Weekly Email: December 29, 2025

Weekly Email

Dec 29

I hope you had a wonderful week off, slowing down and celebrating the birth of Christ with family and friends. Offices are back open this week except for Thursday, January 1, for New Years Day.

In this email:

Student Tip: Don’t let seminary become a machine
Program News: Start the new year off right with academic advising

Student Tip: Seminary Education Against the Machine

Over break I read Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. It is very thought provoking and it makes you consider a lot of different aspects of life. While I do not agree with all of his critiques and I do not share some of the fatalism that shows up at points, I do think the ideas are worth considering and worth discussing. Two that stood out to me were his diagnosis of “want” and his insistence that the fight is often about limits, roots, and what it means to live like a creature.

The problem of want

Kingsnorth argues that “the Machine” is not mainly our devices. It is the posture that treats reality as something to be engineered to fit our desires. He writes, “Sometimes we call it ‘the economy’. Sometimes we talk of ‘growth’ or ‘progress’. I prefer to talk of the Machine.”

That matters for you because the Machine shows up in your seminary education too. It shows up in the pull toward shortcuts, toward efficiency, toward finishing faster, toward staying polished, toward doing the work in a way that gets the grade without doing the work that forms your soul.

Underneath all of that is want. Kingsnorth says: “Today we are led by want, we are drenched in it, and we are increasingly sick from its infection.” Want is the habit of treating limits of humanity as obstacles, not gifts. It is the instinct to keep optimizing, keep speeding up, keep reaching for whatever promises relief, then calling it progress.

If want is the fuel that is driving you and me then how can we stop it? He answers that it is actually recognizing and deploying the limit of life. He says, “The problem of want can be guided by systems and cultures, but it is, ultimately, a matter of the heart.”

Where students feel it

You can feel this drift when your seminary education starts to reshape what you want. When your degree becomes the finish line. When your grades become the measure of your worth. When being right becomes more important than being faithful. When your schedule is so packed that prayer becomes optional and your soul learns to live on adrenaline and deadline pressure.

AI and the temptation to bypass the slow work

As I was reading Kingsnorth, I could not help reflecting on what I wrote last week regarding AI and seminary. If you have not read it, I think you should, because I know it is a particular challenge you will deal with. I wrote, “Seminary is about formation. You are here to become a certain type of person.” I also wrote, “AI always promises a quick fix, a better fix, a more polished fix. But preaching, teaching, counseling, and ministry are not mainly about polish. They are about honesty. They are about faithfulness.”

Kingsnorth is pressing the same nerve from a different angle. AI is not only a tool. AI invites you to bypass the slow work through wrestling with the text, the drafts that you crumble up and throw away, the deep work of thinking without being distracted, and the discomfort of not being finished yet. When you are tired or behind the promise of a quick fix can feel like mercy. But if you train yourself to take the shortcut now, you are training your instincts for later. Seminary does not only shape what you know. It shapes what you reach for when you are under pressure.

In ministry the sermon comes quicker than you expected. The counseling conversation is heavier than you planned for. The week gets away from you. Your default response in those moments will not be whatever you say you believe. It will be whatever you have practiced.

Online seminary and the need for embodiment

This is where I also want to be honest about online seminary, because I am both a strong proponent of it and someone who knows its temptations. Online education does promise real benefits. It allows you to stay where you are. It lets you keep serving in your church. It gives flexibility for work and family. I have seen the Lord use online education to raise up faithful pastors and leaders all over the world, and I am grateful for that.

At the same time online education can tempt you toward disembodiment if you let it become purely transactional. Formation without presence. Learning without friction. Education detached from real people. It can feel like you are doing seminary in a private bubble, when ministry is anything but private.

That is one reason we keep pushing to connect your seminary education to your local church and your ministry context. Some of this we do well and some of this we are still rethinking because we want too do it better.

This is also one reason we created the Experiential Modulars. We want to push back against the idea that online students should remain permanently disembodied from faculty, classmates, and the wider seminary community. There is something different about sitting across the table from a professor, hearing their heart, watching their expression as they talk about the truths of God, and realizing that theology is not merely information. There is something different about meeting classmates face to face who are carrying many of the same pressures you are carrying. We believe this enough to build it into the program and to cover a lot of your costs because we want you to have more than content. We want you to have real formation in real community.

But embodiment is not only a trip to 2825 Lexington Rd. It is what you do where you are, week by week. If you can, talk with your pastor about what you are learning. If you are the pastor, bring an elder, deacon, or a trusted leader into the conversation. Invite your learning into the life of the church instead of keeping it sealed off in your laptop. Let the ideas land somewhere. Let them touch preaching, discipleship, counseling conversations, and actual questions people are asking.

Part of what Kingsnorth challenged me to keep pressing on is that seminary education should not float above the church. It should serve the church, strengthen the church, and stay connected to the church.

The question to carry into this week

Kingsnorth argues that our modern “more” has not delivered what it promised. We have options, but we are unstable. We have tools, but we are restless. He writes, “We…have every gadget and recipe and website and storefront and exotic holiday in the world available to us, but we are lacking two things that we seem to need, but grasp at nonetheless: meaning, and roots.” That is the ministry world you are stepping into. People with endless choices and very few anchors.

Are you using seminary to become more rooted in Christ and in the life of the church or are you using seminary to become more impressive inside a system that will never stop demanding more?

The degree matters, but it is not the point. Christ is the point, and the kind of person you are becoming is the point. Choose limits that protect your soul. Choose integrity when a shortcut is available. Choose embodied faithfulness instead of isolated achievement. If you do, you will not just finish seminary. You will be ready to serve the church with a clean name, a steady soul, and a life that is actually rooted.

Program News: Talk with an Academic Advisor

The new year is a time when many of us are rethinking our habits and making plans for the months ahead. One resource I want to highlight is our academic advising team.

As you map out your courses for the year, take a few minutes to check in with an advisor to make sure you’re on track. Are you taking the right courses in the right sequence? Are there key classes you need to plan for now because of prerequisites or course availability?

Our advisors are excellent at what they do. They can help you think through your degree plan, course timing, and a realistic schedule for your current season of life. Make sure you take advantage of this support.

You can schedule an advising meeting by emailing academicadvising@sbts.edu.