Formation Over Education
It takes more than academic success and excellence in ministerial skills to produce pastors. That’s because the biblical qualifications for the pastorate are matters of spiritual maturity and Christlike character, and an academic institution can only do so much—by design—to influence and assess such things.
It has become cliché at this point to hear from ministers the laundry list of things they “didn’t learn in seminary.” When churches everywhere were navigating the confusion of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was a familiar refrain. “They didn’t teach us about this in seminary!” Church leaders have become accustomed to saying this about lots of things that pop up in regular ministerial life.
The truth is, seminaries could improve in exposing pastoral aspirants to more of the practicalities of ministry. We could do more to minimize the theoretical, especially as it pertains to practical theology and pastoral ministry courses. I try to do that very thing in my own pastoral ministry classes. But if seminaries added everything ministers ought to know in order to be fully prepared for the challenge of serving a church, the MDiv degree would be hundreds of credit hours long, and nobody would go!
The solution is not to go to seminary. These days, theological education is more available and, in some cases, more affordable than it has ever been. I encourage any young man aspiring to pastoral ministry to get a seminary education, if he is able. For many—though not for all—foregoing seminary training would be poor stewardship of their mind and even of their finances. The academy can’t meet every need, but it can be a sound investment that pays lifelong dividends.
No, the solution is not to get rid of academic training—but we can’t expect from academic training what only pastoral mentoring can provide.
In teaching my pastoral ministry class, I spend more time on matters of the heart—the fruit of the Spirit, pastoral disposition, and personal holiness—than on the practicalities at hand. My students spend more time rehearsing the pastoral implications of assessing baptismal candidates than physically practicing how to baptize somebody. (I always say to my students that if they can’t figure out how to put somebody under water, they’re probably too dumb to be in a Baptist seminary anyway!) And I definitely spend more time in the classroom reinforcing gospel-centrality as a unifying biblical theme and as an urgent and necessary ministry philosophy than I do teaching them how to officiate weddings and funerals (though we spend some time on those things too). In the exams I administer and the papers I assign, I am far more interested in whether a student can substantively and thoughtfully reflect on the biblical emphases for ministry than in whether they can regurgitate things they’ve memorized in the readings. But despite all that effort, I am still not really in a position to determine whether what a young man can express in writing or in a classroom discussion matches how he lives and conducts himself in a real-life church setting.
For a man to be truly qualified to care for souls, he needs life-on-life mentoring. He needs another pastor or mature leader to speak into his personal spiritual life and bear ongoing witness to how he’s responding, how he’s learning, and how he’s growing.
I like to say that it’s the job of theological education to give the scarecrow a brain, but it’s the work of spiritual formation to give the tin man a heart.
Precisely because there are so many permutations of leadership challenges, relationship dynamics, and personal and spiritual conflicts throughout a life of ministry, it is not seminary we should expect to prepare men for them, but a pastoral mentor.
Formation into Qualification
While the biblical qualifications for eldership include things like “able to teach” (1 Tim 3:2) and “able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it” (Titus 1:9), which are certainly things formal theological education can inform, the majority of the qualifications focus on areas of character, disposition, and temperament. These qualities are certainly not divorced from sound doctrine and theology, but as the fruit of Christlikeness, they require a more intensive cultivation than even the best academic institutions can provide. What they require is personal shepherding.
What the biblical qualifications for eldership require is discipleship.
In 1 Corinthians 4:15, the apostle Paul says to the church, “For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers.” Paul himself provides spiritual fatherhood to many disciples of Jesus. He says as verse 15 continues that he became a father to the Corinthians “through the gospel.” He certainly was a spiritual father to the pastors Timothy and Titus.
Because the mandate of discipleship is given to the church catholic (Matt 28:19), every Christian ought to make it a priority to pass on the faith to others in a guided and even pastoral way. Titus 2— with its familial and intergenerational portrait of spiritual formation—reflects how this discipleship may play out in a local church setting. But as those with the mantle of church leadership are tasked specifically with equipping the saints for ministry (Eph 4:12), it is incumbent upon those in the pastoral office—that is, those who have been ordained, installed, or otherwise recognized by the church governance as holding pastoral authority and responsibility in a congregation4 —to serve as spiritual fathers to those who are training for that office.
In my capacity as both a seminary professor and a local church pastor personally invested in the training of pastoral aspirants, I frequently speak with young men who, despite making known to their pastors their desire for the noble task (1 Tim 3:1), have gone without discipleship in this area. Undoubtedly some have overstated their pastors’ unavailability or lack of investment, but a good number of them have either been neglected or simply told that seminary will provide their training. What these young men know they lack, however, is not just education, but formation. They’ve had many guides, but they’ve had few fathers.
And what does a spiritual father do?
The principle aim of a spiritual father in the work of pastoral mentoring is inculcating the centrality of the gospel in the mind and the heart of one who is called to ministry. We are helping one who aspires to the pastorate to achieve a greater intellectual grasp on the gospel and to develop a greater spiritual devotion, through the gospel, to Christ Jesus the Lord.
The fruit of this work is greater focus on and development in those biblical qualifications for ministry. Pastoral mentoring is about formation deeper into qualification. The mentor, then, must envision the training of pastors as beyond the intellectual and even the practical, and more substantively into the realm of gospel-centered discipleship. And because the training of pastors is primarily a work of discipleship, and because discipleship is the primary work of the local church, it is the local church that is uniquely qualified to carry it out.
Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from Pastoral Mentoring: For the Care of Souls by Jared C. Wilson, released by Baker (July 2026).
