At Training Leaders International, I was part of a small team that was working hard to help national church leaders in disadvantaged parts of the world start their own seminaries to train pastors. The logic behind this is helpfully explained by my former boss, Joost Nixon, here. The church will languish without good leaders. For many practical reasons, the best way to train these leaders is to offer accessible training in their context. Seminaries in Chicago and Boston are never going to adequately serve Novi Sad or Natal (two places where TLI has been privileged to help start schools).
But is the same logic applicable in the United States?
In contrast to the developing world, we in the West have a glut of educational institutions, but this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t start new ones. In the same way that new churches can reach people with the gospel when there was already an established church on the block, new schools can open up opportunities for different kinds of students.
This has always been the case.
Sometime in the late 11th- or early 12th-century, a cadre of medieval intellectuals formed in a village on the River Thames about 50 miles northwest of London. These men gathered to study, debate, and teach in an informal way. But in AD 1167, King Henry II banned English students from studying at the University of Paris, and the academic aspirations of all England came to rest on this conglomeration of scholars. Over the next century, students took up residency, colleges were founded, masters were appointed, and Oxford University was born.
The two seminaries where I studied for my MDiv were both founded in the 1960s in response to times of sweeping cultural and institutional change (Regent College in 1968, and Reformed Theological Seminary in 1966). Each new seminary’s warrant is found as the ambition and clarity of its vision matches up with cultural trends and the needs of students.
Last April, a pastor and seminary instructor from Denver named Michael Morgan reached out to me with a clear and ambitious vision to start a seminary in Colorado. He and I had chatted just once three years earlier about some opportunities with TLI. Now he was asking me to help launch a seminary. I was skeptical at first, but was won over by Michael’s passion, the team’s vision for reimagining seminary training, and the opportunity to have a hand in shaping it.
I look forward to teaching Old Testament at William Tennent School of Theology and spearheading efforts to build an emphasis on global theological education into the program from the start.
So what sets Tennent apart? Elsewhere on our website we list four distinctives of our approach, but here I want to quickly run down what I see as Tennent’s unique warrant.
Low Residency, Retreat Environment
While seminaries trip over each other to offer online or partially-online master’s degrees, Tennent takes the road less traveled. The program does not ask students to relocate to Colorado, and there is no online work. Rather, students travel twice a year to a gorgeous retreat center in the Rocky Mountains where they take intensive courses as part of a tight-knit cohort of fellow students. The rest of the time they remain in their family/ministry/work context and continue to study at their own pace with the guidance of a faculty supervisor.
I don’t know of many seminaries that offer master’s level training in this format (although it is common for DMin programs). This is going to be the panacea for church leaders who are unable to relocate and can’t stomach the idea of going to school online.
Intentional Course of Study
The curriculum of many MDiv programs is either bloated or disjointed, leaving students feeling that courses are redundant or irrelevant. Not at Tennent.
At Tennent, you don’t sign up for classes, you sign up for a course of study. The curriculum is a tight 72 hours divided up across four key disciplines: Old Testament, New Testament, Historical Theology, and Applied Theology. Each term, students take one class per discipline, and there is a carefully crafted logic to how the courses cohere. The real distinctive is that each student also picks one of these four disciplines to major in. You’re assigned a faculty mentor in that area and you go deep by writing a significant thesis.
We are putting an incredible amount of thought into building a degree with breadth and deep focus that teaches you to think. Again, I don’t know of anything comparable in terms of pastoral training at the master’s level. This is a rich feast. We’re committed to the annihilation of busy work. Nothing is wasted, especially not your time.
The Local Church for the Global Church
Tennent has a built-in vision for the global church. During the fifth and final term each student will travel with other members of their cohort to teach a course for underprivileged pastors in the developing world. As each student passes on the training they receive, it will—by the grace of God—not only cement their own education but also strengthen the global church as they serve their brothers and sisters. The goal is to help each student to place their local work and ministry in a context that includes the ministries of brothers and sisters around the world.
This is not an optional or peripheral aspect of what Tennent is about, but a key component of how we want to teach theology and ministry. By requiring all students to travel and teach overseas it will be central to the Tennent experience and help to shape every graduate’s theological vision.
We are actively recruiting students for our pilot cohort. Classes start this summer, and our first residency is this fall in Colorado. I’ll be teaching a course on the Torah. I can’t wait.
If you or someone you know is looking for innovative, deep, low-residency, face-to-face theological education send them to the website and have them reach out to us. Please pray for this endeavor as well. It is a big vision—we will need the LORD’s blessing if it is to bear fruit. May it fail if his hand is not in it.
Alex Kirk is the Visiting Professor of Old Testament at William Tennent School of Theology. He has been married to Meghan for over ten years, and currently lives in Durham, England, where he is nearing the completion of his Ph.D.. Alex is most passionate about leading people deeper into the literature of the Old Testament as the living and active word of the LORD to his people.