The Pastor as Generalist

This week the latest rankings of the worlds top 200 universities came out. This was quite gratifying personally, as the two institutions I hold degrees from scored pretty well (Newcastle at 140 and King's College London at 21). What was most interesting though was that a British university - Cambridge - has for the first time knocked Harvard off the No. 1 spot. British universities score surprisingly well, taking four of the top seven spots.

A significant weighting in how these kind of rankings are scored is the quality of research a university generates. Serious research begins at the PhD level, and this is the point at which real specialization takes place. By way of contrast to this, Carl Trueman (who is always worth reading) over at the Ref21 blog is posting a series about why pastors should be generalists rather than specialists. On the same blog, Justyn Taylor links to Matt Might's Illustrated Guide to a PhD, which is very amusing, at least for someone like me who started a PhD and then dropped out of the program!

Trueman writes:

Titus 1:8, for example, says that an elder should 'hold fast to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it.'   it is important to note, of course, that this is only one quality noted by Paul at this point: the others are all moral qualities, something of which we should not lose sight and which, if you like, indicate that the elder is to be that greatest of generalists in the broadest sense -- 'an all round good bloke,' as the English would say.

And this is something that isn't necessarily learnt at university - not even Harvard or Cambridge!