Do We Need More "Pastor-Scholars"?

This month I got an unusual e-mail from the seminary I graduated from that announced a new scholarship program for the best and brightest.  It includes total coverage of tuition and fees, preferred on-campus housing and a stipend to apply towards it, an allowance to buy even more books than required for one's classes, and community-building experiences with other scholarship recipients.  This is a very expensive, primo opportunity for a select few to be developed, according to the announcement, into "pastor-scholars."

My initial rapid-fire responses to this announcement went like this:

1. What an awesome opportunity for somebody.
2. Good for the seminary and some wealthy donor for putting up so much cash to make seminary more financially feasible.
3. Wait a second—why didn't I get help like this when I was in seminary and nearly bankrupting myself financially and otherwise to get through?
4. This sucks.
5. Then again, I wouldn't trade my very difficult seminary experience for a different one, because God intended it to make me who I am, which is much more useful as a pastor than I would have been otherwise.
6. Maybe nobody should get this scholarship.  Maybe everyone should have to suffer.
7. Probably not.

Then after going through these quick reactions, my mind settled with curiosity on this term "pastor-scholars" and began pondering it.  And lest you think in the meditation that follows that I'm unfairly critiquing an isolated, accidental phrase, I've seen it repeatedly in subsequent communications from the seminary.  This is a deliberately chosen term; it is branding.

So, what does my seminary mean when it says that it wants to produce "pastor-scholars"?  Here are some possibilities.

"Pastor-scholar" may mean a scholarly pastor.  This person fits the conventional pastor mold but does so with a scholarly mind and the ability to grasp and interact with scholarly material which he or she employs in ministry to non-scholarly people in the church in a way that they can understand it.  We can certainly use more of these people.  I hope that I'm this kind of person.

"Pastor-scholar" may also mean a pastoral scholar.  This person works in the academy teaching and writing but has some pastoral experience in his or her past and perhaps still serves as a pastor part-time, especially on an interim basis, in the present.  This scholar incorporates his or her pastoral experience into instruction of budding ministers in college or seminary.  We can definitely use more of these people too.

I think that my seminary would be (and is) delighted to have both of these kinds of people among its alumni.  But I don't think that either of these are what they mean by "pastor-scholar."  I speculate that what they mean by "pastor-scholar," whether they're consciously thinking this through or not, is a particular breed of Christian celebrity.

Now, when I think of Christian (and here I mean Evangelical) celebrities, I think of three main categories (plus miscellaneous).  Some Christian celebrities are rare mainstream celebrities who have at some point made a claim to be a Christian.  Others are musicians who record openly Christian music.  And the third main group are pastor/speaker/author types.  I lump these roles together because it is frequently hard to tease them apart.  Though there are certainly Christian celebrities who do one but not all of these, it is by no means unusual for a person to have the official title of Senior (or as it's called now, "Lead") Pastor of some church and also to have their own quarter- to half-page of the CBD catalog for their books and spinoff merchandise and also to be a regular feature of the conference (summer camp for adults, especially other pastors) circuit.

Different corners of the Evangelical world have their preferred pastor/speaker/author celebrities.  For example, one corner follows the church growth group, guys who started with 30 members and now have 30,000 and write very simple (to the point of bland) stuff for the Average Joe.  Then there's the crowd that follows the searching, tattooed, flirtatiously liberal, iconoclastic, hipsterish celebrities.  And then there are the followers of the proudly orthodox, often quarrelsome, always thinky celebrities that smart people like to read because they feel smarter after they've read them.  It is this last celebrity type that I think my seminary means by the term "pastor-scholar," whether or not that's what they think they mean.

Why do I think that this is what they mean by "pastor-scholar"?  Well, for one, these pastor-scholars are so darn popular.  But more importantly it's because they are the most successful-looking examples of exactly what this seminary designed itself to produce.

Every kind of marketed product has a "category essence," which is the heart of the meaning of that product.  For institutions of higher learning, the category essence is smarts: every school promises that you will end up smarter by going there.  Now, within that category, schools differentiate themselves: "Smart and Competitive," "Smart and Socially Concerned," "Smart and Practical," "Smart and Creative," and so forth.  But some schools (for example, schools of the Ivy League) go the whole way with the category essence and brand themselves as "Super-Smart"—in other words, even for smart places, we're "wicked smaht" (as they say in New England).  My seminary thinks of itself exactly this way, as one of the two or three Evangelical seminaries in the country or even the world with the highest, deepest, and most penetrating thoughts (and among those few seminaries the most orthodox one, it thinks, so I guess "Smart and Pure" describes its brand well too).  It attracts students with big brains by promising to give them even bigger brains, and it consistently delivers on its promise.  The mission, the model, the method (required courses), and the material (required reading)—especially at the main campus—aim together to produce what the seminary considers to be a well-prepared pastor: that is, a highly intelligent and knowledgable one.

