Church, society, seminary
EFC President David Guretzki reflected on the value of the relationship between churches and seminaries at a speech given at Tyndale Seminary’s 50th anniversary in September 2026. Here's an excerpt.
I am a long-time participant in Canadian theological education. As a systematic theologian, I am deeply committed to the church and her God-given call. I see theological education as a crucial partner with the Church. In this regard, Christian educational institutions grounded in their sacred vocation must never forget whom they ultimately serve: God and his mission, not their ambitions or institutional autonomy.
Along with the universal call to be ambassadors of reconciliation through Jesus Christ, the New Testament repeatedly calls for leaders equipped to preach and teach the whole counsel of God to every generation and nation of disciples. God’s mission is to gather a people of His own, and He has called the church to participate by equipping people to proclaim, teach, shepherd, and serve beyond our lifetimes. As Walter Brueggemann has noted, “Every community that wants to last beyond a single generation must concern itself with education.”
Let me emphasize this: If a seminary is to remain focused on participating in God’s mission, it must never leave its natural home – the Church, the people of God, in their commitment to the authority of Holy Scripture.
I did my PhD at a secular university’s faculty of religious studies. The education was academically rigorous, but its orientation contrasted sharply with the evangelical schools I had previously attended. A long conversation with a fellow doctoral student – a New Testament scholar who claimed to be agnostic – reminded me of this contrast. For him, the living church and teaching of Scripture had no personal connection or authority. The New Testament was simply one ancient historical text among many, and his mission was to deconstruct the myths and political ideologies of first-century Christian communities.
It was mystifying to me how someone that intellectually fascinated by the New Testament could be completely uninterested in the God and gospel the Bible reveals. Nevertheless, his approach represents a model of theological education that sees no necessary relationship to the church.
It is a sad irony how often Christian history has seen the vital connection between church and seminary severed. Having served in seminary leadership, I know the relationship can be uneasy. Many ecclesiastical critics view the seminary with suspicion. But let me state clearly: unlike marriage, where a man leaves his family to cleave to his wife, the seminary is never given the option of leaving its proper family, the people of God.
A seminary that leaves its family becomes a prodigal institution. It spends its energy, resources, and intellectual vigor preparing individuals for careers or intellectually satisfying endeavours rather than equipping faithful ambassadors of the gospel. When no longer spiritually or financially nourished by the church it was created to serve, it will wither and die or seek an alien source for its nourishment and orientation. But if we do not support the seminary spiritually through our prayers and financially through our giving, why should we expect anyone else to do so?
Of course, Church and seminary won’t always agree. Sometimes a seminary must exercise its prophetic responsibility to exhort the Church if it wanders from Scripture, sound doctrine, or historic biblical practices. But a seminary must also, with profound humility, accept the Church’s loving correction – especially when pursuit of academic prestige or scholarly novelty tempts it to dismiss the Church’s accumulated wisdom and lived traditions as intellectually inadequate or theologically simplistic.It benefits neither Church nor seminary if either drift away from the other.
We must pray that God would give seminaries and their leadership deep and permanent roots in the local and global Church of Scripture, so it never forgets its primary end: perpetuating the next generation of faithful prophets, pastors, scholars, teachers, evangelists and servants, equipped to proclaim the gospel of the Kingdom revealed in Holy Scripture.
Seminaries engaging society
While the Church is the seminary’s true home, it always exists within broader society – a reality Scripture refers to as “the world.” The seminary should relate to society in harmony with the church’s call to participate in God’s mission, yet with a unique dynamic. Its presence in secularized society should be analogous to the church’s – a visible, living witness to God and His Gospel that challenges educational priorities shaped by ignorance, apathy, or hostility toward the gospel.
To identify the unique dynamic the seminary needs to engage, St. Augustine’s classical concept of the saeculum is illuminating. According to Augustine, the saeculum, the Latin term from which “secular” derives, describes the historical time and space between creation and final judgment. It is a realm into which sin has entered and corrupted creation. Augustine calls it the City of Man, or City of this World (civitas terrena).
