The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary recently hosted Spring Preview Day, welcoming 146 prospective students and guests to campus. Preview Day gives future students a firsthand experience of life at Southern Seminary. Guests not only tour the campus but interact with the faculty who make Southern a distinct place to grow in Christian community while being equipped to serve the church. For the faculty, Preview Day is a chance to make a case for why Southern is the right place to train for a lifetime of ministry.
Few voices capture that conviction more clearly than Thomas R. Schreiner, James Buchanan Harrison Professor of New Testament Interpretation. Guests had the opportunity to attend one of Schreiner’s lectures. A respected scholar and beloved teacher, Schreiner approaches Preview Day with the same intentionality he brings to the classroom.
“I want students to get a sense of both our scholarship, our theological stance, and our pastoral hearts,” Schreiner said.
That threefold combination—rigorous scholarship, theological clarity, and genuine pastoral care—reflects something essential about Southern’s identity. The seminary has long held that academic excellence and ministry formation are not competing values but complementary ones. Preview Day offers a living demonstration of that conviction.
Schreiner is direct about what he hopes prospective students take away from their visit.
“I want students to know that we have a passion for the local church, for missions, for education, for worship leaders,” he said.
That vision shapes how faculty engage prospective students even before they enroll. Preview Day is not a sales pitch so much as an introduction to a community already at work.
For Schreiner, the relational dimension of Preview Day is inseparable from its purpose.
“It is a great chance to meet students and to encourage them to consider SBTS,” he said, “because we are eager to train them for ministry to reach the world for Christ.”
Southern’s faculty put that eagerness to work. They mentor students through academic life, connect them with ministry opportunities, and stay with them through every demanding stretch of Christian living.
The faculty who attend these events are not doing so out of obligation. They are doing so because they believe the students sitting in those introductory lectures might one day plant churches, translate Scripture, lead congregations in worship, or carry the gospel to places it has never been heard.
That is what is at stake on Preview Day. And it is why faculty like Schreiner show up ready to make their best case for prospective students to train at Southern Seminary.