In this post, I'm going to discuss what I think are the problem with Bible colleges, then discuss why I'm personally grateful I went, and finally give some unsolicited advice to young people considering a Bible college.

Before I get into this, I guess I should define my terms.

When I say "Bible College" I have in mind a four year ministry school, usually unaccredited, usually run as a ministry of a church, where the only thing you can learn there is how to be a pastor, missionary or Christian school teacher.

Many of these colleges exist across denominations. They are all over the country. The independent Baptist movement that I'm a part of has had many, and I graduated from one of these schools.

I loved my time at Bible college and learned a ton there. It was an invaluable part of my ministry preparation. I know that experience is shared by many other pastors, missionaries and evangelists across the country.

So...

What's wrong with Bible college?

Let me start by saying that Bible College can be and has been an absolutely terrible thing for many people. There are five main things wrong with modern Bible colleges:

First, many impressionable young people are pressured into attending. There is a lot of pressure in certain kind of churches for young people to attend Bible college. Many youth conferences and camp speakers put a lot of pressure on young people to go to one of these schools. Many pastors and parents insist that their kids go to one of these schools for at least a year.

This pressure keeps the lights on at the bible colleges, but it also fills the schools with many people who have no business being there, and more than a few there against their will. When I was at Bible college I had roommates kicked out for shoplifting DVDs. My wife had a room mate kicked out for frequenting raves and getting pregnant. There were lots of students there because they were made to come, and their attitude and behavior reflected that.

I feel worse for the people pressured to come who were just pleasers. I think many knew they didn't need to be in Bible College but didn't want to upset anyone. My guess is many of the people I went to school with were in this category.

Second, many of these Bible colleges do very little teaching. Some of these Bible Colleges seem more like a ploy to recruit workers to the church than actual places of learning. I've met more than one Bible college graduate that couldn't define words like "hermeneutics" and "homiletics" (the two main subjects they should have been studying) or who couldn't talk intelligently about basic doctrines.

What do they learn in such schools? It would seem like nothing more than an expensive experiment in brainwashing. There has to be cheaper ways to get people to wear ugly suits, pledge allegiance to your brand of fundamentalism, and recite the same twenty mindless platitudes.

Third, often these Bible colleges feed the ego of their founders. It seems like some of them's main function is to make the founder seem like a "great man," provide him an opportunity to bestow meaningless degrees on his preacher-friends and thus further his personal platform. Sometimes, and this was certainly the case for my school, the founder or president's personal preferences and quirks are given ridiculous importance.

Four, if you attend one of these schools, you may struggle to find employment for the rest of your life. A Bible College degree isn't worth very much outside of a very small group. It's likely not accredited. If you want any kind of job that requires academic credentials - you are likely going to struggle with a Bible college degree.

Many of the people I went to school with ended up getting a second bachelor's degree. Essentially paying twice for college. Many more ended up doing menial entry-level jobs (like gas station attendant or hotel night manager) to feed their families.

Fifth, and this is not made clear enough, many Bible college graduates aren't going to find a paying job in church work. The average church size in the US is 80. 90% of churches have less than 200 members. Many will go on (like me) to be bi-vocational pastors. Some will end up barely subsisting teaching in Christian schools or as assistant pastors at medium sized churches. Many, many more will come home with a degree and learn that, even in their home church, it doesn't mean much.

Now, the same could be said of someone getting any number of degrees at a public university. The old joke about the philosophy factory down the road is funny for a reason. But literature and gender-studies majors don't labor under the pretense that God owes them success, and many Bible college students do.

So to sum it up, many Bible colleges use ungodly pressure tactics to get people in the door, then don't really teach them anything so that their founders can have a bigger platform for their egos. This leaves many students either unable to support their families and many others laboring in unpaid positions.

Despite all this...

I'm glad I went to Bible College

I actually loved my Bible College experience. I met my wife in Bible College. I met some really good friends there. I had some amazing memories. I learned a lot. I grew much closer to Christ.

My college, while far from academically rigorous, actually did teach and expect us to learn. We were quizzed on books like:

• Biblical Preaching by Haddon Robinson
• Understanding and Applying the Bible by Robertson McQuilken
• Basic Theology by Charles Ryrie
• Fundamentalism and American Culture by George Marsden

And introduced to the writings of Christian giants like: - A.T. Robertson - J. Sidlow Baxter - F.B. Meyer - Charles Spurgeon - and many more.

The things I learned in Bible College are the foundational knowledge on which I've built my ministry. Perhaps more importantly, in college I learned that what I learn in college wouldn't be enough, and that I was signing up for a lifetime of study.

After Bible college I went to work as a Christian school teacher at the Christian school I graduated from in New Hampshire, and after two years there, ended up spending five years working for an amazing mentor pastor in Tennessee (who pastored the same church for over 40 years.) While in Tennessee, I took master's summer classes at another Christian College in education, and it was during those classes I really learned to study and write.

While in Bible College, I developed an interest in web and graphic design, and immediately after graduating, I bought a laptop and some software and started learning all I could. For nearly ten years, I studied and took online courses during my free time. Eventually, this hobby blossomed into a second career, and I cofounded a software company which pays my bills today.

About seven years after I graduated from Bible College, I got a call from a little church in a town I'd never heard of asking me to come and preach. I wasn't looking for this, and wasn't sending out any resumes. It was a complete surprise. (They got my number from a past church member who was in my current church.) After preaching there twice, they voted to have me be the next pastor, I've served as the pastor at that church for 11 years now.

