I just read an article in Christianity Today about the gap that exists between the staff roles available for people seeking ministry and the trained ministers that seminaries are producing. The author (Bobby Ross) suggests that seminaries should do a better job training seminary students for senior pastoral roles that require not only a dynamic pulpit ministry, but also the ability to manage personnel. Right you are, Mr. Ross. But let me even take that one step further.
The problem as I see it is that seminaries almost exclusively train pastors for these senior pastoral roles, to be teachers and expositors, but for the vast majority of church positions that are currently on the market, formal pulpit and doctrinal training are only tangentially necessary. The senior preaching pastor is quite a narrow slice of the church world and not the type of role in which a recent grad can just "dive right in."
To be sure, there are many senior pastoral positions to be had. But in my experience, for any publicized, vacant senior pastoral role at a church of over 150 attenders, one is likely to be competing against 50 to 200 other applicants for that position . . . and most churches are looking for a pastor with more experience than a recent seminary grad. Five years of pastoral ministry experience is a typical minimum requirement (along with a litany of additional personal, relational, doctrinal, and spiritual expectations that would make Billy Graham question his call). The point is, senior pastoral positions are abundant, but landing them is a competitive business!
So what's the seminary grad to do? Well, if you have dreams of pastoring a church and preaching your heart out on Sunday mornings, the best way to begin is to just get yourself on staff with a larger church in a role where you can excel, and then build up your experience so that other opportunities might come down the road at a later time. Just get your foot in the door.
But here's the circular problem. The trend among larger churches is to rarely hire staff from local Bible colleges and seminaries, but rather to train up staff from within the church who have experience in the business world, or whose specific skill set meets their specific needs. I learned the hard way that for the majority of church staff positions a background in business actually serves you better than a seminary education.
For most staff roles, the measure of success looks something like this: How well you can manage the people you oversee? How well can you recruit and train new volunteers? How well can you manage your budget? Is your ministry experiencing growth over time? Those are the important questions many churches want to have answered. If you're a small groups director, having a doctrinal background may come in handy every so often, but if you can't build teams, you're worthless. If you're a children's ministry director, your most important job is overseeing your volunteers and leaders, not exegeting Scripture.
And that's the problem. The primary focus in seminary education is not on the organizational/ managerial side of ministry but rather the teaching side of ministry that really only pertains to one or two roles. In your average church of 5,000, with a staff of 30, only a few of those people are actually going to be preaching. Most everyone else on staff is responsible for overseeing teams, recruiting volunteers, training people, reproducing groups, managing their budget, etc.
So here's my suggestion for the seminary student:
1. Get as much ministry experience as you can while you're in school. Churches are looking for your experience, not your grades. If you cruise through seminary and all the ministry experience you've acquired is leading a few small groups, churches will not even consider you for most positions. Get into some sort of role where you will have the opportunity to build a team, and train leaders.
2. Supplement your skill set. Sometimes you can get your foot in the door at a church by offering them a skill that they need while you get better at doing what you really want to do. Learn about web design, graphic design, video editing, sound tech, lighting, computer programming, take up the drums (every church needs a drummer) . . . pick one or two supplemental skills that any church could use, get really good at it, and market the heck out of it as you're looking for roles. Churches LOVE staff that can wear multiple hats.
And now for the seminaries:
1. All seminaries should have an extensive internship program which would allow every M-Div student to leave seminary with at least 3 years of real practical ministry experience.
2. As much as it pains me to say there should be less Biblical education, I think that that's the only way to shift the balance of focus in most M-Div programs so that students can be equipped for what churches are really looking for in staff roles. If I were to do it over again, now that I've been on staff with a smaller church, a mega-church, and gone through the first year of a church plant, I wish I had received some basic training in financial management systems, marketing, small group theory, networking theory, organizational behavior, event planning, etc. I think there should probably be more courses that look like MBA courses, and fewer courses that assume an eventual teaching ministry. I'm not suggesting replacing theological education with business education, but I do know a class on marketing would have been alot more useful for me in the past year than my 4 semesters of Greek and 3 semesters of Hebrew.
Just sayin . . .