"Stand in the place where you live, now face north. Think about direction, wonder why you haven't before." -R.E.M.

seminary

Why I Walked Away From Seminary, Pt. 2

06/05/2009 05:11 AM Filed in: Personal | Pastoral Stuff

Friday I began a series explaining why I walked away from seminary after 2 years, thousands or dollars spent, and hundreds of hours of study time. Today continues the story by examining a sliver of my time in college. You can read Part 1 at this link.

I arrived at East Texas Baptist University in the fall of 2000. I remember not being entirely sure of how this whole college thing would work out. My parents had both started college, but neither had graduated and they seemed to be perfectly happy and quite intelligent. So I didn’t actually know if I was going to finish because I kind of assumed that at some point I would start traveling and preaching or leading worship; if college got in the way of that, I’d just quit.

Needless to say, entering into college with that kind of attitude doesn’t exactly lend itself toward putting your best foot forward in your studies.

But why did I need to worry about that anyway? After all, I was majoring in religion, a subject I practically already knew frontwards and backwards. Though I never would have said it out loud, I had grown up in church and been to Sunday School more times than I could have possibly kept track of. What on earth could my professors possibly teach me about the Bible that I didn’t already know?

And then I found out that angels may have had sex with humans.

That’s right: Genesis 6 threw me for a huge loop on my very first day of class. My Old Testament professor at ETBU was walking us through the syllabus and going over a rough outline of what we would be studying for the semester when he casually mentioned the passage.

“And in a few weeks we’ll look at the flood narrative,” he said, “which starts in Genesis 6 with the unusual prelude, ‘When men began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose.’ We’ll be talking about what that means and the fact that many biblical scholars understand it to mean that angels intermarried with human women. If that is understood as true, it would be considered one of the evils that angered God to the point of destroying nearly every living thing on the earth.”

So imagine being little Mr. Know-It-All from Grand Saline, Texas. Mr. Future-Conference-Speaker. Mr. Sunday-School-Is-My-Middle-Name.

Now imagine having angel sex thrown in your face on your first day of college.

To an outsider, it would have seemed small and insignificant. An inconsequential fact mentioned merely in passing. An interesting bit of Bible trivia.

But it rocked me to the core. Because if I didn’t know about that...if something mentioned in the first five minutes of my first class while we were just looking over the syllabus was that alien to me...

...what else did I not know?

*part 3 will be posted on Monday

Tags: seminary, Christianity, Pastor, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

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Why I Walked Away From Seminary, Pt. 1

06/03/2009 05:32 PM Filed in: Personal | Pastoral Stuff

In May of 2006 my wife and I moved to Chicago so she could finish her bachelor degree and I could start working in earnest on getting my Master of Divinity degree. After carefully researching the best seminaries in the country, I had landed on Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. The scholarship at Trinity appeared to be first class as it was home to such great biblical minds as D.A. Carson, John S. Feinberg, Graham A. Cole, and many other professors who overused initials on the covers of the books they wrote (a sure sign of theological genius).

We moved over 1,000 miles, we took on a huge financial burden, and we threw ourselves into our work with vigor and determination. Within two years I had a supremely healthy GPA and was well on my way to graduating.

And that’s when I walked away from seminary. This is the story of why.

But to understand it, you’ll have to have a little background.

A Tale of 2 “Josh Crain”s
At the age of 16, I walked down the aisle of Main Street Baptist Church and announced to my pastor and my church family that God had called me to “the ministry.” Looking back, I realize I didn’t know exactly what that meant. In fact, I probably assumed that I was either supposed to travel and lead worship or travel and preach. My father had done those things for years, and I suppose I could see myself preaching to thousands of teenagers at “Youth Evangelism Conferences.” After all, that’s where the “real ministry” happened.

To be honest, it wasn’t that much of a stretch. Because of the opportunities my father had been blessed with, I’d already been leading worship in front of thousands of people each summer. And in a little over a year from the time I walked that aisle at 16 I would have the opportunity to lead worship with my dad and brother at YouthLink 2000, an event held on New Year’s Day of 1999 where we would stand on stage in front of 25,000 students.

At the age of 18 I felt like I was living a double life. There was the “Josh Crain” who attended tiny Grand Saline High School in east Texas: generally respected and mostly well-liked, but certainly not the star athlete or the most popular kid in school.

Then there was the “Josh Crain” who got to stand in front of hundreds and thousands of students and play electric guitar, sign autographs, and have a ton of cute girls from youth camps try to get his phone number. No one from high school got to see that side, and I always wondered how weirded out they would have been to see that going on in the summers.

Thankfully my parents did a great job of not letting some silly “youth camp celebrity” go to my head and I was able to get through high school as a mostly humble, if not a little self-righteous, 18 years old kid.

And what does a self-righteous 18-year-old kid who’s called to “the ministry” do when high school ends? Well, I suppose he goes to a Christian college to prepare himself to preach to thousands of teenagers at Youth Evangelism Conferences.

*part 2 will be posted on Friday

Tags: seminary, Christianity, Pastor, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

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