New Book: "The Survivor's Guide to Seminary"

My new book, "The Survivor's Guide to Seminary," is now out on Amazon. It is available on Kindle or in paperback. If you know of anyone heading into ministry, going to seminary, wanting to serve the church, etc. I believe this book will be a great benefit. It is both comprehensive enough to be helpful and yet concise enough at 145 pages to be read quickly. It is also deeply practical. Here's a bit from the book description:

Heading to seminary? Great! But don't go unprepared. "The Survivor's Guide to Seminary" should be the first book you read to get oriented to the challenges ahead. Long enough to be helpful and short enough to be read quickly, "The Survivor's Guide to Seminary" covers the following topics: 

1. Preparing Your Mind for Seminary 

2. This Isn’t Sunday School 

3. The Cognitive and Contemplative Pathways 

4. Having the “Talk” – What Are You Going to Do With This Degree? 

5. Your Professional Image and Its Cultivation 

6. The Six Über Skills of Seminary 

7. Thoughts On Thinking 

8. Thoughts On Building a Theological Library 

9. Thoughts On Life Together: Your Seminary Cohort as Community 

10. Stress and Its Maintenance 

11. Spouses: A Few Thoughts on Marriage and Seminary 

12. May God Bless You in Seminary (and you bless God) 

Get the book, read it, and thrive in seminary!

On the Strength of Seminaries

"What I have seen operating in seminaries that were once bulwarks of orthodoxy is a hunger to have the approval of the wider scholarly world, and to do that, you have to be doing something new all the time.  We need to keep up to date with what’s happening with scholarship outside of our circles, and we try to do that, but the Athenian disease of wanting always to hear something new and to be highly regarded by professional theologians who do not hold to the Scripture I think is a snare even to seminaries that have been strongly orthodox in the past.  We’ll not get the approval of the unbelieving world if we hold to the offense of the Gospel, [but] we have to stay faithful to the Scripture … to the Gospel."

Wayne R. Spear, “RPTS Oral History Video, Pt. 2” (Pittsburgh: Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary, 2010) , https://vimeo.com/5823103.