Here’s another limitation of seminary: if we’re not careful, we treat the ministry like a skill set that can be memorized, drilled, tested, and graded—all in isolation from the people we want to serve. Take medicine, for example. I’m glad my doctor went to med school. I’m glad that before he started working on live people he was cutting up dead ones. I’m really glad he’s been trained to know the difference between a benign and a malignant tumor, and that he can talk about things I could probably never understand. I’m really glad he didn’t just say one day, “I’m going to learn me some
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