Dear ______: Ah yes, your preaching class is requiring you to read something by St. John Chrysostom. I’m so glad — when you get to know a great preacher like Chrysostom, you may end up with a mentor for life. And you might not pick him up on your own, right? But first you have to learn how […]
Learning to Read All Over Again (Letters to a Young Pastor)
Dear ______: It does sound like you are now in the thick of things in your new semester. Glad to hear your new classes are exciting. Sorry to hear that you are finding yourself overwhelmed with your reading assignments. I remember one classmate who added up all the pages assigned for all his classes for […]
Learning to Learn (Letters to a Young Pastor)
Dear ______: Last time I wrote I was full of athletic metaphors — the Olympics were a big deal at our house. Now I’m tracking backward from the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, and thinking about how thriving in seminary is like learning to swim. We all start out with the flailing […]
Getting Through Seminary by Avoiding Contamination? (Letters to a Young Pastor)
Dear ______: The description in your letter of that particular group of students sounds like me when I was learning to swim: I thrashed around as hard as I could just to survive and get out of the water. Many enter seminary with the strange goal of avoiding contamination. I’ve seen two very different kinds of […]
Shouldn’t This Be Easy? (Letters to a Young Pastor)
Dear ______: Thanks for your note. You are definitely right: seeking a mountaintop experience is by no means the only off-target assumption people bring to seminary. And the assumptions that you bring make a big difference on the experience you have. Anyway, the conversations you mention point to another assumption that can keep people from […]
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