Do you really want an educated pastor?
The practical answer is a bit more complicated than we might think.
In a talk for the Missouri Baptist Education Society at Liberty, MO, in 1881, John Broadus argued:
"Ministerial education must go hand in hand with general education. It ought to keep in advance; but it cannot be, as a general thing, far in advance of the education of the people. They must go together.”
Broadus was a titanic figure in Baptist history, both an academic and also a pastor. He had a wealth of firsthand knowledge of the importance of education and also of its practical use in local churches. His point was that ministers or pastors ought to understand the level of education among the congregations they mean to lead and teach. Intellectual ability (or lack thereof), he thought, was a commonality that both pastors and their church members would do well to share.
Broadus went on:
“Why, with our free system of choice, you cannot get the churches to prefer a well-educated man, unless they have some education themselves. A man who has been reared among intelligent people and has been well educated, and who then goes to preach among the very ignorant, is startled to find how prejudiced they are against his ideas and against him.”
Here, Broadus highlighted the reality that in a voluntary church (i.e., one you join by your own initiative and not by compulsion) there is likely to be a bias against a pastor with an education that far exceeds that of the congregation. Just as highly educated folks often look down on those without much intellectual skill, so too, those who have very little exposure to academic training or practice are often suspicious of academia and of intellectual elites.
Of course, there are more and less sincere people among both classes, the world of academia and the “real” world. If all you know about a man is that he is well-educated or that he has no formal training, then you do not know enough to decide whether he may be a qualified and godly pastor. The character of the man is critical to his biblical qualification, and this is not something that can be learned by reading books or by avoiding them.
Furthermore, some pastors may be highly qualified (both in character and in academic skill) and yet relationally incompatible with a given congregation. The ongoing ministry of a pastor is far more than preaching biblical and well-crafted sermons, and sometimes one’s expression of the art of preaching is itself more or less suited for a particular context. Just think of those cultural and aesthetic differences between a rural and an urban context. Illustrations, colloquialisms, and analogies are quite dependent on the familiarities of those speaking and hearing.
Broadus then told a personal story:
“You will pardon a very homely illustration of it, egotistical in addition. I remember to have had the honor, twelve or fifteen years ago, to be elected pastor of a very large country church in Upper South Carolina—the largest country congregation I ever saw—where there were many noble people, too; but they had just been gathered in by hundreds, by good men, and never taught from the pulpit that there were any Christian duties to perform.
At the end of a year of earnest attempts to preach there, with many encouraging results, I [learned] that a good sister in the neighborhood had said, with reference to the justly beloved old man who had preceded me, that she 'had rather hear dear old Uncle Toll give out one verse of a hymn than to hear that there Greenville preacher go through a whole sermon.'
You will pardon me, for I wanted to illustrate the fact that ignorance, like a shellfish, secretes a coating of prejudice that hardens all around it. If you could make all your ministers educated, as long as the mass of people are comparatively uneducated, they would often not want them.”
One might respond to such an observation by making plans to avoid matching educated pastors with uneducated churches. No doubt, there is practical wisdom in using this strategy. Both the congregation and the pastor are sure to face difficulty in a mismatched situation.
However, it seems to me that there is an implicit call here for pastors to pursue an increasingly greater level of education both for themselves and for their church members. If a pastor is already well-educated, then he will need to patiently teach those under his care. His aim is not only to teach them the truths of Scripture and how to apply them, but also to teach them how to learn and understand them. Such an effort will take time and wisdom (and God’s grace for all involved), but this is the charge of pastoral ministry.
The Apostle Paul exemplified this pastoral goal well when he wrote, “Him [i.e., Christ] we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me” (Colossians 1:28–29).
May God grant His people faithful pastors who strive for wisdom and learning themselves. And may God grant those faithful and well-educated pastors the patience to teach everyone under their care to grow in spiritual maturity so that they might be presented well before Christ on the last day.
Cited content above is from John Albert Broadus, Sermons and Addresses, second ed. (Baltimore: H. M. Wharton & Co., 1887), 203–204.