that was my experience here.

I was already being shaped for that before I moved to Kentucky, and then, obviously, being in the midst of planning a brand-new church while also being in seminary full-time and working full-time, everything I was learning in seminary was immediately being put into practice or exhibited in the life of the body, and so it kept it from being overly academic and detached, which is really one of the dangers of seminary.

You can learn how to exegete texts and not have them impact your heart, and that's a danger for every man in ministry, so God's plan was for us to go there and plant a church, and we didn't know that when we left here, but I'm so grateful for it because, honestly, without that, the experience would have been totally different.

If I would have just kind of half-heartedly participated in a congregation and kept myself detached from the life of the body, I don't think the seminary experience would have been nearly as beneficial.

That's awesome, and that's thoughtful for a lot of guys because there may be some who are watching who are thinking of seminary, and maybe they're thinking that they're gonna spend two, three, four years or even more if they're going for a doctorate throughout the program that I'm gonna separate from the church and I'm gonna be in the ivy-covered tower and do the school thing, and for you, it wasn't that way.

No, and not because I was intelligent enough to have that forethought.

God's providence kept me from that error, really, and I think that if you go to seminary and get comfortable being detached from the church and just approaching it as an academic exercise, in three or four or five years or however long, you're gonna have a real hard time getting back into the life of the body because you and I both know as pastors, life in the body's not always so simple, and it's easier to study it theoretically than it is to live in it practically.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, your seminary experience is quite different than the experience that I had, and I wanted to talk about this because, again, there may be some of you out there that are asking this question.

Maybe you feel God's calling you in a ministry, or maybe God's calling your husband in a ministry.

Maybe you're a lady watching this and God's calling your husband, or you know someone in your church who you can tell God's working on them and you don't know what the direction is, and one of the first questions that comes up is, is seminary necessary? And we haven't answered that question yet, and that's an intentional thing.

We're gonna deal with that later, but the reason why I'm starting the way I'm starting is I wanted to say that the answer that we give is actually gonna come from two men who have both had much different seminary experiences, but both did attend seminary.

So that is, what we're giving you is not necessarily a biased opinion, but it is an opinion with experience, because we both do have experience and they're so different.

My experience is this.

I was in this church, even though it was a different name church at the time, and my desire was to preach.

I preached my first sermon on the Sunday after 9-11.

I've told that story before, and God confirmed in my heart that that was what He called me to do.

I wasn't called to sell cars or to lay asphalt, some of the many jobs that I had before that, and I'd been married for a couple of years, had been saved for a few years at that time, and I realized that God is calling me to do this.

So my initial thought was I'm completely inadequate.

I do not have the education, because at that point, I didn't even have an undergraduate degree.

I didn't have any degree.

I had a high school diploma, which I graduated with a solid 2.5, which is right in that meaty part of the curve.

Right at the top of the bell curve.

That's right.

I was a terrible student in high school.

I was great with extracurriculars.

I made hundreds in all of the band and chorus and all of the performance.

Street magic.

I was a street magician.

That is not a lie.

I was a professional street magician.

So all of those things are true, but I was not an academic.

And once I got saved, God gave me a love for his word and a desire to preach his word, but I did not feel adequate at all.

And so I said, I need to be instructed.

And the problem was, and I say this, I don't think anyone would contradict me, anyone who was here at the time.

The church, which was Forest Christian Church at the time, there was a pastor who was here, and he had been to Bible college.

I don't know if he went to seminary though.

I know he was a graduate of Johnson Bible College.

And he went on, he was a businessman who became a pastor.

So his experience was not deeply theological, and neither were really his sermons.

And so I didn't feel like I had a strong mentorship here with him to be able to say, okay, this guy can train me to do this.

And so I felt like I really needed to go outside.

But I didn't feel released to leave the church, like to go find another church.

So I went to the only place I knew, which was Jacksonville Baptist Theological Seminary, which is a small seminary here in Jacksonville, which was actually, there was a Luther Rice Seminary here.

Luther Rice closed, and the men who graduated from that seminary, Vernon Johns, Jerry Powers, and Stanford Cruz, all came together and created Jacksonville Baptist Theological Seminary.

And so it was like, and this is, we discussed this before the program, it was like pastoral trade school.

And that's the best way I can describe it, because first thing, when I met with them to discuss becoming a student, I realized that it did not have the same accreditation as a university or something like that.

It was accredited like a trade school.

