From The Towers:
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary has reached an all-time high in enrollment and is continuing to draw scores of ministers desiring to prepare for ministry in the local church, President R. Albert Mohler Jr. told trustees at the annual spring meeting Tuesday.
Seminary enrollment this semester grew to more than 4,200 students, Mohler said, the vast majority of whom are preparing to serve as pastors of local Southern Baptist churches. Enrollment has doubled since 1995.
Mohler said the increased enrollment has come by God’s grace because the school has sought to attract students during a time when theological institutions in America are turning out “professional ministers” and not pastor-theologians. Many seminaries are going away from training pastors in the classical theological disciplines and, instead, are preparing them to meet the felt needs of a therapeutic culture, he said.
Read the whole thing. Praise God for the great things going on here at Southern! I’m proud to be one of the 4,200 students who rejects the professionalization of the pastorate and embraces the call to a God-centered life and ministry. May the reform and resurgence continue.
BTW, a couple of weeks ago I asked the question, “Why Southern Seminary?” over at Said At Southern. Check out the discussion.
It almost sounds like Dr. Mohler has been reading “Brothers, We Are Not Professionals.”
I thank God for bringing me to SBTS in these times. But I have to ask myself, “What measure of faithfulness will God require of us who have these advantages?”
Thanks for covering this.
Either that or No Place for Truth by David Wells. That book is the bomb!
Yeah, a good question that needs to be asked is, if we reject the pragmatic paradigm presented by culture and market, then how are we to measure what “success” is according to God? I recall, for instance, at last annual meeting in Greensboro where Johnny Hunt preached a message where a lot of ministers came away with the impression, “You are are not as successful because you are not like me.” As I mentioned a previuos article, Bobby Welch is pushing for more at all costs (“everything else is a distraction” language). And the ACP report becomes the “report card” as we size each other up over who has the most baptisms, budgets, buildings, etc. My good friend and mentor Jason pastored a church here in KY for three years in a community that had no more than 500 people in it. The regular attendence was no more than 40-50 on any given Sunday. Yet those people heard one of the most brilliant and gifted expositors around. Was he ministerially unsuccessful during those three years? Absolutely not.