Church and Seminary (3)
Of course, all of this applies to me as well — the day that I consider myself too much of a "man of God" to scrub the church toilet is the day that I have become as a filthy toilet to God. And doing a half-baked job wouldn’t do, either — if I scrub a toilet, I am going to make it shine.
I will not pretend that I’ve had as many opportunities to perform menial work as many other people, but whenever the demand was placed upon me, I did a good job with a good attitude.
To illustrate from an early experience, all the students at my high school were required to work a year in the kitchen.
I was placed under an elderly and grumpy supervisor who was accustomed to handling spoiled and grumbling students — kitchen work was considered the worst on campus. Probably expecting another lazy and whiny worker, the supervisor was very harsh and critical at first. But I worked so hard and so well that her attitude toward me was changed after several days, and she even started giving me preferential treatment.
I was promoted from the smelliest and most disgusting tasks in the kitchen (like dumping leftovers from people’s dishes and trays into a hole where all of this mixed discarded food had been for many hours), to repetitive tasks like peeling potatoes (thousands of small red potatoes!), and finally to the front of the kitchen to arrange the items on the counters and to serve food to the students.
My favorite tasks were the disgusting and the repetitive ones. People stayed away when I was doing the disgusting tasks (I didn’t think it was that disgusting, but apparently others did), and I didn’t have to think about what I was doing for the repetitive ones, so that while I was working, I would spend all those hours meditating on Scripture, and on the sermon that I would preach that week.
On the last day, when the year was up, the full-time adult workers at the kitchen were in tears when it was time for me to leave; they were actually weeping and trembling. This is the power of the normal biblical work ethic. I was not like this because I was born this way, but because I was a Christian, sovereignly changed and nurtured by God.
Jesus left us an example, so that if even our Lord and Teacher was willing to perform a servant’s work, we dare not consider ourselves greater than our master (John 13:14–17). Although it is unbiblical to require a minister to do menial work as part of his regular duties (Acts 6:2), the point is that he should never consider himself above that kind of work, and should gladly perform it whenever it is needed. (In fact, a leader should make a point of humbling himself and setting an example, by occasionally helping with the lowly tasks at church and also in other situations.)
The problem is that, unless I put him on a probation without pay, if I am going to train or test someone I’ve hired from the outside regarding these things, I will have to pay him a reasonable salary even while he is on probation, and when he is not really doing the work that I hired him to do.
Moreover, I have been using humility and work ethic only as examples — there are many other things that I need to test and probably teach him as well. But if I were to promote someone from within my own church or ministry, he would have already been trained and tested for a long time.
There are certain things that a seminary can do to help train and test their students when it comes to humility. For example, all the janitorial work can be done by the students. But seminaries might consider this unfeasible for various reasons, and even those who are willing to implement something like this cannot make it work as well as a church can.
Also, if all the students are doing this sort of work as part of the school requirements, they might not perceive its significance and so would just go through the motions, and it would be much less humiliating to the proud (which makes the training less meaningful and effective) than if they were in the extreme minority, as would be the case if someone is being trained and tested in a church community.
To prevent misunderstandings or misapplications of what I've said, know that my main point is not that seminaries are useless or that they should be abolished, but that churches should be much more deliberate and thorough in their teaching ministries, in training and testing both doctrine and character. If this is done, then in general a church would be the better environment for raising up its own workers and leaders.
(end of series)
Recommended:
Vincent Cheung, Preach the Word
Gordon Clark, The Christian Philosophy of Education