The church member has little if any direct contact with theological seminaries. Nevertheless, graduate theological education has played—and will continue to play—a central role in the vitality of the church. Seminaries provide pastoral leaders with a firm grounding in Bible knowledge and orthodox theology. They help to develop pastors' skills in preaching and leadership. Especially in recent years, seminaries have focused on spiritual formation in order to develop the spiritual maturity required to be shepherds to others.

Despite their vital role, seminaries have faced serious challenges. For the past five decades, developments on many different fronts have changed the face of seminary education.

We are featuring the presidents or deans of six graduation theological institutions to explore the essential purpose of graduate theological education, the trends, the challenges, and the responses. Despite their diverse responses to some questions, they (and countless others) would agree that the health of theological seminaries is crucial to the vitality of the church. Interviews were conducted by Randall Frame, executive director of marketing and communications, Palmer Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, who is also a freelance writer living in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

Clyde Cook became president of Biola University (which houses the Talbot School of Theology) in 1982 after four years as president of O.C. Ministries. Cook plans to retire in June of 2007. After graduating from Biola, Cook served as the school's athletic director from 1957 to 1960. After serving on the mission field for four years he returned to Biola in 1967 as an assistant professor of missions.

Timothy George is the founding dean of Beeson Divinity School of Samford University and an executive editor of Christianity Today. A noted historian and theologian, he has written and edited numerous books. He serves on the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches and is also an active participant in the Baptist World Alliance and Evangelicals and Catholics Together.

Walter C. Kaiser, Jr. is president of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (GCTS), a position he has held for the last nine years. His involvement in theological education spans roughly the same time period as the life of Christianity Today. He began teaching Bible and theology at Wheaton College in 1956 and earlier this year took his first ever sabbatical. Prior to coming to GCTS, Kaiser served for 13 years as Academic Dean at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. His administrative duties, however, through all these years never kept him from the classroom.

R. Albert Mohler, Jr., serves as the ninth president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary–the flagship school of the Southern Baptist Convention and one of the largest seminaries in the world. In addition to his presidential duties, Dr. Mohler hosts a daily radio program for the Salem Radio Network. He also writes a regular commentary and daily blogs on moral, cultural and theological issues. He has contributed chapters to several books, including Hell Under Fire, Whatever Happened to Truth, Here We Stand: A Call From Confessing Evangelicals, and The Coming Evangelical Crisis.

Richard J. Mouw has served as president of Fuller Theological Seminary since 1993, after having served the seminary for four years as provost and senior vice president. A philosopher, scholar, and author, he joined the faculty of Fuller as professor of Christian philosophy and ethics in September 1985 after serving for 17 years as professor of philosophy at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has also served as a visiting professor at the Free University in Amsterdam.

Craig Williford became the sixth president of Denver Seminary in August of 2000. Prior to that, he served on the pastoral staff of five churches. During his 27 years of church experience, he served as senior associate and teaching pastor at two of the largest megachurches in the United States. He is the author of Spiritual Formation in the Home and the co-author (with his wife, Carolyn) of Family Devotions They'll Desire–Not Dread, Faith Tango, and Questions from a God Who Needs No Answers.

What is the purpose of graduate theological (or seminary) education?

Clyde Cook: The primary goal is to educate and graduate students characterized by practical Christian service, missionary and evangelistic zeal, and an adequate knowledge of the Scriptures.

Walter C. Kaiser: Seminaries are "seed beds." That is the literal meaning of the word. A seminary is place where the character and all habits of the heart are formed, where leadership and discipling skills are taught as transferable concepts to be shared with everyone in the congregation, and where expositional preaching of the full canon of Scripture is taught and practiced with excellence so that the proclamation of God's Word is exhibited with enthusiasm, accuracy, and modern relevance.

Richard Mouw: I want men and women to graduate from seminary with a passionate love of Christ and his Kingdom. This means that seminary education must deepen their knowledge and experience of God and his Word. This also means that we must all gain a new awareness of what it means to be serving a Lord who is drawing together people from every tribe and tongue and nation and incorporating them into a Kingdom that seeks to address the ravages of sin in the world that God loves.

R. Albert Mohler: Unashamedly, we are about education. The seminary assignment from the churches has been to impart knowledge of a particular character for those who would serve and teach the church. And so I would simply remind myself and my institution continually that that's why we are here. There are other things we do. We are concerned with the spiritual formation of students. We are concerned with their practical experience. But the one thing that we must do that otherwise will not be done is teach those who will teach the Word of God and teach those who will preach the Word of God how to do so effectively and faithfully.

