Podcast: Should pastors pursue theological education? – with Bill James

This article is part of the Affinity Talks Gospel Podcast series.

On this episode of Affinity Talks Gospel, we’re joined by Bill James from London Seminary. Bill emphasises the importance of robust theological training for pastors and urges young men to pursue higher education for impactful ministry. Bill also touched on the need for pastors to address contemporary cultural issues wisely.

Bill shares his journey from growing up in a Christian family to finding his faith and calling to ministry. He discusses his experiences at university, his involvement in the Christian Union, and the impact of Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ ministry on him as a child. Bill also talks about his time working in industry before pursuing theological education with his wife at Toronto Baptist Seminary.

After returning to the UK, Bill served as a pastor for 26 years at a church in Leamington Spa, where he experienced the importance of women’s involvement in church life. Bill shares his transition to becoming the principal of London Seminary in 2018 and emphasises the unique vision of London Seminary, founded by Martyn Lloyd-Jones, focusing on rigorous training for pastors led by experienced pastors.

We explore the current state of theological education, expressing concerns about a potential drift towards lower standards in training pastors within independency. Bill encourages young men to aim for higher education to deepen their theological knowledge and impact in ministry. He reflects on challenges within evangelical circles, including the need for pastors to address contemporary cultural issues with wisdom and depth.

In closing, Bill invites listeners to pray for a greater influx of men into ministry, for wisdom and power for pastors in training, and for perseverance and refreshment for those already in ministry. He highlights the importance of ongoing pastoral support and training through initiatives like the ‘Pastors Academy’ at London Seminary. We hope this episode provides valuable insights into the journey of a pastor and the significance of robust theological training for effective and impactful ministry.

Find out more about London Seminary by visiting: ⁠www.londonseminary.org

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Topics addressed in this Podcast:

• Impact of Martyn Lloyd-Jones’s ministry on British evangelicalism
• Training experience at Toronto Baptist Seminary
• Vision of London Seminary
• Pastoral ministry vs. full-time academic training
• Training for pastors’ wives and women workers
• The state of theological education in this country
• Importance of investing in ministry training
• Encouragement and challenges in theological education
• Call to prayer for more church leaders

Transcript

[0:11] Hello, my name is Graham Nicholls and this is Affinity Talks Gospel. It’s a podcast where we talk with our various members, agencies, churches, organisations and individuals who are involved with Affinity and seeking to encourage and equip and edify people as they seek to bring the gospel to our nation. So today it’s my privilege to welcome Bill James from London Seminary. And we’re going to talk about his work there, London Seminary and theological education more generally. So welcome Bill.

[0:44] Thanks very much indeed, it’s great to be with you Graham. Tell us a little bit about yourself, about the kind of your history before you ended up in London Seminary but perhaps a bit how you became a Christian, be good.

[0:55] So I was brought up in a Christian family. I was taken along more or less from birth to Westminster Chapel in London to sit under the ministry of Martyn Lloyd-Jones. So I’m not quite sure how much I got out of that at a very early age. He retired from Westminster Chapel when I was age eight and then sadly my parents left Westminster Chapel shortly after that and couldn’t settle anywhere else. Sadly that was the testimony of some Westminster Chapel families that having sat under the ministry of the doctor they found it difficult to settle under or anybody else’s so all through my teenage years we weren’t going to church i had an inner conviction that i was converted i would pray occasionally um i had a definite sense from about the age of 16 that i needed to do something about this and i needed to grow in my faith and really the the crisis point came when i went up to university because when i went to university I identified as a Christian. Of course, immediately I was surrounded by people who were challenging my faith and questioning my faith. And I really had to nail my colors to the mask. I got involved in the Christian Union, which was tremendous.

[2:14] Started to get really excellent Bible teaching, settled in a very good church. And from that point on, I began to grow. I was baptized. Baptized um i ended up serving on christian union committee and it was at university that i had a sense that the lord was calling me into ministry right um just going back to the marty lord jones era do you have is it one of those things where you have a sort of memory of it because there’s lots of recordings so although you don’t remember it you sort of remember it because you’re able to to kind of experience it later Later.

