For Bethel Seminary Students

Bethel Seminary is an institution of higher Christian learning, however, at times it could be confused for a Monday night Alpha course where a professor attempts to cram as much information into the minds of students that there is neither retention nor reflection. Some of the classes that are required as a core curriculum, such as personal spiritual formation, foundations and traditions, or evangelism for discipleship are so pathetically useless to many of the students that they are spoken of as jokes. While the New Testament department, the Theology Department are outstanding, the Old Testament Department with the exception of a few should be teaching Sunday school as volunteers instead of paid professors at an institution of higher learning. Many of the professors have solidified their course prospectus as many as 20 years ago without another thought to the arena of study that they are purporting to teach others. Which makes many of their ideas seem quaint and simple as if they wandered into the classroom by accident, for at times it seems as though they through their lectures together in the car on the way to class. I received a spectacular Christian higher education at Bethel University and expected the same from Bethel Seminary, but in many of my required courses I found that Bethel Seminary has utterly failed me and has not provided what it promised it would.

Bethel Seminary performs very well in various areas but the education that I have received at the hands of this institution has been disturbingly uneven. In my opinion Bethel is selling an image of change, and image of progressive evangelical theology that promotes the Kingdom of God, however, what they are producing is far short of this. In terms of academics many of the texts that we are forced to use for class are sources that my undergraduate professors refused to use because they didn’t believe in them, or their relevance to the subject at hand. Some of the textbooks that we use are insulting, as graduate students we expect to be treated as students looking for more, treated like adults not children fumbling around with these ideas for the first time. We deserve to be treated as students that are paying an outrageous amount of money to a school that is supposed to be providing us with an education that we could not provide for ourselves.

In regards to classes such as Evangelism for Discipleship and Personal Spiritual Formation and Discipleship in Community in particular, if these classes are to be required they must at the very least be encouraging and relevant to what we as seminary students are doing in our other coursework, so many times I have been given conflicting accounts from my professors, and not mere differences of interpretation of healthy contests between brilliant minds, but professors that are assuming a fundamentalist understanding of the text and thus grade as such in comparison to their own views. In the process they make themselves and Bethel seminary look like a gaggle of half-wits pretending to be experts. As a student who is paying for a good education it should not seem as a form of torture to endure some classes merely because one is required to. Evangelism for Discipleship actually made me physically ill, that was the measure of my resentment for the curriculum and what was being said in the classroom, I couldn’t believe my ears at the absolutely fickle theology that was being spoken, as if they were reading the back of a best selling feel good book by Oprah. When I approached the dean’s office about perhaps taking another course they said that I could write to the academic board, but then assured me that it would not make a difference for they would not approve my request. This is a terrible shame when the dogma of curriculum outweighs the needs of the students, if bethel is going to claim in any sense that they are giving a holistic Christian education, drastic changes need to be made to the class structures and the professors must be brought unto the same page with one another so that they do not engage the students with messages that are so conflicting that they seem to be scitsophrentic, if Bethel wants to send the next generation of leaders out to the church as believers with scitsophrentic theologies and conflicting intuitions regarding the central themes of their seminary education then by all means keep the programs as they are.

An example of what seminary should never be is a place where we are so concerned with ourselves that we push through the information at the behest of others. We are so busy that we are no longer able to be present anywhere that we are especially not in class… A man told a story in class today, a heartbreaking story, a story about his wife being diagnosed with a disease and the entire family were in a dark place together, after the room grew silent the instructor prayed for the man, immediately afterward we resumed class as normal, as if nothing had even happened, it was simply a small stream that we needed to cross for we have more important things to do than to be present with those who suffer. How are we supposed to be present with those who need us when we have not had this modeled to us by those who are leading us?

Seminary in the context of Bethel is so thoroughly compartmentalized that it is almost entirely artificial. If what is being taught in some of the required courses are ‘necessary’ for the next leaders of the church to have, then the changes that we hope to see in the church will not come to pass, for by and large the classes are teaching that there is no need for change, there is no need to question the structure, there is no need to think or re-think our context rather let us simply do what the evangelical mega-church is already doing, let us simply do it better. This will not suffice. Further, this is in strict tension with what Bethel’s recruitment material is stating, this is a travesty, until Bethel Seminary learns to practice what it preaches in word and deed it will always be a place of tension and disunity as it prepares leaders. And leaders born out of disunity rarely find their way to unity, you propose transformational leadership when all you provide is formative leadership, there is a difference and as students we are not ignorant of this truly disheartening fact.

Now, I realize I am simply one particular voice and perhaps many are more than satisfied with their seminary experience, I have had wonderful experiences in some of my classes, but in many others I have had discouraging and disheartening experiences. But many of my fellow classmates feel the same way, many are here to simply get a degree so that they will be taken more seriously, many are simply here because of scholarships, but many find large parts of the curriculum to be, simplistic, out-dated, disconnected and at times laughably naïve. If Bethel is going to attempt to be a place of graduate level Christian education it truly needs to step it up.