Clearly, much has changed with regard to seminary education over the past 50 years. But to what extent, if at all, has its essential purpose changed?

Craig Williford: I think that over the past fifty years we have seen a subtle shift away from educating people for the church at large and toward a possible over-focus on training scholars.

Some explain this gradual shift as being driven by the ingrained belief that the best way to prepare pastors and parachurch leaders was to teach them how to be the best scholars. However, this shift away from a focus on the actual work of ministry caused the seminary to gradually turn its allegiance to scholarship as an end unto itself. Some say that in the seminary's attempts to gain respect for seminary education and a reputation of being academically credible, we lost our way.

I am not saying that scholarship and preparing pastors and parachurch leaders are mutually exclusive. I posit that the work and sustainable habits of a scholar are distinctively different from those of a pastor or parachurch leader. The good news is that over the past ten years, many seminaries have begun intentionally working to reconnect with the church and parachurch organizations in order to best prepare leaders for God's Kingdom. The answer is not lower academic quality education; it is integrating character/spiritual development, highest quality academic training, and leadership preparation.

Timothy George: At its most basic level, the purpose of theological education remains what it ever has been—to prepare God-called persons for service in the church of Jesus Christ. Pressure to change or modify this essential purpose comes from the context in which we do our work and the constituencies we seek to serve. Theological schools are not, and should not be, mere centers for the academic study of religion, nor glorified summer camps where students go to "find themselves." Seminaries exist to encourage, undergird, enhance, challenge, and support the pastoral work of local congregations. This includes teaching, preaching, worship, evangelism, global missions, and social ministry as well as spiritual nurture and pastoral care. We can do this effectively only if there is a healthy, symbiotic relationship between theological schools and the communities of faith we seek to serve.

Richard Mouw: Fundamentally, the purpose has not changed. Seminary education's mission is to equip God's people to serve God's mission in the world. This description of a seminary's purpose will stand the test of time. But of course the world itself has been changing. Europe and North America are now "mission fields," and the church in the two-thirds world—Asia, Africa and South America—is growing dramatically. More and more students are coming to Fuller from international nations to prepare for ministry in their own countries.

R. Albert Mohler: I really can't believe the purpose of theological education has changed. I think that the way we might define that purpose has changed somewhat. I see the healthy redefinition here at Southern Seminary being a recovery of the sense that we serve the local church, and that that our sole purpose is to prepare pastors, ministers, and teachers for local churches.

If its purpose has not changed, what has changed over the past five decades?

R. Albert Mohler: Our students are more distracted than ever before. They are coming with heavier responsibilities than before, and they are able to take fewer hours in a given semester. So the academic program becomes a longer program, and it changes the entire learning experience to some extent.

Clyde Cook: Students used to leave their homes and jobs to spend a few years training for their vocation in ministry. Today's students are more pressed for time than ever before. Their busy lives require seminary training that's flexible enough to fit their busy schedules. Also, in the past most students attended seminary to become a pastor or missionary. Today, we have many students who attend for personal enrichment, rather than for their vocation.

Walter Kaiser: I think the greatest change by far has been the cost of going to seminary. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, mainline denominations supported their seminaries and provided an education for their future pastors at very little cost to the students. As freestanding and evangelical seminaries began to emerge in the second and third quarters of the twentieth century, faculty taught at very reduced salaries along with holding a preaching post as a senior pastor to make ends meet financially, thereby subsidizing the students' costs for an education. By 1975 a new trend began to emerge in which the student was being called on to pay an increasing share of the educational costs for the seminary education, moving from $500 tuition a year to the present costs at an evangelical seminary ranging from a low of $6,000 to a high of $13,500 tuition per year.

Timothy George: Less money has led to more part-time students, which has led to more students being recruited so the seminaries can meet their budgets, which has often led to less qualified students, which has led to a weaker curriculum offered in no particular order for a larger number of degrees, which has led to students less likely to excel going into churches. These are concerns that touch everyone in theological education.

At Beeson we are trying to fight these trends so that we can educate highly qualified persons with a high commitment to ministry in a personal environment that will help them become shepherds who know, care for, and teach their people to be faithful witnesses to Jesus Christ.

Walter Kaiser: Theological education became more expensive as it became more professionalized, demanding added personnel to do what faculty once carried out as a sideline to their teaching duties—registration, admission, student services and the like. Added to these tasks were a battery of new annual report forms for the government, accrediting agencies, and technologies that now formed the heart of the total seminary operations.

