As the situation currently stands, no believer in our people group of five million can attend seminary in their own language. No, seminary is not a prerequisite for faithful ministry, but the formal study of theology in an academic setting has often proved to be an incredible blessing for pastors and their churches. I sometimes wish I had a marketplace degree, but I have also seen how my bachelor’s and master’s in theological studies have borne hundredfold fruit in the different ministry settings I’ve ended up in.
However, in our corner of Central Asia, there’s also a practical need. The government won’t allow a church to be legally registered unless it has an indigenous pastor who has a master’s degree in theology. This requirement seems to be partly just making things difficult for non-Muslims, and partly a reflection of the culture’s high valuing of training, experts, and certificates.
In our context, we believe that if there is a path toward legality, then the honorable and Christian thing is to pursue it. And this is our long-term goal. Yet knowing that we need to obey God and not man, we have proceeded with starting undocumented churches anyway, even as we pray and scheme of how to someday meet these high requirements. Some of the churches that have been started are able to temporarily come underneath the legal covering of the small number of churches that are registered. Our church plant did this after being raided by the security police a number of years ago. But in a patron-client culture, this sort of relationship can often come with strings attached.
Even worse, some churches get around this legal requirement on their paperwork by claiming as their pastor one the handful of locals who in years past attended seminary in another country – although these freelance “pastors” no longer attend any local church and they lead questionable lives. These men know the power they exert over the churches they have these made deals with. It’s a dynamic ripe for extortion.
We believe that only men who are qualified and faithful according to passages like 1st Timothy 3 and Titus 1 should be pastors, regardless of seminary training. We believe that we should pursue legally registered churches. Yet the government requires seminary. Yet there is no seminary available in the language of local believers. You can see the bind.
The path forward for the long-term is to work to see a crop of believing men armed with master’s degrees, some of whom will be biblically qualified to be pastors. Toward this end, our first two local believers have started online programs, albeit only because they are fluent in other languages and were provided scholarships. Frank* has been involved in Southeastern seminary for a couple years now, taking classes in their Persian-language track. Alan* recently started taking online classes in English at SBTS. But few local believers know another language at the level required for theological training, which brings its own advanced collection of terminology and writing requirements.
Could non-residential theological training be set up with groups like Reaching & Teaching or Training Leaders International? Someday, yes, but currently we don’t have the minimum number of local pastors required to qualify as a site for these ministries. Eventually, partnering with these groups may be an answer to our need for this kind of training. But in our situation we need seminary training that will help raise up pastors, not just training for pastors who already exist.
“But seminaries aren’t reproducible,” says mainstream missiology. To that I would simply say there are thousands of them, all over the world. They are clearly reproducible, perhaps not according to someone’s arbitrary or preferred timeline, but reproducible nonetheless. Previous generations built these institutions all over the place. We, having reaped the benefits, now claim they are not really worth building.
Given these realities, I’d like to put out a call to start new seminaries in strategic unreached cities. Recent online conversations have highlighted that far more aspiring professors with PhD’s exist than there are open seminary positions. My costly request is that some of these men take the incredible training they have received and use it to start new seminaries overseas. Yes, starting a seminary in a foreign city will be much harder than plugging into a job in pre-existing school (itself still very hard work). But, in the West we have a backlog of potential professors. And in much of the rest of the world we have a theological famine.
To highlight our specific context, our people group has a hub city which would provide easy geographic access to students from the surrounding areas. This city even has enough freedom whereby an evangelical seminary could be established legally. Initially, there could be three tracks: one for classes offered in English and two for classes translated into the main languages of the regions. Some professors could then learn the local languages and eventually teach in them. After a few years, gifted local graduates could also be ready to teach. This city also has a healthy international church and a new MK school, so families of professors would even have believing expat community available. Starting a seminary in a city like this is far from impossible. But we lack the PhD’s, the funding, and most important – the men willing to take the risk.
It would take a unique individual to head something like this up, someone who is not only a gifted academic, but who is also a starter and administrator – and potentially also good at learning languages. Or, this could be pulled off by a team of professors where these gifts are distributed among them. My alma mater, SBTS, was founded by a team of only four professors. The first year they only had 26 students.
If you have a holy ambition to teach in a seminary context, have you considered doing so among the nations? You could found a seminary in a place today considered unreached that plays a pivotal role in raising up hundreds or thousands of trained pastors, scholars, and missionaries – some of whom might someday bring the gospel back to your homeland.
If this post stirs something in any of you out there, then I would love to hear from you. Let’s start the initial conversations that could one day give birth to new seminaries among the unreached.
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*Names changed for security
Photos are from Unsplash.com
Entrusted to the Dirt 