How should pastors be trained and called?

Question 09011.

Good pastoral training begins in a local church, continues in a local church, and is tested by a local church, and any model that treats the congregation as the place you go once the training is finished has the order wrong.

I say that as someone who values study a great deal. The question is not whether a pastor should study but where the centre of gravity sits, and what a college can and cannot do.

The Calling Comes First

Before any pastoral training, there is a calling, and Scripture speaks of it in two voices. There is the inward desire, which Paul commends. If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task (1 Timothy 3:1).

And there is the outward confirmation, which is the recognition of a church that has watched the man work. The two need each other. A desire nobody else can see is not yet a calling, and a recognition the man does not feel will not sustain him at three in the morning when someone has died.

I usually tell men who ask that if they can do anything else with a clear conscience, they probably should. That is not discouragement. It is a test of whether the thing is a preference or a compulsion.

Character Before Competence

Read the qualification lists in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 and notice their striking imbalance. Above reproach, faithful in marriage, sober-minded, self-controlled, hospitable, not a drunkard, not violent, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money, managing his own household well, not a recent convert, well thought of by outsiders.

Only one item in the whole list is a skill, which is being able to teach. Everything else is character. Any pastoral training that reverses that proportion has misunderstood the job.

This is also why a college on its own cannot produce a pastor. You cannot examine a man’s hospitality in a lecture theatre, and you cannot assess how he handles being contradicted unless somebody contradicts him. Those things are visible in a congregation and almost nowhere else.

What the Local Church Provides

Real people. That is the short answer, and it is not a small one. Pastoral training inside a church exposes a man to bereavement, marriage breakdown, awkward committee meetings, difficult members, the tedium of administration and the discipline of preaching to the same people every week.

Paul’s model with Timothy was an apprenticeship. He travelled with him, corrected him, deployed him, wrote to him. Jesus trained twelve men over three years by having them near Him while He worked.

So my strong preference is for a man to be growing in a church while he studies rather than removed from one. My answers on what ordination is and the role of a pastor fill out the picture.

What Formal Study Provides

I am not dismissive of colleges, and I would be a hypocrite if I were. Serious pastoral training needs what a good institution gives, which is systematic exposure to Scripture, the biblical languages, church history, and the discipline of being marked by someone who knows more than you do.

A man who has never had his exegesis corrected will preach his own instincts for forty years and call it faithfulness. Reading widely also inoculates against the peculiar arrogance of the self-taught, which is the assumption that nobody has thought about this before.

The Bereans examined the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so (Acts 17:11), and they were commended for it. Careful study is not the enemy of warm ministry.

Where Colleges Can Go Wrong

Two failures recur. The first is theological drift, where an institution’s doctrinal basis quietly loosens and men return with the confidence of scholarship and the convictions of the surrounding culture. Any church sending a man should know exactly what is taught where he is going.

The second is formation without accountability, where three years of study produce a man who can construct a lecture and cannot sit with a widow. Pastoral training that never touches ordinary suffering produces a certain kind of preacher, and congregations can spot him in a fortnight.

See my answer on recommended books for pastors for the kind of reading I would want alongside any course.

The Practical Shape I Would Recommend

Serve first. Teach a group, visit the sick, do the unglamorous jobs, and let your church see you over several years rather than several months. Let somebody older correct your preaching before you have an audience large enough to be flattered by it.

Study in a way that fits your circumstances. Full time residential works for some men and is impossible for others with families and mortgages, and part-time or distance pastoral training is not a second-class option. What matters is rigour, not the postcode.

Then be examined honestly. Ask for the appraisal you would rather not hear. A man who cannot receive criticism at that stage will not receive it at fifty, and by then it will cost a congregation.

A Word to Churches

Most of the responsibility here belongs to churches rather than to colleges. Are you actively looking for men to raise up, or are you waiting for one to arrive by post from somewhere else?

Pastoral training costs a congregation something. It means giving a young man real work and real feedback, tolerating his early sermons, and paying for study nobody guarantees will produce a pastor. Churches that will not carry that cost should stop complaining about the shortage.

And when a man is ready, be willing to send him away. Some of the best training a church ever does ends with the trainee serving somewhere else. My answer on why churches are declining in the West touches on the longer-term cost of not doing this.

Pastoral Training in the Languages and the Text

I want to make a specific case for the biblical languages, because they are usually the first thing dropped when time is short.

You do not need Greek and Hebrew to preach faithfully, and some of the best preachers I have known had neither. But a working knowledge changes your relationship with the text. It slows you down, it shows you where the commentaries disagree and why, and it protects you from the confident nonsense that circulates about what a word really means.

Even a modest grasp is worth having, and the tools available now are extraordinary compared with what previous generations had. Looking up presbuteros for yourself is a different experience from being told what it means.

The Wife and Family Question

Any honest account of pastoral training has to address this, because ministry is not a job that stays at the office.

Paul’s qualification list includes managing his own household well, and the reasoning is explicit, which is that a man who cannot manage his own household will not care for God’s church. That is not a demand for a perfect family. It is a demand for a real one, faced honestly.

So a man exploring this should be talking to his wife constantly rather than presenting her with a decision. I would be wary of a calling that only one member of a marriage can see, and I would want to know how the children are being considered rather than assumed.

Lifelong Rather Than Preparatory

The word training suggests a phase that ends, and that is the last thing I would want to convey.

Paul was still asking for the books and the parchments at the end. A pastor who stops learning at thirty will be recycling material at sixty, and congregations can taste it. Ongoing pastoral training means reading outside your comfort, being preached to by other people, and staying in relationships where someone can tell you that a sermon was poor.

It also means keeping your own soul fed rather than only preparing food for others. That is the hardest discipline in the work, and the one most likely to be quietly abandoned when a church grows.

The Danger of Starting Too Young

Paul’s warning that an overseer must not be a recent convert is a warning about timing, and it applies to training as well as to appointment.

A young man who has never worked outside the church, never had his convictions tested by a hostile employer and never watched a Christian marriage survive a bad decade will preach from a narrow bank of experience. That is not a reason to discourage him. It is a reason to slow the process down.

Some of the best pastoral training I have seen involved a man staying in secular work for another five years while serving heavily in his church. He arrived later and arrived better.

So, now what?

If you are a man wondering about this, do the next obvious thing rather than the dramatic one. Ask your pastor for something difficult to do and ask him to tell you honestly how it went. Pastoral training that begins with real service and real correction rarely goes far wrong.

If you are a church, look around your congregation this week. Who is already doing the work without being asked? That is usually where God starts, and He tends not to send a memo first.

The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task.

1 Timothy 3:1 (ESV)