mgpcpastor's blog

Nathan wrote a reflective post about stress and church life, particularly Bible College – Seminary, which is where he is now, studying in Queensland.
It’s a good read and there is some helpful followup comments and posts.

I wrote an extended response which I thought I should post here. Despite it being a comment I think it stands alone okay. It contains a bit of reflection about my own seminary experience.

[Nathan’s original post] iden­ti­fied three areas:
The con­tent and nature of pas­toral train­ing;
The present nature of pas­toral min­istry; and
Con­tem­po­rary church life and its con­tri­bu­tion to stress expe­ri­enced by members.

Part One: the content and nature of pastoral training.
The individual’s expe­ri­ence of the train­ing course issue, as you’ve iden­ti­fied, is some­what idio­syn­cratic. Some peo­ple sail through it with the high­est aca­d­e­mic achieve­ments, only to find parish life a stress­ful and neg­a­tive expe­ri­ence (and then go on to be the­o­log­i­cal lec­tur­ers); while oth­ers find col­lege and study the worst three or four years of their life, only to flour­ish when in the parish and never darken the door of a col­lege again.
Pas­toral train­ing is lim­ited, and inten­sive. It is not nor­ma­tive, but that doesn’t inher­ently make it neg­a­tive. It also revolves chiefly around knowl­edge of the con­tent of the Old and New Tes­ta­ments, their orig­i­nal lan­guages, sys­tem­atic the­ol­ogy, preach­ing and church his­tory. The other courses flow from these.
I did find col­lege dif­fer­ent from uni­ver­sity: four units a semes­ter at uni, to the mul­ti­ple strands of col­lege. But by that stage I’d had four years of assim­i­lat­ing mate­r­ial and churn­ing out essays and two hour exams. The process was locked in, it was the con­tent that was dif­fer­ent. My col­leagues in study, the major­ity of whom were older and did not have ter­tiary study expe­ri­ence found it an ordeal.
But apart from cos­metic changes in assess­ment, mas­tery of process and con­tent can­not be avoided, par­tic­u­larly in a con­nected, con­fes­sional church where we need to ascer­tain and be con­fi­dent of the knowl­edge and ortho­doxy of those who will enter the pas­torate.
Most of my cohort had been in local church lead­er­ship as elders. They had matu­rity and expe­ri­ence which helped them assim­i­late the aca­d­e­mic mate­r­ial they were wad­ing through.
Part of that prac­ti­cal­ity meant that the motto ‘Fifty-one per­cent is a per­cent of wasted effort’, was not a cyn­i­cal rejec­tion of aca­d­e­mic activ­ity, but kept the main game, the main game. Grad­u­ate and get into ser­vice in the pas­torate.
The Queens­land col­lege pop­u­larly con­sid­ered itself as being looked down upon by Syd­ney and Mel­bourne for ele­vat­ing prac­ti­cal expe­ri­ence and apti­tude over aca­d­e­mic achieve­ment.
The stu­dent appoint­ments were a sig­nif­i­cantly valu­able bal­anc­ing fac­tor in stop­ping one becom­ing ‘too heav­enly minded to be any earthly good’.
(For the pub­lic record I again note that I passed every­thing com­fort­ably, ini­tially fail­ing only final year preach­ing, but was rejected for licens­ing by my Pres­bytery because I was an imma­ture, smart-alec, arro­gant, jerk.)
This is not a blan­ket endorse­ment of cam­pus based – exam assessed pas­toral train­ing. I’ve also been gone from Queens­land for thir­teen years now, so I don’t know the cur­rent nature of the course.
But in terms of your full post above, the ques­tion which strikes me is: does the nature of the course cause the dis­tress, or is the dis­tress a reac­tion of some as they deal with the course?
Some dis­tress reac­tions are to be expected in a short term inten­sive expe­ri­ence. What can we learn about our­selves from the expe­ri­ence? A defi­ciency in process, or some­thing we can deal with as part of our own Chris­t­ian growth.
This is also not an endorse­ment of some form of ‘bas­tardi­s­a­tion’, that it is an inten­tion­ally neg­a­tive expe­ri­ence which is meant to dis­ci­pline the trainee and dull the full range of their emo­tional reactions.

For what it’s worth, the train­ing expe­ri­ence will bring out and mag­nify the per­son­al­ity ten­den­cies which will prove least help­ful (and also the most help­ful, oth­er­wise we’d go mad, or give up) should the indi­vid­ual make it into pas­toral min­istry.
To use your illus­tra­tion: a per­fec­tion­ist in col­lege will likely con­tinue being a per­fec­tion­ist in the parish. The sense of anguish, frus­tra­tion and even phys­i­cal ill­ness that the train­ing course can evoke will only be mag­ni­fied in a con­text where the over­whelm­ing num­ber of duties is open-ended and sel­dom able to be car­ried out to per­sonal satisfaction.

I had to learn a lot about a need to jus­tify my own sense of inad­e­quacy which meant I behaved like an arro­gant, know-all jerk.