Beeson Podcast, Episode 391
Collin Hansen
May 8, 2018
https://www.beesondivinity.com/podcast/2018/Fifteen-Things-Seminary-Couldnt-Teach-Me

Announcer:	Welcome to the Beeson Podcast coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George.
Timothy George:	Welcome to today's Beeson Podcast. Well you know, today, I have the privilege of talking to one of my favorite people. He has an office right here at Beeson Divinity School, but he's not a part of our staff technically. He's actually the editorial director of the gospel coalition. He's a writer himself, an author of a number of books. Maybe still best known for that great book he published back in 2008, I think, called “Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist's Journey with the New Calvinists.”
	He's gone on from that to write a number of other things, and we're going to talk about one of his most recent books, which he edited with another minister, Jeff Robinson. I'm talking of course about Collin Hansen. Collin, welcome to the Beeson Podcast.
Collin Hansen:	Thanks for having me Dr. George. 
Timothy George:	Always a pleasure to talk to you. Now this is a little bit of an unusual book. It's called “15 Things Seminary Couldn't Teach Me.” Now I work at a seminary. I have done that for my whole life more or less. I thought we taught people everything they needed to know. What makes you think there's some things they need to know we haven't taught them?
Collin Hansen:	The real problem was limiting it to 15.
Timothy George:	Oh my.
Collin Hansen:	I think we came up with 30. I don't actually think, Dr. George, that seminaries do leave that impression. I think they do have a sense of their own limitations and their own ... They're not trying to accomplish everything for a lifetime of ministry. There is much that you can accomplish in three or four years of seminary but I think it's mostly the students who come in with the mistaken impression, and it's such a seminal, such a momentous formative time, that they think coming out of it, that they are fully equipped for ministry because they've learned so much about exegesis and history and theology and even some of the practical courses as well.
	Really this is less of critique of seminaries, and more of an encouragement toward especially younger pastors to say, there is much more. Your education has only begun, and if you start out with that concept, if you start out with that humility, you'll probably be in good shape, but if you have expected your seminary to have taught you everything that you needed to know, you're likely to encounter some significant challenges.
Timothy George:	Now one thing I like about this book is that it's focused toward the church, as so much of what you do at the Gospel Coalition is. I think some people think of the Gospel Coalition as a think tank, which in a way it also is. You're concerned about theology with ideas, but you never lose sight of the fact that God's people are gathered into flocks with shepherds, and this in particular has that kind of dimension to it.
	It's a volume with a number of different chapters, written by different people. We're not going to talk about all of them, but I'm going to mention a few and see what you want to say about them. Let's say a word about your co-editor, Jeff Robinson, who also works with The Gospel Coalition, is also a pastor.
Collin Hansen:	Jeff, this really came out of a formative pastoral experience for Jeff, while we met together in Birmingham, not far from the Beeson Divinity School campus. His first ministry experience after many years at Southern Seminary, as a master of divinity student who came in a little bit older, after coming out of a career, a successful career, in sports journalism, and then going on to do a PhD in Christian history, or in historical theology at Southern Seminary, came in very well prepared academically, but found in a particularly difficult church environment, the limitations of that academic training as it relates to his own spiritual formation as well as his preparedness for the practical dimensions of ministry.
	That was a truly agonizing process for Jeff, one that he and I processed together, that we prayed through together, that I helped to counsel him through in some small ways, but one of the things I love about Jeff, and I noticed with Jeff, is that when you look at his writing, and he was an accomplished writer before I ever met him at The Gospel Coalition. If you look at his writing before this experience and after this experience, you see a profound difference. Not a difference in terms of his beliefs or his convictions, but in his tone. There's a certain tone of humility, a certain tone of chastened experience, that actually makes him, I think as a writer, one of the most compelling pastoral writers that I'm aware of, because younger pastors can look up and say this guy's learned a lot, but through hardship and through difficulty and that is perhaps actually the way of our Savior to godliness.