[2:50] Yeah, I can’t say that I actually remember any of his sermons or that I remember details of what he preached about. What I remember more is a sense of the experience of being in the place. I would say a sense of the presence of God. I would say the sense of the enormity of what was going on around about me. And I would say that that made an impact on me even as a child. Because in those days, even as a child, you were sitting through the whole service. You didn’t go out for Sunday school or anything yeah um and you were just sitting quietly and and there was just a sense of yes the supernatural I would say and I would say that that has lingered with me and made an enduring impact upon me the the interesting thing is there are adults and I know some of them who had the similar experience that you did at age eight in that they were in there felt something good about what was going on but can’t actually remember much about what they heard and and actually had a bit of a crisis when they left um so maybe like your parents perhaps um uh so it’s interesting i mean obviously his ministry had a very wide impact and had impact on people who are at the church and they were both converted and grew as christians but obviously some people didn’t they they kind of they experienced the the the the ambience but not Not really got the substance of it, really.

[4:15] Yeah, it’s very interesting and also very sad when you reflect on some of the

[4:21] fallout and some of the legacy of what happened at Westminster Chapel in the succeeding years. But still, when you look around evangelicalism and when you look at the impact of the doctor’s ministry on evangelicalism he was such a giant and so many were converted and so many grew and developed in their faith so i think i think he did have a have a formative impact upon many people yeah and i i still listen regularly to lloyd jones’s service today i i have the lloyd jones app on my phone and you know the quality is fantastic they cleaned it up digitally and i just still find it tremendously edifying and helpful yeah um someone you know robert but strivens who’s your predecessor there he came and did a talk in one of the gospel partnerships locally here about lloyd jones’s evangelistic sermons which was quite a revelation really because we’re much more used to his kind of expositionary slow working through chapters of the new testament epistles and so on but his evangelistic son was really interesting and um they work uh in a contemporary setting as well obviously not necessarily playing them but the kind of model of what he does, um, was, was very up to date actually.

[5:38] Well, of course, Lloyd-Jones was very much following after the sort of Puritan Spurgeonic tradition of preaching to the heart. And when you’re preaching to the heart, that has a trans-cultural emphasis, really. Yeah, I was at a different seminar that Affinity was running to do with death recently. And just someone said in passing it was to do with dementia patients that um uh because the gateway to to sort of physiologically the gateway to our brains is through our emotions not necessarily through rational um propositions it’s it’s kind of emotional content as well and that’s even more so um for dementia patients um so i think in every sense both spiritually and just in how we work and made us human beings you can’t leave out the emotional element in both preaching and uh how you preach but also the effect of of the preaching you’re looking to address the heart not just the the rational as it were exactly precisely yeah yeah um how how did you sort of get into ministry then you said you felt a call to get into ministry uh what did how did that work its way out.

[6:50] Yeah so so i was i was at university i was on the committee of the christian union we were inviting some of the leading evangelicals you know John Stott, Eric Alexander all of these guys to speak at our Christian union meetings at weekends and I was the vice president so I was writing them the briefing letters and I was saying dear John Stott please come and preach on this passage and please we would like you to make these points I mean imagine the arrogance of this university student writing to John Stott and telling him what headings he should have in his sermon. But basically, we were constructing a Bible teaching program for the benefit of the university students. And I just got so excited. I got excited about the way in which my life was being impacted and changed through good expository ministry.

[7:35] And I got excited about the potential impact this could have on others. And so I felt very strongly, the Lord is calling me to this. But I felt very young in the faith. I felt very young and immature as a man. And I prayed to the Lord, Lord, will you give me five years just to grow up a little bit and gain some experience of the real world? So I went out and I ended up working in industry in the end for six years. I worked for Glaxo Pharmaceuticals in Barnard Castle in County Durham. I had a variety roles with them in production and so on, project management. And that was enormously helpful for me in gaining skills that I think ultimately were helpful to me in later life. Well, excellent. And did you then train for ministry or did you do it vocationally?

