James Emery White - What They Didnt Teach You in Seminary: 25 Lessons for Successful Ministry in Your Church

2011 by James Emery White

Published by Baker Books

a division of Baker Publishing Group

P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.bakerbooks.com

E-book edition created 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meansfor example, electronic, photocopy, recordingwithout the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

ISBN 978-1-4412-3219-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture is taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

Scripture marked Message is taken from The Message by Eugene H. Peterson, copyright 1993, 1994, 1995, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group. All rights reserved.

Scripture marked NLT is taken from the Holy Bible , New Living Translation, copyright 1996, 2004. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

Dedicated to the family of faith

known as Mecklenburg Community Church

Contents

Foreword

Perry Noble

I m a seminary dropout.

Wait! I did not say I am anti-seminary; in fact, I think that some seminaries still offer some value to those who are seeking to enter vocational ministry.

Its just that for me, well, I had a different experience.

I was well on my way in regards to what I refer to as the traditional trajectory when it comes to ministry. I received Christ and soon after entered college, where I received a four-year degree. After that my plans were to attend seminary, earn my MDiv, and then enter the full-time ministry.

But things didnt quite turn out the way I planned them.

I did finish college; however, upon completion I was offered a full-time job in a Baptist church where I had served in a part-time capacity during my senior year of college, and I took it, adjusting my plans from attending seminary full time to attending part time, one day a week, with a group of other pastors.

To say I was excited about diving into a theological and practical education that would prepare me for greater things in ministry would be an understatement. I was about to go out of my mind and just knew that what I was about to experience would change me forever.

It did... but once again things didnt turn out quite the way I planned them.

Within a few weeks of starting my experience in Christian higher education, we began diving into deep theological concepts such as limited atonement, the trichotomy and dichotomy of the Spirit, and the peccability versus impeccability of Christ.

However, what I was learning in the classroom and what I was actually experiencing on the front lines of ministry were completely different.

No one in the church seemed to be obsessed with whether or not Jesus could have sinned; they just knew that their marriage was in deep trouble and wanted help.

No one in the church was fascinated with my TULIP acrostic and the way I could present both sides of the argument; they just wanted to understand why in the world God would let their loved one die.

The leaders in the church did not care if I knew brilliant theological terms and could lecture them on church history; they just wanted to make sure that I was going to set a realistic budget for my area of ministry and then stay within the framework of that budget for the entirety of the year ahead of me.

I said it earlier, but please allow me to restate it again: what I was learning in the classroom and what I was actually experiencing on the front lines of ministry were completely different.

So I dropped out. I could list several reasons why; however, the main one was that I personally did not want to continue to invest hundreds of hours of my time and thousands of dollars into something that in the end would not adequately equip me for what I knew I would be facing in the real world known as ministry.

That is why I am so excited about the book you are now holding in your hands. My friend and mentor Dr. James Emery White is someone who I would call an expert when it comes to the academic and the practical world; he has walked in both of them and sees the value in each.

Dr. Whites realization that seminary, while it does provide some value, does not adequately equip men and women for the ministry has led to what you will read in the pages that follow.

Honestly, I believe that the information contained in this book is more practical and empowering than nearly anything I ever experienced in the seminary setting. The stuff that he writes about really does happenand if people are not prepared for it, then it will either knock them for a loop or, worse than that, cause them to either drop out or disqualify themselves from the ministry.

This is not a book to be simply read through and then stuck on a shelf but rather one that should be studied and discussed among church leaders and the people they serve with. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and can say that even as a twenty-year ministry veteran, I was greatly stretched and sharpened by its words.

Perry Noble
Senior Pastor, NewSpring Church
Anderson, South Carolina

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the Baker team for their support of this project, specifically Robert Hosack.

I have been greatly blessed by the support of three women for this project: my longtime assistant, Glynn Goble; Alli Main, who has begun partnering with me on book projects in innumerable ways; and my lovely wife, Susan, who once again made every page possible.

I also wish to thank the two seminaries that have most influenced my life: The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, with campuses in Massachusetts, Florida, and North Carolina. You have bestowed degrees, professorships, and even a presidency on my life. The book on what I did learn in seminaryas a student, professor, and administratorwould be too long to write.

This book is dedicated to the family of faith known as Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, North Carolina. Since Ive been their founding and senior pastor for twenty of my nearly thirty years of vocational ministry, most of what I have learned has been at their expense.

Introduction

What They Never Taught Me in Seminary

W hat they never taught me in seminary sounds like Im going to pick a fight. Im not.

My life has been lived largely in two vocational worlds: the church and the academy. I am the founding and senior pastor of a church; I am a professor and former president of a seminary. So I would only be picking a fight with myself.

More than that, I loved seminary. I loved learning about church history and theology, philosophy and ethics. My pulse quickened the first time I was able to stand behind a podium and say, In the Greek, this word means... I loved building my library with works from Augustine to Zwingli. Adding entire multivolume reference sets, such as Kittels Theological Dictionary of the New Testament , made my hormones bubble.

I was the classic three-year, residential MDiv student. But toward the end of my seminary studies, just before I started my doctoral work, I received a call from a church near the school asking me to consider coming as their interim pastor. It was an established denominational church in a county seat town near the seminary. The interim turned into a full-fledged invitation to serve as their senior pastor.