The Pastors College & Partnership with Local Churches
I was encouraged to share the recent podcast recorded with my friend Jeff Purswell, Dean of Students of the Pastors College, so I’m including the link and full transcript below. As Jeff said so well: “given who we are as a family of churches, given what the Lord has worked in us, the doctrine that we confess together, our connected polity, our shared values, our shaping virtues, those things that we hold to and treasure and cherish, I think for those to be nurtured and preserved and transferred between generations, I do think the Pastors College plays a vital role.” We are so grateful for the Pastors College for these reasons and many more that Jeff shared with Ben and me.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Benjamin Kreps:
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Mark Prater podcast where our aim is to connect our global family of Sovereign Grace churches with our executive director. We have a guest with us. You are down in Louisville, and we have the legendary Dean, Jeff Purswell, Dean of the Pastors College, joining us. Thanks for joining us, Jeff.
Jeff Purswell:
It's great to be here. I never thought I would make the lineup here. I've never seen the podcast. I read the podcast every week and to be included is quite the honor, so thank you.
Benjamin Kreps:
Your resume is complete. I attended the Pastors College in 2011 and 12, so I'm going 12 years since I graduated from the PC and we got guys on my team that went to Pastors College. It was one of the most wonderful years of my wife and I, our lives together. We often said we'd love to go back and do it again. It was such a joy. I'm coming to the pastoral ministry class next month, so I do dip back in, here and there.
But at the conference, Mark, you urged us to consider sending people to the Pastors College and talked about how it's an important part of raising up the next generation in pastoral ministry, a need that we have as the founding generation ages out of ministry. And so you had Jeff on because we want to talk about that.
Mark Prater:
Jeff is my good friend. We work a lot together, so thank you for honoring me to be on this podcast. Really what I'd like you to talk about is framed in this question, Why is the Pastors College vital to the future of Sovereign Grace, especially as it relates to theological training for our pastors, and not just theological training, but character development as well?
Jeff Purswell:
Wow, great question. Vital, that's an imposing word. I certainly wouldn't say, and I'm sure none of us would say, that churches cannot raise up pastors, that churches cannot grow and flourish and reproduce themselves, that Sovereign Grace cannot endure without the Pastors College. I would say though, that given who we are as a family of churches, given what the Lord has worked in us, the doctrine that we confess together, our connected polity, our shared values, our shaping virtues, those things that we hold to and treasure and cherish, I think for those to be nurtured and preserved and transferred between generations, I do think the Pastors College plays a vital role.
There's a number of reasons for that, but perhaps the primary one I would say is that the Pastors College exists not just to train men for pastoral ministry, but to train them for pastoral ministry in Sovereign Grace churches. In other words, it's pastoral training calibrated to our partnership. It's designed to strengthen our partnership. It's designed to impart values and instill virtues by the grace of God that are vital to our partnership. So we're not just a generic, freestanding academic institution determining our own values and our own standards in a vacuum driven by our preferences or the preferences of random instructors or much less driven by the marketplace. We exist to serve churches. We are accountable to the churches that we serve. And so we seek by God's grace to design and hopefully to continually strengthen a program that serves the interests of our churches, our doctrinal commitments, our philosophical commitments, our missional commitments, even our politic convictions.
And I'll just tell you from my perspective, as you observe the broader evangelical world, as you look at where certain institutions have moved, if you look at the pressures that are upon, especially theological training institutions, if you look at how theological definition has weakened, how denominational fragmentation has occurred, and even more broadly within the evangelical world, the fragmentation that we've all observed in recent years, I do think the Pastors College is helping and will help in the future to preserve and to strengthen and protect us in our doctrine, in our mission, in our relationships. And I trust, beyond all our gospel commitments and ultimately our devotion to Christ and His glory in our lives and in the church.
Mark Prater:
Amen. So well said. I think it's well said for a number of reasons, but one is just equipping men for ministry, specifically for Sovereign Grace churches. Sort of a follow-up question to that would be, what can the Pastors College accomplish that a local church can't?
Jeff Purswell:
Yes, that's a great question, especially for pastors who might be listening. Again, I want to say I think local churches do have a responsibility to raise up pastors, elders; 2 Timothy 2 places that imperative upon the shoulders of every pastor. So it's not that a local church, and none of us would want to say that a local church cannot raise up pastors, obviously they can and clearly not every man aspiring to pastoral ministry in Sovereign Grace is able to come to the Pastors College. Although I do want to say over 25 years of experience, I have seen the Lord provide in a remarkable way. So I would politely challenge any guy who just automatically assumes they can't make it. Well, perhaps you can. Not every church is necessarily in a position to send a man and his family to the Pastors College, but if they can, and I would strongly encourage them to consider this, we're just able to accomplish things in the Pastors College that is difficult, if not impossible, for a local church to do.
And that is not because we have created something great in the Pastors College or we have this wonderful expertise in the Pastors College. It's because the churches of Sovereign Grace have partnered together to create the Pastors College, and they are devoted to resourcing the Pastors College precisely to produce a quality of training and an intensity of training that an individual church would love to do, but can't. So it's not as if a church can't do it and we can, it's that our churches have partnered together now for a quarter century to create the Pastors College to create what they wish they could do, but given their limited resources and time and manpower, they're just unable to do so.