At the same there were students graduating from private Christian colleges with significant accumulated debt, more debt than an average church could support even without adding debt from seminary. This is one of the most serious problems for the future of providing a well-educated pastorate.

Richard Mouw: New modes of delivering education is the biggest change. While we still believe Fuller in Pasadena has many advantages as the central hub of our training and research programs, we also know that many potential students are unable to leave their home communities, their churches, their families, and, perhaps, their current ministries. Fuller has responded with a variety of options: a network of six extended education sites—Phoenix, Colorado Springs, Menlo Park/Northern California, Irvine/ Orange County, Sacramento; and Seattle— enables men and women to study closer to home.

Fuller also has established online programs, enabling students to study under Fuller professors. Also, we have an extensive list of intensive courses that enable people to study at the Fuller Pasadena campus for short periods of time and then return to their homes and ministries. The challenge is to ensure that our students receive the excellent Fuller education found in our traditional classroom setting and that our students have active participation with our outstanding professors.

Craig Williford: Another important change has been the increasing focus on internationalization, or creating a multicultural diverse learning community that reflects God's heart for the world and all his creation. While I am not implying that we have achieved this goal, many seminaries are now committing themselves to create these types of learning communities because their leaders believe that this is the best learning community to prepare leaders for the church and world.

What should go back to the way it was before?

Richard Mouw: The good news is that many of our students come to seminary having sensed God's call only recently and they come with great enthusiasm for the cause of the gospel. The bad news is that beginning students these days have little knowledge of the Scriptures and the history of the Christian movement. This means that we have to do more than was necessary in the past by way of teaching the basics, while at the same time we have tremendous pressure to add new content to theological education in the areas of the practices of ministry.

Walter Kaiser: I am concerned that the gap between the church and the seminary is widening in many instances instead of the two offering mutual assistance and reinforcing one another. Since the percent of seminary support from churchowned seminaries continues to hover between ten and fifteen percent of the total operating/annual fund, the church realizes it can offer only minor critiques and direction due to its shrinking investment in the total project.

Meanwhile several cultural revolutions offer the potential of seriously impairing the witness of the church in the areas of hermeneutics (for example, readerresponse teachings accepted over biblical authorial assertions) and theology (for example, open theism, justification, new perspectives on Paul). The church needs the reflective help of the seminary and the seminary needs the accountability to the church. However, the tendency is for each to go its own way. This ought to be a concern for all of us.

Craig Williford: I am not prone to glorify the past or attempt to recreate it. Learning from the past is critically important, and using that wisdom to best communicate the gospel and to train leaders for today's world tends to be my approach. If I were to point to one thing, it would be the apparent decreased partnership with the church. We are working hard to build reciprocal partnerships with church and parachurch leaders, though I should add that I am not sure the relationship between the church and seminary was really that good fifty years ago. We may be glamorizing it a bit.

Timothy George: If I could have my way, all seminaries would be residential communities where teachers and students lived, worked, prayed, and fleshed out the meaning of the gospel in covenanted life together. The monastic ideal—ora et labora—has much to commend it. However, today very few schools, including Catholic ones, are able to carry out this ideal consistently. Rather than pine for the "good old days," we must find creative ways to incorporate the life of prayer, contemplation, reflection, and accountability into our work today.

Albert Mohler: I am not being merely nostalgic when I long for a day when all the students were together in one place at one time—when students would move together in a cohort class taking basically the same number of hours together. They would move through a shared experience—a time in which they were giving themselves almost unreservedly to their seminary education.

On Southern Seminary's campus, it is still the case that the majority are fulltime residential students. But we are an exception. Still, we offer classes from early in the morning until 9:50 at night, five days a week. That is a big expansion for us. The fastest growing master's program we have delivers the entire master of divinity degree on Friday and Saturday schedules. Those are big changes. I miss having all the students together at one time in chapel. Our Friday-Saturday students are not here on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Our Tuesday and Thursday students are largely not here on the weekends.

Clyde Cook: I'm concerned about the trend in theological education to make the M.Div. more attractive to students by eliminating some of the traditional M.Div. courses. These courses give the students tools they can use for their ministry long after they leave the seminary. Another trend that concerns me is the move away from biblical inerrancy. Since the Bible is foundational to what we do in providing a seminary education, it goes without saying that the authority and veracity of the Bible is essential.

How are your schools responding to the trends? How are you seeking to maintain or improve the quality of the graduate theological education experience?

