Letters to a New Pastor: They Didn’t Teach Me That in Seminary

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It’s been a couple of years since I wrote regularly. I wish I had a profound reason for losing touch with this discipline that I once felt like helped define my calling.

But, alas, I’ve got a series of excuses instead: Too much pastoral work in my church

A global pandemic and life becoming upended for two full yearsNagging insecurity that my voice is little more than an out of tune piccolo in the symphony of online voices who write about important things

After almost 13 years as a full-time pastor, I’m learning many things — not the least of which is that there are so many things we all need to learn and it literally takes a lifetime to come close to learning them all. So I don’t want to make promises about my blog or my writing discipline making a grand comeback. But I do want to begin a journey of processing some of these lessons it’s taken me over a decade to even begin to try to learn.

This series is dedicated to the new pastors, many of whom might be fresh out of seminary, who are looking for answers. I don’t promise to have them, but I hope this series can join you in your journey of exploration…

They Didn’t Teach Me That in Seminary!

“They didn’t teach me _______ in seminary” is one of the most common phrases I hear pastors say. Usually this saying follows some revelation that the pastor is expected to know how to do things like fix a toilet, fill out paperwork for a grant, or know how to connect a homeless person with resources. In all of those hours and seemingly endless reams of papers we were expected to write, it seems some of the more practical lessons of ministry were lost.

“In all of my hours of systematic theology I never once learned how to come up with an interesting children’s sermon!”“I wrote hundreds of pages in Old and New Testament and it would have been nice to learn how talk to talk to our youth about struggling with anxiety and peer pressure!”“I took multiple courses on Methodist theology and no one ever told me how to navigate denominational division along the way!”

Sure, seminary didn’t teach you:

  • Being your church’s sexton
  • How to set up Quickbooks
  • Ins and outs on how to negotiate contract services to care for aging buildings.

It didn’t teach you how to formulate and orchestrate a massive building campaign.

And it didn’t teach you that sometimes you’re going to be the one who cleans up vomit on your front steps the morning after someone has a little too much to drink and decides the church steps is as good a place as any to exorcise those demons.

But here’s the thing…and it’s a big thing some pastors and leaders will probably take issue with me over…seminary is NOT the place to learn a lot of those practical lessons. In fact, as much as we want to say that “seminary is where pastors go to be trained” we should also tell the cold, hard, truth that expecting to fully outsource the training of pastors to seminary is a pretty lazy way expect pastors to be trained.

What Seminary Can Teach You

Here’s a few things seminary CAN do to train pastors:

  • How to think theologically about life and the church
  • Basics about how to construct a sermon that seeks to be faithful to a biblical text and prioritize the needs of those who hear it
  • Many of the broad, but vitally important, lessons about care such as: Just be present; Don’t try to say too much; Learn healthy boundaries; and Remember you are not God

And, newly minted pastor, those lessons might not seem like enough to carry you through the most frustrating days of ministry. But, I promise, those lessons and God’s grace will be up to the task even you don’t think you are.

To expect a seminary to form fully trained pastors by the moment of graduation misunderstands both the role of seminary and the role that life-long learning should play in the vocational life of a pastor. As much as we think school can/should teach all things we need to know as pastors, there are some tough lessons that we simply cannot know until we are out of school and eyeball deep in church budgets, visitation lists, and building maintenance needs.

Conclusion…sort of

So, you’re right. They probably didn’t teach you this or that seminary — especially if it’s a lesson of the practical nature only life and experience can teach. Instead seminary taught you how to think critically and theologically; how to go find answers when they don’t easily present themselves; how to ask for help when you need it; and they taught you how to embrace the role of becoming a leader who isn’t afraid to make life-long learning an ongoing part of your vocational journey.

The rest of the lessons? Well, you’re probably going to need to buckle up, find a good mentor in ministry, put your listening ears on, and be open to learn as you go — which, if you’re lucky, will make for some wonderful stories and relationships you build as you slowly become the pastor God calls you to be.

The Rev. Ben Gosden serves as Lead Pastor at historic Trinity Church in downtown Savannah, GA. Trinity Church is known as the “Mother Church of Methodism” in Savannah with historic roots all the way back to John Wesley’s days in Savannah. This post is republished with permission from his blog, Covered in the Master’s Dust.