Weekly Email: March 16, 2026
I first want to thank those who wrote back and the countless others that I know were praying in response to last week’s email about Kathy’s unexpected passing. I talked with her husband and he reflected that he could feel the prayers of God’s people as he was grieving this past week. Thank you.
As we look forward to this week, here is what is in this week’s newsletter:
Student Tip: A reflection on how seminary is forming you in more ways than just purely academic
Program News: Introducing a new online format, Live Seminary classes, being offered this summer
Student Tip: Your Studies Are Forming You More Than You Realize
When I was going through my MDiv, I did not think much about the formation aspect of seminary that I often talk about week to week here in this newsletter. I was very much caught up in the day-to-day tasks. Read this, write that, hit the deadline, move on. When I look back and reflect now, I notice that seminary, the study of the things of God and preparing for ministry, was forming and shaping me in ways I never fully realized as it was happening. I never thought too much about the why or what was happening underneath all the activity.
As you can probably tell from my writing, I am a particularly Type A person with a background in accounting and a mind naturally bent towards efficiency. That instinct has to be fought sometimes, because efficiency can blind you to the slower, deeper thing that’s actually going on. Over the years I’ve grown beyond the 23-year-old new seminarian, pretty fresh out of college and newly married, thinking he knew what life was going to look like. What I didn’t realize then is how much seminary was shaping my spiritual life. I knew it in the abstract but not deeply, not in the way you can only see when you look back year later.
I often reference Cal Newport and ideas like “attention is a muscle,” which is all true. But have you ever thought about how the work you’re doing in seminary, the skills you’re developing, the attention, the reflection, even the carving out of time in your life, is a spiritual act? One that prepares you for prayer.
One of your fellow students sent me this essay written in 1942 by Simone Weil a while back called “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.” I’ve looked up some things about her and nothing in her life particularly helps me resonate as a Christian who thinks her models of thought are something to form after. I highly suspect that my and her definitions of God, once we peel back the layers of spirituality and many other things, are very different. But as a launching pad discussion partner, I found her essay particularly helpful and insightful. Several ideas stood out to me and I think they’re worth considering as you move through your studies this week.
Attention as preparation for prayer
The central argument of the essay is that the real purpose of school studies is not the subject matter itself but the development of attention and that this attention is the very substance of prayer. She writes, “The key to a Christian conception of studies is the realization that prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God.”
I’ve written before about attention as a skill, as something you train, as something the modern world is designed to erode. But I had not thought about it quite this way that every time you practice sustained focus on a difficult text or an unfamiliar idea, you are building the very capacity you need to orient yourself toward God. Every time you sit down with a Greek parsing exercise, a theological reading, a church history essay, you are not just completing an assignment. You are training something more. The content matters, of course it does, but the act of sustained, honest attention is forming something in you that goes beyond the grade.
When the effort feels wasted
This is the part of the essay that hit me the most personally. She writes, “If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem in geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension.”
I think about my own experience with that (not to mention a reminder about how terrible I was at geometry in high school!). When I started seminary, I was not a good writer. I was an accounting major, and through college most of my writing had been bullet points, include a graph when you can, and keep it short. Even the thought of writing a 10–12 page paper was overwhelming. I didn’t feel the growth happening week to week. I couldn’t point to the moment where I went from struggling to competent. But by the end of my seminary, I was producing much better research and applying for a PhD program. The growth had been there all along, class after class, draft after draft, building something I couldn’t measure at the time.
You will have weeks where the reading feels too dense, the writing feels clumsy, the assignments pile up, and you can’t point to a single moment where you felt yourself growing. The effort still counts. The results will show up later, possible in prayer, maybe in a counseling conversation you didn’t see coming, maybe in a sermon where you find a depth you didn’t know you had. Seminary is not a vending machine. You don’t insert effort and receive formation on a predictable schedule.
