Seminary

In 1966 my brother Chris went to Bible college in Birmingham, studying the Bible, theology and church history, preparing him for a life of Christian service in France. In 2008, when I retired from teaching, I went to Bible college in London…

Throughout my life, friends and family members have attended Bible College, receiving training and education to become clergy, ministers, religious educators, chaplains, priests and pastors. Currently daughter-Jo is attending Bible College in Cambridge…

At some point I realised that in America ‘Bible College’ is ‘Seminary’.

‘Seminary’ originally meant ‘plot where plants are raised from seeds for transplantation’ – from the Latin ‘seminarium’ meaning ‘plant nursery, seed plot’; ‘semen’ means ‘seed’.

So… my greenhouse is a little ‘seminary’. Runner bean plants, grown in my ‘seminary’, were planted out last weekend; the first tomatoes are growing; this weekend I’ll plant lettuce seeds.

Faith growing like a seed is a good picture – Jesus used it!

My understanding of seminaries as plots where the seeds of religious vocation are nurtured and grown for eventual planting out, has developed through reading Don Cormack’s ‘Killing Fields, Living Fields’:

‘The Cambodian Church was first planted among the rice farmers of North-West Cambodia in the mid-1920s. Growth was slow and painful…’

‘In 1925… a small Bible School, a ‘seminary’ was started. This strategic little seminary would for exactly fifty years be the ground where all the pastors and leaders of the Khmer Evangelical Church would be carefully raised and nurtured before being transplanted one by one out across the province of Cambodia to bear fruit…’

‘As the bands of eager sowers left the seminary year by year to broadcast the good seed upon what were mostly hard-trodden rocky and thorn-infested fields, some of it fell into prepared soil where the ploughshares of trial and suffering had already cut deep furrows…’

Musing… Seminaries and sowers… growing and cultivating plants of faith from seed… in Britain, America… in parts of the world where the ploughshares of trial and suffering are cutting deep furrows.