In contrast, Augustine introduces the City of God (civitas Dei), a simultaneous spiritual reality in which God’s people pursue supreme love for and obedience to God rather than surrender to the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life.
These two cities are intertwined in the present age and a neat boundary separating the City of Man from the City of God can’t be drawn.
To be clear, Augustine doesn’t regard temporal human pursuits as inherently evil or solely the domain of the City of Man. They belong to God’s good, created order. Citizens of both cities are called to till the land, raise families, earn livelihoods, engage in commerce, practice art, pursue education, and enjoy rest and leisure. In other words, citizens of both cities inhabit the saeculum, but, because of the Fall, citizens have radically divergent commitments and loyalties. Consequently, the church’s life in the saeculum is marked by an ongoing struggle for what Augustine called “properly ordered loves” (ordo amoris). Whatever commands your first commitment inevitably shapes who you are. As James K. Smith memorably puts it, “You are what you love.”
In regard to the seminary’s relationship with society, this means the seminary must not be limited only to preparing individuals for vocational ministry – pastors, teachers, scholars, missionaries, and evangelists, as vitally important as this task is. Of course, seminaries must continually evaluate how those called to these vocations are best discerned, trained and formed. But at a broader and deeper level, the seminary ought to also consider how it can in its activities and graduates speak out and model being a prophetic advocate for those who choose to pursue the love, goodness, grace, and truth of our Father in Heaven, rather than the fallen ways of wealth, autonomy, social power, and earthly pleasure endemic to the City of Man.
In this sense, the seminary should embrace the inherent oddness of its sacred call relative to other forms of civil education. We ought to share society’s concern for high-quality education, but we reject the premise that self-fulfillment, career advancement or wealth generation is education’s primary end. We ought to share society’s concern for the environment, for helping the poor, and even innovating in technology, but the seminary must help people to do those things in the advancement of God’s kingdom of Love.
Practically, I pray that the seminary will continue the risky yet necessary work of training pastors, missionaries, and evangelists, even those vocations run counter to the economic logic and personal goals of secular society. No wonder it’s difficult to recruit students to such programs! But maybe it is good when those outside the church remain baffled by why anyone would dedicate a life to Christian ministry. If everything the seminary made sense and was relevant to the world, the canary in the coal mine is already dead. Consequently, let me suggest that the seminary view itself as an educational protest against the hyper-utilitarianism and commodification of contemporary education.
There is urgent need for seminaries to recommit to partnering with the Church to train more pastoral leaders. Research conducted by The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada and my conversations with denominational leaders indicate that the evangelical church faces a critical shortage of pastors as an entire generation of leaders approaches retirement. The seminary isn’t likely the sole solution, but it must be a vital part of the response.
Yet beyond filling vocational ministers, I challenge the seminary to form believers who, whether serving in pastoral ministry or working in business, healthcare, trades, or education, are profoundly shaped by Scripture, sustained by prayer, grounded in spiritual disciplines, and anchored in Christian community. Here the seminary may need to creatively expand its student base to include to many more Christians without forgetting its obligation to provide pastoral formation.
Running such a seminary will be neither easy or cheap. Yet I say with a degree of trembling that the seminary is most on mission when it trains people who are highly irrelevant to the pursuits of the earthly city and her loves. The world will not necessarily love a transcendently focused seminary graduate because they grate against the grain of what an immanently framed (Charles Taylor) secular education seeks to accomplish. But the world needs visible and faithful gospel ambassadors who understand that disordered loves of the world will pass away and that those who with all their heart seek to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength will be the ones who ultimately reign with God in the eternal city of love.
Seminary as Sabbath
Finally, we must turn to the internal life and identity of the seminary itself. Having considered its relationship to church and society, what lies at the heart of its unique vocation? Here I offer the biblical concept of sabbath as a possible way to envision for the seminary’s unique identity.
