Why Seminary? – Reflection from Dr. David Barker
March 27, 2025
Why seminary? Why is seminary education important for the church in our times? Here are some thoughts from over fifty years of deep involvement in this calling both as a student and a professor.
First, the church stands at the heart of God’s redemptive program today. Paul tells us that the church is “the community of the living God” and “the pillar and foundation of the truth” (1 Tim 3:15). Seminaries are intentionally designed to prepare pastors and leaders for the church, so we need seminaries simply for this reason. In my view, this is sufficient to answer the question.
However, we can go further. Second, seminary is a place where the rigorous disciplines of languages, Bible, theology, exegesis, oral and written communication, history, apologetics, preaching, theology of ministry, and more, are studied and learned. Our congregations are well educated and expect their pastoral leaders and preachers to be informed and competent in the disciplines of their calling.
This is not to go counter to Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 1:26-29 (“Not many . . .”). Paul himself was well-educated, and there is no sign of incompetence in any of the writings or ministries of the apostles and prophets in Scripture.
And so, a seminary has gathered uniquely highly trained people in these disciplines in a central locale so as to serve a constituency of churches and denominations who look for the kind of people needed to serve their churches. The Association of Theological Schools, the primary accrediting agency for seminaries such as ours, asks three questions of seminary graduates: (1) Do they truly love God?, (2) Do they relate with care and integrity with human beings?, and (3) Do they have the knowledge and skills that the job requires?
Heritage Seminary works hard at answering all three of those questions with “yes.”
Third, the mixing and mingling with teachers and fellow students allows us all to be exposed to thinking and practices both inside and outside our traditional experiences. We rub shoulders with people from different church and theological backgrounds, and it provides an opportunity to broaden our thinking. But, as well, it allows profs and students to solidify thinking and approaches to the Christian faith that we may already have in place as we interact with questions and challenges that diverse traditions bring to the classroom and hallway conversations.
Fourth, seminaries are all about integrating learning, being, and doing. We work hard at not creating a dichotomy between the academic and devotional. One of my favourite lines to use is, “Every time you crack the Book, you’re face to face with God.” Seminary is not just a graduate school of theological studies. It is preparation for a powerful and dangerous spiritual task, mission, and ministry like nothing else in the world. It is about the gospel—the gospel of Jesus Christ, the gospel of the kingdom of God. Eugene Peterson talks about the highest good a human being can experience is the convergence of the knowledge of God and prayer. The seminary is place where piety, faith, and a disciplined mindcome together in such a convergence.
Finally, seminary is the place of the interplay of pressures placed on the church from contemporary culture with rigorous biblical and theological direction. On the one hand, the church speaks into the seminary from its place on the front lines of the mission of Christ’s kingdom. This is a voice the seminary needs to hear.
On the other hand, the seminary speaks into the life of the church from both practical experience—all our professors have served in the church as pastors, elders, and leaders—and theological attention. As Stan Fowler regularly said, “We are theologians in service of the church” (cf. A Theologian in Service of the Church: The Collected Writings of Stanley K. Fowler, available in the Heritage bookstore). This is a voice churches need to hear.
Hence, I would argue that a rigorous seminary education is as much needed now than it ever has been needed, as it speaks into, and hears from, a church that is facing a more and more complicated culture of both church and world. More than ever, we need thoughtful and well-prepared servant-shepherds and leaders to lead and guide our churches, denominations, mission agencies, and para-church organizations in our times. The mission of Heritage Seminary is to do exactly this.
Now, I will say this: seminaries are called to engage the twenty-first century church and world. This demands a commitment to the core of what seminaries have always been about, along with embracing the new realities of the nature of the seminary student, multiple delivery modes of both classroom content and praxis training, the use of technology, and the “right now” intense ministry issues that face us as God’s people. This necessitates wisdom in knowing how to engage the present culture of education and learning along with ensuring that we retain the above stated commitments without chasing the latest fads and forms with their limited shelf-lives.
And so, yes, in my journey with Heritage Theological Seminary for all these years, I take great joy in seeing that our seminary captures all these ideas, and more. Further, as I think about our seminary, the following five things come to mind:
- We have a high commitment to the authority of the sacred Scriptures, along with a solid doctrinal statement which anchors our position as a conservative evangelical seminary.
- We have clear statements of mission and philosophy of education, along with a hermeneutical position statement, that serve as the guiding documents that shape how we do our work here.
- We have a resident and adjunct faculty that are drawn from our primary constituencies, and that stand in complete solidarity with the churches we serve.
- We work very hard at providing the highest quality education that we can. We are accredited by both the Association of Biblical Higher Education and the Association of Theological Schools. Annually we review our programs and modalities to seek to do the best we can with the resources we possess, including a state-of-the-art building.
- We are committed to serving the church. Our MDiv and MTS degrees, along with the various diplomas and graduate certificates, and in concert with a robust internship program, are designed to do as much as we can with the students that enter our doors (we can only work with the students that churches send to us; we don’t “manufacture” students) to prepare them to do the work of their callings and affirmations by their churches.
So, from someone who has been around the seminary world for over half a century, and hopefully with some wisdom gained over those years, these are some of my thoughts in answering the question, “Why seminary?”
David G. Barker (Th.D.)
Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies
Heritage College and Seminary