[8:27] Yeah. So then my church, that was Geneva Baptist Church in Darlington. My church sent me off to Toronto Baptist Seminary with my wife. I got married at that point to Sharon Hulse. And we went off to Toronto Baptist Seminary. We both did the MDiv degree together.

[8:45] And that was a tremendous experience. It was a school that was very strong on biblical theology. Theology you had to do four years of greek you had to do three years of hebrew you had to do a lot of bible you had to do a lot of biblical theology um the emphasis was very much on working things up from first principles and particularly from first principles biblically we had some excellent teachers um and it was a very valuable time it was it was also a valuable time because it wasn’t just an academic course it was a church-based seminary um and they had had a very strong emphasis on practical work so alongside our studies you had to go out and do door-to-door work in the local area downtown Toronto you had to preach in the open air in the park I was running the seminary bookstore you had to go and preach in old people’s homes care homes we had to lead the young adult bible class we were involved in a multiplicity of different ministries and and that was enormously helpful as well and the whole thing was four Four years, I presume. No, three years. So we had to do four years of Greek. You were expected to do a year of Greek before you started. Right. So you were expected to have finished Wenham before you even arrived on the doorstep. So it was quite heavy. Right. And why did they send you, Darling to Road, to Toronto? Was there nothing in the UK or anywhere nearer?

[10:12] Well, it was really interesting. Sharon and I did about a year of due diligence, looking at various options. In the UK as to where we might study. And also in the States, we were on the brink of accepting a place at Westminster Theological Seminary, which in those days was considered the premier seminary to go to if you were a Reformed evangelical.

[10:33] Sharon’s dad said, well, that would be brilliant, and it is a very good seminary, but I’m not sure that they produce good preachers. And i think that their course is very academic and we we took that to heart and we thought well actually what what do we need do we really need a hyper academic course or do we need something that’s going to equip us for ministry and i think toronto baptist seminary fitted that box much more closely we looked at a variety of options in the uk we weren’t quite persuaded by any of them And so we ended up in Toronto. And you’re a persuaded credo Baptist, aren’t you?

[11:13] We we we are we are persuaded credo baptist yes yes we are we are baptistic i don’t know whether i don’t know whether i uh don’t know whether persuaded was too much of an overemphasis on it but i suppose it was to make the point that um some people i think wrongly would take a view that it’s a sort of very low order issue um and i don’t think i would take that view um but obviously within affinity we have good fellowship uh across those boundaries with peter baptist presbyterians and so on congregationalists but toronto baptist seminary sounds more credo baptist than westminster is that true yes yes yes yes uh it’s it’s very much baptistic it’s it was a slightly odd place because it was sort of reformed but the church was sort of king james only and it sort of still had some fundamentalist elements and it was sanky songs and solos so we were

[12:06] way outside our comfort zone culturally in many, many ways. But there was lots of good stuff that we took advantage of. It was a real learning experience. And then you came back and did side ministry in the UK somewhere, presumably. Yes. So we came back to the UK, we landed. This was, of course, pre-internet and you just looked for preaching opportunities. It was all word of mouth.

[12:28] We happened to stumble upon this new church in Leamington Spa, which had been going for about five years and um they invited me to preach and really from that first sunday sharon and i fell in love with the church family there very quickly they called us um and we began ministry there wow and how long were you there because that that’s where i knew of you first so you must be there the whole time you were in sort of paid full-time ministry, Yeah. So that was the only place I was ever a pastor. I was there 26 years. So, yes, that was an extraordinary. It was a lovely church family. That was the place where our children grew up and were converted. And we are enormously grateful for that church family. They were a tremendous blessing to us. I think they gave to us much more than we ever gave to them. We’re still grateful for them. Yeah. And now what’s your job now?

[13:22] So to that beginning of 2018 i started as the principal of uh london seminary um so over the years of my pastoral ministry i’ve been involved in training in various capacity going to various parts of the world training men for ministry eastern europe um brazil philippines kazakhstan uh african countries so i i had various different opportunities to go and be involved in training. I was involved a little bit in training in the UK. I was on the board of London Seminary. I was teaching some pastoral theology here. And when the door opened for me to be principal at London Seminary, it seemed to be the logical next step. I had the sense that the Lord was opening the door to a new ministry at Emanuel for my associate pastor, who had just been called to that position and closing the door for me and opening a door for me at london seminary so yes and what what for those people who are listening who don’t know what does london seminary do what’s it for.