Looking honestly at your failures
One of the most convicting parts of the essay is the insistence that students should examine their mistakes “squarely and slowly,” without hiding from them, without making excuses, without rushing past corrected work to protect their ego. She argues this is how you develop humility and that humility matters more than academic achievement.
When you get a paper back with hard feedback, the temptation is to glance at the grade, feel the sting, and move on. The opposite is what forms you. Sit with it. Look at where your thinking went wrong and don’t try to defend it. That practice of honest self-examination, which feels small and academic, is the same practice you will need in ministry when someone tells you that your leadership hurt them, when a sermon didn’t land the way you wanted it to, when your assumptions about a situation were wrong. How you handle correction now in seminary is how you’ll handle it later.
Joy, not just endurance
The essay also pushes back on the idea that study should be a white-knuckle endurance test. She makes this distinction between real attention and what she calls “muscular effort,” the kind where you set your jaw, stare at the page, and wear yourself out without actually learning anything. Real attention she argues, is led by desire. “The intelligence can only be led by desire. For there to be desire, there must be pleasure and joy in the work.”
I saw this in my own seminary experience, and it came through the professors more than anything else. I think back to Dr. Pennington’s Greek exegesis class on Matthew. You could see the joy he had in studying the text, in pulling a part what Matthew had to say and why it mattered. That joy was contagious. I saw the same thing with Dr. York in pastoral ministry and Dr. Haykin in church history. These were not men enduring their subject matter. They were alive in it. And that changed the way I engaged with the material, because I could see what it looked like when someone studied with desire rather than obligation.
If your seminary experience has become nothing but grinding through assignments, something has gone awry. The work is meant to be hard, but it’s also meant to be alive. If you’ve lost the joy, pay attention to that. It might be a season of fatigue and that’s okay. But it might also be a signal that you’ve slipped into just completing tasks instead of actually engaging with what you’re studying and why it matters.
The question to think about this week
I think the core insight of the essay is right, even though I’d ground it differently. Your academic work is not separate from your spiritual life. It is your spiritual life, at least a significant part of it right now. The attention you’re building in your studies is the same attention you’ll need for prayer, for preaching, for sitting with someone in their pain and actually being there. The discipline you’re forming in how you engage a difficult text is the same discipline that will sustain you when ministry gets harder than you expected.
So here’s what I’d ask you to consider this week. When you sit down with your coursework, are you just completing a task, or are you training the kind of person you want to be when it counts? The assignment is not the point. The person you’re becoming through the assignment is the point.
Program News: Live Seminary Classes
One of the realities of online seminary is that the flexibility you need can sometimes create a distance you didn’t expect. You chose online because it lets you stay in your church, keep serving, and study around the rhythms of work and family. But some of you have told me that you miss the feeling of being in a class, hearing a professor think out loud, asking a question in the moment, and learning alongside other students in real time. The asynchronous format gives you space but it doesn’t always give you that even though LiveSyncs can help with that.
We’ve been thinking about how to build more options into the program without taking away what already works. This summer we’re introducing what we’re calling Live Seminary (LS) classes. These are fully online 8-week courses, structured like what you’re used to, but with a weekly 60-minute live session with the professor at the center of the learning experience. The live session isn’t a supplement. It is the core of the course with some pre-recorded lectures assigned alongside it.
This summer we’re offering two options:
Introduction to New Testament I (22200LS) with Dr. Cook, Wednesdays at 12 p.m.
Christian Philosophy (28500LS) with Dr. Wilsey, Mondays at 7 p.m.
You’ll attend each week with your camera and microphone on, which means you’re actually in the room with your professor and classmates. Attendance is required for all eight sessions, with exceptions for emergencies.
This isn’t replacing the asynchronous flexibility that makes the program work for most of you. It’s another option, just like when we added 16-week courses for those of you who needed a slower pace or wanted to add another class. Some of you have the space in your schedule and the desire for more direct engagement with faculty. If that’s you, look at your summer schedule and see if you can carve out an hour a week. You can enroll as you normally do through MySBTS. Look for the LS course designation instead of the usual WW.
