D.A. Carson on the Local Church

Jonathan Leeman reports:

Adrian Warnock has a good video interview with D. A. Carson filmed during the recent New Word Alive conference. Beginning at minute 2 is a discussion concerning the role of the local church and the role of the seminary and why professors should dream of being pastors. Here's a few lines:

• "The front line is the local church, and there's a sense in which the seminary is a back up slot."
• "The first impetus toward ministry and toward stamping people for what ministry ought to be ought to be within the context of the local church."
• "A good seminary, a good theological college, helps to provide the kind of training, and further exposure, more technical knowledge, grasp of the language, this sort of thing, that virtually no local church can produce."
• "Yet it's really important for those who teach in such places, nevertheless, to be pastors first, because if they think of themselves as teachers and scholars first, then they tend to produce teachers and scholars. So there's a stamping not simply from the course materials, but from your own values, what you think about, what you dream about."
• "So at our seminary, we always hire a certain percentage of faculty who wish they were in the pastoral ministry or else, quite frankly, we don't want them. Now, they have to be academically competent and all the rest. But we don't want people who just want to be in a seminary.We want people who, in many ways, would prefer to be in the local church."