[14:28] Well, London Seminary was started in about 1977 by Martin Lloyd-Jones. He was irked that nonconformists were going to Anglican institutions to train for ministry. And he says, why don’t we have a good pre-church college to train men for ministry? And so partly it was that that provoked him. but also he he had a unique uh a vision for theological education and i still to this day think it’s an absolutely brilliant vision he was he was somewhat disillusioned with the academic model for uh theological education but for a couple of reasons first of all because he didn’t like the link with secular universities and he was rather afraid of the liberal influence that that they were bringing to bear. Secondly, he was rather afraid of academic courses. I think in our constituency, we’re all slightly nervous about sending someone off to college, and then they come back preaching to giraffes, and you just can’t understand them. They’re incomprehensible because they’ve got their head so deeply into these abstruse theological books. And Lloyd-Jones said, no, that’s not what theological education should be about. Of course, it should be rigorous. Of course, it should be extremely stretching, but the goal should always be in view that it’s all about ministry. It should be vocational. And he said the best people to train pastors are pastors.

[15:56] And so that was the model on which London Seminary was established. And so it’s a very rigorous course. For example, biblical languages, Greek and Hebrew, have been compulsory for all students ever since the seminary started. There’s a depth which I think matches anything else at other institutions up and down the country. But the flavor of it is, first of all, that the only people sitting in the room are men who are called to ministry. And secondly, the only people who are lecturing are men with substantial pastoral preaching experience. And so always the question in the classroom is, OK, what difference does this make to my preaching? What difference does this make to pastoral church life?

[16:44] That’s brilliant. And that model continues. Does it? I mean, vocational ministry must have been more exceptional then, I guess. Um like not the norm um whereas it’s a bit more the norm now to be fair people trying lots of different models of training yeah yeah i i think so well there’s all sorts of streams with within our traditions within the uk particularly within england brethrenism yeah has had a very very strong influence a suspicion of theological education indeed a suspicion of paid ministry.

[17:22] And then and then within various streams so for example those within the more strict baptist tradition have been rather suspicious of theological training um slightly more mystical elements worrying again about this whole thing of getting too academic or getting too remote of not connecting um and so yeah i i think there have been suspicions over the years but now there would be a general expectation that yes if someone’s going to go into ministry they they they should have some sort of training and they should be set apart in some way yeah yeah they were probably in the past the extremes of of sort of no training just do your own private reading and study or yeah academic training and and now i think maybe maybe london seminary was the first but there are there are a lot of places in between now um that are that are trying to do that uh do Do you have, you must have a view about is vocational ministry better than full-time academic training or just different?

[18:27] Okay, so I try not to be too partisan. I think there’s always a danger in any Christian ministry to become so devoted to our own particular brand that we start sniping at others as sort of rivals. That’s true in pastoral ministry. There’s a grave danger of sort of pastoral resentment of other pastors’ successes. And I think that’s true in parachurch agencies as well. We become so fanatical. So, for example, I can become so fanatical about London Seminary. I just say nasty things about everybody else. So when I started at London Seminary, I took an oath that I was really not going to promote London Seminary by being nasty about other institutions. I think other institutions, generally speaking, do a great job. And for all sorts of reasons, different men will choose different institutions for training, for ministry. And for example, if someone went to Oak Hill, I would say, well, you’ve got a great theological education. And there would be other institutions of which I would say very similar things. Of course, I still prefer the London Seminary model.

[19:46] I love the dynamic. I love the ethos of London Seminary. I love this sense of us all being brothers together, working towards that sort of ministry objective. I also love the quality of our lectures. I think my own prejudice is that those who have experience in preaching and pastoring actually make better lecturers than academics. So that’s a very sweeping statement, isn’t it? I mean, that’s an overgeneralization. But I think guys who are very experienced as preachers are used to engaging their congregation, their audience. Yeah, I think so. That’s a skill which doesn’t come quite so naturally to academics. Yeah. I mean, whether I’m any good at it now, I don’t know, but I do some teaching at a gospel partnership, sort of local training thing in Sussex. And I would say I find it difficult not to get too preachy sometimes, but at least it keeps people awake.

