Tennent residencies immerse students in a beautiful retreat setting, designed to refresh, encourage rest, and nurture relationships among students from many different ministry locations. No move required. No internet crash to interrupt the lecture. Retreat, reenergize, and return to your vocation intellectually challenged and better equipped.

Rather than trying to recreate the campus, at Tennent, we want to reinvent the campus, immersing students in a place of great natural beauty and quiet, a place designed to help you experience God in an extraordinary way.

The power of retreat has been long known in Christian circles. Getting people out of the day-to-day context of their regular lives provides a much needed spark to engage on a different level. In traditional education, the excitement of the campus may wear off; in the online substitute, students never get a break from their workaday lives. Retreats, on the other hand, provide a restful sanctuary from the daily grind.

At Tennent, spiritual formation is not a class; it is a context. Missiology is taken with space to walk and pray. Theology is considered in the context of times and places to journal, think, read, and reflect. In a retreat setting, removed from the distractions of busy life, each student is allowed to engage seminary at a heart level. Serious academic inquiry thrives where there is space to reflect.

The retreat aspect of a Tennent education serves another purpose, as well. While seminaries cluster in America’s big cities, vast swaths of the country have no local options for theological engagement. Pastors and leaders in rural areas, particularly in the Mountain West, have few options. Of those who move away from their context of ministry to pursue graduate school, many never return, impoverishing the very local congregations they sought to enrich. Meanwhile, many pastors and servants in rural communities struggle with isolation, compounding the spiritual burnout that often plagues Christians in leadership. The retreat/return rhythm of Tennent residencies provides another option for rural leaders to pursue theological training without leaving the places to which they feel called.