I’m not an evangelical (anymore), but am sort of a missionary kid—my family moved to Poland explicitly to do church building (after seeing how much of a pagan wasteland it is—fun!). This was to a very evangelical denomination, where the official name is “Free Christians”. For legal reasons there’s a counsel that in theory has authority over all the branch churches, but no one cares about what they think. In these circles having a seminary degree was viewed sort of negatively. Not explicitly so, but it was viewed with suspicion. Studying theology was sort of frowned upon, as they’re more likely to lead you astray.
TBF I have friends from other denominations where you do need a degree of some kind to be respected, so it’s very denomination dependent. I get the feeling that the more America influenced churches care more about credentials (Baptists, Pentecostals). It’s correlated with how much structure and levels of authority there are.
I’m not an evangelical (anymore), but am sort of a missionary kid—my family moved to Poland explicitly to do church building (after seeing how much of a pagan wasteland it is—fun!). This was to a very evangelical denomination, where the official name is “Free Christians”. For legal reasons there’s a counsel that in theory has authority over all the branch churches, but no one cares about what they think. In these circles having a seminary degree was viewed sort of negatively. Not explicitly so, but it was viewed with suspicion. Studying theology was sort of frowned upon, as they’re more likely to lead you astray.
TBF I have friends from other denominations where you do need a degree of some kind to be respected, so it’s very denomination dependent. I get the feeling that the more America influenced churches care more about credentials (Baptists, Pentecostals). It’s correlated with how much structure and levels of authority there are.