What you can do today to prevent ministry burnout tomorrow.

By Dr. Craig Blomberg

It's no easy task for a seminary to strike a balance between the theoretical and the practical. Theological education needs both.

Coursework can take you only so far. The next step is mentoring.

I've participated in my seminary's program to mentor students, and I think there are several principles that students can apply to their experience. One worthy goal of mentoring, I think, is to help turn the tide on the appallingly high statistic of ministry burnout and the short number of years that people stay in ministry. I wish all seminaries kept—and published—the statistics for how many of their grads who intended a life of professional ministry have left it because of burnout or moral failure. Perhaps the statistics are better buried.

Mentoring, though, can make a difference. If you're a student preparing for God's call on your life, here are several ideas for thriving in a mentoring relationship.

1. Find a community.
Over the past decade, we’ve developed a program where each student must be part of a mentoring team. Every faculty member has a group of no more than ten students with whom he or she meets weekly during the semester. That faculty member is technically a mentor, but students must also identify two other people, one a ministry professional and one a lay minister, who can mentor them as well—from different perspectives. They also meet weekly—preferably all together—to pray together, check on any theological questions or problems the student might be having, and measure what the student is doing against his or her “mentoring contract.”

2. Write it down.
In our program, each student is required to write a contract for him- or herself that focuses on two aspects of ministry: skills and spiritual formation. Within these aspects, students further detail their needs, including such things as a self-assessment of what they’ve done, what they feel they need to work on, what they’re good at, etc. The actual contract develops out of this. The goal is to come up with objectives and theological justifications for the student’s field experience.

On the spiritual formation side of things, the goals can range across all the different spiritual disciplines. For example, students often focus on prayer because they see it as a weak area. Others explore fasting, solitude, or family building. This area is broad enough that one student was able to acknowledge an addiction that he was then able to work through in his mentoring relationship.

Goal setting is nothing new, but if you're in a mentoring relationship, it's important to clarify exactly what you want out of the process. Too often mentoring can be fuzzy.

3. Broaden your experience.
Another important piece of our program is the number of full- and part-time faculty members who oversee various training and mentoring centers in the community. This provides students with about eight different arenas in which they can do their practical mentoring: the suburban church, the urban church, a parachurch ministry, missions, counseling, a rural parish setting, chaplaincy, and campus ministry.

Even if your school doesn’t have a set mentoring program, this doesn’t mean you can’t pursue these kinds of relationships on your own. Even if no one is giving you credit for it, it’s so important to be intentional about the areas in which you know you need experience. I strongly encourage you to write out objectives that can be accomplished within a reasonable time frame. Then search hard for a ministry setting in which someone would be interested in meeting weekly—or at least as often as they can. Also, seek out a layperson to balance out the professional’s perspective. This kind of input will be crucial to your education and ultimately your preparation for ministry.

r. Leonard Sweet says interactivity is the key to the emerging culture.

Ever wonder how reality TV will play into your ministry?

Dr. Leonard Sweet, author of the best-selling book, Post-Modern Pilgrims, and professor of Evangelism at Drew University, certainly has. And he thinks it’s a big one! MinistryMentor talked to him recently about life and ministry in a Post-Modern seminary world.

How do you think seminary has changed since you attended?

I’m tempted to talk about the "post-Christian" and "post-modern" thinking, but it’s also "post-middle-of-the-road." When I went to seminary, I looked at the middle as the safe place. The art of compromise was bringing people to the middle; to get the heart of something was to get to its center. Today it is exactly the opposite. When I was in school, we were living in a "bell curve world," which created a middle world: a big middle class, mainline denominations, middle management, and mainframe computers.

There is now a new normal distribution term, called the "well curve." The well curve is where middles are flattening—it’s mitosis of the middle while the ends are getting huge. This has caused a major shift in my own thinking.

Ironically and wonderfully, a well curve world is actually more biblical than a bell curve world. The essence of orthodoxy is paradoxy. God is one; God is three. Jesus is fully human; Jesus is fully divine. There is no way to stay in the middle when you talk about that stuff.

So what’s the impact of post-middle-of-the-road ministry today?

To be in ministry today is to think much more about biblical categories and first century categories. Also, this is a karaoke culture, and the understanding of representative ministry, where one is going to represent God to one’s people and the people to God no longer works.

