Thank you for this thread.
I am a pastor and I know many pastors, both ones I have sat under their ministry, and know many fellow seminary students who have gone into ministry. My friends are pastors, missionaries and church planters. Their hearts are to preach the gospel and win souls to Christ, and then to disciple them.
They work in many nations around the world. The work in small towns and on Indian reserves. They work in large cities, planting ethnic churches in English speaking cities, and not only are people saved, but then they take the gospel back to their home countries on visits, and more are saved.
Yet is obsessed, because some church would not let him preach in the far distant past.
Not only that but he really doesn't have a Biblical foot to stand on. His posts are basically mixed up exegetically, coloured by his bitterness instead of the truth of God's Word.
We had students in my Seminary who had advanced degrees in engineering and medicine, but left behind lucrative positions to preach the gospel. We had a lot of students who were bivocational, and did not give up their "day" jobs, because they knew their ethnic congregations could not pay them enough to live on. Our convention supported some of them who became church planters. One woman from China, with a Master's degree in engineering, who then got her MDiv, was planting a thriving church every 6 months. Another student, who had been a card carrying member of the communist party in China before he got saved, finished his Ph.D in engineering and came to Seminary and finished two degrees to help him when he left to return to Mainland China to work with youth there.
I don't know what kind of people you think go to Seminary, Yet, but it is not people looking for fame or money, but rather the tools to serve God and their congregations. The professors and other students were the most godly people I have ever had the privilege to work with and learn from.
I am grateful for my pastor, and for all my friends who have given up jobs that make a lot of money to serve God in full time ministry..
Thanks for burying the hatchet, Yet! In my back! I tried very hard not to get involved in your ridiculous rants against me and my fellow pastors. It's too bad you couldn't get down off your high, arrogant and bitter horse and find out the truth about the averge pastor instead, of the absurd things you think are real, when they are the exception, not the rule.