Making Better Pastors, Making Better Writers
Learning to plan knowledge work
Our hope at Grimké is to train pastors in and for the local church. And as any student who has sat in one of my writing seminars can attest to, I frequently remind Grimké students that they are professional communicators. More than many other vocations, pastors are called on to write, speak, and manage knowledge work at a high level—you try speaking for an hour every week and sending out a weekly 500-word newsletter. It can be challenging.
We hope that our students will grow in their ability to communicate the gospel in all the ways that are required of pastors—preaching, teaching, one-on-one, and writing. We also hope that some of our students will go on to write more broadly for the church. We’re always thrilled to publish student writing at Sola Ecclesia, like here and here.
To help our students grow in academics and writing, we have a writing center populated with various essays and how-tos on writing for classes and congregations. For this SE update, I thought I’d include one of those articles below. The following article is one we hope all our students read at the beginning of the semester.
Making a Semester Plan for Theological Studies
You sign up for your classes, buy your books, review the syllabi, and the semester begins. You sprint through two intensives and knock out whatever is due at the end of the semester. But life also shows up in the spring and fall—babies are born, people fall ill, congregants have needs, sermons need preaching. For most students, an academic semester is a well-intentioned triage. It is well-intentioned because every student has every intention of doing as well as possible on every assignment for every class. It is triage because the unexpected happens, priorities demand attention, and schoolwork gets relegated to "crunch time" and all-nighters. Research bears this out beyond anecdotal evidence. Sönke Ahrens records his findings on student diligence in his book, How to Take Smart Notes. Referring to a psychological survey, he reveals:
The planning skills of students are pathetic. The psychologists Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin and Michael Ross asked a group of students to:
Estimate realistically the time they would need to finish a paper.
Estimate additionally how long they think they would need.
if everything goes as smoothly as possible or
if everything that could go wrong would go wrong.
Interestingly, the majority of the student’s “realistic” estimates were not so different from their estimates for writing under perfect conditions. This alone should have given them pause for thought. But when the researchers checked how much time the students really needed, it was much, much longer than they estimated. Not even half of the students managed to finish their papers in the time they thought they would need under the worst possible conditions (emphasis added).1
That students neglect their academic opportunities by planning poorly is a tragedy when considering individual students. The staff and faculty of Grimké Seminary want every student to succeed and steward their studies well. But the diminished academic expectations for theology students are even more devastating in the church. Heistand and Wilson note that:
We no longer view the pastorate as an intellectual calling. To be sure, we still expect pastors to know more about the Bible than your average congregant. And we usually expect pastors to know a bit of theology and apologetics to be able to speak winsomely to a student or a skeptic. But we don’t expect pastors to be theologians, certainly not scholars, at least not of a professional variety. Intellectually speaking, we expect pastors to function, at best, as intellectual middle management, passive conveyors of insights from theologians to laity. A little quote from Augustine here, a brief allusion to Bonhoeffer there. That’s all.2
This is also not how the larger culture has traditionally viewed pastors. Historically, studying theology—once called “the Queen of the Sciences”—implied that theological students were some of the most diligent and competent students that academia had to offer. The academic skill of clergy often meant that pastors not only excelled in theological and pastoral studies but also pursued academic rigor beyond theology into other areas of study. N.N. Taleb points out:
An extraordinary proportion of [academic] work came out of the rector. . . . The Reverends Thomas Bayes (as in Bayesian probability) and Thomas Malthus (Malthusian overpopulation) are the most famous. But there are many more surprises, cataloged in Bill Bryson’s Home, in which the author found ten times more vicars and clergymen leaving recorded traces for posterity than scientists, physicists, economists, and even inventors. In addition to the previous two giants, I randomly list contributions by country clergymen: Rev. Edmund Cartwright invented the power loom, contributing to the Industrial Revolution; Rev. Jack Russell bred the terrier; Rev. William Buckland was the first authority on dinosaurs; Rev. William Greenwell invented modern archaeology; Rev. Octavius Pickard-Cambridge was the foremost authority on spiders; Rev. George Garrett invented the submarine; Rev. Gilbert White was the most esteemed naturalist of his day; Rev. M. J. Berkeley was the top expert on fungi; Rev. John Michell helped discover Uranus; and many more.3
It is time to return the reputation of academic excellence and diligence to the pastoral office. And this revival will begin with theological students taking responsibility for their studies before the semester begins. For students who agree with the need for this renewed focus, the following plan is offered as a method to prepare for each semester at Grimké Seminary.
How to Plan an Academic Semester
We must note that almost everything a student needs to plan a successful semester is provided at the beginning of the semester. There are few surprises. You have your calendar. Family expectations are clear. You know your ministry responsibilities. Professors have already given you their syllabi. Gather these tools together and use them to make a basic and flexible plan to ensure that your theological studies are accomplished well.
How Much Work Is Assigned?
