Seminary training (or Bible college/school, etc) can be a massive blessing for the preacher.  It can provide skills, awareness, background knowledge, even slightly accelerated spiritual maturity (depending on the individual, the institution and the pressures of the experience!)  In many ways, all the studies come together in homiletics – this is where they merge and meet.  However, formal training does not guarantee good preparation for preaching.

Listen to Clyde Fant’s words from thirty years ago, I think they still hold true for some institutions:

For many preachers, unfortunately, seminary training in preaching merely furnished them with a set of homiletical cookie cutters, which they routinely mash down upon the dough of the text and presto, out pops a little star, or a tree, or a gingerbread man.  No matter that the text doesn’t want to go into these forms, the poor thing is mashed and tortured until it is made to say the things it never intended to say. (Preaching for Today, 1978.)

If you’ve had the privilege of formal training, take the time to honestly evaluate whether your training in homiletics was what it should have been.  If you are going to Bible school, try to discern whether homiletics is truly taught, or merely bolted on to the side of the syllabus.

Whatever your situation, don’t torture a Bible text – texts have rights too!