The word “seminary” derives from the Latin seminarium, meaning a “plant nursery” or “seed plot.” A seminarium is a sheltered space where seeds are planted, nurtured, and allowed to take root. In contrast to the relentless competitiveness of contemporary higher education, the seminary should function as a spiritual greenhouse where biblical, theological and spiritual seeds are patiently cultivated for a life of service.
This vision of the seminary is deeply tied to the theology of Sabbath. In Genesis, God creates the heavens and earth in six days and rests on the seventh. Strikingly, humanity’s first full day was not a day of work but an invitation into God’s Sabbath rest. Before Adam and Eve had even done a single stitch of work, God called them first to walk in the Garden of Fellowship with their Creator.
Imagine how astonishing this must have seemed! After giving the mandate to multiply and exercise dominion, we might have expected God to say, “Now, get to work!” Instead, he says, “On your marks, get ready, get set, rest!” Before Adam and Eve had accomplished anything or tried to earn their keep, God invited them into His rest – an implicit reference to the doctrine of justification by faith and not by works. Rest was commanded not because God was exhausted, but because human beings need divine communion to empower their work.
Sabbath is not merely a mechanism for recharging our physical or mental batteries. True Sabbath is restorative communion with the living God. In fellowship with the Creator, our loves are rightly ordered, enabling us to carry out our responsibilities – raising families, cultivating creation, managing organizations, seeking justice, and proclaiming the Gospel – from a spirit of divine rest rather than from human ambition.
In short, the seminary should both be a place of sabbath for those being trained, and a sign, a city on a hill, to testify to a restless world that ultimate peace and purpose are found only in resting in God. Rather than justifying its existence by seeking to compete against secular educational models, the seminary must be prepared to offer a counter-cultural educational model, reminding us that transcendent truths are infinitely more valuable than profit margins, career success, or personal prestige.
If Sabbath represents the spirit of the seminary, what might this mean for the future of seminaries?
First, the seminary provides a dedicated environment in which students, especially mature students, can step back from the frantic pace of modern life to focus on reordering their loves. I hope seminaries will always find ways to remain spaces where seeds of truth, wisdom, and faith are given time to mature. I hope they'll never apologize for devoting substantial time to deep scriptural and theological study, communal prayer, worship, rigorous debate, and spiritual healing. Modern educational trends may pressure institutions to strip away these sabbath rhythms in the name of efficiency. But a seminary’s calling is embodied in the psalmist’s “Be still and know that I am God,” even as it prepares students for the Pauline “correctly handling the word of truth.” Without the stillness of sabbath, even scriptural and theological knowledge can become lifeless.
Second, theological education across North America has too often adopted secular educational metrics to measure success. Output, enrollment targets, operational efficiency, and faculty credentials – all important to consider for overall excellence – can nevertheless gradually and silently push out spiritual depth in discipleship as the true standard of excellence in the City of God. We must return to the conviction that those best prepared to serve a chaotic and broken world are those who have learned first to rest in God in prayer and contrition. True leadership flows from souls anchored in Christ’s forgiveness and peace.
Institutional and academic standards have their rightful place, but they must never overshadow the primary task of the seminary as a place of sabbath and soul formation. Will seminaries remain a sanctuary where men and women come away to be renewed, equipped, and transformed by God’s grace before being sent back into the world?
As we look ahead to a future shaped by artificial intelligence, virtual community learning, and shifting age and ethnic demographics, seminary methods will undoubtedly evolve. Yet may our prayer be that that the seminary's core vocation will remain unchanged: to form faithful disciples of Jesus Christ who rest in God in order to preach the unchanging Gospel to a changing world.
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. The gospel remains the power of God for salvation. The Church remains the bride Christ promised to build, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.
Adapted from a speech given at Tyndale Seminary’s 50th anniversary in September 2026.
Author: David Guretzki