[20:40] I can’t really, you know, do an hour session without getting enthusiastic at some point. Otherwise, why would I bother? So I’ve never really lectured. I did a little bit of mass lecturing for some extra money at one point. So apart from that, I’ve never been a lecturer, so I don’t know how to do that. I only know how to communicate. So I’m sure that’s the case with lots of the people there. Do you find pastors have sufficient of the academic training, though, to be able to train other pastors? Meaning people who are not full-time lecturers, have they got the skills? Are they well enough read to do what you want?

[21:18] Yeah, yeah. So our lecturers typically would have doctorates or master’s degrees. Generally speaking, they’ve done advanced study in some area of theology. I mean, the sort of guys who are doing teaching at London Seminary, apart from me, David Green, my vice principal, he does most of the Old Testament and the Hebrew. Uh you know he’s he’s he’s got a doctorate paul mallard uh gary williams has got a has got a a a doctorate robert stridens does some of the church history he’s got a he’s got a doctorate stephan simonini’s got a master’s degree so so generally you know ray evans um david mcgowan those are the sorts of people who are doing the teaching and and yeah yeah they would they would be well qualified So I would say in terms of quality, pretty much it stands up. We aren’t giving a sort of simple offering. A tricky question. Do you have women on the course? Would you have women? Is it by definition you don’t because that’s not theologically where you’re at, just to be clear?

[22:23] So at present we we we just have men in the classroom uh rumor has it that that women have sometimes attended elements of the course but it’s just a rumor and i wouldn’t like to to propagate propagate that i i believe wholeheartedly in in women doing theological training um and i think certainly that there’s there’s a place for women training alongside men because i i think there’s a very valuable role for pastors’ wives and women workers in ministry. I wouldn’t have survived in ministry without an excellent wife who was actually very well theologically trained as well. I wouldn’t have survived in ministry without an excellent women’s worker. So I think those things are extremely valuable. But the general rule at London

[23:10] Seminary is that the only people on the course are men because it is a pastoral training course.

[23:16] Yeah, yeah. And I guess there’s an inconsistency if you’re training men and women to preach but with the assumption that only the men are going to preach um which is different to just training theologically but if you’re training with a goal of preaching it seems being consistent to say well we’re training you all the way to not actually doing the final thing um uh which is yeah different to theological training so but i mean for example at london sandring we also have the flourish course so so the flourish course we it’s only mean nine days through the year. We do it over two years. So 18 days over the two years. So I mean, we do provide some training for pastors, wives and women workers. And that’s of a serious level. And I think it’s extremely popular. We seem to fill up every year. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it is an area where.

[24:09] Churches are increasingly have to figure out not just what they believe in a sort of tick box sense of you know are we complementarian or egalitarian um at a very high level but kind of how it works out um and how we affirm what i think god has taught in the scriptures um about men and women and about our different roles but also about how we both need to contribute to church life i’m not sure we’ve we’ve quite got there yet i think there’s still stuff to to think about no you teach stuff to do with um men and women roles in london seminary and and get people get the men to think about how’s that going to work out in your church yes so for example uh in in in one of our mornings uh we we have a a a women’s work in in in fact it’s the woman who was my women’s worker at emmanuel she comes in for a whole morning and persuades them of the importance of having a women’s worker and the importance of women’s ministry in the church. I mean, Leo Blesser was just transformative at Emmanuel because a lot of women at Emmanuel Church were from a very traditional background. They were from very traditional strict Baptist slash gospel standard background, very traditional brethren background.