	I found his writing, including in this chapter, this opening chapter that sets the tone for “15 Things Seminary Couldn't Teach Me” to be very accessible and empathetic, and I think ultimately very encouraging to younger pastors in particular. That was really our motivation for the entire book.
Timothy George:	Luther once said "Experiencia est omnia." Experience is everything. Now that can be taken in a very bad way, and has been in the history of theology, where you begin with yourself, your experience. That becomes the criterion, the standard. That's not what Luther meant. Luther meant, I think if you really get something deep in your soul, you have to live through it. You have to experience it in that sense. It can't be just theoretical. These essays, all these essays in this book have that tone, that tenor to them. They are wrought out of the crucible of experience in that way.
Collin Hansen:	Yeah, and that was what we looked for. We looked for people from diverse denominations, diverse ages, diverse ethnic backgrounds. That was one of the advantages of going with a multi-author concept on this book, because there's a lot that we can learn from an individual who's gone through something, but to be able to see it systematically through these different people from different regions of the country, and like I said denominations, ethnicities, age, you start to see that there's something common in here that you're not ... You don't become a pastor the moment you receive this diploma or even in the moment when you might be ordained, but that this is a crucible of life that actually got intense.
	I think ultimately if we see the example of Jesus, the cruciform example of Jesus but also consider the example of the Apostle Paul. How his, the hardships that he faced, the physical hardships, the opposition, but especially, it was the experience of the pastoral burden. It was his burden for all of his people. That was what really sunk in. That is something that stands out in this book, that you are truly formed for your preaching, for your counseling, through the many sorrows and the many burdens that build up as you begin to carry that weight, being guided by the Holy Spirit, ultimately held up by the Holy Spirit. You start to be formed in that way, and that's truly how you become a pastor, when you identify with the sufferings and joys of your people on this journey together of life.
Timothy George:	Well, let's talk about some of the essays. Two of them deal in particular with families. Now we know, one of the great breakthroughs of the Protestant Reformation is that it's okay to get married. Priestly celibacy is no longer a requirement, although we have to also say God does call and use single people. We think of great leaders like John Stott who never got married.
	Here are two essays, one by our friend Danny Aiken. Danny is the president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. It's called, “How to shepherd my wife.” Say a little bit about that, and then I want to ask you about another one related to children.
Collin Hansen:	One of the things, just about ... I know a lot of pastors. Pastors are different from each other, different personalities, different giftings, but it's so significant that when I meet pastors’ spouses, there's a vast difference there as well. Some spouses are really closely engaged in ministry. They identify intellectually. Maybe they've even been trained as well. 
	I think one example that's very near and dear to us at The Gospel Coalition would be Tim and Kathy Keller. They met in seminary. There will be other leaders I work with, pastors who I'll never see their spouse. I'll never know anything about them, about the wife or anything like that. That's, I think it's okay. One of the things we just have to realize is that every spouse is going to be different in terms of gifting and that's hard because, especially in traditional environments that have a clear notion of a pastor's wife, that comes with a lot of significant expectations that become a major burden.
	I've seen time and time and time again, it's actually something that's going on with the spouse that becomes an opportunity for division and suffering and hardship for the pastor, and that's just something that I think people need to be aware of. It's just a hard thing to convey in a classroom setting in a seminary, but it's something to be very, very, very mindful of, I think, and Aiken does a good job of guiding us into what that looks like.
Timothy George:	Yeah. When I was at seminary at Harvard Divinity School, way back in the dark ages, my wife and I, we were fairly newly married then. We'd been married, oh two or three years. We took a course together called Marriage and Family Counseling.
Collin Hansen:	Oh really.
Timothy George:	It's the only class I think we ever took together. It was wonderful. Not so much about because of what it taught us about marriage and family counseling, but it brought us together in a common enterprise. We were able to see one another in our own callings in a special way by being in that setting. That's not going to work for everybody. It shouldn't. It's not a model for everybody, but the fact that this is an important part of your life and it needs to be taken seriously. Danny does a great job I think of talking about that with reference to his family and his wife. Then also Matt McCullough. Matt is a pastor in Nashville, isn't he?
