Ooh... more stuff to listen to

While reading some blogs today I came across a post mentioning that Covenant Theological Seminary was making a number of its courses available online for download.

Why I found this interesting was that this was not the first time that I had heard of this particular seminary. The first time was probably when another blogger that I read mentioned that he had applied to this particular seminary. He's a member of the Evanglical Free Churches, but Covenant is actually the denominational seminary of the PCA (which I've written about in recent days).

Covenant definitely has a different "economy of scale" than some other theological seminaries. As a denomination with over 400,000 members is behind it, its not stuck with a graduating class of perhaps 2 or 3. Rather, the most recent graduating class was awarded 160 degrees.

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Pastor Lodder (from Cloverdale) is doing his D.Min. through Covenant. Covenant has some excellent professors, including Bryan Chapell. His "Christ-Centered Preaching" is the best book on the subject.

Covenant definitely has a different "economy of scale" than some other theological seminaries. As a denomination with over 400,000 members is behind it, its not stuck with a graduating class of perhaps 2 or 3. Rather, the most recent graduating class was awarded 160 degrees.

Are you implying something here? Regardless of the accuracy of your numbers, less graduates doesn't mean that our theological college is inferior. Our high schools also have less graduates than public high schools, and we're rated much higher than they are by the Fraser Institute (ignoring the opinions of some that the Fraser Institute is biased because it's not crucial to the argument). Fewer students enrolling means fewer students graduating.

I'm not saying that the CanRC theological doesn't produce qualified graduates, but that having significantly more students allows things to be done in a different way.

Thinking back to CCHS, due to its size it was never able to offer any advanced placement classes or certain other classes (computer science, calculus, electronics, more foreign languages, etc). A larger school can also have instructors qualified in these areas, rather than having something silly like an English teacher teaching Math or the like. I would suggest that an instructor qualified in the particular area will likely be better able to teach students simply given their background. Going into a field that was at the time highly competitive, such things as course selection can make a difference. Most of the people that I knew at SFU had taken some course(s) that simply weren't available to me, and this can set you at a disadvantage.

As to the Hamilton seminary, as I understand it, the school is so small that it cannot afford to offer separate courses to 2nd, 3rd, and 4th year students. Instead these students all take the same courses together, and the curriculum is run through in a 3 year cycle. Thus the instructors must deal with having a fairly broad target to meet, and may have to repeatedly reintroduce subjects that those students not in their second year may have already seen several times before. A larger seminary could offer more targetted classes.

I would suspect that the cost-per-student at Covenant is also somewhat lower simply due to the larger size, although I haven't inspected the respective budgets of the seminaries.

One of the primary reasons for CCHS's success seems to me to be its level of parental involvement - rather than its small size.

David is right. Having a larger seminary (and a larger federation) does allow for more possibilities in certain ways. It's the same thing with having a large church with two pastors -- lots of doors open up for different things. However, there can be certain advantages to having a smaller seminary (and church) as well. One would be the opportunities for developing mentoring relationships between the professors and students. With a smaller student/prof ratio, those opportunities are there. And if the goal of the seminary is to be a training institution for the ministry (and not just a purely academic institution), mentorship should be a priority.

Smaller does have its advantages as you mention. Mentorship is also something that can exist outside of a theological college too though. One of the things that I recall Dr. de Visser talking about was establishing mentoring relationships between those early in their ministry and those that had been around for some time already.