Going to Seminary

If God has called you to get a seminary education, here are some tips that might help you to go debt free or reduce your debt.

1.  Get a ministry position, even if it is part-time, and serve for several years before going to seminary.    By doing so, you will enrich your seminary education.   Students who know where the rubber meets the road get more out of their studies because they know what’s important and what’s not.   If you are going to a residential seminary away from their hometown, you are also more likely to obtain a ministry position while in seminary, simply because of your previous ministry experience.   Fifty percent of seminary graduates are no longer in vocational ministry five years after graduation.  Much of that, we believe, is due to the high expectations in-experienced ministers have about vocational ministry.  It is better to explore ministry first-hand before you invest $20-40,0000 in a seminary degree.

2.  Pay off your educational and credit card debt before entering seminary.  Many prospective students ask about a school’s accreditation, to determine if they can defer payments on their educational loans.  Acquiring more debt is not the answer.

3.  Carefully analyze the costs of the school you are attending.  Unfortunately, schools hide costs in their marketing material.  Look at your budget and determine if a particular seminary is going to be right for your finances.

4.  Research for scholarships.   These are few and are highly sought after.  Plan to spend a number of hours finding financial aid.   Many seminaries do not provide scholarships until a student has enrolled and completed a term at the school.  Here is but one site to get you started:  http://www.fteleaders.org/pages/who-we-are/

5.  Raise the funds.  If you are giving your life to a non-profit organization, you’ll be forever dependent upon the generosity of others.  You’d better get used to it and learn how to raise your own support from family and friends.  Take a course in fund raising.  Share your mission with others and explain how a seminary degree is going to help you accomplish that mission.  We don’t advocate Bingo, but the following article does illustrate the creativity of students: http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/1200723.htm.   Be sure to research the tax implications on these gifts.

6.  If you are going to borrow money, consider a micro-lending approach such as GreenNote.   Instead of going to a bank or getting a loan from the government, invite your friends and family to invest in your seminary degree.   Lenders like GreenNote will pay the school and give your friends and family a return on their investment.  In some cases, family members will dismiss the loan upon graduation.

7.   Go to seminary part time.   If you are already in a ministry position, take your time and pay for seminary as you go.    It’s better to stretch a 3-year program into ten years, than to spend 15 years paying off a loan.

8.  If you are in a ministry position, ask church leaders to provide a portion of your seminary education.   It should be a no brainer for the organization.   By providing seminary assistance a ministry organization can keep a valued staff member in their organization.  As the seminary student grows through their learning experience, what they learn will improve the quality of service to the ministry organization.  If organizations are worried about keeping a student after they complete their seminary studies,

9.  Piece together a seminary education.  See how much online credit a seminary will allow (it can range between 50% to 66%).  Combine that with 1 or 2 week residential classes, weekend classes, etc.  Consider a fully-online school.   If a seminary doesn’t have a specialty you are interested in but provides the basics, see if you can take courses at another school and transfer those into your degree program.  Some people take junior college courses because they are cheaper than a private liberal arts university.   In a similar way, you might save through this piecemeal approach.  Be sure that your seminary will allow you to transfer credit hours into their program, once you begin.

10.  Ask your church for permission to do conferences, writing, and speaking engagements to pay for your seminary education.  The things you learn and produce in seminary could be turned into a source of income.

It is possible to graduate from seminary with no debt. But, it takes planning, a lot of work, and commitment to your long term goal. You will graduate with more options than your peers because you are not a slave to the lender.

Recently, a local news program reported that educational debt in the US is $870 billion, more than the nations credit card debt. Nearly 10% of the debt is past due. In Texas, 56% of college graduates owe an average of $21,000 to private and government loans.

The 2010-2011 annual report of the Association of Theological Schools cited the educational debt that occurred while students were in seminary:

None                            43.4%
Less than $10,000    10.3%
$10,000 to $19,999  10.2%
$20,000 to $29,999 10.7%
30,000 to $39,999     9.5%
More than $40,000   6.2%

ATS also reported the debt that the students brought into their seminary studies:

None                            60.9%
Less than $10,000    10.0%
$10,000 to $19,999  10.8%
$20,000 to $29,999   8.0%
30,000 to $39,999      4.1%
More than $40,000  16.0%

Notice the percentage of persons having more than $40,000 increase 10% during seminary studies.

Why is this important? Debt contributes to marital stress. Personal finances and failed marital relationships are the top reasons why church planters fail. Many mission agencies will not call seminary graduates with educational debt. Because of debts, those called into full-time vocational ministry have to work several secular jobs to pay off debt occurred while in seminary. This has its affect on the quality of life and ministry.

While MBA graduates may attract salaries that provide a return on their educational investment, few seminary graduates will land salaries that provide enough income to pay off their educational loans in a timely manner. From this vantage point, going into debt for a seminary degree is unwise.

Ask yourself and your advisors, “Do I really need a degree to be an ordained minister?” While this may sound strange coming from a website that supports seminary education, many denominations and ministry fields, do not require a Bible college or seminary degree. Only 50% of vocational ministers have a seminary degree. We believe a seminary degree will make your more effective and will open some ministry opportunities for you, but the cost to you and your family may be too great. A seminary degree does not guarantee you will land a ministry position.

When the publisher sent me the book From M.Div. to Rev. by Eubanks, I confess I was less than enthusiastic about it reviewing it. However, I quickly changed my attitude. Books of this genre often just state the obvious, but Eubanks does a good job of covering the many sides of a ministry transition. The book is not just for young adults starting out in ministry. It provides helpful tips and refresher material that will benefit a seasoned minister who is making a transition.

I appreciated the book challenging readers to see candidacy as a spiritual season bathed in prayer. You would expect that, but the book give detailed help in guiding candidates on how to spiritually prepare for the transition from seminary to first church.