The credit for this goes to our churches. And what we seek to do is just build upon what our churches are already doing in the lives of the men that they are raising up now. So examples of that, we could enumerate many things. Obviously there are resources provided by our churches that are available in the Pastors College, the pooled experience or the pooled expertise in the Pastors College through our various instructors. And this is another thing that I think people often are unaware of. The exposure to Sovereign Grace pastors to an array of Sovereign Grace pastors and Sovereign Grace leaders that a pastors college student receives, I mean, they benefit. So in the process, they benefit not only from their own local church, but from many local churches through interacting with the leaders of many local churches, they get to know and interact with Sovereign Grace leaders.
Most of the members of the leadership team typically come through. Many of them teach. They interact with members of the executive committee when they're in town. So they're getting to know the leaders of our family of churches. It's a wonderful exposure. I think of an example, if you think of certain corporations, they'll have an executive training program, a management training program. And so certain people in that corporation, they'll meet the CEO, they'll meet the board of directors and so forth, and they're just meeting people who are leading them, and they're meeting people who are providing guidance for that organization that may, it's a weak comparison, but it's kind of like that; a person, a student who graduates from the Pastors College, they have gotten to know our family of churches in a very personal way. And I think there's real benefit from that.
They also benefit from the staff, obviously, of the Pastors College and of Sovereign Grace Church of Louisville. And so in addition to the church that sends them, they benefit from another local church, a local church that has a broad range of experience on his pastoral team. So they're learning from CJ Mahaney and his years of experience and his years of faithful example from the team he's assembled there. They learn throughout the year worship from Bob Kauflin and so forth.
And then of course, they are building deeply relationally with a group of men and families from throughout Sovereign Grace. As I always say, the secret sauce of the Pastors College, our secret weapon, it's the men who come. It's the men that our churches send. And I've seen it year after year, what happens among the students and their families. I tell the guys at the beginning of the year, look around; the greatest means of grace to you this year through the spirit's work is going to be the men sitting around you. They become lifelong friends, they become gospel coworkers.
All that to say, when a man graduates from the Pastors College, he has had an intensive, multidimensional exposure, not just to doctrine, not just to scripture, but also to Sovereign Grace as a family of churches.
And then the other part of that, and this may be obvious, but I do want to mention it, there's simply the benefit or the privilege of an intensive undistracted focus on learning, on a biblical and theological education, on a pastoral education, on intensive discipleship that most of them will probably never have that opportunity again. And when a man is in the marketplace serving as a bi-vocational pastor and so forth, and I'm so grateful for our bi-vocational pastors and have tremendous respect for them, because they are adding on top of their labors, providing for their family. They're serving the local church. But when a man has the opportunity, there is a particular benefit to that intensive, concentrated focus that just leverages all that they're learning, I think.
So I think those would be a few of the things that a local church would have difficulty doing, but again, our local churches have decided they want to produce this. So it's not as if we're doing something that are separate from our local churches. We're doing something that our local churches support and have helped to create.
Mark Prater:
Well said. Well said. Obviously there are guys that come to Sovereign Grace Churches with a seminary degree or there may be men in our churches that are thinking about pastoral ministry and they're thinking about seminary, which could be an option. So I'd just like to answer this question, What does the Pastors College do that a seminary can't?
Jeff Purswell:
Yeah, that's a great question. I interact a lot with people over that issue. Obviously, much to be gained in a seminary setting. We are grateful for seminaries. I'm personally grateful for seminaries. We encourage guys to avail themselves, if they have the opportunity, of seminaries and their resources. Like you said, more many guys come to the Pastors College after seminaries. A number of our students will go on to take seminary courses after graduating from the Pastors College. So we just fully encourage that and are grateful for that, especially where seminary education is going, which is going online. It's actually one of the unfortunate things that's happening among seminaries, and this is happening every day. Their ongoing viability for a residential program is becoming very difficult. And so the trend is online, and while that is a qualitatively different experience, I think in pastoral training, nonetheless, it does make available biblical and theological information and doctrinal teaching that I think is a blessing.
But when we think about the Pastors College, the Pastors College is not merely a seminary alternative in other words, a sort of quantitatively lesser seminary experience. The Pastors College is a qualitatively different experience from a seminary in many ways. I'm not saying it's superior, that we're superior to seminaries. I'm just saying we're different. It's a different thing. So the choice is not simply a stark "seminary or the Pastors College". I think you have to look deeper than that and say, okay, what is the Pastors College? What is the college experience comprised of? This touches on what we said a moment ago about the Pastors College training being calibrated to our partnership. A few specifics there. First of all, it's not just theological information that's downloaded online. It is a confessional education. We have a charge from our churches that Sovereign Grace Churches, theological biblical convictions, undergird and inform all of our instruction. And so we look at our statement of faith, which all of our pastors affirm as representing the body of teaching that they're committed to.