[25:24] And they were very much withdrawn in terms of their contribution to church life. Life and when leo started as a women’s worker she would say well when you go and visit this lady in hospital or when you go and you visit your lady friends in the church you do open the bible with them don’t you and you do pray with them and the initial response she got was oh no no i’m i’m just a woman yeah in in other words they felt so conservative they felt very constrained right And so Leo’s ministry was to liberate them from that. And she did an enormous amount of work with the women of the church. And so some of those who were extremely shy were brought out of themselves. They ended up leading Bible study groups. They ended up speaking in women’s settings. And they became very actively engaged in the life and the ministry of the church. And I was thrilled about that because women’s ministry and women’s influence is very often the lifeblood of our churches. Our women are so dynamic in many ways, not least in areas of evangelism and also fellowship.

[26:33] Yeah, I looked at the statistics on our own church recently, and we’re roughly half and half men and women. But if you look at the converts from outside the church, we’re skewed towards women drastically. Naturally. So, I don’t know, 75% of the women in the church were converts and only 25% of the men, if that makes any sense. So so yeah uh you know most of the men in the church came because they were christians already or they grew up in the church but in terms of evangelism outside the church women are more significant it’s a real it’s a real positive about women and and their their relational um ability there’s also a bit of an indictment on men and and our inability at times to to build relationships and evangelize uh which is something to work on as well um in terms of london seminary um just in case it gets lost later on uh how do people find out about it well i mean the first first contact is generally either through social media or through our website londonsemery.org, and then generally if guys are interested in coming on the course they would generally book in for a visit day and they come in and they sit in lectures for a morning and they meet the students and they they chat about their situation

[27:50] and you know accommodation on site and how they They access the course and all that sort of thing. And we have all of those conversations with them. Brilliant.

[27:58] Just finally, really, the state of theological education in this country, really, have you got kind of reflections on, I suppose, both practically where it’s going and whether there are things to be concerned about and things to be positive about? So kind of practically, where do you think it’s moving towards? I believe, not to criticise them at all, I believe there’s a bit of a downward trend in Anglican colleges, evangelical Anglican colleges. There’s a hesitancy just because of what’s going on in the church at the moment. But I don’t know, are there other trends, other things you see happening? Yeah, I’m quite anxious about the way theological training is going in our non-conformist constituency, particularly in independency. I mean, I think the Presbyterians within Affinity have got their denominational colleges and so on, and they do an excellent job. But generally within independency, I’m slightly anxious. I’m slightly anxious for two reasons. I think lots of pastors and leaders within independency didn’t have the opportunity of.

[28:59] A sort of proper college training themselves. Perhaps they didn’t have the opportunity for learning biblical languages and so on and so forth. They’re still very capable preachers. They’re still excellent pastors. They’re still a blessing to the church. But for those reasons, perhaps because they never had that for themselves, they’ve never seen what a difference it makes. Right. And so when they’ve got young men coming up through the churches, they say, oh, well, don’t bother with biblical language. It’s you’ll spend hours on. And I’ve got a way in my ministry without having it. So you probably don’t, you see what I mean? And so the bar slips down a little bit.

[29:33] There seems to be a very pragmatic approach that a very promising young man comes along and you want to use him for ministry in your local church. You don’t want to send him away to college. And so, well, just do something short and easy and accessible and online and don’t make it too demanding and so on and so forth. And then amongst the young men, Again, I’m slightly despondent that I see that lack of due diligence in terms of investigating options. I say, are you thinking about training? Oh, yes, I’m thinking of doing that course. Oh, why are you thinking of doing that course? Well, my mate’s doing that course or my pastor recommended that I do that course. I said, well, that’s great. But have you looked at other courses? Have you not thought about doing biblical language? Oh, no, I haven’t thought about it. So for all of these reasons, we seem to be drifting towards lowest common denominator training. Now, some of these training courses do a great job in their own way. And I’m trying not to criticize other institutions. But as a constituency, let’s look 25, 30 years down the track. What impact is this going to have on our constituency if we’ve not got pastors who are pastor theologians, who’ve got depth, who know how to read the text in the original languages, who are able to bring depth in their preaching and teaching and in their training of other men. So my plea would be for any young men looking at training is…

