Elders who do their work well should be respected and paid well, especially those who work hard at both preaching and teaching.
-I Timothy 5:17, NLT
But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.
-John 14:26, NIV
While I am not someone who believes in the absolute power and authority of pastors, I do believe pastors deserve more respect than they often receive in our current culture.
The Reformation did much to demote (and some may say demean) the office of pastor. It did so by demoting it from the recognized sacraments while raising up the important doctrine called “The Priesthood of All Believers.”
In my opinion, Luther and others swung the pendulum away from an unhealthy obsequiousness to priests to a place where today people treat seminary-educated pastors with utter contempt.
Like much in life, the healthy place is somewhere in between these two extremes of pastor-worship and pastor-denigration.
As someone who comes from Mennonite heritage, I am a firm adherent to “The Priesthood of All Believers” doctrine. To roughly summarize, this is the doctrine that teaches that all of us have direct access to God through Jesus without need for a special intermediary like a pastor or priest.
Where I think people take this doctrine to an extreme is when they start thinking everyone thereby occupies the office of pastor irregardless of call or training.
We do not make this mistake with other common professions:
Many of us know how to change out the battery in our cars. That does not make us mechanics.
All of us are able to provide healing services like giving someone an aspirin or applying a cool cloth to a fevered head. That does not make us a medical doctor.
All of us can provide nonjudgmental listening to a friend in need. That does not make us therapists or psychologists.
Now, I understand many of us have experienced spiritual abuse in our situations from pastors. Some of us may have suffered inept or destructive therapy sessions.
Please do not judge the whole class of individuals by your bad experience with one or two!
As I have come into adulthood, I have learned for all these professions to approach them with healthy skepticism.
The mechanic is not always right just because he is the mechanic. The medical doctor is not always right just because he is a medical doctor. And the therapist is not always right simply because she is a therapist.
The same applies to pastors.
However, I would say we would be unwise to NOT listen to the mechanic when we have a car problem. We would be remiss NOT to consider the doctor’s advise when faced with a health problem. And we would be foolish to completely ignore the therapist’s advice without reason.
Seminary education is valuable. We know this from the fact that these schools have existed for thousands of years. These institutes are not going anywhere.
You see, it is helpful to have someone who has trained and learned from the collective knowledge of experts and generations as it comes to theology, church history, liturgical practices, and biblical studies.
True, seminary education does not necessarily weed out all the bad pastors.
Graduate school does not weed out all the bad psychologists either, but we still require aspiring psychologists to attend them.
It ought to matter whether or not someone has attended seminary or divinity school. Such is not the final word whether or not their spiritual advice is good just as attending medical school does not perfectly insure the best medical advice. However, it ought to help.
Dismissing seminary education as completely irrelevant is reverse pride, in my opinion.
It is not the final word, of course. I encourage healthy skepticism. Check a pastor’s teaching against the Bible. I am very aware that some pastors are especially awful on matters regarding infidelity and divorce (hence, I created this blog to address that very real problem.)
However, by dismissing the value of seminary education completely, you are dismissing the benefits that come from learning from God’s movement through generations of church history. And if that is not prideful, I don’t know what is!
