So, why might it be that when we see potential in a young person to be a firey alive Christian in a dark world (where their demographic of young adults is varied in their belief systems and aparthided from the church) that we say, "You should go to Bible college?" Bible college? The place where you will spend 4 years apart from those who will have by that time likely made up thier mind on issues of ehtics and the worthwhileness of Christ? Bible college? The place where you can settle down nicely and simmer in passivity?
Does this make sence to you? Comment and be retaliatory if you want; it's ok.
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9 comments:
Yeah it seems...Well,
'Wow, you are amazingly passionate for God'
'Yeah, and through Christ I'm going to change the world.'
'Hold on there son, first we have to teach you a few things about bringing the word out to the world'
'But the disiples never had to...'
'Yes, but they lived in a different world back then. No one will take you seriously without this training'
'Well, okay. How long will this take?'
'Oh, about four years.'
This passionate young man enrolls in Bible College and learns all he needs to know about spread God's word. However, once his time is complete, he has aged and lost the endless depths of energy he had in his youth.
Don't get me wrong, I like bible college. I don't go there regularly, and might never, but whe I have been there, it seemed pretty solid. Being surrounded by good people is a great thing. This college is especially helpful if you wish to be a pastor. But, it really isn't the only way to go. As the old, overused saying goes, there's more than one way to skin a cat.
Who the deuce came up with that?
(apologies for the length of this conversation...)
I think that's a really great question - I wonder that myself. I feel like a lot of young people are pressured into going to bible college because it's the thing to to do - to get your certificate so you can be a christian now. Perhaps not always the case, but I struggle with that occurence myself. It's ok to live outside the box and just as honorable to go to uvic or camosun and pursue other fields of study or interest in different settings. To make anyone feel otherwise because they are not at bible college, is shameful. great ponderage!
Come on now Mike, I think the answer to this question is fairly obvious if you think about it for just a minute. I mean, we always talk about how the youth are our future -- we're talking about our best and brightest minds here; we wouldn't want to waste them on the real world now, would we? Just imagine what could happen -- they might see a movie with a vague reference to sex, or buddhism! And as we all know, seeking education at a secular institution is just a polite euphemism for backsliding.. after all, the last thing we'd want is Christians in the medical or law fields or something!
They'd all be much better off as out-of-work youth pastors with useless degrees!
In all seriousness though, it impresses me greatly to see a young adult / youth or whatever taking a serious look at just what sort of priorities the Church seems to place on their people's futures. That verse "In the world but not of the world" comes up a lot, except that the "in the world" part gets totally forgotten in the shuffle as we try our hardest to prevent our impressionable young people from accidental exposure to real non-believers!
There certainly is a calling for some people to be pastors, but even then, if God is calling you to do something like that, do you REALLY think you need someone at a college to give you certificate in ministry? The whole concept of ordination as we know it is a completely man-made concept anyway.. never saw anything like that in the gospels anywhere...
Here's my challenge to all the youth people getting ready to blow 4 years of their life and God-only-knows how much precious money on Bible college to learn how to be missionaries or something: Take all that money you'd be spending on tuition, and spend the next 4 years of you life feeding starving people in Africa with it and DARE God to make a missionary out of you even though you weren't "college trained" in the field!
Good thoughts, man, good thoughts.
many many thoughts here and I could take a long time to respond to it all, because I disagree with much of it. (If you are at all curious why, coffee sounds good to me).
What I would like to ask Michael is why does Bible College take you away from the world? My memory (and it is fuzzy sometimes) tells me that I had classes for a few hours each day and then lots of time to do as I please. Doesn't this leave a lot of time to get connected with the world?
Also when you say "we" generally are you referring to Christians as a whole, because that is not a fair statement. As a pastor myself I don't encourage people to go to Bible College to train to become a pastor or missionary unless that is their desire. IN the same way I don't encourage youth to go to college to become a teacher if that is not their desire. I think we need more Christians with law, education, philosophy, social work, etc degrees. I do however, encourage those that want to grow in their relationship with God to check out Omega (1 year discipleship and missions trip). IMO those who grow complacent at Bible College do so on their own accord, not because of the Bible College itself. If you are a fiery alive Christian shouldn't being fed the word of God daily build that fire even more?