Collin Hansen:	That's correct. That's right.
Timothy George:	Is it Trinity?
Collin Hansen:	Yeah, that's right.
Timothy George:	Church, and tell us about his chapter relating to children.
Collin Hansen:	Yeah, so we wanted to write from the perspective of a pastor who actually grew up in a pastor's home. So Matt's father is a Southern Baptist pastor in Alabama. Small town, south Alabama. We wanted to know not only how does Matt think about this as a parent, but then also, how did he experience this? We wanted to give a positive example here as well, because we know there are also negative examples. 
	A couple of the takeaways that we had there, and they're fairly simple. I've heard these from other people as well, but one of them is there are certain pastoral situations where it becomes appropriate especially as your children get a little bit older, where you can take them along in different things. That's something that Matt experienced with his father that he found to be beneficial, where you become integrated into the life and the vocation and the lifestyle of your parent. 
	I think that's, not going to work in every situation, as we know, but it also can be an encouragement to members of your congregation. I think especially older members of your congregation, they like that vitality of the family, and they love, and it also might even change the tone of conversation is some cases with those members, with the kids around, but think about certain hospital visitations. It's probably not a coincidence that Matt and I are working together on a book that he's writing that I've edited, called "Remember Death," that's coming out in the fall of 2018. 
	It's probably because he's been proximate, he's been exposed to those situations through a pastor's home his entire life. I think the, that's just a natural thing. I think another simple thing is just to speak well of the church. We know how difficult pastoral ministry is, but if your children's experience of church is about you complaining about all the difficult people in your church, especially ...
Timothy George:	Oh sister so and so, oh brother so and so.
Collin Hansen:	Exactly. Just we should not be surprised when our children grow up and they see the church as a den of vipers that they want to stay away from. 
Timothy George:	Those are actually good points.
Collin Hansen:	Simple things we can do.
Timothy George:	You're not intentionally in anyway conveying your resentments to them, but they pick it up in the small words and the tones you use. It's a hard call to make because it's difficult to hide that when you're at home. You have to hide it all the time when you're at church.
Collin Hansen:	It relates to the spouse issue as well, because some spouses want to be involved, want to at least know about things. They want to be able pray about things. Other spouses can't really, they don't want that. They can't handle that. They're not interested in that. That's just something you have to feel out, but I would say that's something that I continue to have to work through, even in my own marriage, of thinking about, what do I share and what do I not share. There's no, like I said, this is why we're talking about 15 things seminary couldn't teach me, because there's no rule book for how this handles. I don't even know how you would do this in a textbook.
Timothy George:	Now here's another situation you deal with. This is in a chapter by another Matt, Matt Kapps.
Collin Hansen:	Yes.
Timothy George:	Who's a pastor in Apex, North Carolina. Fairview Baptist Church. He talks about the difficulty that can arise when you are the associate pastor. You're on staff in a church, and you have some pretty deep or serious disagreements with the lead pastor. How do you handle that? 
Collin Hansen:	Yeah, so one thing that your former student and our friend Mark Dever has said is that the position of associate pastor is perhaps the most difficult in a congregation because you don't have the authority to call the shots. You are executing on plans made by the elders, by the lead pastor, or other leaders of the church, but you might have oversight of programs and some significant latitude there, but ultimately you're accountable to other people for that vision. 
	One of the things that Matt Kapps talks about there is that sometimes the disagreement simply will become so significant that you have to leave. You can't in good conscience, and it's not necessarily only because you're objecting to something and you're resigning in protest. It's because you can't in good conscience do what they're asking you to do. That's just something you have to be very careful about. You don't want to be deceptive about.
	Another thing I think is especially helpful for maybe a lot of people listening to this podcast, younger ministers who are often going to start out in associate positions, is to go right back to Jesus' basic teaching, to love their senior pastor the way they would want to be loved in that same situation. Because many of them will grow up, will become lead pastors, senior pastors someday, and they will have the same dynamic when they're leading. How would you want to affirm and encourage and love a superior in that case, or how would you want to be loved by somebody who worked for you when you're going to be in that position someday.
