Brian Proffit interviewed Leland Eliason, who is retiring as provost from Bethel Seminary after decades of service at Bethel and in the pastorate.

How long have you served at Bethel?

15 years this time, 10 years the other time. Everybody tells me the surest way to fail in retirement is to do nothing, so I'm trying to figure out how to fail at retirement.

It's tough because with all our transitions before, Carol and I have always gone from something to something, and this time it's going from something to the unknown. That's unique. In addition to my time at Bethel, I had 22 years in the pastorate, so this is a significant transition.

There have been lots of changes in the church during that time. It must be challenging for seminaries to stay relevant.

It is sometimes challenging, but it really is the business of a seminary faculty to be up to speed on what's happening in our world. By far the majority of our faculty relish understanding what's going on in our world and in diverse cultures. I don't think any of them are using yellowed notes in the classroom that they used 12 years ago, and I'm proud of them for that. It's all fresh and up to date, and I'm sure of that.

We hear of some very successful churches led by people without seminary training. Yet nearly all pastoral search committees require an M.Div. How important is seminary training today?

You're asking somebody who has invested 25 years of his life in seminary training. What I have learned about pastors of large effective churches who have not gone to seminary is that they are avid readers—insatiable in their appetite for understanding life and the world, culture, and the Bible. And a great number of them have done the equivalent of seminary education by seeking out gifted mentors who have a wealth of resources and provide guided studies. So I think many of these people—the ones that last over the long haul—have the characteristics that I've just described.

So those who have succeeded in ministry for the long haul without seminary are those few exceptionally driven people who achieve the same level of learning—not just from themselves, but from others they accept guidance from—without the discipline of seminary?           

What I often say to people thinking about seminary is that a seminary degree will create a structure of discipline for you to read and study and learn in areas that you would want to learn anyway. Without the structure seminary provides, you may not find the discipline to make it all happen.

I think the danger of doing pastoral ministry without the equivalent of seminary education is in being contemporary without having roots in the history of the church. The history of Bible and theology, for example, turns up every conceivable heresy that we find in our world today. They have surfaced before in an earlier setting. They may be called something else, but in essence there are rarely new heresies. If you have the benefit of church history, it shapes a world view that diffuses the enthusiasm for everything that's new by tempering it with the truths of God that have been given to us through the Scripture and godly teachers down through the centuries.

I recently interviewed Scot McKnight and he talked about the problem of bringing our preconceptions to our reading of the Bible. For example, if we have a preconception of a prosperity gospel, that's what we find.

I think you've identified one of the really unfortunate developments in the modern world. And sometimes the prosperity gospel has even more appeal in the poor countries of the world than even in America. That whole way of reading scripture needs the lens of the Old Testament prophets Habakkuk and others who make it very clear that faith is grounded not in the material possessions we receive, but in a God who is holy and just and loving and forgiving. That's a great example of a ministry proceeding without the Biblical grounding.

You know Bill Hybels at Willow Creek is an example of someone who dropped out of seminary and has worked well over the long haul. But he is so well-read that he could teach with great effectiveness in any seminary I can think of. And he avoids the pitfalls that we're talking about.

One of the challenges in ministry is focusing narrowly on the text for this week's message rather than placing it within the whole counsel of God—even including Habakkuk. Our preconceptions shape what we see.

I think you put your finger on one of the big challenges—rightly interpreting God's word. And one of the first things that teachers of hermeneutics do is challenge the preconceptions that we bring to the Scripture. It can be uncomfortable for seminary students when we challenge their beliefs, but it helps throw away those blinders. I just came from another country, and I heard someone there speak of some of the pastors—that they really only have one sermon that is what they preach from every text they find in the Bible. I sometimes say I know pastors who have five or six sermons and they rotate them through every text. Both have to do with what you point out—the preconceptions. Seminary provides the tools to mine the truths of God's Word over the long haul.

Dave Redding teaches preaching here and he has a marvelous way of painting a picture of how sermons should sound. Sermons from the Psalms should sound like poetry. Sermons from Proverbs and Ecclesiastes should sound like wise counsel. Sermons from the Beatitudes should be declarations. Sermons from doctrinal books can easily have propositions. Sermon from ethical passages can have "should's" and "ought's." And just by simply describing the genres of the Bible—sermons from the historical books should tell stories. By doing that you get the marvelous richness of God's word. And pastors who get that, last. And they are loved by their congregations for thirty years of ministry.

And their people continue to grow from them through all thirty years.

Exactly.

There is a line of thought in the church that someone who has the gift of communication and seems to be speaking the Bible doesn't need any further training.

I think that evangelical churches are caught in a polarity. It's very clear that God speaks to people when they read the Scripture whether they've had seminary education or not. My dad stopped school after the sixth grade to help his father farm a homestead up in Canada. But he never stopped reading and he loved to read the Bible. When he was 88 years old he asked me questions about the Scripture that were thoughtful and probing. That's one side of the story. The other side is that preaching sermons is different from reading the Bible devotionally. And the skills of probing the Bible deeply enough to teach it over the long haul is a very different thing.

In the last 15 years, the number of positions that have opened up within emerging churches and ministry agencies has proliferated. It used to be that there were five or six basic positions that meant that five or six different degrees would be adequate. Bethel Seminary now has 11 degrees to meet the different needs. For instance, one of our most popular degrees is the Master of Arts in Transformational Leadership. Now we've added a Master of Arts in Community Leadership. It focuses on urban ministries. I won't go into all of the different degree programs, but when students come to seminary they should have a sense that the seminary is serving them where they connect with culture and ministry and opportunity. So Bethel Seminary has tried very hard to offer diversity at the same time as we hold to the central truths of God's Word.

Jeremiah says, "Find the ancient ways" and Isaiah says, "God is doing a new thing." And I think that seminaries that are effective know the ancient ways and keep apprised of the new thing that God is doing.

And the world we are in is changing more quickly than ever before in human history. Lots of opportunity for God to do new things.

It just means we can't do business as usual. Every year we take the faculty as a regular part of faculty meetings to visit different parts of our community. For example, Minnesota has the largest Hmong population outside of Laos and Cambodia. We take them to visit Hmong leadership as well as prisons and rehabilitation centers and Salvation Army posts and family life centers. We've toured areas of the Twin Cities that we normally wouldn't go to, as a way of trying to stay abreast of the developments right under our noses. So I think there are intentional activities that seminaries can do to insure that we're not in a bubble and not isolated from life and the culture.

Leland Eliason is retiring as provost from Bethel Seminary after decades of service at Bethel and in the pastorate.