One of the primary problems seminarians have to fight is that of competition. It may surprise you that this is so, but I have observed many examples of competitiveness among the future pastors of God’s flock. It makes sense that seminarians would be competitive. Take 3000 of us and cram us together and there are bound to be rivalries, jealousies, and disputes that pop up. Most of this stuff is under the surface. Competition is not expressed through shouting matches.... Read more

I’m still not used to the graduate school calendar, or, for that matter, the post-primary education school calendar. Eight years after graduating from Machias Memorial High School in Machias, Me, it still feels odd to be out of school in early June. So it’s not personally weird to me to write a brief retrospective on the past school year, even if I’ve been out of school for almost a month. Three years completed at Southern Seminary, one semester to go.... Read more

I want to encourage you to check out the website of New England Theological Seminary, a church-planting operation based in Vermont’s Christ Memorial Church. Located just outside of Burlington, Vermont, the program is led by Pastor Wes Pastor, a Westminster grad. It represents an aggressive effort to sprinkle the barren spiritual soil of New England with gospel-preaching churches. I highly commend the program to you and encourage you to look around at the website. NETS is an exciting program. Rev.... Read more

I wasn’t intending to revisit my series from last week, but I’ve received some feedback that I want to address. 1) I am not saying that all women who play contact sports become brutish or unmanly. I don’t think you’ll find that assertion anywhere in my writing. I have made the point that sports can have that effect. There is a key distinction there. It is happily true that there are Christian women out there who have played high-contact sports... Read more

A few quick hits today:1) I hope the teaching-as-ministry blogs were encouraging to some of you out there. My own mother is a teacher in a public school, and it warms my heart to think of all the quiet ministry she’s done for students. Mrs. Strachan is an exceptional librarian, and I’m proud to know my sweet, kind mother has long been a witness to the countless hurting souls found in our public schools. For her, and for the many... Read more

I want in this blog to encourage students who are not called to the pastorate but who want to do ministry to consider teaching in a public school. The work will be hard, costly, and spiritually challenging, but it will all be worth it. You will be a witness in a dark place. Many of us get stuck regarding ministry and vocation. We’d love to be a witness in our work, but we’re not sure where to go. To any... Read more

I am not sure who exactly first regarded teaching as a noble profession, but the phrase has stuck. On its own merits, teaching is an important vocation, one not easily surpassed by other callings. Yet teaching presents the Christian with yet another advantage: it is an excellent way to witness to the world. How is this so? Well, in the last 150 years, Americans turned the responsibility of schooling their children to “public” schools, shifting the entire enterprise of education... Read more

I want to alert you to a new website called Said at Southern. It brings together the blogging community that has coalesced at Southern Seminary here in Louisville, KY, though a number of the bloggers you’ll find at the site are alumni who live elsewhere. I’m one of three editors of Said at Southern, so I’m pretty involved in the direction of the site. I am also going to be writing some editorials there, so if you find my writing... Read more

Everyone loves a good cookout volleyball game. Or a fun coed wiffleball or ultimate frisbee game. Those sorts of activities can be really enjoyable, and I’ve personally had alot of fun in such settings. Coed sports can be fun when they’re relaxed. But when one wants to play seriously (an amusing phrase), the benefits of coed sports plummet. In our egalitarian age, guys and girls often compete seriously together. I, for one, almost never enjoy this. When I want to... Read more

There is no perfect standard by which to measure which sports girls might play, as Stephen suggested (check out his interesting blog here). With this subject, we’re going to have to do what we do on a constant basis as Christians: discern. Think. Cogitate. There aren’t necessarily easy answers to this question, and so we’ll need to think wisely about how we can cultivate a gentle, beautiful femininity in our daughters. In doing so, we will be going against the... Read more