06.02. Chapter 2: The Proposed Standardization Of The Ministry
Chapter 2 THE PROPOSED STANDARDIZATION OF THE MINISTRY THE ADVANTAGES that accrue from standardization in many fields are confessedly great and important, and there are men—particularly in our “modern” ministry—who think that standards should be applied to the minister of the gospel. THE MODERNIST DEMAND!
It is more than academic!
Several of the larger denominations have in connection with their governing bodies—as, for instance, the General Assembly among Northern Presbyterians, and the Annual Conference of the Methodists, and others—legislated upon this subject requiring of the candidates for ordination an A. B. degree from a reputable college and at least two years or more from a seminary approved by the particular body involved.
It turns out, however, in practical application that this academic requirement may be fully met (together with those associated virtues of health, morality, Christian experience, and conscious call, commonly expected), and yet ordaining councils hesitate, debate, and in certain instances refuse to proceed with the sacred task of approving for the ministry, only because modernism has not been satisfactorily voiced by the candidate. The modernist demand is a peculiar mold. The candidate should not only bring to the Presbytery an A. B. degree, together with a diploma from a first-class theological seminary, but, if he expect favor, that diploma should come from a college known to be liberal in its teachings, and from a theological seminary whose professors are more famed for the creation of doubts than for the defense of “the faith once delivered.” This demand amounts to regimentation. This word “regimentation” is in very constant, even popular use just now. It is a time of dictators, armies constituted of millions, and the regimentation of those who were formerly free citizens.
Regimentation means “formation as into a regiment,” where the superior officer gives command and all the underlings must obey. We grant that such is the tendency of the times. We grant that the drift of the day is in that direction, but we also insist that neither the tendency nor the drift ever had, or ever can receive, divine approval; and since the minister is supposed to be God’s man, God’s mouthpiece, God’s representative, he is the one individual who should forever resent human regimentation. When Peter and John were taken from the prison in which they had been unjustly held, and commanded “not to speak at all nor teach in the name of Jesus,” “But Peter and John answered and said unto them, Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye” (Acts 4:18-19). A specious plea for regimentation is that it looks to the improvement of the office. The argument advanced is, “We would improve the profession, put into it stronger and better-equipped men.” But here some hard facts have to be faced, and among those faced is the increasing conviction with laymen that ministers of the first-grade are not as much in evidence today as they were a quarter or a half century ago. The skeptical schools that began some twenty-five to forty years ago to promise the “improved output” have signally failed to make good on their confident predictions; and the result is that when an outstanding pulpit is vacant, the anxious, even the alarming question is, “Where can the church find a man who is sufficient?” The Mark Matthews, the Clarence Dixon, the J. H. Jowett, the T. T. Eaton, the DeWitt Talmage, the L. W. Munhall, the John A. Broadus, the B. H. Carroll, the P. S. Henson, the George Lorimer, the Frank Gunsaulus, the Joseph Cook, the Bishop Brooks, the Dwight L. Moody, the Henry Ward Beecher, the Joseph Parker, the Charles Spurgeon of yesterday and the day before, are not so perfectly out-classed by this liberal school output as its propagandists would have the world believe! We grant you that the full height of a tree is never taken until after it has fallen; but we insist that any intelligent judge of ministerial ability and value would give the honors to these buried ambassadors of Christ almost infinitely above the self-advertised “social gospelers” of the present hour. But I turn from the modernist demand to THE MARKET DEMAND Here I make three statements and have little fear that anyone of them will be successfully disputed. That market demand is still unmet; it involves variety; and it resents the make of the mold.
It is still unmet!
Only a few years ago there was a great alarm spread across the continent, William R. Harper of the University of Chicago being its chief mouthpiece, over the “scarcity of ministers.” He provided abundant statistics to prove his contention. He culled these from colleges where young men reported and enrolled in the ministerial department, but by graduation time had decided against the divine calling. He never assigned the reasons for this change. He could hardly afford to admit that it was his own German-imported skepticism concerning the inspiration of the Scriptures and the deity of Christ that became a deadening influence and turned scores, yea, many hundreds of young men from ministerial purpose and plan.
However, that very cry of shortage, together with the skeptical stamp being put upon the theological output, sufficed to stir believers to action; and the modern Bible training school was the immediate and is now the enormously growing answer.
“When the enemy shall come in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord shall lift up a standard against him” (Isaiah 59:19). The rise, growth, and success of the modern Bible training school is the most marked episode in American Christianity, characterizing the twentieth century. They have not only increased in number, in the accumulation of property, in popularity of student attendance, and the teaching ability of the professors who serve them, but they have also lifted their curriculum of study to the very level of the oldest seminaries themselves from a scholastic standpoint, and have produced a spiritual atmosphere conducive to real minister-making, such as the sociological seminar finds himself denied, and the result is ever increasing calls for their services.
Northwestern, the institution over which I preside, in 1941 numbered 1233 students, 596 of whom were attempting full courses in the stiff curriculum of the Bible School, or the still higher one of the Theological Seminary, the others in night classes, and it graduated that year, 1941, 125 young men and women from the several branches. In 1946, it enrolled 729 in full courses and hundreds in night classes. And yet there were more calls for its output than we could provide, daily demands from the churches for Christian service that we could not promptly and adequately meet. The market demand involves variety. The churches are not writing in for men made in a mold. On the contrary, they break the mold by their very demands. For instance, a few days since a pulpit committee wrote to me saying, “Recommend to us a man who has an A. B. degree from a reputable college and who has had a complete theological training. We have two laymen on our committee and they will accept no man who does not bring the pass-key of college degree and seminary diploma.” In the same mail, from another section of the country equally distant (about 2000 miles in each case), came a second call saying, “We want a man who has himself been regenerated, a man who believes God’s Book to be His inspired Word, a man who can teach that Word effectively and whose daily life puts its precepts into practice, a man who preaches in the power of the Spirit; he must be a man who looks for the coming of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ a second time without sin unto salvation.” Never a word about degrees or diplomas! The first church wanted a scholar; the second church wanted a Christian teacher. Fortunately, we were able to meet both.