It was accredited by the Florida Department of Private Schools and Colleges, which is not like SACS or something like that, which is a regional- ATS, which is the big theological accreditation.

No, it wasn't accredited through that.

But that didn't matter to me, because what mattered to me was I wanted to learn.

And also it was something I could afford, because the seminary was, when you look at some of the bigger seminaries, there's a lot of investment there.

Sometimes people have to take out massive loans to be able to accomplish that.

This wasn't that.

The credit hours were very reasonable, and the church actually afforded it for me.

So the church paid for me to be able to go.

And so I never had to pay.

And they had an undergraduate program, which was, because again, what this seminary was designed for, it was designed for men who were most likely already in ministry and wanted to get a degree, but didn't have the ability to go to Southern or leave their family, leave their home, go do those things.

Most of the men I was in class with were like 40s, 50s, and 60s, where I imagine you were probably in class with a lot of younger.

Yeah, there were a few guys my age in mid-30s, a few older guys, but the vast majority of them were 22, 25, 27.

Coming out of Boyce as well, right? That's right, coming out of undergraduate.

A lot of them had just finished their undergraduate degree and come straight to seminary.

And yeah, Boyce College is a four-year undergraduate school that's on the same campus as Southern Seminary.

Yep, so I did my undergraduate through the seminary.

I then stayed and did my bachelor's and my, or I'm sorry, my master's and my doctorate.

At the same time, because I was concerned about accreditation, and this is just for side note, I did an additional degree, I have a degree in social science with a minor in education, because I felt like if the church was ever not able to meet the needs of my family, I wanted to have a degree that would allow me to teach, because I felt like the only other thing I would want to do, the only other thing I felt equipped to do was to teach.

And by God's grace, that hasn't happened yet.

I was a substitute teacher for a while, but that was just to supplement income.

But I've never had to have a full-time.

The church has always met my needs full-time, which is a tremendous blessing.

I can't express how much I'm thankful for that.

But, so my experience, I was working during the day.

I was working at the time at First Coast High School.

I was a paraprofessional.

I was going to class in the evening, and I was serving the church during the week, and on the weekends.

All the other times.

Yes, all, yeah.

Yeah, and in that respect, we had really similar experiences, because I was working outside the church as well.

So the difference for me was, I kind of corralled all my classes into Tuesday and Thursday, so that I could go work Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday.

The Lord provided the job where I could work four days a week and be able to be a part of the church on Sunday.

And you're serving in ministry Sunday, so you're really working seven days a week.

It was a difficult and trying season, but even to point out what you said, God provided for us in so many ways.

I mean, we made it through seminary at a place that certainly was not cheap, but by God's grace, the church and you and many other faithful folks here encouraged and supported us financially, and we made it through.

But your story brings out something that I think is really key in this conversation, which is you and I both assessed where we were in life when God called us to ministry.

We both were at kind of different stages.

I was older at the time, and kind of already career and all that stuff.

You were a little bit younger, but already pastoring a church, right? And so that was a heavy influence.

Well, not when I went into seminary.

I was 21 when I preached that sermon.

The very next year, I was 22, I became a student at the seminary.

I got ordained after I got my bachelor's, and then the church called me.

I was still working on my doctorate after I became a pastor.

I was in seminary when I became the pastor, but I had already been in seminary for a few years.

But that's really a key thing is for a man who feels like God's calling him to the ministry, you need to assess where you are and not follow some prescription that you found on the internet that says this is exactly what every pastor must do.

It's not in the New Testament, right? I mean, that's an important thing for us to examine.

The New Testament doesn't say, thou shalt go to seminary, or thou shalt not go to seminary, because there are plenty of folks who would say, oh, the seminaries, they're terrible.

They produce men with puffed up heads, but cold, dead hearts.

There's an anti-intellectualism that a lot of folks look to and say, well, all I need's the Bible and the Holy Spirit.

And we would speak against that and say, certainly you can do that, but training is helpful and beneficial.

And whatever God has laid before you, opened the doors for, you ought to pursue that in accordance with the Spirit and where he's leading you.

Yeah, I have my Bible with me.

I just wanted to mention one particular passage because this was on the door of my seminary as I was in the class.

I would see this every week or every couple of days, because I had Tuesday and Thursday classes as well.

And make sure I'm in the right place here.

Yeah, now the ESV doesn't say it the same way the King James, because it's not as strongly inspired as the King James.

That is a joke, but the ESV in 2 Timothy 2, 15, it says, do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.

