What Nobody Taught Me in Seminary That I Had to Learn the Hard Way

Excerpts from Sermons by Dr. John Huffman, Chairman of the Board of Trustees
Eight Things Not Taught in Seminary Part 1, October 29, 2013
Eight Things Not Taught in Seminary Part 2, October 30, 2013

1. Seminary is the best place in the world to lose your faith.
2.  Maintain a daily devotional life independent of your studies and sermon preparation.
3.  The highest calling tin the world is not professional ministry.
4.  You will never be more in ministry than you are today.
5.  Get involved now in a covenant group and never be without one all through your ministry.
6.  A simple trust in God's Word is more important than a highly sophisticated intellectual set of answers for everything.
7.  Spend as much time in the newspaper as in the Bible, and vice versa.
8.  Be faithful to biblical moral standards now.
9.  Develop a physical exercise program now and treat it as faithfully as you do your devotional life.
10.  Ministry marriages are not exempt from the same problems other marriages have.
11.  Begin tithing now, don't rationalize that you will do it later.
12. If you mess up, claim God's grace, get help, and get up and get going.
13.  Pastors too come from dysfunctional families and can perpetuate it and even originate it.
14.  Because you are in fulltime Christian services does not mean you are exempt from catastrophe.
15.  Yours is the privilege of a "task within a task."
16.  Write out one sermon per week as your best effort and then claim God's help to come as close to possible to preaching without notes.

To download Chapel podcasts, visit https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/hamilton-campus-chapel-2012/id593878978?mt=10

December Faculty Forum

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

It’s always a dangerous thing to think when you are preaching. You start wondering why the guy in the fourth pew is staring out the window, or whether you have sufficient time to include the illustration about illuminated medieval manuscript, and suddenly you have no idea what you are actually saying at that moment. What’s even worse is the ensuing awareness of your dissociation: how is it that I’m talking and at the same time I’m aware I’m talking? How many “I”’s can there be?

I was reminded of this as I looked out my window at the bare branches of the winter trees outside my office. A few years ago I was preaching in a hall with large windows in the back, looking out on the same bleak tree-scape that greets me this morning. And as I was (at least supposed to be) teaching, I was struck by how human those particular trees were looking that day.

I had been set up for such arboreal anthropomorphizing for a long while. If the Wizard of Oz’ witch and winged monkeys set the standard for childhood terror, the malicious apple-flinging trees of the same film weren’t far behind. On the positive side of the ledger, I have always thought Tolkien’s Ents are just about the best thing Middle-Earth has to offer, hoom, hoom. I am one of the few people who thought the Two Towers film could have been vastly improved with a few more hours of Entmoot-musings from Treebead and his companions. I grew up on an acre of land that was almost entirely covered with tall pines, and spent much of my youth wandering through the woods down the road.

But what I saw that day, and this, was not simply the generic human-ness of trunks and boughs. These trees, it seemed, were doing something quite specific – stretching out their bare branches to the grey skies, crying out to God for the renewal of Spring, calling out for their own annual resurrection.

In the bleak mid-winter, on the cusp of Christmas, in the bareness and brokenness of our own lives, may we go and do likewise.

A Stroll Along a Raging River

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

Harsh words for a gentle, country Scottish pastor, but here they are:

The pastor is called to feed the sheep, even if the sheep do not want to be fed. He is certainly not to become an entertainer of goats. Let goats entertain goats, and let them do it out in goatland. You will certainly not turn goats into sheep by pandering to their goatishness.

Amazing words with a surprising sting to them.

Surprising, indeed! I began reading William Still’s book, The Work of the Pastor, with the idea that I would be taking a leisurely stroll along side of a placid Scottish pond and found myself most often knee deep, fighting a raging river. This faithful country preacher who ‘pastured’ in the same small parish at Gilcomston South Church of Scotland for over fifty years packs quite a punch in his understanding of what it means to be a pastor.