So Bible College worked out for me. I really believe I followed God's leading there, it was some of the best years in my life, and it truly was foundational for my life and ministry.

So with that in mind, here is...

Some unsolicited advice for people considering Bible College

1. Make sure you are called of God.

Do NOT go to a Bible college because you got caught in the Bible College industrial complex's dragnet. Pray about it. Pray about it outside of the hothouse influences that got you thinking about it in the first place. Seek wise counsel from your parents and godly older men from various trades. If you are still convinced (as I was) that Bible college is for you - then go all in.

2. Consider learning a trade.

Regardless of what you may think, you most likely will not be pastoring a large church. You'll likely spend many years, if not your entire ministry, in churches that cannot pay you much. There are many trades you can learn in a few years that would be an invaluable asset to you for the rest of your life:

• You can get a nursing degree.
• You can learn to be an electrician, plumber, or HVAC technician.
• You can learn to weld.

These types of skills will always be in demand and will pay you well enough to support a family while you serve in a church. You could either learn these trades before you go to college or while you are in college. Some colleges (like my alma mater) now encourage ministry students to learn a trade and offer a trade school to them.

3. Make sure you attend a reputable college that believes in education.

There are half a dozen schools (that I know of) that I would not recommend to a teenager in my church. In fact, I try to avoid camps and youth rallies where these schools are represented. Most of the people who are bitter about their Bible college experience got suckered into attending one of these schools. The best way to avoid this is to go to the school and sit in some classes. If it isn't a good school, there will be plenty of red flags: - Does it seem like a school or a brainwashing factory?
- Are students studying books written hundreds of years ago or books written by other colleges, or are they just passing around books by the pastor and his friends?
- Does the school take an anti-intellectual posture? (As crazy as that sounds, it's a thing.)

4. Submit to the rules.

Regardless of where you go to school, they will have rules you will not like. My college (when I attended there) had rules forbidding shorts and wearing jeans off campus. I had to wear a suit nearly constantly and could not grow facial hair. I needed express permission to do things as simple as drive fifty miles away to go hiking with friends.

No matter how strict the rules are, determine to submit to them while you are there. If you cannot abide the rules, go elsewhere. But do not whine about college rules for the rest of your life. The military (and military colleges) also have ludicrous rules for people to follow, but twitter isn't overflowing with people complaining about it.

No one expects you to live like that as an adult. I regularly wear shorts and jeans. I occasionally grow facial hair. I do all sorts of things I couldn't do in Bible college and have zero fits of conscience about it. So go, submit, graduate and then live your life in the liberty of the gospel.

5. Focus on preparation for ministry.

When you go to Bible College, you should go for one thing: to prepare yourself for the ministry. Go to get educated on how to be a pastor or missionary. Learn all the good things you can, not just from classes but from the experience that will help sharpen your ministry. Look for opportunities to serve. Try to minister in the summer through camps, tour groups, and internships. Dig a deep well you can draw from for the rest of your life.

6. Make good friends and good memories.

In college, you'll have the opportunity to make lifelong friends: avail yourself of it. Few things will make a bigger difference in your life than the people you choose to be your friends. Find godly people and make some memories with them.

Lots of people I went to school with aren't in the ministry. Many aren't even in church. But, it's interesting that most of the people I hung out with in college are still in the ministry today. Due to the nature of Bible College, there will be plenty of people who don't want to be there. Avoid these people.

Go on activities. Do goofy stuff with your friends. Take trips. As restrictive as Bible College rules are, in some way you'll have more opportunities for this kind of stuff there than at any point for the rest of your life. So make the most of it.

7. No one cares about your Bible College degree.

A small number of people brag about their degree from bible college like it's a degree from Harvard. Nothing could be sillier. Don't be that person.

8. Learn to be a lifelong learner.

When I was in Bible College, I spent a lot of extra time in the library, reading books that weren't a part of my assigned course work. My poor girlfriend (now my wife) would sit in there with me for hours as I read all kinds of things. (I tell her now she knew what she was getting into.)

From about the time I was 16 until today, I've read at least two books a month that do not have anything directly to do with my workload at that point. I've written about that here. If you are called to the ministry, then you are going to spend the rest of your life teaching yourself, and you'll be fitting it in between very busy weeks, so you may as well start while you are in school.

9. Realize Bible College isn't a requirement.

While there are hints that something like a Bible college existed in scripture (the school of the prophets in the Old Testament), there is nothing in the Bible that says you must attend a Bible college to be a pastor. While there are benefits to Bible college, you could study underneath a pastor in a kind of pastoral apprenticeship, and it would be no less valuable. You could also go the traditional path and get a degree outside of ministry, work for awhile, and then go to a seminary. Bible college is just one of many legitimate ways to prepare for the ministry.

10. Find a good pastor to work for, even if it's for free.

If you are serious about being in the ministry, the absolute best thing you can do after you graduate is to find a seasoned pastor, someone who has been in the ministry for twenty-five plus years, and work under him for awhile. Even if you have to work in a free capacity, you should approach this with the same seriousness you approached Bible college.

I know a lot of people who were burned by who they worked for after Bible college. There is abuse that can happen here. So be careful.

But in my case, I would not have been able to stay in my church for nearly 11 years now, was it not for what I learned working alongside a mentor who had pastored the same church for 40 years. I loved Bible college, but I'd take that experience over Bible college any day.