First, you need to figure out how much work is assigned. Go class by class and set a realistic time value for every assignment; this includes writing and reading assignments. Remember that not all reading or writing is created equal. Because of writing style or topic, some authors write denser content than others. Some writing projects are easier than others—compare a brief reflection paper to a research paper. Take that into account as you assign how many hours you think each assignment for each course will take you.
What Grade Do You Want?
You may respond, “Of course, I want an A.” Yes, we all do. But that isn't always realistic. It can be helpful for students to consider the level of rigor the class demands and their responsibilities outside of school to come up with a reasonable goal for a final class grade. That means you should not expect to get an A in every class unless your aptitude and capacity merit it. And it is ok to go into the semester realizing that you may not get an A in a class. This also means that if you decide all you can expect are Cs in all your classes, then maybe you need to consider if pursuing a graduate degree at this time is wise for you. This also is not an excuse for laziness. Do the best you can but be honest with yourself and set an expected numerical grade for each class. And then, based on the grading rubric in the syllabus, figure out how you will get that grade in that class.
How Does the Professor Grade?
Esther Meek explains in her book Loving to Know that “teachers don’t teach information; they teach themselves. As authoritative guides, with humble intentionality they replicate themselves in forming their students. For learning involves tacit indwelling of the embodied clues of the master, subsidiaries that even the master cannot name.”4 Each class that you take is an embodiment of your professor—his subject matter expertise and his hopes for forming his students. The wise student realizes this and plans accordingly.
Plan each class's work based on your knowledge of the professor reflected primarily in the syllabus. What does the professor value—reading, writing, memory work, group work, class participation? What is the professor's grading rubric? From the syllabus alone, you should be able to tell where you should invest most of your time for that class. Take time to consider this as you plan your work for each class and how much time you will spend on each assignment.
Give Yourself a Margin
Basic project management would tell you to implement a 10% margin or buffer for every project. So as you're planning a fifteen-week semester, you would give yourself a 1.5-week margin, rounding up to two weeks for good measure. This means that as you allot your work week-by-week, you are spreading your work over thirteen weeks. That is until you take into account intensives
Plan Around Intensives
As you can imagine, we're pretty big on in-context theological training here at Grimké Seminary. That means we highlight both the work you do in your local church and the time you spend on-site for intensives twice a semester. At this point in our planning, you're probably already realizing that intensive weeks will need to be modified in terms of expected work, reading, and writing. Let me add: you want them to be; don't waste your intensive. It is a unique few days to connect with classmates, spend time with professors, give your best to class discussions, and hopefully get some sleep, so you’re chipper for multiple-lecture days. All this means that you should count intensive weeks as margin weeks. So, if you're doing the math with a 10% margin and two intensive weeks, you have eleven weeks of planned academic work
Plan the Remaining Weeks
You begin to put some things together to make a concrete plan at this point in the process. Take your expected work by the hourly breakdown and divide it among your eleven weeks. Also, consider what assignments need to be finished based on mid-semester due dates or by intensives. Based on the planning work you've done, you should have a pretty good estimate of what you need to be working on week by week. You've given yourself intensive weeks off from regular coursework, and you know you have a two-week buffer for the unexpected.
Align Your Studies with Other Responsibilities
Realistically, most Grimké students are not full-time students. And we don't want them to be. We want you to be working out your theological studies in the context of ministry in the local church. That work may be pastoral work, counseling, discipleship, administrative work, small group teaching, or any other facet of local church ministry. The next step you should take is to align your studies with your local church responsibilities. As much as possible, look for opportunities for your school and church work to reinforce one another. Use your capstone paper to research a real need in your church. If you can plan your teaching schedule or content, plan it so you can begin to teach your church what you're learning at Grimké. If your pastor wants to see you mature in a particular area, see how you can focus your Grimké studies there. Avoid the tendency to silo off your theological studies from your investment in your local church.
Plan for Relationships
This is maybe the most overlooked aspect of your seminary experience. Your theological education is not just knowledge transfer or skill acquisition; you also meet men who could be lifelong friends and encouragers. As you think of the upcoming semester, who do you want to get to know better? If an intensive is your primary time to develop those friendships, make plans now to spend time with men over meals, courtyard time, coffee, or by rooming together
Execute with Confidence
At this point, you have a well-designed plan that reasonably takes the unexpected into account. The key is to execute your plan. Do the work. Put your study times on your calendar as scheduled appointments. And then keep those scheduled events as if they were with one of the most important people in your life. And the added benefit of planning like this is that the principles involved are universal. Time budgets, margins, alignment, priorities—you will incorporate all of these principles in any planning you do in your church.
See you at the end of the semester, hopefully, as a more rested, better-studied, on-time student than you were last semester.
Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes (self-pub., Amazon Digital Services, 2017), loc. 2578, Kindle.
Gerald Hiestand and Todd Wilson, The Pastor Theologian (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015), loc. 192, Kindle.
N.N. Taleb, Incerto: 4-Book Bundle, Antifragile (New York: Random House, 2012), loc. 3878, Kindle.
Esther Meek, Loving to Know, (Eugene: Cascade Books: 2011.), loc. 3062, Kindle.