Clyde Cook: At Talbot, we believe that the long-term fruit of a ministry is related to a leader's spiritual formation. That's why we created the Intentional Character Development (ICD) program and added it to our seminary curriculum. With this program, students develop habits of the heart as they participate in a combination of classroom, small group, and mentoring experiences that enable them to grow in character and understand the different stages God takes leaders in their spiritual development. The ICD program also challenges students to formulate a life and ministry purpose statement and to discover how their character, emotions, and spiritual maturity affect their relationships. We want to help our students develop sustainable spiritual disciplines so they can build a foundation for a lifetime of ministry.

Timothy George: One of the most encouraging trends in theological education over the past generation has been the recognition of spiritual formation as an essential dimension of pastoral preparation. Not so long ago, evangelical and Protestant schools gave almost no attention to this area. We assumed that students came to our schools already spiritually formed, needing only theological information and skills development from us. If that was ever true, it is surely so no more. If theological education were only about the transfer of cognitive data from one mind to another, no seminaries need exist. It's all on the Internet!

I say to our new students, "Here at Beeson, we're after your soul!" This does not mean that we neglect the classical disciplines of theology, nor important tools for ministry. But we seek to do these tasks in a holistic way, one that recognizes that, above all else, we want our students to be men and women of God.

Richard Mouw: We have adapted some of our learning methods to address current issues. Following 9/11, for example, we focused increasingly on ministry among Muslims. Also, to meet the growing challenges of youth violence, youth gambling, and inter-generational conflict, we have increased our programs and curriculum to address these needs. We have recently created a new center at Fuller to help churches provide support for those who have been hurt by addictive behaviors. With our Fuller Pasadena campus only 12 miles from Hollywood, we are developing strong relationships with the film community. We have also given sustained attention to gender questions and cross-cultural communication. These are just a few of the ways we are at work to equip students and leaders for the church.

R. Albert Mohler: The biggest change for us has been the expansion of instructional hours in the calendar. When I was a student at Southern Seminary 25 years ago, the classes were taught basically Tuesday through Friday from 8:00 in the morning until 2:50 in the afternoon. And now we teach from early Monday morning until Saturday afternoon with morning, afternoon, and night classes. Of course we also are able to reach students now through high technology delivery systems, including the Internet. But we are still wholeheartedly committed to residential theological education. And everything else we do has to serve that central cause.

Craig Williford: At Denver Seminary, we have developed new delivery formats for our degrees that allow working adults to gain a seminary degree without leaving their work. We do this through evening, weekend, block, or intensive course offerings. And we offer up to a full year's worth of curriculum online.

Our mentoring program matches students with mentors who have extensive experience in the student's areas of ministry interest. We emphasize spiritual formation and character development through the mentoring program and through participation in spiritual formation small groups.

Also, we have moved in the direction of allowing students to individualize their learning experience, matching their calling and passion for ministry to the classroom. In many classes the professor allows the student to design or redirect projects, papers, and other assignments to match their ministry interests. For example, in a recent leadership class, students selected a problem or important ministry initiative within the church or organization they serve. They did research, assembled a collaborative team within the organization, and led in the development of a strategy to address the concern or challenge.

Finally, we have adopted initiatives designed specifically to train pastors serving Hispanic or Korean congregations.

Walter Kaiser: Gordon-Conwell has stepped up to the plate in several ways. First, we continue to hold high the M. Div. degree as our central mission and the important significance of the role of a pastor in our day and age.

Second, we have worked hard and creatively to address the financial difficulties facing students. For example, we have seen scholarship endowment monies increase as we also discounted costs to those who would take a full load of ten courses per calendar year.

We have weighed in on the key hermeneutical and theological issues of our day by providing lively interaction in the classroom and in the scholarly journals on important topics. And we have widened our curricular goals to include spiritual formation, habits of the heart, disciplebuilding, teaching more adequately how each is to pray, along with character and value strengthening. Our goal is to involve each student while at the seminary to be involved in a small group with these kinds of goals in addition to faculty academic counseling, chapel services, and ten hours of mentored ministry per week in a local church.

Finally, we have brought the issue of globalization directly to our whole program by sending students on summer projects overseas, sending 15–20 faculty overseas for teaching every summer, opening the Center for the Study of Global Christianity on campus, and involving the two-thirds world students in our Master's and Doctor of Ministry specialized courses that are non-western in orientation.

Men and Women Who Left Their Mark

Serving a Changing Student Population

Graduate Studies Grounded in Faith