To read what Still places at the very center of what it means to be a pastor seems at first obvious. Obvious, until you realize he really means it. He insists, the Word of God fully and exclusively defines the role of the pastor. Not only does it shape the preaching and teaching ministries of a pastor as one would expect, but the simple power of the Word is meant to spill out into the life of a pastor as he or she walks through his or her community, the way he or she goes about the mundane management of church life, the way pastoral care is distributed to the flock. Allow me to have him speak for himself again:

"To be true pastors, your whole life must be spent in knowing the truth of this Word, not only verbally, propositionally, theologically, but religiously, that is, devotionally, morally, in worshipping Him whom it reveals, and in personal obedience to Him whose commands it contains…”

Everything in a pastor’s life should be laced with the Word.

One of the implications of this radical commitment to the Word in ministry is that Still would suggest that many of the ministry tools we have grown to view as important for doing our job as pastors not only are not essential but actually compete with the Word for our attention and the attention of our flock. Unintentionally, perhaps, our over-dependence on church programs has become a cheap substitute for the power of the Word, entertainment most often has become a substitute for fellowship in the Word, and in the case of his words at the beginning of this blog, cheep gimmicks intended to attract unbelievers are more evidence of our lack of confidence in the power of the Word than of our well-intended concerns for the lost.

I recommend you take a stroll along this raging river of a book. It is well worth the risk.

In Praise of Pastors

By Jeffrey Arthurs
Professor of Preaching & Communication and Dean of the Chapel

I value pastors. You should too. And if you are a pastor, please feel valued and receive my encouragement: You folks are the soldiers on the front line, and we professors are the support troops who live in an ivory tower (interesting mixed metaphor); you are the practitioners, while we generate theory; you are the communicators, disciplers, evangelists, and leaders, and we are your assistants. I consider your work more important than mine. By this I do not mean to denigrate my work or fly my Eyore flag; but I do think that you are the Church’s heroes. I’ve been on both sides of the fence as a pastor and professor, and what you do is harder than what I do. I admire you. Please stay true to the Lord so that you embody the life-changing and heart-wooing power of the gospel. And let us know how we can help. You might have to shout loud up the battlements of the Ivory Tower, but we’re here and many of us are listening.

Zephyrs Wanted

By Jeff Arthurs
Professor of Preaching & Communication and Dean of the Chapel

I teach preaching, and sometimes I get tired of my own teaching. I get tired of the constant emphasis in my classes on rhetorical skill. Somehow that emphasis seems to crowd out deeper, loftier, or more pressing issues like theology and spirituality. Don’t get me wrong, all of us could use a heapin’ helpin’ of rhetorical training (boring sermons are so . . . boring, and confusing sermons are so . . . boring), but I often like to breathe the fresh air of pastoral theology. Like this:
“Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they keep watch over your souls as those who will give an account (Hebrews 13:17a, NASB).

Preachers are soul-watchers. Is that how you think of preaching—as keeping watch over souls? When we preach, we should “look at” souls (as when we watch the sunset), “tend” souls (as when we watch the fire), and “guard” souls (as when we stand on watch through the night). That last nuance is closest to Hebrews 13:17 because it says we are to “keep watch,” attentively guarding our dear congregation. In the context of the book of Hebrews the idea is that pastors are responsible to help believers keep believing. Our preaching should help them not slip back and turn from the Faith. Pastoring is serious business! Notice also that the verse says we will have to give an account of how well we did this. Real serious business!

That’s clean air for my lungs. Do you have any ideas for how I can incorporate more clean air in my teaching? Remember that I have only ten 3 hour sessions (and that those sessions are really 2.5 hours); remember that homiletics is a performance class (student sermons take up half of the ten sessions); remember that students really do need help with rhetoric (boring sermons are so boring); and remember that my training is in rhetoric (I think God has positioned me in the Church to be of service in that area). But I still need a breath of fresh air. I think my students do too. Please post your zephyrs to this blog.