Saint: Just wondering why it is a waste of time to go to Bible College? If God is calling someone to be a teacher or a doctor or anything else do they not need to get their degree? Why should it be different for pastors? There is a lot of things we do that aren't in the gospels, should we stop them too (i.e. church service, small groups, blogging :o)?
Some good thoughts on this but
I hit the wrong button. I was going to say but if you are in Bible College and losing the passion you once had do something to find it again. If you don't want to be a pastor or are not sure, then GET OUT and do what God has called you to do.
There's nothing wrong with wanting to learn more about God by going to Bible college, but the way it gets treated so often (and Drew - I certainly don't include you in this, as you've given me no reason to think you're like this) by so many youth pastors, and really the church in general, is that in order to be a "pastor" one needs to go to Bible College, because this is where people obviously go to get their pastor's training.
But my question here is WHY is this where people go to get pastor's training? There's no call whatosever for this in the Bible, so why anyone ever decided to invent Bible college to begin with is a little beyond me. The people that we traditionally look at in the Bible as models for what it means to be a minister of Christ never had anything but a call - God took care of the rest. If anything, there is a decidely negative slant put on the gaining of theoretical religious knowledge at the expense of real-life experience, and basically just getting into the trenches with everyone else.
And I don't necessarily think there is anything wrong with learning - but it is the expectation that in order to be a minister you HAVE to have that training, and that these institutions have established themselves as the oridinators, if you will.
The other part that I find very concerning is the price tag one has to consider for this kind of school. For someone to spend $10,000 learning how to be a missionary is a ridiculous waste of money that could have been spent on actual mission work, on people who need food, clothing, shelter. You don't need a college education for that.
Or it might have gone towards an education that could actually prove gainful and productive in the job marketplace, and in so-doing actually prepare young people to face a world that really doesn't care how much formal education you have on the Bible. And I know the argument could be made "Well we don't go to Bible College for the sake of the world".. but actually yes, we do. Or we should anyway, they are the ones we are here to minister to, after all. And it just doesn't need its ministers to be Bible college graduates, it needs them to be its friends.
I guess it goes back to my general rejection of institutionalized Christianity in general too. The existance, or let's say the reliance on Bible Colleges is a symptom of a short-sighted church box that is too full of human-established rules and tradition and short on actual Biblical, Christ-modeled faith.
I guess I wonder: If there were no Bible colleges for one to go to, how many of today's pastors would still have become pastors, anyway?
And in answer to your question, Drew, actually yes, I do think we would be better off doing away with Church services and programs, at least the way that we know them today. From what I read in the Bible, the vast majority of what goes on in the average church service contradicts a lot of what Christ was trying to accomplish and gets in the way more than anything else.
We spend so much time DOING Church that we've forgotten what it means to BE the church.
(*Disclaimer: The above section of ranting and/or raving is entirely my own opinion as is open to -- and encouraging of -- healthy, adult debate on the subjects discussed. If I've said something controversial, or that challenges your personal stance / values/ beliefs - good! Let's talk about it!
Saint:
Nice disclaimer. In the context of North American "institutionalized" Christianity, it is necessary to become a recognized pastor (the spiritual leader or leaders) of a church. Whether this is biblical or not doesn't change the reality.
A couple things about training. Bible College (as we know it today) is a cultural and time-bound product of the world of modernity; thus it may change as we leave modernism. Back in the days of Jesus and Paul and the early church they had their equivalents to Bible College. To be a Rabbi Jesus would have had to done schooling. Paul was a Pharasee and would have been trained in the intepretation of the Bible (the Law and prophets, etc). It is true that the disciples didn't have "Bible College" training, but they spent 3 years with Jesus which was the equivalent to our Bible College training today. Rabbis would take students to mentor and these students would live and breath the teachings of the Rabbi for years until they were of age to become Rabbi's themselves.
I understand your frustration with "Instituationalized" Christianity, but that is what we have, so isn't it better to work with that so that we can change it from the inside out. And that includes Bible College. Bible College is TOO expensive and pastors don't get paid enough (this in no way reflects my situation, but is a generalized statement) and as a consequence come out of Bible College severely in debt and have a hard time paying it off. I would love to see a system that is more of an apprentice style like the trades have.
