My Concern About Bible College

Someone today (and over the holidays) asked me what I would say to Bible college leaders if I had a few minutes to talk to them about trends and what I thought they should do in the future.

That conversation brought something that I wrote a couple years ago, and I decided to pull it up and post it here. 

About 2.5 years ago, I was on my Twitter account, and in a moment of frustration, tweeted this: 

"I have to say this: I am not as pro-Bible-College as I used to be. *ducks behind desk*" 

This started a Facebook comment firestorm that could be seen from 3 states away, and possibly from outer space. :-)  I will try to explain what I meant... here's my post from back then: 

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Perhaps a word of explanation about the journey I've been on for the past 3 years. About 4 years into my pastoring career, God began to really break some things in me, and do some serious remodeling in my heart. I am grateful for the progress I've made in my own relationship with the Lord in recent years, and I've continued to grow in my understanding of theology, the Bible, preaching, and practical ministry.

I consider myself a part of the Conservative Holiness Movement (referred to sometimes as the CHM.)  My greatest concern for the Conservative Holiness Movement theologically is in the area of Ecclesiology -- the study of the nature of the Church. Ecclesiology is where one deals with local church issues, including membership, leadership, pastors, church discipline, and more. I became convicted because my church did not look, run, or conquer like the one I read about in the Scriptures (it still doesn't, but we're working on that!). In the course of study, I discovered the concept of elders (pastors), which I had somehow missed in the first phases of my education. I became aware that not a single church in the NT had only one elder/pastor, yet almost every church I knew about only had one pastor. God crushed me that I was not raising up leaders to serve as elders, to teach the people. I was hogging the work of the ministry, the responsibilities of pastoral leadership, instead of raising up men to take them.

I share this because much of what I am saying will not make sense at all if you have not thought deeply and biblically about the topic of eldership in the local church, (link to a short, excellent booklet on the topic) particularly the concept of multiple elders (pastors) in a local church. If you are responsible for raising up that many men to lead, the question immediately arises, "Where are they going to come from?" The answer is that some of them are necessarily going to be men who are saved in your local church! There are no other viable options. In that case, it is important that they be trained theologically and ministerially. How to do that? Suddenly, the question "Does Bible college make any sense for the men being saved in my local church?" becomes a question of paramount importance!

My frustration with the way I had always thought grew gradually stronger, until while reading an article on seminaries, my frustration boiled over into the tweet referenced above.

So, having briefly stated the journey that leads me to my current frustration... let me address the problem.

I'm a hopeless local-church guy. I sincerely believe that "The local church is the hope of the world, and the future of that hope rests in the hands of its leaders." (Bill Hybels) My comments here will be focused toward the training of Christian pastors (I will often refer to them as elders in writing). I here mean no disrespect to Christian teachers, secretaries, underwater basket weavers, and other noble professions trained at a Christian college.

I am also aware of the many arguments that could be leveraged against what I am about to say: 

What we have is working... 

anything else is unrealistic... 

you had a bad experience (I didn't)... 

community college is worse... etc. 

I haven't time or space to dispute these things. I will simply ignore them.

I wish to stress that I am not anti-Bible college, and absolutely not anti-higher education. Today, as I write, a teen from my church left (the 3rd since I moved here) to go to Bible college. This summer, two Bible college groups did services at my church, and I would have had more if scheduling conflicts hadn't prevented. I also greatly appreciate the role Bible college played in my life & my wife's.My family, for 3 generations, has been deeply involved in Bible college work. Members of my family have attended, worked, or taught at all 5 of our major CHM Bible colleges (AWC, HSBC, GBS, PVBI, & UBC). Both grandfathers invested years of their life into holiness Bible colleges. My brother leaves within 24 hours of this writing to go to UBC for his education. My family has been so involved, in fact, that I have done almost no talking to anyone in my family about this topic, for fear of being misunderstood! 