Now, the King James, as I remember it, because again, it was placarded over the door of the seminary, it says, study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed.

Shoo thyself.

Yeah, that's right, to shoo thyself.

That's right, S-H-E-W.

Study to shoo thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing.

And our good dispensationalist friends really hold onto that one.

I'm just saying, and that is the thing.

It was a dispensational school, so they would often point to that dividing the word of truth.

But that verse was sort of, in a way, the foundational verse for the seminary, that we are called to be men who are diligent.

I think that's the New American Standard says, be diligent to show yourself approved.

This one simply, of course, is do your best to present yourself.

But to rightly handle the word of truth is our responsibility.

So as a man of God who is called to shepherd the people of God, as an elder in God's church, as a pastor in God's church, we have the responsibility to rightly handle the word of truth.

Therefore, the question of is it necessary that a man go to seminary? My answer, and you tell me your thoughts on this answer, maybe you'll say it better than I will, but this is the way that I would say it.

I would say the requirement is not seminary.

The requirement is that you rightly handle the word of truth.

And if a man is able to do that, apart from seminary, then praise the Lord.

Yeah, I think that's a super helpful framework for thinking about this question, because you can then ask yourself, seminary, whether it be a big, well-known, accredited seminary, a local seminary, or pastoral training academy inside a church, or myriad online resources, can this help me to be a man who can do this? Am I going to grow in that ability through this tool, and can I do this thing while still honoring all the other responsibilities God has given to me? So that could be a family, a wife, children, providing for them, because the other thing we see a lot is some guys get so fastened to this idea of going to seminary, and it's got to be an accredited seminary, that they neglect their God-given responsibilities and put the burden on their wife and children, so that they can do this thing when really they could have attacked that from a different angle and still been faithful.

God may provide the opportunity.

He did in my case, I'm so grateful for that, to do that while, not perfectly, but to the best of my ability with God's help, being faithful to my wife, to my children.

But it's not worth sacrificing that for either.

Sure, and that's a good, perhaps maybe we could have you come back another day and talk about the role of pastor's wives and the elder's wife, and maybe one day we could fill the room and put both of our wives beside us, and we could just have it, we could tighten this area and have us all snuggled and talk about, that would be weird, sorry.

We could talk about their role, because I know this, if my wife had not supported me from the very moment, in fact, she was the first one who said to me, God is calling you to preach.

She, it wasn't even me asking her, she knew that God had gifted me to do this thing, and she said, this is what God has for you.

And then my question is, well, is this what God has for us? Because you are gonna be here too.

You're gonna be working alongside of me as my closest friend, as my faithful partner in many ways, and though her burden is, she is not an employee of the church, and we make that very clear, she still, of course, like any man's wife, has the burden of sort of shouldering, when I'm struggling, she knows it, when I'm weeping, she is not unaware, and when I'm frustrated, she knows.

And so, yeah, there's a lot that, yeah, we could.

Well, and not to go too far down that road, but that's another important consideration for especially a married man who thinks God is leading him to ministry, is what preparation is there gonna be for your wife in that? We were blessed, again, Southern has Seminary Wives Institute, so Allison was actually able to go and participate in some classes, because while she was always supportive of me, many times she said, I'm not sure about being a pastor's wife, right, I don't know what that involves, am I ready for that? And I had a great confidence in her and who God made her to be, but she was able to take some classes, somewhat less formally, but still the same professors, the same men I was taking classes with and their wives were investing in the wives of men who were being trained for ministry, and that's made a profound impact as well in preparation.

So if you're a man who's thinking about this and you have a wife, it may not be that you have to go to a seminary that has that, but think about how are you going to help her be prepared for the life God's calling you to as well.

Yeah, absolutely, and that's a good word, for sure.

Well, let's take a step back and let's talk about the subject of accreditation, because I think we've agreed that seminary is not absolutely necessary.

I mean, I serve with two men who are faithful, God-loving elders, pastors, and we are all three, in a sense, we share an authority here as pastors in the church and we work together as ministers, and I'm the only one who has a formal education, but Brother Andy has many years as a pastor in a church where he was the lead pastor at a church in Middleburg, and he did that without formal seminary training.

Brother Mike was an elder at a previous church, is an elder here now, and he does not have any formal training.

Both of them, though, are voracious readers.

They both are, you know, Brother Andy consumes, he's always telling me about what he's reading, Brother Mike consumes so much in their reading, and it's like this, someone once said something about Spurgeon not having formal education.

