Monday, March 5, 2012

Pastors or Scholars?

When I was accepted to Covenant Seminary, I wasn't quite sure what to expect.  I had been told by many people that it was a great school.  Every Covenant graduate that I met was extremely happy about the time they spent here.  When my wife and I visited the seminary, we came away very impressed.  Instead of "selling" the school during our admissions interview we were advised to confirm our calling to ministry before we decided to come.  In spite of these great endorsements, however, one never is quite sure if a move halfway across the country is really ever a great idea.  I have been here for about six months, and the question "was it worth it?" has been met by an emphatic, "YES!"  I am quite sure that God led me to the right seminary.


There are plenty of seminaries that will give you a good education.  Covenant is no exception.  A quick browse through the faculty shows degrees from Harvard, Princeton, Cambridge, and so forth.  This is not exceptional.   Our professors write articles for journals, have books published, and speak at conferences.  In class we interact with the thoughts and writings of important Christian thinkers and ideas.  We talk about accusativus cum infinitivo in Greek, about Schleiermacher in systematic theology, about critical realism and speech-act theory in our hermeneutics class, and about Aristotle's "On Rhetoric" in homiletics.  All seminaries do these things.  With all of this academic rigor in any seminary curriculum, it is little wonder that many people jokingly call seminary a cemetery.  In fact, Google returned 3.7million hits in 0.36 seconds for the phrase "seminary cemetery."


This, though, is far from the case here at Covenant.  While Dr. Bayer did strongly hint at the existence of a cemetery on campus for students who died learning Greek (a situation that he made sound quite common), Covenant has been a place where one not only grows in knowledge, but in love and faith as well.  At our orientation we were told that the seminary's pedagogical goal was not to put facts in our heads (though they certainly do), but to make us closer to Jesus.  One imagines that many seminaries say this, but here, they mean it.  


Every class in every course is designed to help us not only know about God, but to show us why and how to love Him.  Our professors demonstrate this love of God everyday.  They preach the Gospel to us and show us how to help others understand it.  This is not just something they know in the abstract, it is something they believe and trust in.  Just this past week three professors in different classes were brought to the point of tears when talking about the beauty of the Gospel.  It is real and it is powerful.


The Gospel should change us.  It should change how we view God, of course, but also impact how we love other Christians, our neighbor, and the creation.  Here, at Covenant, one catches a glimpse of what lives transformed by the Gospel really look like in an educational setting.  Here is a community where the Gospel is the center and the effects are pervasive.  I am very thankful that I was led to this place, and I pray that my life will exemplify the change wrought in me by the Gospel.  If it is reflected in me even half as powerfully as it is reflected in my professors then the seminary will have met it's goal: producing people who love Jesus more.


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