Here are the top 10 things I need to admit after graduating seminary.
1. I am a woman. I have an M.Div. Just want to be clear. No, I do not want to be a pastor. No, I do not want to be a nun. No, I do not plan on being the next Beth Moore (I clearly don’t have the hair for that). Yes, I am a woman who loves theology, public speaking, and teaching. I will probably write more about this later. Try to contain your excitement.
2. I am tired. Like really tired. Like I might lock myself in my basement in Kansas and sleep for several days in the cool and dark space.
3. Words and phrases I need to refrain from using in regular conversation… because they make me sound like a snob:
- Hermeneutics, Soteriological, Eschatological
- Contextualized theologizing
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s explanation of that…
- Within Karl Barth’s theological framework…
- In the 1st Century Roman world…
4. Arrogance may be my BIGGEST pet peeve. If you are pastor, please learn to embrace epistemological humility. I sat in class with many of you, and, believe me, you do not know everything. And I don’t know everything. I know I come across as arrogant sometimes, too, but few things will push people away from Jesus faster than an assumption of omniscience.
5. In college, I never swore sweatpants to class. In seminary, I did. But I was at seminary in California, so that makes it more ok right?
6. When church becomes your job, sometimes God does too. And that sucks. It really does. There are days when God has to grab me, pull me into a dark room, and softly remind me that I serve Him because I love Him.
7. I still love learning, especially about theology, just not about church administration. They have potential to be interesting, but generally those classes make me want to go home and watch Netflix so that I can have something entertaining and stimulating in my day.
8. I watched 7 seasons of a show on Netflix in the last 5 months of seminary. Escapism is an art. And I am skilled at it.
9. I think I learned more about my spirituality than about theology here. But I tend to do things backwards. I did my first word study at the age of 15. I read a dissertation for fun at 19. This is not to brag; many people came to seminary more emotionally mature than I did. Seminary was a holistic spiritual experience for me–much more than classes.
10. There are so many good books to read! And most of them were not written in the past ten years. I’m not endorsing everything in these books, but these are some of my favorites I read in seminary (in no particular order):
- Candlelight: Illuminating the Art of Spiritual Direction by Susan Phillips
- Deliverance to the Captives by Karl Barth
- Next Generation Leader by Andy Stanley
- The Life of God in the Soul of Man by Henry Scougal
- Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza
Capriciousness 