I said, yeah, but he read all the time.

Yeah, at a scale you and I couldn't comprehend.

I read somewhere it was six books a week.

Some insane number, I'm sure.

And the only other person I've ever heard of anything near that would be your president of the seminary you went to.

Yeah, Dr.

Moeller, yeah, he has, I think, a special gift for consuming information.

What was his, you told a story about his bookshelves, can you? Yeah, so at the presidential residence, the seminary, the White House.

He has visited the presidential, the White House of Southern Seminary.

So after graduation, you go over and you get to, you know, Dr.

Moeller and his wife, Miss Mary, who are both extremely humble and gracious people, you know, greet you, congratulate you.

They walk you down into his library, which is essentially the basement, you know.

Up in the north, they have these things under your house called a basement.

Here in Florida, we don't have that.

Here in Florida, we're afraid of them because they're wet, you have to swim.

But it's, you know, it's a library of who knows how many thousands of books.

And I think, if I recall correctly, there's like two full-time librarians who work in that private library because it's, you know, it's big.

It's not like, you know, five bookshelves.

And on the stairs going down are stacked, as I understand it, all the books that, you know, are coming to him, the things he's gonna read next.

And they're stacked by the dozens.

And each staircase, I think, represents like a month's worth of reading or, you know, what he's tackling next.

But he is a, God has given him a phenomenal gift for that kind of capacity.

And if you get in a conversation with him and ask him a question, he's very likely to say, you know, so-and-so's recent work on page 158.

So I don't know if he sees it visually to recall it, but he can almost quote you, you know, by paragraph, sentence, and line what he's read.

And so, yeah, if you have that kind of ability to consume information and understand it, then maybe seminary is unnecessary for you.

Exactly, yeah.

I mean, and you wouldn't have to have that to say seminary is unnecessary.

Of course.

But yeah, absolutely.

Extreme example.

Yeah, but that would be the Spurgeon picture.

Right, but Spurgeon, who didn't have any formal education, felt led by God and felt it important enough to create a kind of a training.

Yes.

System for young men called to the ministry.

And so he, you know, obviously, even though he didn't have it, he didn't devalue it.

Sure, and very clearly, definitely don't want to do that.

And that's not at all what we're having both gone.

You know, we could both say, and I said it earlier, I knew I needed it because I was, I needed to learn how to study.

And in fact, that was probably the most valuable thing I got was not the information, but how to acquire the information.

When I first got, when I first said I was going into seminary or going into ministry and going into seminary, I had a man, I was at a karate seminar, and he was a karate friend.

And he goes, oh, you don't have to go to seminary.

I can get you ordained over the weekend.

And he was being very kind because he thought, no, ordination's not a thing.

It ain't no thing but a chicken wing.

Karate chop.

That's right, I can give you a hockey chop and a certificate of ordination.

And he was very, he was being very serious.

Which color belt do you get with the karate ordination? It would be your chartreuse.

Actually, purple with the vestments.

That's right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But no, you know, and I told him, I said, that's very gracious.

Thank you for offering.

But I'm not going to seminary because I need that forward nation.

I'm going to seminary because I feel the need to learn how to study because I don't feel like I was taught that in high school.

And that is not a shot at my teachers.

I think I had some fine teachers.

They just had a really bad student.

And I'm willing to admit, I had no interest in learning how to acquire, I knew how to study magic.

I knew how to adopt and retain information, but I didn't care enough to do it in the scholastic sense.

So going to seminary helped.

Yeah, and it's interesting you mentioned that.

We didn't talk about this before, but I would actually say that was probably, in all the things seminary can teach you, the thing I learned that I needed the most was the ability to study as well.

And I was not a good student.

I always had good grades, but I never felt challenged in school.

And so- That's a rib, that's a rib.

No, no, no.

I didn't have- So I got to seminary at 32 or 35 years old, I don't recall now.

I was in my thirties and I got to seminary and I did not have good study habits.

And I had never really had to study anything in depth before.

And then along came Hebrew.

And it kind of rocked my world.

And so- You know that right to left business? It's that.

It's reading hieroglyphics backwards.

It's not an alphabet, it's paintings.

It may as well have been Japanese and it's upside down and backwards.

And I got to it and it challenged me so intensely because anytime I had needed to learn anything before, I'd been able to just cram it in, pass a test.

Well, that wasn't gonna work.