	I think a lot of us can relate to that in job experiences all over the place, no matter where we are. But it's a helpful word, even as I process it personally. I think about, even as a young church member, some of the things that I said to pastors and critiques I made to pastors make me cringe. I'm not as smart at age 37 as I was at age 23 somehow. I don't know how that works.
Timothy George:	There you go. Well let me as you about the chapter by Juan Sanchez. He's one of your leaders in The Gospel Coalition.
Collin Hansen:	He is one of our council members, that's right.
Timothy George:	He is the pastor at Highpoint Baptist Church in Austin, Texas. He's written an interesting chapter on leading. How do you lead your leaders, because that's another kind of problem, isn't it. When you move into a congregation, you've got people who are themselves already in their work and the community, even in the church, the real leaders. How do you offer leadership at that situation?
Collin Hansen:	I have to be clear on this point. A lot of pastors are not necessarily good leaders. That's a specific kind of gifting that's not the exact same thing as being able to teach, or being able to study. That's one of the major problems is that you've been called because you might be a gifted orator, a good sermon writer, even a good paper, research paper writer or something like that, but then you get dropped into a church situation, and especially, let's think about two different scenarios here.
	Let's think about somebody who comes in as a late 20s or early 20 something, or young 30 something pastor. If you're a solo pastor at that age, one, you're either a prodigy, which is not going to be most of us, or you're in a difficult church situation. Because those churches are not normally hiring somebody that young as a solo pastor. That means it's going to require that much more of you in terms of leadership, and you're quickly going to learn just how difficult that is.
	I think somebody who's written well on this topic is Mark DeVine, here at Beeson Divinity School, of these revitalization situations, and make no mistake, a lot of what he's learned is just the necessity of strong leadership giftings, to be able to navigate churches in those situations. 
	Another example would be, a lot of larger churches will look for somebody about age 40, or so, to lead, but if you come into an established church and maybe you're 40 years old, as a lead pastor or a senior pastor, that means your elders or other leaders in the church are probably going to be older than you, and probably the previous pastor was significantly older than you and perhaps retired. That's one of those moments where you have to follow the exhortation from Paul to Timothy to not let others despise you because of your youth, but be able to lead through example, lead through your commitment to Scriptures, lead through your humility. 
	There are ways to lead ... Congregations are interesting. You very rarely can lead through direct authority. Rarely are you going to be able to just say, this is how it's going to be. So much of your leadership capital is relational, and that requires ... I mean it's a special kind of gifting but also discipline to learn how to lead people from almost like behind, through persuasion rather than upfront through dictation.
Timothy George:	Yeah. Well, you know this is a hot topic in pastoral studies because the idea that the pastor is the leader who should exercise authority, it's my way or the highway, that's kind of ingrained in a way in a certain kind of church culture. Yet, it does run in a way, it seems counter not only to the example of Jesus but to the advice we have from the apostles in the New Testament. The question, I come back to your title, “15 Things Seminary Couldn't Teach Me,” now we have courses on leadership.
Collin Hansen:	Sure.
Timothy George:	Every seminary does. It's almost a requirement today, but very often the models of leadership that we're drawing from are not particularly the apostolic, biblical Jesus kind of models. How can we do a better job with what you're talking about?
Collin Hansen:	Well, I think another factor that complicates things ... This is actually something I've just been pondering in recent days is that the younger generations ... We're not even talking about millennials, but even the generation coming after millennials, is very skeptical of authority, and very skeptical of religious authority, and that also includes biblical authority.
	These kind of direct, even just, I'm the person in charge and this is how it's going to be because the Bible says so, are just these immediate turn offs for them. Part of that is getting back to the apostolic, to Christ's model, that he gave us because there's all kinds of language here that does not fit very well into the reigning corporate paradigm for churches. Things like the first shall be last and the blessed are you when you are persecuted. Blessed are the poor in spirit and things like that.
