Give him the opportunity, what would you choose to say to an auditorium filled with future

pastors? What council might you share with those who are training to lead our local

churches? Today, on Insight for Living, you have the privilege of listening in to Chuck

Swindall as he addresses the students at Dallas Theological Seminary. For seven years,

Chuck was the president of the seminary. Today, his title is Chancellor Emeritus, but it all

started when Chuck enrolled as a student. He titled this highly personal message to the

students, the essential ingredient for ministry.

Sixty-two years ago, I stepped on this campus as a first-year student, a fresh out of a tour

of duty in the Marine Corps. That's what you call a major contrast in life. I had really

no idea what to expect. I had never seen the inside of a seminary, never attended one

class, and had really only met a few of the professors of this school. My world had been

a world in the military for a number of years, and now that that was over, Cynthia and I came

on this campus just about as green as we could be. Since that time, everything in our world

has changed, and many things in the church have changed. No one gave me a piece of paper that

listed the things that I should anticipate and embrace in the changes that would come. Those

things that were good, healthy, and wholesome, nor was there a list of things given to me of things

I should shun, watch out for, under the heading of warning. This is dangerous. This will affect

your life and ministry negatively. Stay away from this. Those were choices that I would make in the

next more than six decades, and those choices would be up to me. Just as you who graduate some of

you sooner, others of you later from now, you'll need to make on your own. What I did receive, as I

looked back, were four wonderful years of biblical knowledge taught to me by a rather small faculty. Our

student body was about 300, 325, as I recall. I also was provided with a, to use a metaphor that

...