So let me be clear because the above might be garbled: To be a PASTOR in today's world, Bible College is part of the equation. NOT everyone is called to be a pastor. Nor do you have to be a pastor to be a minister. Everyone is called to be a minister of the gospel but in there own way. So if you feel called to be a minister of the gospel through writing, then get training in that area. If you are called to be a minister through medicine then get training in that area.
I realize this could get very long so I will stop and Saint, let's do coffee. It's easier one on one anyway.
Blessings,
Andrew
Coffee sounds cool - we have good conversations you and I. And I hope that none of this is coming across as attacking your personal position (as a pastor, etc), because that is certainly not my intent. I certainly don't blame pastors for the system they operate under, it's more of a general frustration at the system, itself, one which I know will probably never change. Kind of like politics.
You make a good point about the "training" that existed back in old days, although it seems to me a very different way of doing things than what we have now - although the disciples, etc, were being mentored under Jesus for 3 years, it was, as you say, more of an apprenticeship, where they learned as they did.
A system like that would be a much better way. Although I still have to ask questions about the basic definition of pastorship to begin with. I don't think the problem lies solely with the way in which a person becomes a pastor, but in what a pastor, biblically, is meant to be.
I'm not sure at what point this occurred, but somewhere down the line we have completely brutalized the five-fold ministry established by the early church, where everyone was called to be a teacher, prophet, evangelist, pastor, or apostle. For some reason the role of prophets and apostles have been relegated to "lay-person", while teacher and evangelist have been combined to make "pastors". Even the meaning of the word pastor in the bible has been completely bastardized, and what pastors are compelled to do now is more of the teacher or evangelist role (although 'evangelism' as we know it today is a joke), and the actual role of a pastor (or shepherd, as the word actually means, aka somebody who walks beside his flock on a day-to-day basis) is virtually non-existant.
My frustration is more out of a sense that there is SO MUCH MORE we should be getting out the Christian life, that we miss because we don't want to see it. Anyway.. my previous disclaimer still applies :)
I'm going to try and condense/ input my reflections and thoughts in here in response.
Somone mentioned that there were problems with institutionalized church (which I agree with). It must be changed from the inside out. Yes, I can see that Revolution needs to be a one of peace so as not to negate its purpose.
I am a fan of the revolution ideals. And it's probably for this reason that I see so many things I don't like about Bible college. Others who are in the same boat as me have taken on Bible college's system (which aims at putting one in the institutionalized church setting) in a hope to learn how to reinvent the way we do church. Needless to say, they hit walls frequently.
Does bible college need to be reinvented then? Perhaps we need to see things differently. I've already admitted that I'm not here to be in the institutionalized setting. Therefore, if i don't like it then its my own fault (To his additional credit, The Drew warned me to such before my departure). But as to changing things from the inside out...
I've heard this concept of an apprenticeship deal before- along with it's pros and cons. (although I see more pros than cons.)
Saint said:
"My frustration is more out of a sense that there is SO MUCH MORE we should be getting out the Christian life..."
This has been my frustration as well. There's something that says that college here doesn't reflect life like its supposed to be.
So what am i going to do? Quit? Yes and No. I won't reveal my plans out front now (who knows what can change anyways), but I will say this.
It's got to be all or nothing. I've got to be here- challenging what I don't believe in, changing what I see problems with, living the life I've felt neglect of and living with my heels dug actively into the ground. Or else I've got to drop it altogether, because theres no point otherwise.
The recognition I've come to make is that I AM PART OF THE PROBLEM. I cannot beef without blaming myself. ( When did I stop thinking that God wants leaders? )
I relate with the comment about bible college being your "ticket to be a Christian".
Bible college is clearly not the only way to go, and doesn't necessarily make us any more or less spiritual.
On a practical note. It's true that there is free time for getting into the world. But it's easy to become unbalanced. i.e. lack of car and "ministries" take place within church-ish contexts.
But given, who's fault is that?
(Note: John 17:15-18)
I see some ways that bible college is biblical and many ways that it's not. But what is biblical? Is it replicating biblical cultural practices or lasting principles?
Good conversation. Thanks.
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