You can just google dr barrick grammar i and download the pdf s

That was tough! I was about 50%

Ken Zeier I used to offer my Greek tutoring services for free to some pastors I knew (when our schedules allowed it). I'm also a high school Latin teacher, and I see the kind of demographic who choose Latin and do well at it. It needs to be said that learning an ancient language is a genuinely difficult thing to do. It requires a lot of discipline and hard work, and it draws on the same parts of the mind that de-code and understand complex mathematical logic. I can't speak for all pastors, but being gifted with a skillset that helps you to do well in ancient languages (so often, it's the good maths students who practice violin every day and have very high expectations of how well they should be doing in school) is rare enough in the general populace, and even rarer in the special subset of that general populace who find themselves called to ministry. Now that's one problem: the students aren't particularly the ancient-language-learning sort, ready and willing to undergo the rigours of ancient grammar and vocabulary and different writing systems and sound laws. The other problem is the courses. They have to be so so short. As a high school teacher I have the luxury of having students learn things over several years. In tertiary degrees, the degree itself is often only 2 or 3 years long! You can't have people juuust reaching the end of learning Hebrew or Greek just before they leave. Everyone wants to be able to exegete original texts while they're in tertiary. That means the introductory grammar courses have to be as short as humanly possible, or even much shorter for some people, given that not everyone learns at the same speed. And if you don't learn it well in seminary/university, are you really going to be great at it when you become a busy pastor? I was hoping to help ease this problem by offering free tutoring to pastors. I think that what will work better in the long run is to have a network of pastors, teachers, laypeople who know the ancient languages, meeting regularly at reading groups and practicing the languages together. That way it's about life-time learning. Seminary is far too short for most people to learn an ancient language really well, to live in it, to feel its nuances. Ongoing practice, bit by bit, every day, wherever you are, takes you beyond what your seminary can do. That would be my solution, rather than asking seminaries to fail students who aren't fluent in languages they had a very rushed time in learning.

Carla Schodde Thank you for that thoughtful response to my comment. The urgency of getting students through a course of study doesn't negate the grave warning in 2 Peter 3:16. The world needs to hear the gospel but a proliferation of inadequately prepared pastors isn't the answer either I think. The desire to be a pastor isn't enough. They need to be gifted in the necessary mental skills as you noted. Plus men need to be trained under gifted teachers. Many of the men in seminaries possibly are better suited to be deacons. The real expositors would be fewer but the most brilliant. For every St. Paul there are many lesser. Look at all the training Paul had. That's the kind of intellect and training that Yahweh God used to make a difference. I think it's the model that is desired.

@@kenzeier2943 God also used tradesmen. I'm curious with what you said how we reconcile that fact?...

I am more worried about them having the calling and anointing of God then their education level

In modern Hebrew there isn't. However, if we take into consideration one of its closest sister language aka Arabic, qoph is like pronouncing k deep in your throat. There some videos on KZfaq about sephardi pronunciation of the Hebrew alef beit which helped me a lot.