I am not as pro-bible college as I once was, because:

In the current system of Bible College, I fear that:

1. Great focus on academic knowledge in an inexperienced young man feeds pride.

I have said that I spent 5 years in Bible college and 5 years in recovery. The main reason was pride in my own heart. But Bible college, because of its very nature, did little to challenge my pride, and much to feed it with "I know what is wrong with our movement" thinking. This has little or nothing to do with the content I was taught there (many ideas which I still espouse). The truth of the content has no relation to the pride it produces. "Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up." (1 Corinthians 8:1)

Learning in practice keeps an incredible tension on what you don't know, resulting in greater humility. Learning in theory has a tremendous danger of pride. There may be opportunities to preach from time to time, or regularly in Bible college. Yet these opportunities are at best a test tube environment, where one does not have to deal with a church board, lead financially, deal with a subpar building, and a thousand other things that serve as a preventive to pride in actual ministry.

I would be willing to chalk this up to my own experience and struggle with arrogant pride... if I hadn't observed the same in other young men.

Pride flows directly into the second problem. I fear that:

2. We are doing little to help a young person learn to submit to their local elders/pastors.

The Bible reiterates in several places (1 Pet. 5:5-6, Heb. 13:17, 1 Cor. 16:15-16) that people are to be submissive to their elders (local church pastors).

Young men are some of the most naturally arrogant and prideful creatures in the world. Peter hammers young men and commands them to be subject to their elders (in context it's pastors, not aged) in 1 Peter 5, telling them that if they humble themselves under God's mighty hand, in due time, God will raise them up. Then he tells them in the meantime to "cast all their care on Him." (1 Pet. 5:7) There is little straight talk like this to young men at Bible college, at least in my experience.

Would it not be better if these young men were to serve and learn primarily under their local team of elders, gaining wisdom while practicing humility? By circumventing this process, we inadvertently short-circuit the whole concept of Christian community!

Instead, we send young men & women away for a season, where they learn that there is another culture where they do things "right." At Bible college, they never sing "I'll Fly Away" for Sunday morning worship, and no one plays a banjo & accordion in the church band. Rather than view themselves as a missionary back to their local community & as a servant to their local church culture, they decide that their mission is to change their local church culture. It is difficult to submit to an elder whom you have concluded is backward or uninformed.

As for those who actually leave Bible college to go full time church leadership as elders themselves, exercising spiritual authority and headship in a local church, I will say... 

I fear that:

3. Too many Bible college students are not leaving.

My "evidence" here is entirely anecdotal, not statistical. Perhaps if I saw statistics over the last 10-20 years of how many graduates are actively serving in ministry in a local church, I would take this point back... but I doubt it. It may be only anecdotal, but it seems as though it is everyone's anecdote. I have never discussed this with a single person who hadn't noticed the high concentration of Bible college graduates who stick around the area where they graduated. It is not mere coincidence that most of the largest churches in our movement have a Bible college nearby. I do not resent this at all, (my dad pastors one) I merely make the observation.

The point of a Bible college should be to send graduates into local churches and minister there, and view that as their life's great work. But often, it is easy to become so enamored with the work of the Bible college, that one forgets the work of the churches further than 25 miles away – and boy, could we use the help!

The reasons that Bible college students are not leaving (at least the area) are many. All these may apply:

• Comfort in an area, near friends, loved ones, etc.
• Security in a job/other financial constraints (debt, etc.)
• Failure to locate & acquire a suitable spouse. :-)
• Insecurity about exposing oneself to the potential of failure.
• Desire to continue to fellowship with "smarter" people, like oneself.

This last factor mentioned leads me to my next point – I fear that:

4. We are creating another layer of Christian subculture.

Perhaps it was my own arrogance, but when I started pastoring, I was astounded at how few people appreciated the kind of excellence that Bible college had afforded me... They were unimpressed when I quoted a Greek verb, quoted Barth, or talked about Handel (let alone sang Handel!). The people that I talked to were more impressed with Mosie Lister (one group) and Soulja Boy (another group entirely.)

