Seminaries serve an important function: they train up leaders whose churches are simply not adequate to the task. This is the same function that orphanages serve. But we think ill of parents who—simply because orphanages exist that will take in their kid—decline to do the job themselves.
In today’s churches, we think it’s normal. Why?
It’s not because the Bible taught us to think so. The first-century church raised up its own leaders. “The things which you have heard from me among many witnesses, commit these to faithful men who will be able to teach others also” (2 Timothy 2:2). That verse was given to a man in church ministry. Today, you’ll find that verse all over seminary websites and literature, but Paul intended it to be obeyed in the context of the church.
It’s not that the New Testament is somehow opposed to academic preparation; it says nothing of the kind. But the New Testament knows nothing of “preparation for ministry” that is abstracted from the local church context, taking place outside the local church and away from the oversight of local church leaders. That’s not a thing in the New Testament—and for good reason.
Is our way better? Consider that the seminary is famously unable to prepare its students for the realities of practical ministry. “They don’t teach you that in seminary!” is a very common joke among seasoned ministers, but for the guys in their first couple years of ministry, it’s not funny.
Imagine walking up a nice suburban sidewalk, knowing that on the other side of the front door you’re about to knock on, there’s a young widow and three kids whose dad is never coming home. And they don’t know about it yet; you’re the one who’s going to tell them. And nobody ever taught you how to do it. Nobody even mentioned that you’d have to.
That’s a sign of pretty serious dysfunction. Seminary-trained pastors, answer me this: would you go to a doctor whose med school prepared him for practicing medicine as poorly as your seminary prepared you for ministry?
Why do seminaries fail so terribly? I think it’s pretty obvious. A seminary is two principal things: classroom and library. Naturally, it gravitates toward the things classrooms and libraries are good at. Doing the rough work of discipling people through the dust and mud of daily life, becoming a generalist in the varieties of human misery along the way—that doesn’t fit well into semesters. In most academic programs, you can’t even flunk someone for having weapons-grade empathy but no discernment or vice versa, no tolerance for disagreement among teammates, or other critical failures of personal development, and still less for lack of personal spiritual maturity. In other words, there’s a fairly obvious mismatch between the tools a classroom brings to bear and the task of preparing someone for ministry, and an even more obvious mismatch between what the classroom can assess and the needs of real practitioners.
You know what I find particularly maddening? As a culture we know exactly how to solve for that mismatch. In trades where practical know-how is everything, from electrician to doctor, we solve that problem reliably with a relatively simple formula. We use academic study to give the trainees sufficient background knowledge to get them started, and then put them into the field for supervised practical experience. Practical performance is graded, tests with meaningful feedback are frequent, and the trainee is expected to improve rapidly, because their future opportunities hang in the balance. We don’t let them practice independently until they’ve been through that gauntlet and prevailed.
And it works. Our electricians and our plumbers and our doctors graduate into their trade able to practice competently. What we do with our pastors, at this point, is analogous to putting a guy through the first two years of med school—the classroom part—and then sending him out to practice medicine with no support at all. We’ve no right to be surprised by the results.
Full Contact Christianity 
God prepared His leaders by putting them personally through the “Bible Matrix” pattern of ordeal as “head” before they would be trusted with a “body.” We see this most obviously in Moses’ personal wilderness sojourn. And that is repeated in Jesus, who was “perfected” (matured) by suffering before His Spirit led the first-century Church through the spiritual wilderness of rejection to its first victory.
How interesting. I’ve been asked to help teach a Bible curriculum to a handful of Ugandan pastors already out in the field; the need is almost the inverse of “pastorlings”: lots of little churches in need of training with no seminary in sight. I wonder whether we here in the “first world” have lost sight of the original commission. In spite of my own seminary training I have no idea how I’m going to “make disciples” during our upcoming 2 week “intensive” on Zoom but I’m “holding things loosely” as I prepare my first tentative OT survey. I’m kind of apprehensive but also kind of excited.
What a great gig for you! I love it! You should spring for whatever kind of Zoom account you have to have to be able to record everything. There’s gotta be further good use for that material, too.
Yes, my Zoom account includes recording capability; been recording my men’s group lessons for years. I’m thinking like you about other uses.
If nothing else, feeding it into a transcription program and getting searchable transcripts might be worth it. Maybe you could get a couple of first drafts for books out of it.
I had not thought of that! But, yes, my account includes transcription capability. Thank you!!