[31:02] Go as high as you can, set the bar as high as you can, get the best possible training. It might mean investing two or three years of your life, but you’re investing in what might be. If you’re 30 years of age, you’ve probably got, by the grace of God, 40 years of ministry ahead of you. It’s actually a very small investment in a ministry that could make an enormous difference. Hmm i think there are cultural reasons just to do with how different generations um approach things there are probably financial reasons as well that are making people hesitant um it’s it’s quite well it seems quite a lot of money and so people kind of think could i get the same thing as going to a an academic college for three years and building up another student loan sure um could i get the same thing but for much cheaper um so i do understand some of those drivers as well um, and i think that’s part of the attraction of something like london seminary that you you can be in ministry and and doing it um which is uh yeah i know plenty of people who are in ministry and are doing you know one days or two day there or something yeah i mean on finances i think there’s two things i think one thing is that young men have been terrified by stories as to how much money they’re going to have to spend. I mean, there are some colleges, which will remain nameless, that charge you £50,000 a year. And men think, wow, it’s no way. That’s beyond imagination.

[32:31] But if you come to London Seminary and you live on site in a flat with your family.

[32:38] With all heat and light and gas and electricity and all the rest of it, and all of your meals and all of your tuition fees, and you come here for the whole full-time two-year course, the total bill at the end will be 50,000 pounds. Well, that’s not astronomical. And even if you haven’t got any money, we’ve got bursaries. We’ll make it work with you. We’ll help you to raise support. So those financial barriers, actually, as soon as you start looking at them and you start working with these young men, those financial barriers start to melt away. So I think it’s more of a fear factor than a reality and and in terms of the country as a whole do because you’re a bit despondent about some things are are there any things to encourage i mean is there less, liberalism in theological training or is there more or how you know more broadly across the spectrum.

[33:33] I would say I’m very encouraged, generally speaking, in terms of our progress as evangelicals. I think we could make yet more progress. I think in some circles there is a tendency to what I would describe as biblicism. In other words, all you need is to study the 66 books of the Bible and that’s all you need. In other words, there’s a neglect of systematic theology. There’s a neglect of historical theology and church history.

[34:01] And I think there’s also a failure to really dig down deep to the roots of our current cultural moment. So I think there are all sorts of challenges today, which we’re familiar with, issues of gender, sexuality, critical theory, all of those things. I think as evangelicals now, we need to be training guys more rigorously than ever before to deal with some of these somewhat overwhelming challenges so i think again i would just say the more depth the better yeah brilliant well very good it’s been really interesting uh anything um just to to kind of give people a bit of a call to action obviously people might want to apply or at least to think about theological training in terms of uh people who are training and people who are trained anything you think people could pray for uh we’ve done this in quite a lot of the podcasts where we We say, you know, for Christian teachers or for Christian medics, you know,

[35:02] what should your churches be praying for, for people who are doing that? What should you be praying for, for your, for your pastors or trainee pastors?

[35:10] Okay, well, the first thing I would say is pray for all men and pray that the Lord of the Harvest would raise up labourers. The great anxiety in our constituency at the moment is not enough men are coming forward. I don’t know what the Lord is doing. I don’t know exactly what’s going on in all churches. I don’t have the capacity to go around counting exactly, but it seems like not enough men are coming forward. I am besieged with requests from churches who need pastors, and those pastors don’t seem to be out there. Secondly, when those men do come forward for training at whichever institution they train, pray that not only their heads will be filled with theological knowledge and understanding, but pray that they will be filled with wisdom. Pray that they will be filled with the Holy Spirit. Pray that they will be filled with power. Pray that their ministries will be fruitful, that they will be a blessing to the churches, that their preaching would not be dull, that their preaching would not be mechanical, mechanical that their preaching would not just be a Bible talk, but that actually it would make a powerful impact on the church and on the world. And I would say, pray for those men then who go out to ministry to persevere. A whole department of London Seminary is the Pastors Academy.

[36:24] Where we provide pastoral support for pastors who are struggling. We provide ongoing training opportunities, including our master’s degree for pastors already in ministry. Ministry and there are desperate needs out there of men who are struggling and lots of challenges in ministry and pray that they would persevere and pray that they would be refreshed and pray that they would have wisdom brilliant well james london seminary thank you very much thank you graham it’s great to talk to you.