*** Update ***
A number of students and graduates of these two schools have emailed, asking, "Me?" Others want to know about the breadth of the brush I'm painting with.
Overwhelmingly the students and graduates that I have encountered, from my point of view, are wonderful men and women and express themselves in a normal fashion. The post below was in reference to roughly 7 people who have applied for jobs or that I have met while recruiting at the schools.
I've met or known scores of students and graduates from these schools who don't express themselves in a distinctively formal manner. The post below is about a subset-- a very small number of people-- who puzzle me with their formality.
Related, I've hired a bunch of students and grads from these two institutions who are STELLAR. While I have declined to hire those that strike me as too formal in their communication, I've hired multiple people from SEBTS and SBTS who are doing superb work for pastor-clients around the country.
The pattern I've noticed is small, but I've witnessed it enough in the past 10 months to wonder about it and then write about it.
----------
In the course of running Docent Research Group, I meet a lot of seminarians and graduate students. Anecdotally (no social science research done), I've noticed an interesting pattern. A subset (not all) of the seminarians at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY and at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, NC that I have personally become acquainted with in person or by email (or reading their blogs) are more likely than seminarians from other institutions to use formal speech in person, emails and blog posts.
With a frequency that astonishes me, some (not all) of these seminarians express themselves in language that strikes me as very formal, even Puritan-esque. The language of Reformed systematics spills out in greetings and in email closings especially, but also in many other instances of written and verbal communication.
One commendable aspect of this is God-saturated speech. From my point of view, living and speaking in a way that demonstrates one's God-centeredness is a good thing.
Another commendable aspect of this way of speaking is that it surely reflects long hours of reading and reflection. In an age in which "thinness" (thinness of mind, thinness of character) is one of the most serious problems that evangelicals manifest, I applaud believers who devote themselves to study, to the life of the mind, and to wrestling deeply and thoughtfully with what it means to follow Jesus in our time and place.
And yet...
Among this subset of students that I have observed, some have already graduated and moved on vocations as church planters or on the staff of existing churches, while others are still students headed to church planting or church staff positions in the next year or two. I think about their formal manner of communication, and wonder what it will look like for them to try to connect to non-believers operating in a dumbed-down cultural milieu. A voice in my head says, "Almost NO ONE talks like that...why do you?"
And yet...
I resist the idea that the world is my all, my horizons, my inspiration, my core, my boundaries. Surely I don't resist the world enough, but why would I want to be shaped in the world's pattern? Does the Church, following Christ, have no shaping ability of her own? Does the Church have no culture of her own?
I "get" that the Church is constituted by distinctive truths, so distinctive as to be unique, and these unique truths necessitate their own language. So maybe this small subset of SBTS and SEBTS grads and seminarians are also resisting having their vocabulary, thought-processes and verbal/written expression supplied to them by a world that is dumbing down its intellect and desires. Further, maybe they are self-consciously seeking to speak and write the Church's distinctive language in a way that keeps faith and vitality with that language.
Still I wonder. I listen to people like Mark Driscoll, Matt Chandler, J.D. Greear in conversation, in blog posts and in emails (in addition to listening to their sermons) and they express the Church's distinctive truths in ways fresh, sticky, winsome and compelling. These guys read mountains of literature (including the Puritans) and yet don't sound like they are inhabiting the 1950s or 1850s or 1650s. Tim Keller is another-- to listen to his sermons and to read his books and articles is to become acquainted with a vast literature-- and yet he expresses intellectually thick ideas in ways that resonate with people in our contemporary society. All of these exceptionally erudite men communicate in an accessible manner.
I don't know what to make of this observed pattern of formal speech and writing from planters and church staffers, present and future, from these two seminaries. Such speech does not flow not from SBTS professors like Russell Moore, as solid a scholar as anyone at SBTS, who blogs and tweets like an ordinary person. I'm puzzled as to why and where this pattern emerges.
Maybe it's all fine and good. I'll be watching to see the sort of fruit these guys produce in the trenches of planting and church staff labors. Perhaps I'll be surprised.
By the way, I wondered about similar but distinct things in my first real post at CGO some four years ago, Lost in Translation. The best thinking is not in my post but rather in the perceptive comments by Greg Thompson, Tuck Bartholomew and Greg Hewlett.
Thoughts? What say the readers?
Comments