I mean, circuits in my brain had to rewire themselves.

And again, God was gracious to me.

I met a man who was studying in my same Hebrew class from Nigeria, who English was not his first language.

He was a pastor in Nigeria, a wonderful encouragement to me.

And he was struggling as one might imagine learning Hebrew in English when his primary language was not English or Hebrew.

And he asked me to help tutor him.

And I thought, well, this is funny.

This is the blind leading the blind.

I was drowning in Hebrew, but the process of trying to help him helped me and helped me develop those study habits.

And so I came away with a degree from seminary that hangs on the wall that, like you said, doesn't mean, oh, now I'm qualified to be a pastor, but it represents what God taught me in that process, which was how to study, because that's what we do, right? Rightly dividing the word of truth doesn't just happen.

We don't sit in our offices and put our Bibles on our head and sleep and hope it all filters in.

You have to put in the work to study and prepare and be ready and make sure you understand what you're trying to teach to other people.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

So when we talk about the subject of accreditation, we have mentioned earlier, I mentioned the seminary that I attended was not accredited.

Obviously Southern is fully accredited and a seminary degree from Southern would be recognized in the same way that a degree from any prestigious college would be recognized in the sense of, if you were to go and you wanted to teach at, say, a higher education facility, if you wanted to teach at...

Let me ask, because I don't know the answer to this.

Let's say FSCJ or UNF were looking for an adjunct professor.

Would you be able to qualify for that with your degree? Typically, a professor in a university would have a doctoral degree, a PhD.

There are occasions where you see men with an MDiv or a DMin teaching in that level, but they're less common, so...

Well, let me say this.

If you got a degree from Southern, a doctoral degree, you could teach there.

Sure, yeah.

I mean, obviously in the field of study, right? If they needed comparative religions or something like that, they wouldn't hire me to teach biology, I don't think.

Yeah, no, no, yeah.

But yeah, I think so.

I remember this.

When I went to work as a substitute teacher, this was before I got my four-year degree from the university, which at the time was Ashford University.

It's now the University of Arizona Global Campus.

Go whatever the mascot is.

I really don't know.

Arizonians.

Yeah, go Arizona.

Globally.

Yeah, the global Arizonians.

Okay, so before I got that degree, I applied to work as a substitute teacher, and a substitute teacher in Nassau County did not at the time have to, I don't know if they do now, but they did not have to have a degree.

You just made less if you didn't have a degree.

And I said, well, I do have a degree.

It's from the seminary.

And when they looked at it, they said, unfortunately, it's not accredited, therefore it won't give you the pay raise increase that you would get.

They would still hire me, but they wouldn't give me that.

You didn't just write accredited on the bottom.

No, I could say- Look, it's accredited.

It says so right here.

Pastor Vernon Johns signed this.

This is important.

The Pastor Vernon Johns.

The Dr.

Vernon Johns, who was, side note, always looked like a pastor.

He had the profile.

He had the perfect- Modus grass and a suit and tie.

Yes, he did.

He had a perfect hair, perfect mustache.

Looked like Jack Van Impey.

I don't know if you remember him.

Perfect suit.

He was a televangelist, but he just looked like a pastor.

And yeah.

And here we are looking like this.

Yes.

I wore a pink shirt with a...

Well, anyway, the reason why I bring that up is accreditation, for me, I knew if I ever wanted to teach in a school, like I said, if the church couldn't meet my needs and I needed to have a tent-making degree, and that's what some people call it, comparing what Paul did when he made tents to be able to provide for himself during ministry, my tent-making degree was a degree in education.

Major in social science, minor in education, which allowed me to be able to teach things like social studies, I could teach history, things like that in school at the middle and high school level.

And if I wanted to, I could go for another 12 to 18 months and I could get a master's in history or a master's in social science or something like that, and I could go on to teach at higher levels if I wanted to.

But again, at this point, I don't see a benefit to it.

But I understood the difference, especially when that happened to me.

I understood the difference between accreditation and non-accreditation, sometimes it's got to do with how far you're gonna get in a field if it's accredited or non-accredited.

So what do you say to a man who comes to you and he says, God's calling me to ministry, and this is your opinion, I know that both of us are gonna share our opinions.

Man comes to you and he says, I wanna go to seminary because I feel like God's calling me to ministry, but I don't know whether I should choose an accredited seminary or if I would be just as good going to, and there's a lot of good non-accredited seminaries.

