Bible college?

     I find Tom Nettles' newest book, Living By Revealed Truth: The Life and Pastoral Theology of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, an interesting and challenging read. In my opinion it is the best of the Spurgeon biographies.

     In the portion of the book that deals with Spurgeon's college is found this paragraph on page 356: "The depth of his conviction that no human agency can call, set aside, and endow a minister of the gospel overflowed in one intense and extended sentence. 'Both those who usurp the Spirit's office and send, and those who admit to the imposture and are sent, may think themselves mercifully favoured that they escape the immediate judgment of God; but they may be assured, beyond all hope, that no power of a divine kind ever will or can rest upon the ministrations thus inaugurated, for God will not own the messenger of men, nor set his seal to a commission which did not originally emanate from his throne.' The surplice may fall on uncalled shoulders, but not the prophetic mantle." This started me thinking.

     Do we see in Christendom in our day those who usurp the Spirit's office and send, and those who admit to the imposture and are sent without a divine call to the gospel ministry? Nettles' final sentence following his quote of Spurgeon is, "The surplice may fall on uncalled shoulders, but not the prophetic mantle." A surplice is a garment worn by Roman Catholic and Anglican priests while conducting the Mass. Nettles is suggesting that someone not called by God to the ministry may end up wearing priest's garb while performing his religious duties, but that does not mean he wears the [spiritual] mantle of a prophet; he will never be a God-called preacher.

     I think we do see in Christendom these days what Spurgeon saw in his day, those who usurp the Spirit's office and send uncalled men into the gospel ministry. The mechanism is different in our day than it was in Spurgeon's day, but it happens nevertheless. In Spurgeon's England it occurred when an infidel attending Oxford or Cambridge chose the path to the priesthood in the Church of England that guaranteed a lifelong income without any particular need to perform more than routine religious duties. It was just this type of priest that George Whitefield and John Wesley railed against almost every time they preached outdoors to the assembled multitudes. It was this type of priest Gilbert Tennant wrote against in his published sermon whose title I will shorten, "The Dangers Of An Unconverted Clergy," that so well prepared New England for the ministry of Jonathan Edwards and the arrival of George Whitefield. However, in our day the path of the uncalled to the gospel ministry, especially among independent Baptists, is somewhat different than in 18th and 19th century England.

     Imagine several cases of individuals that I will consider in turn, the pastor's kid who goes off to Bible college and majors in music, the pastor's kid who goes off to Bible college and majors in youth ministry, and the church kid whose dad is not a pastor and who goes off to Bible college. Such a youngster would go to camp every summer. Why? Because that's what churches with youth groups do. So, what happens when a hundred kids are at camp each summer and most of them made professions of faith the year before or two years before? The role of the camp speaker is not to preach the gospel, not really, since most of the kids at camp are all saved (he thinks). Therefore, his thrust can be summed up in two goals; to get a kid to rededicate his life and go forward at invitation time, shedding tears for his past sins, and asking for forgiveness as a commitment to doing better in the future, and also to obtain a commitment from the kid (especially if he or she is a high school junior or recently graduated senior with no fixed academic goals) to go to the Bible college favored and endorsed by the pastor . . . for at least one year.

     The three different categories I have mentioned are encouraged by their parents, by their pastors, by the Bible college's recruiters, and by camp evangelists to enroll and attend the Bible college. I know of one Bible college here in California that used to use female students to call prospective males still in high school, luring them to Bible college with the suggestion that they would be friends if only he would enroll. I hope they have forsaken such means to grow their school. What hormone-charged teenage boy would not enthusiastically to such a "spiritual" motivation? The student ends up enrolling in Bible college and provides only the most perfunctory testimony of salvation to gain admittance, goes through Bible college (not knowing what else to do even though his original design was to attend for only one year), and then ends up after graduating working for a church as an associate pastor, or as a music director (they call them worship pastors these days), or as a youth pastor. Some graduates occupy all three positions in their first positions out of Bible college.

