A bishop offers advice
for seminary graduates
The Layman, May 21, 2009
Profile of bishop
The Layman Online published a profile of Bishop Will Willimon on Aug. 30, 2004. The profile was also published in the Oct. 2004 Layman.
United Methodist Bishop Will Willimon of the North Alabama Conference, taking a cue from a Presbyterian seminary professor, has written suggestions for graduating seminarians who are preparing for their first church.
His advice is typical Willimon: iconoclastic, light-hearted and dead serious. He explains what prompted the suggestions: “Allan Hugh Cole, professor at Austin Presbyterian Seminary, edited a book for new pastors, From Midterms to Ministry (Eerdmans). I was asked to write a chapter in the volume, recounting my own journey from seminary to the parish, drawing out any implications that my experience had for new pastors.”
Thus, Willimon, former dean of the chapel at Duke University and professor of homiletics at Duke’s seminary, has posted three essays for graduating seminarians: Advice for New Pastors 1; Advice for New Pastors 2; Advice for New Pastors 3. The text is much livelier than the titles.
Willimon begins with his first year as a pastor, “the most painful, frightening year of my entire ministry,” and then offers a spate of advice as to what’s important and what’s not, as in:
- He takes a poke at Marcus Borg of the “errant” Jesus Seminar and the value of contemporary Biblical criticism. “Seminaries, at least those in our church, labor under a growing disconnect between the graduates they are producing and the leadership needs of the churches these graduates are serving.”
- “Recently, I asked a group of our best and brightest new pastors what they would like most from the church and from me as their bishop. I was surprised to hear them all respond: ‘Supervision!’ They yearn for help with the move between these two worlds because they realize the inadequacy of their preparation. Churches and judicatories must take this move more seriously and must develop better means of mentoring and supervising new pastors through this process.”
- “[M]ost seminarians are more skilled, upon graduation from school, to be able to describe the world anthropologically than theologically. They have learned to use the language of Marxist analysis or feminist criticism better than the language of Zion. We must be persons who lovingly cultivate and actively use the church’s peculiar speech.”
- “The purpose of theological discernment is not to devise something that is interesting to say to the modern world but rather to rock the modern world with the church’s demonstration that Jesus Christ is Lord and all other little lordlets are not.”
- “Be open to the possibility that the matters that were focused upon in the course of the seminary curriculum, the questions raised and the arguments engaged, might be a distraction from the true, historic mission and purpose of the church and its ministry.”
- “On the other hand, be open to the possibility that the church has a tendency to bed down with mediocrity, to accept the mere status quo as the norm, and to let itself off the theological hook too easily. Criticism of the church ought to be part of the ongoing mission of a faithful church that takes Jesus more seriously and itself a little less so.”
- “A winning smile, a pleasing personality, a winsome way with people, none of these are enough to keep you working with Jesus, preaching the Word, nurturing the flock, looking for the lost. Only God can do that and a major way God does that is through the prayerful, intense reading, study and reflection that you can only begin in three or four years of seminary.”