In an article about why Spurgeon’s College suddenly closed, Evangelicals Now picks up on comments from three men trying to explain it. Peter Williams of Tyndale House picks up on the financial situation, the college spent more money than it had. We know that a primary donor had pulled out.
Bill James, principal of London Seminary tells us that there is a shortage of men coming through for ministry. Unfortunately, here he repeats a claim that I still await evidence for and that plenty of people are contradicts this. From what I can tell, there isn’t evidence of people not wanting to go into church leadership/eldership. However, we may be seeing less younger men going through traditional training roots. So the age, class and ethnicity of those called to serve us increasingly diverse as are the types of rolls people are going into. This is something I and others raised with theological college leaders nearly a decade ago.
Pooyan Pershahi, in a sub stack article which was also published in EN identifies theological drift as the issue. Now, I would have some sympathy with this take from my understanding of the particular college ‘s history. However, I would encourage Pooyan to be more accurate on his recording of history. He identified Steve Chalke as one of the examples of the college producing liberal ministers. However, Chalke trained in the 70s alongside men who remained Orthodox and was popular within Evsngelical circles. It was in the mid noughties that we saw evidence of theological drift in his teaching. Secondly, Pooyan ‘s analysis doesn’t engage with the wider challenges facing theological colleges.
Understanding what went wrong at Spurgeons and the broader issues involved with theological training is important. This means we need to be careful of confirmation bias and don’t just see what we want to see in the evidence.
Faithroots 