Understand: Bible college is a subculture. It has its own rules, influential people, initiation rites, social mores, homogenized localized living areas... and like all cultures, it has its idiosyncrasies and blind spots.

Rather than training Christianity to speak to the culture where one lives, shouldn't we be training our future elders in such a way that they can quickly translate theology through hands-on experience in a specific culture where they are called?

The local church is also a subculture. But by its very nature, the pool of talent from which to choose is (let's be honest) far inferior to that of a Bible college, where the best and brightest have gathered from around the country to study. The local church is far less "sexy" than a Bible college, where "they just get it."

Here's what it feels like: 

Where I go to college:

Where I go to preach when I graduate:

For a lot of guys, that's hard to swallow.  It made for some painful transitions for me.

Nothing against that college or that church. That's my alma mater, God's Bible School and College. Beautiful auditorium! That's really my church, & me in 2004.  I LOVE my church!

I'm just saying it's a hard transition.

Any sociologist will tell you that breaking out of a subculture is difficult. The people are like you – they have the same assumptions, experiences, and values you have. The people outside the subculture do not, and it involves a certain amount of pain to transition from one to the other. A subculture also propagates its own superiority over the other cultures available, strengthening loyalty to one's own group.  It can be very painful & frustrating to be a local church leader...usually, the people I am called to deal with have not read the books I have, heard the lectures I have, done heavy thinking that I have... yet they vote. :-)

In some of my conversations with Bible college students, the fear of all this is palpable. They are genuinely fearful that they are not ready... Not surprisingly.  They haven't observed a board meeting, promoted a ministry, brainstormed outreach on no budget. 

The Bible college subculture thus propagates itself... it is difficult to transfer out, for fear of failure and distaste for pain.

I also fear:

5. We are not training ministers like Christ and the early church trained them. 

OK, trivia: How does one become a pastor in the Conservative Holiness Movement? General answer – be born to a Christian family, saved as a young child, go to Bible college for 4-5 years, start pastoring. Rarely (there are a few exceptions) do you see a guy who got saved in his late 30s, left his business/job, took his wife and family across the country for several years and then went back to start pastoring. 

I don't like that answer. 

We need guys like that as elders, but we can't even staff the churches that we have. We can't even staff them with one pastor, let alone the biblical NT model of multiple elders who are "able to teach" (1 Tim 3, Tit. 1) and who "rule well." (1 Tim 5:17)

Now consider the statement "the system you have is perfectly designed to give you the results you are experiencing." (paraphrase Nelson Searcy)

Instead of training young men on the job, we have decided that the way to do it is to send them away, isolate them in a Christian subculture (claims of ministry focus notwithstanding) and fill their minds with lectures for four years.

By our very system, we have guaranteed that we will never train pastors fast enough. At the rate pastors leave the ministry, (and some pastors leave the Conservative Holiness Movement) the current system cannot replace them! We will not be able to sustain the churches we have, let alone plant new ones (and forget elder-teams in each church!)

Christ invited men along with Him. There was plenty of lecture – they listened to Him preach. But then, he sent them out by twos to do it themselves, complete with healing and power over demons. They returned, he gave them perspective on the experience, and ministry went on. They knew what it was to run from the crowds, to not have the answer for a deaf boy, to be unable to feed the hungry crowd. Talk about humbling! And Jesus had no problem with letting them fail in their ministry. 

Someone has observed that in every story in the second half of the Gospel of Mark, the disciples come out looking bad. But these experiences and failures were woven together by the Master Professor, producing men that were "unlearned," but ready and usable.

Solutions, anyone?

I hate it when people come to me with problems, and have no solutions. So, I feel compelled to offer suggestions – beware, I have few easy ones, most are staggeringly hard. (All institutions are hard to change anyway!) Some suggestions would actually be the death of the current Bible college system as we know it.

I'll add these solutions in a separate post in a couple days.  

In the meantime, have at me in the comments section.  What are YOUR ideas for solutions?

Just thinkin',

Darrell