Our statement of faith is like a solemn pact between the Pastors College and our churches. So our instruction doesn't waver according to an instructor's idiosyncratic preferences or current fashions or sort of evangelical trends. No, it's tethered to the biblical and theological character of our partnership, and that's just vital. I'd include in that our gospel centrality; that's not a slogan, on a flag, we wave. We're just not in the gospel centered club. No, the gospel embodies certain realities and the pastor's call, it seeks to honor the realities embodied in the gospel. And so we endeavor self-consciously to train men to build their lives and their families and their churches upon the gospel of Jesus Christ and it's glorious doctrinal realities as well as it's existential, it's life implications.
I think another distinction is our connection to the local church. Of the many ways I would describe the Pastors College program, one is the theological training that is informed by our ecclesiology. And so the entire structure, the entire program is just that. It is informed by our ecclesiology because our students are being trained to serve in local churches. We don't want their education isolated from the very context for which they're being trained to serve. And that doesn't mean that it's education just within the walls of a church, but no, training that is informed by, illustrated by, reinforced by, contributed to, from a shared church context. I think of the illustration of medical students that are trained in connection with a teaching hospital. They're in the classroom a lot, but then they get connected to a teaching hospital. Our students, there's a comparison there. Our students, they benefit from that powerful combination of instructional expertise and contextual application. So every day we are making, in every course, we are making connections intentionally between the content of lectures and the life and ministry of the host church that the men are coming from, where they and their families are worshiping and so forth.
And then let me step back and say our ecclesiology informs the entire Pastors College experience from the admissions process. So our students aren't self-selected men who have money and can fill out an application and just pursue a theological education. No, they are sent from local churches with their character and their gifting being affirmed, their internal desire for ministry receiving some degree of external confirmation from their local church. When they graduate, their deployment into local churches is going to be informed by their Pastors College experience. So again, it's not just you graduate, you send out resumes and try to get a job in a church, but those connections that we have in our partnership is informing the deployment of them.
And then another way I sometimes describe the Pastors College, is we're training men to do theological ministry. In other words, we want every aspect of ministry, every methodology of ministry to be informed and shaped by theological convictions. Methodology is not incidental, but we want all methodology to be informed and shaped by scripture and by theological education.
Another aspect that I'd have to throw in there, I mentioned this earlier, but our training is relationally nourished. One of the unique aspects of the Pastors College as opposed to a seminary setting is that students aren't just taking the same curriculum but on their own timetable passing one another in the halls, but they are experiencing everything together. They're experiencing the classroom setting together. They're experiencing fellowship groups together. They're experiencing couples groups together. So every aspect of the program; pastoral, theological, personal, is leveraged by those relationships making each component of the Pastors College experience, I think more fruitful.
And that gets to one other dimension, and seminaries know this and they say this, not that they don't want to nurture the spiritual lives, but you'll typically hear when you enter a seminary, we are not your church now, the Pastors College is not their church either, but because it is informed by our ecclesiology, we do have a distinct life and doctrine focus. If I can just echo 1 Timothy 4:16, that is a verse that the students here exposited on day one of orientation, and it is a verse that will appear on their certificate of graduation when they graduate. Every aspect of the Pastors College is designed to cultivate one or both of those priorities. Watch your life and watch your doctrine. Both are imperative. Neither is incidental and neither is meant to be pursued in isolation from the other.
So, I think all of those things together make the Pastors College a qualitatively different experience from a seminar. Again, grateful for seminaries, really encourage guys to supplement their education with seminary education. But I do think by the grace of God, because of who we are and who God has made us as a family of churches, there's things that happen there that a seminary is just not designed to accomplish or equipped to accomplish.
Mark Prater:
So well said.
Benjamin Kreps:
Yeah. Excellent. Well, I know firsthand having had exactly the kind of experience you described when I attended way back when, I remember talking to a guy in my class who had an advanced seminary degree, and he was just talking about what a blessing the Pastors College year was and how different it was than his academic experience up to that point. One of my favorite things and I think is most helpful is that, yeah, it's academic in nature. There's strenuous hard work to be done and papers to be written and tests, but everything is oriented towards helping the student understand how to apply this as a pastor. And so that was extremely helpful. I'm confident I would not be anything like the pastor I am today without my PC experience.
And so thank you, Jeff. 'Looking forward to taking a class next month. Typically I go about once a year and find a good class and attend. And so thank you for the many years you have blessed our family of churches by leading the Pastors College.
We are evaluating a couple of guys potentially for PC, so we're excited about that. We got Kevin back from PC a couple of years ago, my executive pastor, and it's so true, I remember the first time I went to a Pastors Conference in 2010. I didn't know anybody, and my wife and I sort of wandered around a little awkward. And 2011, by the time we got to that Pastors Conference, we were in the PC and we had already begun to build bonds of friendship that just continued to this day. And so it really does provide this relational foundation. We care about relational partnership, and so PC serves our churches so well, when guys go through there and come back home to be pastors.
So thanks, Jeff. Thank you all for reading or watching. We'll see you here, Lord willing, next week. Bye for now.