When I started off in ministry, I was a one-man band at funerals. I read Scripture, I delivered the eulogy, etc. If you’ve been to a funeral recently, funerals can go on for hours if you let everyone talk. There’s a huge shift in mindset from performance to participation. It’s time to rediscover the priesthood of all believers.

That’s all good, right?

Absolutely. The one reformation doctrine that was never implemented in the modern world is that everyone is a minister. That is another major shift, and it’s only going to get more severe: Reality TV is reinventing television to become an interactive media. Interactivity is the key to everything, including ministry to the emerging culture.

So how is this world shaping students differently?

Students today have an understanding of a new delivery system for learning and faith development that seminaries haven’t adjusted to. We are print people, and the whole delivery system has been print and books. The new delivery system is digital and electronic and interactive, and education still does not match the learning experience of the students. Seminaries are being challenged.

Also, there is a greater interest in "spiritual leadership." When I went to school, ministry was seen as a technique. The words "spiritual" and "leader" are being restored in seminary today. Students today want to be more spiritual and help others become more spiritual, and they want to look at this issue of leadership. I never took a leadership course. I never understood the need for leadership.

What is the number one thing that students today, in this post-modern world, can do to prepare for ministry?

I look at it this way: To make a swing work you have to do two things at the same time—lean back and kick forward. That’s how I would encourage students. Lean back and learn the traditions and text and 2,000 years of church history. Lean back into God’s everlasting arms. Then, in the power and passion of those arms and the text and tradition, kick forward into the kingdom of God, not into the latest fad, fashion, or trend.

It’s time to stop focusing so much on getting people to church and more on the Great Commission. The mission statement Jesus gave doesn’t start with "come" it starts with "go." The question shouldn’t be how to get more people into church, but how to send better people out of church.

We are measuring churches by seating capacity, not sending capacity. We’ve got to get the church out there in the world. That’s a whole different mind shift from when I went to seminary. We have to rediscover the original biblical challenge, the one that started with Abraham.

by Steven D. Mathewson

Some of the most important training I received during my seminary years came from my "other seminary." You see, I attended two seminaries simultaneously in Portland, Oregon, during the mid-1980s. My favorite of the two was Western Conservative Baptist Seminary. My least favorite was Matawan Manor Seminary. Western Seminary was accredited by the Association of Theological Schools; Matawan Seminary was not. Western Seminary had world-class professors; Matawan Seminary did not have anyone with a doctorate. In fact, few of its professors were Christians! Western Seminary required extensive training in Hebrew and Greek. Matawan Seminary had no language requirements.

But Matawan Seminary provided me with some educational experiences I never received at Western Seminary. Today, I am a better pastor, writer, and Bible scholar because of my experiences at Matawan Manor Seminary.

The curriculum at Matawan Seminary included fixing leaky faucets, shampooing carpets, and repairing holes in sheet-rocked walls. But more importantly, I learned how to shepherd a diverse group of people. I tried to help a young man deal with an anger problem after frequently receiving phone calls from other tenants about his late-night fights with his wife.

While repairing a stove burner in another apartment, I pleaded with a man and his girlfriend to pursue adoption rather than abortion. Once I shared the Gospel with a frightened tenant who pulled a knife on a guy with whom his girlfriend had been cheating.

As it turned out, my job at the Matawan Manor Apartment complex did more than pay the bills. Oddly enough, it kept the goal of my studies at Western Seminary in focus. It provided a laboratory for loving and shepherding people—including the poor and the outcast. That is, of course, the heart of Christian ministry.

In the course of your seminary studies, you may find yourself resenting the part-time or full-time job that seems to consume precious study time. Or your budget may force you to live in a less-than-desirable neighborhood. But I encourage you to look at this as your "other" seminary in which God has enrolled you to prepare you more fully for His kingdom work.

"Be strong and steady, always enthusiastic about the Lord's work, for you know that nothing you do for the Lord is ever useless."(I Corinthians 15:58 NLT)

Steven D. Mathewson
Pastor of Dry Creek Bible Church in Belgrade, Montana, and author of The Art of Preaching Old Testament Narrative (Baker, 2002).