	I do think we have a wonderful example. You can't think of better leaders than Jesus and Paul, and yet, they look very different from a lot of what we see today. I think about Paul being somebody who was relatively meek in person. You know strong in his letters ...
Timothy George:	Not good looking apparently.
Collin Hansen:	Not good looking. Then perhaps if Isaiah 52:53, if we understand that correctly, Jesus perhaps was himself not very good looking either. Yeah, we're looking for that strong, tall, charismatic figure, but I wonder how many more high profile examples of moral failure and abuse we need with that model before we realize that maybe the Bible did have something to say about leadership that we should be paying attention to.
Timothy George:	Great. Let me ask you about two other chapters. These in a way are kind of, you might say opposing themes. One is, When to accept a call to leave my church. That's by our friend Harry Reeder, who's the pastor at Briarwood Presbyterian Church here in Birmingham. The other, the joy I can know over a long tenure, by another friend of mine, Phil Newton, who's a pastor in Memphis. I preached for him, it seems like 50 years ago. He's been there ...
Collin Hansen:	That is true.
Timothy George:	He's been there a long time.
Collin Hansen:	That's true. He has.
Timothy George:	Talk about those two realities and how you discern I guess God's nudging you in one way or another on these matters. How can you get joy if you're there for a long, long time or when do you know it's time to let go and to leave?
Collin Hansen:	Let me start with the beginning, and then end with the end. In the beginning, I don't think it's wise, usually, for pastors if you're taking a lead pastor or solo pastor position, I don't think it's wise for you to take that position unless you can envision yourself being there for a while. Now, I won't go quite so far as to say you're entire life, though that might be wise. The point is, usually, you're off to a bad start if you're expecting to leave that church.
	Now I'm not talking about an interim type situation or something like that. I understand things are going to come in there, but this notion that has been especially prevalent I think in Southern Baptist churches. Wendell Berry writes a lot about this from his perspective in Kentucky, within striking distance of Louisville, and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary over the years, but generally speaking, if a pastor comes in expecting I'm going to kind of pay my dues at this place for a couple years, unless it's a student or something like that, that's not often going to end well.
	The people are going to view you a certain way. You're going to view them a certain way. People don't like to be your ticket to be punched to a higher and bigger things. Unfortunately that is especially in a denominational context like the SBC, that's often how younger pastors do view these things. That's one thing to keep in mind, but then another thing to keep in mind is that the church doesn't need you.
	On the other side of things, if you get to a point in ministry where you can't imagine the church being okay without you, then you've probably failed as a leader at some place or another. You have inadequately developed the plurality of leaders, other pastors, elders. You perhaps have not modeled an effective way of handling the truth of God's Word for yourself, but maybe you have been putting on a performance, demonstrating your own wisdom and your own insight, and things like that rather than the wisdom and insight of the inspired, inerrant Word of God.
	That's what you need to avoid. You can set that tone early on in ministry, but again if you get to the end and you start to think, I can't imagine these people surviving around here without me, then maybe it is a sign that you should be moving on.
Timothy George:	Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know this in the life of the church as these things come and go, and you stay or you leave. In the midst of that, there's conflict, all kinds of conflict. One of your chapters is how to handle conflict, by Jay Thomas. There's not a pastor I suggest listening to this podcast who hasn't faced that at some level in some way at some time. So how do you handle conflict?
Collin Hansen:	Yeah, I mean part of it's just not to be surprised by it. Conflict is going to follow you wherever you pastor people. That's obviously everywhere. Conflict's going to follow you because you likewise are a sinner. The real question is not whether you face conflict. One thing is that there might be more conflict early on in your ministry, but if there is escalating conflict, you have to learn the difference of discernment between is this escalating conflict because I'm guiding people into the truth of God's Word in newer and deeper ways and they're resistant to it, or is this because I've created a culture of ungodliness that is coming around and really kind of biting and devouring me?
