Why Seminary Students Stink and Moving Past Being the Guru

"Seminary students are horrible preachers," I once heard Tim Keller say.

"And the reason is that we all prepare sermons based on the questions in our heads that we bring to the text or the issue that we've been asked to preach on. And seminary students are spending all their time asking one another questions that nobody else cares about.

It usually takes them a couple years to de-tox from the questions they've been thinking about in seminary before they start asking the questions that the people in their congregations are actually wrestling with."

I thought about this quote from Keller last week when a staff that I'm supervising passed on a question from one of his students. This student had read an article either for a class or just randomly on the internet that was arguing that the Old Testament names for God shift dramatically after the Abram/Abraham story and therefore all the rest of the OT (and NT for that matter) was corrupt.

So the question this student had was, "are we actually worshiping God or something else when we read and respond to the God of the Bible?"

This is a classic college student question. The type of stuff that I love to talk about--and the type of question/issue that very few of you in cube world or chasing down kids has the time or interest to care about.

But the questions I'm wrestling with as an Area Director in my new position one-step removed from students are very different from this question of who Abraham's God was.

I spent all last week helping my staff wrestle with issues of funding and budget shortfalls. The economy is doing a number on most all of them--please support your local staff worker!

The questions here are much more subtle. And God is rarely articulated directly in relation to them. When we're talking about issues of fund raising and having to take time off campus to do it and whether or not take a raise that is needed, it stirs up all kinds of angst about policies and procedures and strategies for how to raise the funds required to make a live-able wage.

And I'm beginning to recognize that these types of issues, which are much more akin to the types of issues that many of you who aren't students face, require a different approach. Rather than being the guru on the hill who delights to field questions about the validity of God, I must be the one who asks the questions.

"How does God relate to this? Where is God at work here? What does it mean to trust him? What does it look like to do this work in faith, hope, and love instead of fear, guilt or anxiety? If the gospel matters, it must matter here--how might the gospel be applied to this situation?"

It takes a different type of energy and a different approach to be the one to interject the God-questions rather than to be the one who receives and processes the God questions.

This isn't completely foreign to me. Obviously with students there were lots of times when I had to ask them to consider an issue they were facing in light of the gospel.

But I'm learning how to work it out in a different context, with different types of issues, and with people who are beyond the 18-22 window. And that's been a good challenge that applies more directly to my own life stage and the life stage of my friends. Hopefully it will make me a better blogger!

But I must confess that I do miss the occasional, very random question about Hebrew names for God in the post-Abrahamic Scriptures.