And when I talk about mine, mine was more like pastoral trade school, I recognized the limitations of the school I went to.

But there are some schools that have recently popped up, like Sam Waldron has Covenant Baptist, which is, I think they're working on accreditation, but I don't know.

Yeah, so if I understand right, that you bring up a good school that I actually looked at, I think back then it was MBTS, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and it was not accredited.

And you and I looked at it together because they had a church program where if your church supported you.

They still have that, by the way.

It was almost free, right, for the student to go and the church had to support at some level.

Yeah, let me mention that.

If you are interested, contact Dr.

Waldron or contact the school that he's the president of.

They have a church affiliate program where if the church partners with them, anyone in that church can go to the seminary, at least that's the way it was.

And I think it's a good reason.

Yeah, and I think it's now Covenant Theological Seminary, I think.

Covenant Baptist, I think.

Oh, is it Covenant Baptist? I think so, I think so.

So I looked at that school, and from what I understand, I think the academic rigor is there.

So a lot of times people assume that accredited versus non-accredited means less rigorous.

Sure.

It could mean that in certain circumstances, but it doesn't necessarily mean that.

You may get a very rigorous and challenging education from a non-accredited school that the only difference is gonna be, again, if you go to get a PhD at an accredited school, you may have to go back and essentially redo that work with accreditation so that you can move past that.

And so I was shaped a little bit by your experience because you and I had talked and I knew where you were.

And I thought then and still think now, this is not a word from the Lord, but I thought then perhaps later in life, I would want to teach, not in seminaries in American context, but on the mission field to go and train and equip pastors globally.

And we're seeing the same thing happen there as well.

Accreditation is becoming more and more important even in global seminaries.

And so I wanted to have that ability and I didn't wanna have to go back and redo the work.

And so I went accredited largely for that and ultimately because God opened the door for us and provided.

And had he not, I could have gone somewhere else.

I mean, not to puff your head up, but the seminary education you got shaped you to be a pastor who have encouraged me and so many other people and served us in growing into ministry.

And so it's not as simple as, this one's good and that one's better, right? It really is about where are you when God calls you to ministry and where is he leading you and being faithful in those opportunities? Because you can study hard in a non-accredited, perhaps even less rigorous environment, or you can skate through in a more rigorous environment and get the piece of paper, but it doesn't change what's actually happened to you.

Amen.

And we talked about this the other day about you can't see five, 10, 20 years in the future, but you can think about what do you feel like God is calling you to? And if you do feel like God is calling you to something that would require that accreditation, then looking at it earlier rather than later is probably wise.

Whereas I've actually considered, because I do have a desire to teach, and I always have since becoming a pastor, I enjoy teaching.

And so my wife and I have discussed the idea, and I've even discussed with our elders here the idea of me going back and getting a, even though I have my doctorate, it's not accredited, getting an accredited degree.

That way, other doors might open.

But at this point, it becomes an issue of the why for me, because it's a question of, and I'm sort of baring my heart with the audience today, but I am very pleased with what we're doing here at the church.

We're not perfect by any stretch of the imagination.

We make a lot of mistakes.

But I feel like we are doing a lot of good things in the kingdom and teaching, and I feel like even this is an opportunity to teach in many ways.

And so I'm asking myself, cost analysis, because this is gonna be a financial burden if I do.

And is it worth it? Is this the best way to spend the money in the kingdom? That's the question we're, you know.

And I don't live in this world, so I'm not super current on it, but I know that the amount of teaching jobs in seminaries is not great.

And every year, just like in secular fields, we're minting far more PhDs than there are teaching jobs for.

And so there's no guarantee that you get that accredited degree and a job opens up for you.

I think, and I've told you this before, you have a particular gift in teaching.

It's always been one of the strongest ways God has used you.

And so you have a capacity for that, that if I got a dozen more degrees, I don't have as strong a gift in that specific area as you do.

And so that's not to say if you went and got a degree specifically to be able to teach, you wouldn't learn some things, but I think it illustrates the point that God doesn't need us to have some external qualification to use us in ministry.

Ultimately, we're all relying on a ministry, the spiritual gifts, right? The things that God has equipped us with and the work of the spirit in our lives to make us faithful.

And so seminary, and this was a little bit of a conversation we had before, there's a lot of things seminary can teach you and there's an equally long list of things seminary cannot teach you, right? Seminary is not a replacement for exercising the spiritual gifts God has given you.

Seminary is not a replacement for cultivating a heart for God's word and for living in obedience.

