Seven Things They Don't Teach You in Seminary: I recommend to you a book that has no intention of being a book on Christian history or Baptist history. It is nonetheless filled with history.

It is John Killinger's latest: Seven Things They Don't Teach You in Seminary (Crossroad, 2006). It is not intended to be a book of humor either, but if you have ever been a pastor, married to a pastor, or lived in a pastor's home, I guarantee you will guffaw in places. Let me identify some of the historical aspects of this serious but humorous non-historical book.

Killinger's "Introduction" is dubbed "A Word from the Author," and it is a look backward at his growing-up years in Somerset, Kentucky, especially the role of the local Baptist church in his life. Taking issue with Cyprian that "there is no salvation outside the church," Killinger nonetheless gladly confessed that after his conversion "church became more or less everything to me and the church people became my real family" (10).

In this engaging autobiographical chapter, Killinger then described the seven churches that he served as pastor. Among them were four rural Baptist churches, one sophisticated urban Presbyterian church in Lynchburg, Virginia, one famous Congregational church in Los Angeles, and one small wealthy interdenominational church on Mackinac Island, Michigan. Interspersed between these pastorates-a calling he could never quite shake--Killinger taught at Georgetown College, Kentucky Southern College, Vanderbilt University, and Samford University. Through the years as pastor and professor, Killinger scrounged enough time to write fifty provocative and amazingly diverse books!

In this personal memoir of pastoral life--surely one of the most interesting genres of church history--Killinger exposed the fault lines in theological education, eviscerated pastoral predecessors who were little more than power-mongering CEOs, laughed with clergy colleagues at the petulance of the laity, sympathized with clergy who were trapped in dead-end pastorates, opined that some of the best people he had known had been capable of some of the most dastardly deeds, identified the bottom line of budgets as the governing power in local churches, suggested that bungee jumping will one day be regarded by anthropologists as a symbol of our entertainment-starved culture, and enumerated the never-ending tasks of a local church pastor. Killinger's computer breathed fire, but one could always sense the Christian compassion and certain calling beneath the fury.

I was taught in my preaching classes never to take back in the last point of the sermon what I had hammered away at in the previous points. It causes the sermon to limp going into the home stretch. For some readers of this funny, inspiring, and historical book, Killinger may have appeared to do exactly that in the last chapter. But I don't think so. In the last chapter, he simply called pastors to the truth that "it is a privilege to face our impossible situations for Christ." This is inspired and inspiring stuff. The book does need a subtitle: "For Laity, Too."

I am sure that you want to know the Seven Things They Don't Teach You in Seminary.

1. Churches Are Really Institutions, Not Centers of Spirituality

2. To Most Churches, Appearances Are More Important Than Reality

3. Every Successful Minister Is Drowning in a Sea of Minutiae 

4. Pastoral Search Committees Seldom Know or Tell the Truth

5. Preaching to the Same Congregation Sunday after Sunday is Extremely Hard Work

6. There Is a Meanness in Some Church Members That Is Simply Incredible

7. The Calling to be a Minister Transcends All the Problems that Being a Minister Entails

Walter B. Shurden

Callaway Professor of Christianity

Executive Director

The Center for Baptist Studies

Mercer University, Macon, Georgia