I also appreciated his emphasis upon relationships. After all, ministry is about people. Eubanks stresses the importance of building your network, not as a means to get your own end, but to develop “a sense of community in which everyone serves one another toward the common benefit of all.” This carries on through the interview process. Rather than see this as job hunting, minister to members of the search team who have been given the charge to find God’s person for their church. In other words, begin your ministry even prior to your visit.

The book is filled with great suggestions about each stage of the journey. He also includes a recommended reading list, questions to prepare you for your interview, 10 questions you should ask a search committee, and other tools to prepare you for this journey.

I encourage you to purchase this book at least a year before your scheduled graduation and carefully work through it. If you are married, work through it with your spouse.

Receive 20% off by using the promotional code: GtSPromo.

• Purchase From M.Div. to Rev.
• Download free sample chapters of From M.Div. to Rev.

May I confess something before we get started? I assume this is a safe place. I am terrible at time management. There, I said it. I am not an expert at it in the slightest. This is borderline embarrassing, but I was given the “ok,” to write this article back in February! It is now November and I am just now getting to it. I didn’t even make time to write an article on managing time! Notice that I said, “make” time, as oppose to “have” time. I had the time. We all have the time to do whatever it is we need to do; we just simply don’t do it at times. My wife, Natalie, says, “We make time for the things we want to do.” So when I try to use the excuse of, “I didn’t have time to go run.” She replies, “No, you didn’t make time, because it wasn’t important to you.” Stings, but it’s true. Why don’t we do _________ ? It’s not because we didn’t have the time, it’s because we didn’t give it time. So whether it was an assignment, a ministry deadline, or time at the gym, it comes down to giving not having.

Instead of using words like, “making,” “balancing,” or “management,” let’s use the word “delegation.” We all have 24 hours in a single day. Our fruitfulness hinges on how well we delegate our time between our different activities and roles.

Was not writing this article back in February a bad thing? Was it a bad delegation of time, or was it a proper use of my time? This is precisely what we need to explore and apply to our lives. “How do we use our time in accordance with the responsibilities God gives us?” Our roles and priorities answer this question. We must strive to organize our lives in such a way that our various roles receive the appropriate amount of love and attention needed to glorify God and love others.

Whether you are only one semester into your journey at seminary or you’ve been attending for several years, balancing your studies with other responsibilities is of utmost importance. God-glorifying time management is a task we will pursue for the rest of our lives.

Here is reality. With every new season or life stage, life only gets more loaded with roles and responsibilities. Those of you who are married know exactly what I am talking about. And if you have children you know what I am talking about even more! Being married with children is a busy and wonderful life! Then add ministry into the recipe and we are cooking up some busy schedules.

Let me give you a quick snapshot into my life and see where you can relate.

• Married for only two and half years
• One year-old baby girl
• One of the Pastors at a church planted less than two years ago
• Preach roughly 15-20 Sundays a year
• In the process of appointing elders
• Setting up membership
• Attending to discipline issues
• Leading a college ministry
• Discipling multiple groups of guys
• Leading a ministry team
• Seminary (5-6 hours a semester)

That’s just to name a few things I’m involved in! Consider your involvements.

Honestly, we are all busy. And we ought to be. Our lives or not our own, they belong to Jesus (1 Cor. 6:19-20). We’re to work like an ant (Proverbs 6:6-11), ox (1 Timothy 5:17-18), a good soldier, an Olympic athlete, and a fruitful farmer (2 Timothy 2:4-6). However, it seems that busyness has almost become a badge of honor. In response to, “How are ya?” people often say, “Great! Really busy.” This begs the question, “With what?” Are we busy with: Facebook, Twitter, blogging, reading blogs etc…? We must not confuse being a busy with being fruitful. We need to aim at being faithful with our time and lives for Gospel work, not just active. (Acts 20:24).

Church history provides amazing examples of hard workers, oxen-like persons, who impressively delegated their time. In a biographical sermon on George Whitefield, John Piper said Whitefield would sometimes preach forty hours a week! That’s forty hours of actual preaching, not preparation, but preaching! Steve Lawson, in his wonderful book on the preaching of John Calvin, shared how Calvin felt like one month he had hardly done anything. Calvin felt ashamed and useless. What’s amazing about this is that Calvin had preached twenty sermons and delivered twelve lectures that month! (Steve Lawson, The Expository Genius of John Calvin, Reformation Trust, FL. 2007, 45.)

How busy are we? We’re probably not as busy as Calvin or Whitefield. But this begs another question. Was it right for them to be that busy?

At a recent Acts29 boot camp, Matt Carter, lead pastor at Austin Stone Community Church, preached a message on the lives and ministries of Wesley, Whitefield, and Edwards.
In that message he shared how Whitefield’s wife, lamented how much her husband labored. She said she loved George, but felt like a widow. Should he have been that busy?

If we give great chunks of time to our studies, books, and ministry but neglect our family, we are not honoring God. God is gracious and still does amazing things, but I don’t want my wife to feel like a widow or my daughter to feel like an orphan. We need to be very careful. Here we find our lifelong tension. How do we do everything we need to accomplish, do it well, and remain faithful to other areas of our lives?

This is where we get really practical. We need to think about prayer, priorities, and roles. In the next installment, we will discuss practical tips for managing our time.

Guest Writer: Jeff Medders is in his first year of studies at Dallas Theological seminary, and has hopes to transfer to Reformed Theological Seminary in 2010. He has been married to Natalie since, March 3, 2007. Between being the college pastor and a member of the preaching team at Redeemer Bible Church, a new church plant in Tomball, TX; he loves playing with his little girl, Ivy, born on November 21, 2008. Check out Jeff’s blog: EatBible.org