Seminary is not a replacement for learning how to be a disciple, right? And growing in discipleship.

It can teach you how to read and exegete a text and you should understand that if you're gonna be a pastor.

It can teach you original languages and it can teach you important skills in counseling and preaching and all kinds of wonderful things, but seminary is not a magic bullet.

And again, to say it because I think it's just so true, seminaries do not meant pastors, churches do.

Amen.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I wanna say just how grateful I am.

Very kind words.

It is funny what you, when you first started that sentence a minute ago, you said something to the effect that I don't live in this world.

And I was like, he's about to get super spiritual.

He's out of this world.

That's exactly, N-O-T-W.

I got the tattoo.

He's, I don't live in this world.

And you were talking about the world of academia.

I said, where's he going with this? This is gonna get awesome.

Actually from outer space.

I'm sorry.

I can't help but wanna have some fun on the program from time to time.

Well, I wanna mention one other thing, and this is where we maybe start drawing it to a close because I became convicted about three years ago that I wanted to produce an academy within the church.

And you've mentioned that a few times, churches raising up ministries or ministers from within the church.

And my conviction came on a couple of points.

One, I realized that, as you noted, there aren't a lot of opportunities out there as far as teaching opportunities and things like that.

And I felt like this is something that our church could be doing is providing opportunities for learning and even for teaching.

And we could do it on a lower level and say, this is not for necessarily the man who wants to become the full-time pastor or anything like that, but this is for people who want to cut their teeth in an academic environment that is meant to be more than a Sunday school, but not quite a seminary.

And that's sort of where we landed with Sovereign Grace Academy.

We produced a two-year program, which is eight core classes.

We have surveys in Old Testament, surveys in New Testament.

We have church history and doctrine.

We have classes on ethics, apologetics.

All of those are part of the eight-week, or each one of those is an eight-week course that has an additional four weeks, so it becomes a 12-week total, because the additional four weeks is independent study and writing a research paper, and each class requires a research paper.

And I based this actually partly on what I did in seminary, because that was sort of how our classes were spread out.

You spent eight weeks in the classroom, and then you had four weeks before you had to turn in your final project for that class.

And I went to our seminary, the seminary that I graduated from, and I said, hey, I wanna do this.

Can we do this and do this in conjunction? And the first thing the president said was, yeah, you have a doctorate from here.

We're happy to support you in this, but you're a Calvinist.

And I'm Keith Foskey, and I am a Calvinist.

There was no doubt that that was, and so the seminary that I went to wasn't Calvinistic.

In fact, I was taught in seminary that Calvinism was not good.

And so there was a little bit of a struggle there.

There was a little bit of sort of a back and forth about how we were gonna handle that, and we got through it, and everything was fine.

And so what we were able to do, we were able to set it up where if you take classes here, that that class would count toward credit with the seminary.

So a person could start here, and if they decided they wanted to go for a degree through the seminary, they would be able to use the certificates they earn for that.

So, and like I said, getting back to the conviction on this, part of my conviction is I do believe, as you have said a couple times today, that it is the church's responsibility to raise up ministers.

Absolutely.

And at 21 years old, when I felt God calling me into ministry, I really felt like that was, if that would've been there, that would've been the first thing I would've done.

I would've spent two years learning from the pastors.

If there would've been men here who were preaching and teaching the word, I would've sat under them.

I would've trained under them.

And I may not have even went to seminary because I possibly could have, through that, learned how to study, which is what I wanted to do.

And so I do hope that we start seeing more churches that understand the value of studying.

Yeah, and that's a critical ministry that we've talked about it at length, even when you were first conceiving the idea of it.

And I'm so grateful it's accessible.

And it's a great place for a lot of folks to start because they're getting, what I got from you before I ever left for seminary was seven years we'd been together.

And many evenings we spent in a parking lot together working and, but having conversations.

Sounded weird, let's clarify.

We were working.

We did security work.

Yeah, we just sat in a parking lot.

And we worked in a, we did security for many big events.

Yeah, but we got to spend time, you were discipling me and shaping me so that I had so much of that already.

And when it came time, and I felt like God was calling me to this, the first people I looked to was not just you, but our elders in the church to say, do you see this in me as well? That external call is so important, not just I feel like God's calling me.

So to any man out there who's feeling led to seminary, but who's not plugged into a local church, that's absolutely step one.

Amen.

You need to be connected to a local body serving.