     At some point he marries. At some point his wife delivers their first child, and he is given a raise. However, when the second child comes along the pastor (likely as not daddy if he is a preacher's kid) provides no additional raises because the church cannot afford it. Therefore, because he simply has to make more money to support his growing family, the associate pastor, the worship leader, the youth pastor, must secure his own pastorate to make enough money to live on. The real problem, of course, is that not only is he not really called to the ministry (remember, he was talked into Bible college by pastor/dad, by the evangelist, and by that sexy girl who called him on the phone indicating they could be friends if he enrolled - he never did find out who she was), but he is not genuinely saved! Thus, his approach to the associate pastorate is mechanical and fleshly, his approach to music is not ministry but to overestimate the benefit of emotionally moving audiences, and his real philosophy of youth ministry is pizza and Pepsi, funny jokes, and pranks that lead into sad and tearful stories and end in prayers of recommitment. Thus, it is no wonder that his arrival to the pastorate is the beginning of a shallow and church growth philosophy approach that is more concerned with manipulating crowds than seeing individuals coming to embrace the Savior.

     Of course, if he is not a pastor's kid the story has a somewhat different ending. He may not even finish Bible college. Or he may finish Bible college but spend only a short time attempting to function in the gospel ministry. The real problem is that if he is converted he may still not be called to the gospel ministry and is inherently honest enough that he just can't live a lie. So, he goes looking for a "secular job" to support himself, and may be one of many who continues to live in Mecca (the town where the Bible college is located) and attend the church he was involved in while in Bible college. He will become one of those guys who is not a God-called preacher but is married to a young wife whose heart was set on a life in the ministry here in the USA or on the mission field, forever feeling like is he somehow a disappointment to his wife. He attends church faithfully, serves in some capacity, uses some of the training in his church that he learned in Bible college, though he will likely always feel he is a second class Christian citizen because he somehow let his parents down, let his wife down, let his former pastor down, and let his school and current pastor down.

     What he never quite figures out is that his former pastor always knew how it would turn out for the kid whose dad was not a missionary or a pastor. Churches these days lose such a high percentage of teenagers who eventually drop out of church to never return that pastors prefer for that tragedy to occur somewhere other than their church being the exit portal out of Christianity. That is the real reason they want all of the church's kids to end up in Bible college elsewhere, so that when the expected dropout does occur it will take place somewhere else and neither the pastor nor the parents will have to face the blame for their role in what happens. Bible colleges are okay with all this because they too know most of their incoming students will drop out, but they need warm bodies if even only for a year or two. The truth is that training for the ministry today is nothing like Harvard, Yale, or Princeton used to be when huge percentages of enrollees graduated and spent their entire lives in the gospel ministry (and not as youth directors or so-called worship leaders either). And the big church with the Bible college, or the big churches in the same town as the Bible college, are engaged in a quiet conspiracy to take those kids in with the full understanding that while most will drop out of Bible college or graduate but never enter the ministry, a high enough percentage of them will hang around after the inevitable occurs that those churches end up growing numerically as a result of their participation in the wicked conspiracy.

     Spurgeon's approach was radically different. There were real obstacles to overcome to gain entrance to his school. You actually had to convince him you were converted. You then had to convince him you were called. You then had to do the academic work or you would be flunked out, something almost no independent Baptist Bible college actually does these days. As well, Spurgeon did not provide fluff training in the form of song leaders disguised as worship pastors, or pizza and Pepsi party guys disguised as youth ministers, which two supposed local church jobs have no authorization I have ever found in the New Testament as paid staff positions.

     I have been in the ministry since 1975. I have the privilege of serving Christian men and women who were caught up in the Bible college meat grinder, who are wonderful church members who in some cases needed a great supply of God's grace to deal with disappointment and possibly even guilt associated with what they at one time felt was failure on their part for having failed. Only they did not fail. They were taken advantage of by cynical pastors, thoughtless evangelists, and Bible colleges caught up in a must succeed by whatever means and at whatever the cost mindset. Gone is the day when it can be assumed Bible colleges exist for the purpose of training men and women for the gospel ministry, not since recruiters have existed, and not since youngsters have been encouraged to attend for only one year. We are now in an era in which many Bible colleges have been seen as useful only for adding numbers and unpaid workers to the church or churches most closely associated with the Bible college, literally sucking the young people out of medium and small-size churches to contribute to the growth of large churches. How is this not parasitism?

     Are all Bible colleges bad? Certainly not. However, it would serve the cause of Christ well to take a careful look at what really takes place in connection with each Bible college. There are lives at stake, and the cause of Christ to be advanced by spiritual means and not carnal means.