	I don't know exactly how you discern that, but I guess my best example there is to continue to match our ministry against that of Jesus. But the real question there is, do you find yourself being personally destroyed by this conflict or do you find yourself running to the refuge of Christ in that conflict, and ultimately can you be okay if the worst case scenario happens, if you get fired there and your family is out? Because a pastor who can be okay with that because he knows that Christ will provide for him. He clothes the lilies of the field and feeds the birds of the air, so he will take care of you and your family. A pastor who can be assured of that and know that, is a pastor who can accomplish pretty amazing things, even with conflict.
	But a pastor who feels like he has to hold on to this because he doesn't know how his family is going to be okay otherwise is a pastor who one, is going to be very likely to cover up sin in the pastor's own life. There's going to be probably some concealed sin that's involved there, and then also you're going to try to avoid conflict by placating people and there are certain people in your church that you cannot afford to placate. That would be ungodliness and an abdication of your responsibility as a shepherd of God's flock to placate certain people in their evil in your church that requires a lot of discernment and humility to know where that is, but that's, those are just some of the things that I've observed personally and also just working with a lot of pastors over the years.
Timothy George:	Pastor Jay Thomas wrote that chapter on conflict. He's the pastor at Chapel Hill Bible Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Collin Hansen:	A good friend of mine from Wheaton. We were at college church together.
Timothy George:	Yeah. Now, we're almost out of time, but you wrote a chapter yourself.
Collin Hansen:	I did.
Timothy George:	You not only are the co-editor. You're also the contributor, and the chapter you wrote is, “What to do when no church hires you.” I bet a number of Beeson graduates and other people from other seminaries have asked that question.
Collin Hansen:	I would hope not Beeson Divinity School. I was thinking maybe that's why I didn't get hired, because I didn't go to Beeson Divinity School and I should have listened. Oh, goodness. That was certainly a very difficult and formative thing for me, but the real big takeaway and the Lord was very kind to me in this. He revealed to me that my calling, my gifting is a gifting regardless of whether you get a paycheck for it. 
	If you are called to take care of God's people, to teach God's people, to set an example for God's people, then you will do that. You will do that no matter if somebody pays you to do it. That I think is a pretty good indication of calling. We're better off observing the work of God in someone's life and then affirming that as a call to ministry, rather than what we normally do, which is a ... I mean I really think, Dr. George, this is a big problem when it comes to younger pastors and calling.
	I think a lot of them imagine, well, the spiritual things of God are really important and I like to talk, and people seem to respond to me when I talk. Therefore I should be a pastor. Well you can see how that kind of self-centered subjective approach to calling gets us into a lot of trouble because people are not going to always be impressed with us, and there's going to be conflict and hardship and suffering, like we're talking about. I wonder if we went back to the biblical notion of calling, as a calling to lay down our lives for God's people, just like Christ himself laid down his life for the church. What if we got back to that notion of the privilege of calling, to lay down our lives for God's people and to bear these burdens of one another that the Apostle Paul talks about? 
	What if we got back to that notion of calling? Then I think we would better prepare people for ministry and including during some of the suffering and hardship of when your dream of how things are supposed to go is not aligned with God's vision for your life, which is what I found when I graduated seminary and reflect on, at the end of this book. I'm very grateful for the Lord leading me through there, and also grateful that he didn't inflict me on some poor congregation back then.
Timothy George:	You know, the preface to this book, the foreword was written by my friend, Dr. Al Muller, who is also one of my former students. I'm old enough to say that. But, he makes a good recommendation. I want to read just a paragraph from that foreword, about the Christian ministry. He says, "The essays in this book seasoned with thoughtfulness, seeded with experience, are helpful in clarifying the centrality of the local church and the education of the pastor. Some of them will make you smile. Others may make you wince. Every essay will make you think."
	It's true. And so I want to commend this book, “15 Things Seminary Couldn't Teach Me,” edited by Collin Hansen and Jeff Robinson and published by our friends at Crossway. It's a great read. It's not a long book, but it's a book that will be a blessing to you. I commend it to all those who are pastors or anybody who knows a pastor. I think you'll find it very helpful. Thank you Collin for this conversation.
Collin Hansen:	Thank you, Dr. George. 
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