You need to figure out what this is really all about, because it's not about sitting in a study and exiting once a week to deliver a message from on high and then retreating back to it.

You need to get in the nitty gritty.

But then something like Sovereign Grace Academy, a two-year process is going to help you test that call.

That's right.

And find out, is this really where God's leading? Or am I just feeling a hunger for more depth in my understanding of the word and in my life as a follower of Jesus? So when God pulled me away to seminary, you didn't know it, but he was dropping me in the world of church planting.

Planted the church in Indiana.

I came back here to pastor a church that was a plant, you know, just a few years old plant.

And my desire has been that, you know, in God's timing, we'll be able to plant more churches.

And so obviously this raising up men in the faith is very important to me as well.

And I approach it only slightly differently.

I orient my schedule around, you know, a few guys and engaging them week after week in the way that you and I did and seeing God raise them up and prepare them.

But there's going to come a time where, right, that more formal stuff and sending them here, again, because I think it's such a reflection of the gift you have, right? That teaching gift is so strong.

And so even it's important for churches to think about working together in communities for this, right? Every single church doesn't need to have the exact same thing.

Sure.

So that we can all teach our, you know, tiny little distinctive differences between, you know, I see it that way.

We can work together for the good of the kingdom, for the growth of disciples.

And ultimately you learn that, you know, the hard thing we went through is you're growing disciples to give them away.

Yes.

And it's difficult, but the more they grow, the more likely you are to lose them because God's going to send them out to another part of the kingdom to do his work.

Amen.

And that's what I would say was the hardest part with us because I did enjoy working together and I was, you know, you've given me a lot of encouraging compliments today and I promise I didn't give him any payment for that at all.

But, you know, I've told you many times, I like to surround myself with people who are smarter than me.

And I've always felt like you were a very bright young man and I was always grateful that we got to work together and encourage one another.

And I always felt, you know, that God was going to do something great.

And I think he is doing something very great.

And I think he's doing something very great in your life and in the life of your family, which has grown recently.

You mentioned earlier, you had two boys when you started seminary, now you have a third.

We have a daughter, yeah, almost two.

That's awesome.

And continuing to serve in the church.

And I'm grateful just so much for you and for the ministry that you have there.

Well, I'm going to begin, I'm going to draw us to a close here.

Brother, thank you for being on the program today, for giving insight into this.

And does he have any final words, any final thoughts for anybody? No, I think we covered so much of it.

I think my final word is, you know, be discipled under a pastor.

So, you know, I had the benefit, the blessing of you being my pastor then.

And in God's providence, we cried many tears when we were separated for a time, but, you know, ultimately you were there at my ordination and God brought me back into the community.

So, you know, 30 minutes down the road, and I'm grateful that you're still my pastor and still the guy I call when, you know, when I'm working through difficult things.

And that perhaps is kind of the final word is, the other thing seminary is not going to necessarily provide for you is pastoral friendships and relationships that are going to help sustain you through some of the challenges of ministry.

And so you might meet those guys in seminary, but if you're not intentional about forming them in the fires of a church, they might not last.

And so I'm grateful that God's provided that for us together.

And I'm grateful for being here with you today.

Amen.

And yes, I did speak at your graduate or your ordination and you got me on a plane for the first time in a long time.

I am not a good flyer.

And you saw snow.

I did, it was a wonderful, that was a good trip.

Got to go to the Louisville Slugger factory.

Yeah.

That was cool.

That was cool.

Well, gang, thank you for being with us today.

I hope this has been profitable for you.

And even if you're not a person who is seminary bound or interested in seminary, hopefully this will give you thoughts about what it takes in regard to being someone who is called to pastoral ministry, maybe give you ways that you can pray for your own pastor if you're not a part of our church.

And if God is calling you into ministry and you feel that call, and we would both affirm that, have that call recognized and affirmed by your church, not to call yourself into ministry, but to recognize that God uses the church to call men into ministry.

And if you have questions, please feel free to reach out.

I have an email address that you can email, calvinistpodcasts at gmail.com.

That reaches me directly.

You can send me any question that you'd like.

If you'd like for me to expound on something we talked about on the program, or if you'd like to ask Aaron a question, I can forward it to him.

So again, it's calvinistpodcasts at gmail.com.

Thank you, Aaron, for being here today.

Thank you, listener, for being with us today.

And thank you all for continuing to support the channel.

I'm Keith Foskey, and I've been your Calvinist.

May God bless you.