I finally got around to reading Jason Byassee’s marvelous essay on reading, writing, and theological education. Drawing on sources as diverse as Basil the Great and Annie Dillard, he reminds us of the importance of both reading and writing to ministry. I especially appreciated his observation that much of what we do in ministry is writing, whether emails, sermons, newsletter articles (in my case, this blog). Much of that is done on the fly. Certainly I rarely take the kind of time I should with my writing. Perhaps that’s why I like to blog. I throw something out there, almost never glancing back except to check grammar and spelling in a superficial manner.

But he says something I find true–that one hasn’t really read something until forced to write about it. I followed that advice when I was teaching. It’s another reason I like to blog. There’s a lot I want to comment on when I read, and I gave up the marginal note long ago.

His essay put me in mind of another piece I came across in the past couple of weeks–Fred Schmidt’s piece on the future of seminary education. I share many of his concerns and wonder about what theological education might look like in thirty or fifty years. It’s outrageously expensive and inefficient. Still, looking back twenty-five years after I received my M.Div, and with twenty years separating that degree from my ordination, I’m reminded regularly both of what I learned in Divinity School, and how appropriate my field education setting was for my current position. On the other hand, other than the seminar on preaching I took with Koester and Gomes that I mentioned a few weeks back, and the work in Greek and New Testament, there’s very little from those three years, other than a trained mind, that serves me. In the end, much of it is about reading and writing.