 I completed my training to become a pastor in my church tradition, the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod. I graduated from our seminary in St. Louis. Now, not every church body prepares its pastors in the same way, and not every pastor has to go through a four-year graduate degree program, but that's what our tradition has done, and it works well enough. There were 94 men our seminary sent out that year to be pastors. Recently, a classmate of ours looked us all up