I know this, because I was exactly that student that the seminary tries to attract, and I came out of it with all the cognitive equipment that they wanted me to have (and some other weird stuff that I picked up along the way, but that's another story).  I can relate so well to a current student whose "goal," according to a recent donation appeal from the seminary, "is to become a scholar-pastor [there it is again] contributing to the field of theology and preaching 'in the mold of Jonathan Edwards.' "  Seriously, I might have actually said those exact words as a seminary student.  My fervent dream was to unite the Academy and the Church in my very person, because I believed (and still believe) that they desperately needed each other.  I could see myself getting a Ph.D., writing books, and teaching on an adjunct basis in a college or seminary while devoting myself to ordinary believers in a place far removed from the ivory tower and giving them the benefit of this learning.  I revered historical figures like Edwards and Augustine who appeared (at least with my limited knowledge) to do this very thing.

But during those years, when I was faced with the question, hypothetically or practically, which road I would choose if I could only be a scholar or a pastor, I always chose the route of the pastor, because I knew that that's what God had called me to.  And that led me to where I am today.  And now, going on eight years after graduating with six and a half years of pastoral ministry under my belt, I realize that the life of a true pastor-scholar is generally impossible.  There just isn't enough time to be committed waist-deep in the holy swamp of ministry in the church and also to be cloistered in a library writing articles that hardly anyone understands.  Maybe if you're celibate and think that free time and hobbies are for sissies then you can pull it off.  But if you have a family that you don't utterly neglect and are even remotely well-rounded, there simply aren't enough hours in the day.  I'm not saying that a pastor can't sneak in a Ph.D. at some point or that a scholar can't serve on an elder board.  I'm just saying that both pastoral ministry and scholarship are demanding pursuits, and only phenoms like Edwards or Augustine (and admittedly I don't know how well they actually pastored) can make it work.

And that leads me back to the question, do we need more pastor-scholars?  Because frankly, I question whether the thinky pastor-scholar celebrities consumed by Christians today are doing either job all that well.  How can they really be pastoring, what with so many weekends doing guest speaking gigs, weeks on sabbatical preparing their next tome, and hours reading and reviewing ten books a month on their blogs?  Sure, they're preaching most Sundays and probably doing a terrific job in the pulpit, and they're probably doing a good job taking elders and other pastoral staff on retreats to think deep, visionary thoughts together.  And maybe in churches their size these are the best things they can possibly do.  But surely other people in their mega- or mini-megachurches are doing the dirty work of interacting pastorally with actual, beat-up, flawed human beings, right?

Likewise, these pastor-scholars aren't really scholars.  What they write is assuredly scholarly in that it's thoughtful, well-written, critical, and informed by the work of scholars.  But the actual work of scholars is, to most people, painfully tedious, researching microscopic subject areas ("the objective use of the genitive case in the Pastoral Epistles") and slaving away writing manuscripts that hardly anyone will read.  Those writings that someone else (e.g., a pastor) might actually use (e.g., a scholarly commentary) still require an enormous amount of time doing very detailed work to research and compose; these pastor-scholars aren't writing works like that.  And of course, scholars do this kind of work in scholastic environments where they spend a lot of time grading papers and attending faculty committee meetings.  Pastor-scholar celebrities aren't doing these things.  They may have done these things for a while just like they may have really pastored for a while, but they're not doing it now.

So do we really need more of these people for the good of the Church?  I don't think we do.  We certainly need more scholarly pastors and pastoral scholars, but not pastor-scholars of the celebrity type.  But it wouldn't surprise me in the least if my seminary hopes that some more pastor-scholars like this will be birthed from its new scholarship program.  They fit the seminary's ideal of pastors as big-brained scholars-in-residence in churches.  They will further raise the seminary's prestige among potential big-brained students (and donors).  And the seminary has produced such people in its past.

Now, as I conclude I need to make one final comment that perhaps you are anticipating.  When I say that we don't need more pastor-scholars, some of me means that in a straightforward way, but some of me means, let's put a cap on the number of pastor-scholars, then remove one, and I'll take that guy's place.  Because frankly there's a substantial part of me that dreams of doing what these guys do—have my CBD section, be featured at conferences all over the place, get a hip black-and-white head shot for the brochures, receive fan e-mails (and I guess hate mail) every day, give the occasional quote to the national media, spend all week with my head buried in books, articulate ministry principles that underlings put into practice, and preach to the thronging masses on Sunday.  And you may have observed that with my little church and my out-of-the-way blog and my obscure forthcoming book I'm trying to do the very same thing, but I'm just much less successful at it.  And truthfully I do long to take four years out of my life (maybe when the kids are grown) and get a Ph.D.  So I admit that envy might partially be driving this post, and obviously that's evil.  But at the end of the day, if I really had the opportunity to go to the other side where the grass is so obviously greener, I don't think I would—at least not today—if I wouldn't really tend a flock once I got there.  That's because as far as I know, I'm called to be a pastor.  Not a pastor-scholar.