Churches resent attempted coercion in this matter.
Those who propose to standardize the ministry forget that to get their candidates for office accepted, they would have to standardize the thinking of pulpit committees, church officers, and even democratic church bodies. That is a more difficult task, and up to the present, not even General Conferences, Annual Assemblies, or denominational Conventions have been able to accomplish the task.
I come now to THE MASTER’S DEMAND
I want to make three remarks concerning it. First, it was spiritual rather than cultural. Second, His college presented a cross-section of society. Third, His prescience calls for no twentieth century change.
It was spiritual rather than cultural.
Believing as I do that Christ was “God . . . manifest in the flesh” I hold that no school known to His time could impart information or new knowledge to Him; consequently, He must have known the essentials to a successful ministry.
I take you to His selection: “Peter, and James, and John, and Andrew, Philip, and Thomas, Bartholomew, and Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus, and Simon Zelotes, and Judas the brother of James.”
If there were one single man in this company who was an outstanding scholar, who brought a degree from the superior schools of His day (and, mark you, this was at the world’s peak of high education!), we do not know which, of these names represents it. That under His leadership they became students no one can question; and that as a result of His training certain ones of them became peculiarly effective preachers, history abundantly attests.
We agree absolutely with Dr. I. E. Gates that “ignorance, whiskers, and a clerical garb” do not constitute ministerial adequacy. But, with the exception of the latter, those traits were possibly prominent in the early experiences of the chosen apostles. At the feet of Jesus the first would increasingly vanish; the second would indicate growing maturity; and as for the third, it never was and is not now an essential.
Among liberal authors I have my favorites, just as I have among second-hand cars, and Dr. R. F. Horton of the Old World is one of them. I have quoted from him often and will doubtless have many occasions, in the days to come. He claims that preachers’ sermons are only fragments of men, and that many a man who has apparently failed to present truth so that people comprehend it, retrieves the situation because every one knows that the same man exhibits it. For instance, “He preaches the Atonement, and there is more than one fault of logic in his exposition, but he is so obviously at one with God Himself that the severest critic inclines to follow his way, if not to use his arguments.” In other words, the biggest thing in the ministry is the man; and the Master who “knew what was in man” made no mistake in His selection among men; nor was He shortsighted when He put the spiritual above the cultural. His college presented a scholastic cross-section.
These chosen ones were not, as we have seen, among the most highly educated, neither did they belong to the “dummy” class. They reported no diplomas from famed institutions; they carried no earned or honorary degrees; but they proved marvelously effective in their presentation of truth, and some of them developed into authors whose books have lived and will be read by millions long after the most notable graduates of the Universities of Berlin, Glasgow, London, Oxford, Cambridge, New York, Chicago, Harvard and Yale each and every one has been forgotten. Who will criticize the Master’s selection for the ministry?
I have said that Christ’s college presented a cultural cross-section. That does not at all indicate that no great scholars characterized the company. Luke, one of His early disciples, was evidently a man of culture, as the volumes emanating from his pen clearly indicate; and Saul of Tarsus, the outstanding scholar of his day, the proudest output from Gamaliel’s school, will forever remain an argument for an educated ministry.
Under no circumstances would I refuse ordination to Peter, lest by so doing I should keep the church of God out of a nonschooled Moody, a non-degreed Spurgeon, another Campbell Morgan; but if Peter were in his youth and consulted me on the subject of college training, I would point him to the Apostle Paul and remind him of the fact that by receiving a kindred education to that which Paul enjoyed, he might, for thousands of years, influence readers as profoundly as have the Epistles of the outstanding apostle. In other words, our advice to every young man who sets his face toward the ministry is to get as thorough an education as he can secure. Our further advice would be, take it in a college that believes God and accepts without question the Bible as His inspired Word, and in a theological seminary that is spiritual in tone and supreme in Scripture exposition. But while ardently advocating that procedure, I would count myself nothing short of a bigoted upstart if I attempted to take from the hands of the ascended Lord the right to call into His ministry those of His own selection, or if I refused to lay hands upon one so manifestly chosen, because forsooth he brought not a diploma from an institution that neither worshipped God nor respected His Word.
North Carolina is accused of having an unlearned Baptist ministry, yet it leads in baptisms. Now its college is enriched with millions. We wait to see whether the cause of Christ prospers under the new and broader culture.
Finally, the prescience of Christ calls for no twentieth century change.
Fifty years ago the man most discussed in America by Christian ministers and laymen alike was Dwight L. Moody. He was a product of no university, a graduate from no school! He was educated in the “College of Hard Knocks” and finished up in the theological seminary of a shoe store, and yet when God who ‘looketh not on the outward appearance, but on the heart,’ not for a college diploma but for a Christian experience and a passion for souls, was searching the land for a mouthpiece, his eye fell on Moody, and there He stopped, saying, “This is the man.” A standardized ministry? Yes, we believe in it, but we prefer the standards that are divine! You can find those for weights and measures in the Bureau of Standards at Washington; you will find those for the ministry in the Bible. When this infidel and blatant generation has made its transient mark on the shifting sands of time and has passed into the oblivion which is sometimes called “history, the standards of God will remain unchanged, unshaken and unharmed!”