Two Kinds of Hunger

What a week in St. Louis taught me about the future of the pastoral office.

I spent this past week in St. Louis, walking the halls of the seminary again. This time not as a student, but as a supervising pastor, there to help get one of our members officially into the SMP program. It was a good week. I reconnected with people I hadn’t seen in years, met new ones, and remembered why I love this place, flaws and all. But it was also a week that left me with two competing feelings sitting side by side, and I haven’t been able to shake either one.

Let me start with why I was there. The SMP program, Specific Ministry Pastor, exists because our church body is staring down a shortage of pastors that isn’t slowing down. It’s a distance-learning route into the pastoral office, built for men who are older, already working, already rooted in a congregation, and called into ministry later in life rather than straight out of college. John is one of them. Watching him take this step, after months of building toward it, was one of the real joys of the week.

What I saw in the SMP candidates

The SMP guys I spent time with had something I wasn’t fully expecting to notice so clearly: maturity. Not perfection. These are men still very much in formation, still learning the tools of the trade. But there was a settledness to them. They could hold a conversation. They could sit with a hard question and not flinch. They’d led teams, buried parents, made payroll, coached their kids’ teams, weathered marriages through hard seasons. Call it “real world” experience if you want. Although I’ll admit even putting that phrase in quotation marks feels necessary, because seminary is real life too, just a different shape of it. Whatever we call it, it showed up in how they engaged. They knew how to dialogue.

What I saw in the incoming residential students

I made several attempts over the week to have real, face-to-face conversations with some of the residential students – the traditional-track guys, straight in from college. And more than once, I hit a wall I wasn’t prepared for. Eye contact was hard to sustain. Sentences trailed off unfinished. Questions that should have opened into a conversation got answered in a single word, and then silence.

I don’t say that to be unkind, and I don’t think it’s a character flaw. I think it’s a formation gap. A generation that has done a lot of its relating through screens, and is now being asked to do something screens never taught them: sit across from another human being and actually talk. That’s not their fault. But it is our problem, because five years from now, some of these same men are going to be standing in a hospital room delivering hard news to a grieving family, or sitting across a table from a couple whose marriage is falling apart, and dialogue won’t be optional anymore.

The hope…and the condition on it

Here’s where I land, and it’s not a tidy conclusion. I think there is real hope for our church body in all of this. But the hope isn’t in either track winning out over the other. It’s not “SMP is better” or “residential is better.” The hope is in whether we’re willing to let these two very different formation paths actually touch each other.

Picture it: the young, unformed, socially unpracticed residential student sitting across the table from the seasoned, weathered, still-theologically-green SMP candidate. One has years of life he hasn’t learned how to talk about yet. The other has just enough theological training to ask better questions than he’s used to being asked. What if formation meant putting those two in the same room on purpose, not to rank them, but to let them sharpen each other?

That’s a governance and curriculum question as much as a spiritual one, and I don’t pretend to have the answer to how the seminary structures it. But I know this: if these two pipelines stay in their separate lanes with residential over here, distance learning over there, never really talking – we will keep producing pastors who are strong in one dimension and stunted in another. If we find a way to braid them together, even loosely, we get something better than either track alone: men who can dialogue and men who’ve lived enough to know why dialogue matters.

That’s the kind of growth I want for our church body. Not just more names on a roster, but more depth in the men standing in the pulpit. And more of them ready for the conversations that actually change lives.