Heart & Mind
by Steph Schmidt and Rachel Finsaas
Our youth pastor seems distracted — he's always listening to his iPod! How can he possibly be working, spending time with his family, and finishing his seminary degree when he wastes so much time listening to music?!" Before you decide to confront your youth pastor, consider this: he may not be tapping his foot to the beat of the latest pop tunes pumping through his iPod earphones. Instead, with the acquired technology utilized by Bethel Seminary's InMinistry program, he's listening to streamed video and audio lectures that his seminary professors have made available for download to computers or iPods. He's attending virtual seminary!
For this youth pastor and other ministry professionals like him, Bethel Seminary offers a practical alternative to traditional seminary studies. InMinistry (InMin) is Bethel's degree program for students, both local and at a distance, who want to pursue graduate theological education while remaining active in their own ministry venues. InMinistry began 11 years ago as an experimental program, offering one degree option to 25 students. Today, the program offers five different degrees and at latest count serves more than 325 students from approximately 44 states and 18 countries.
Bringing seminary to students
"The InMinistry program is hard to describe in words, in all honesty," says Kristin Anderson, director of InMinistry distributed learning. "[It's] designed for people who are active in ministry, so if God is using them in a ministry context, we don't want to say ‘uproot yourself to come to seminary to get trained for the stuff God's already using you to do.' Instead, we want to say, ‘Stay there, keep your family there, keep doing that, and let us train you while you're in that context.'"
"The students are learning as they're doing," says Greg Meland, director of supervised ministry and placement. Meland assists traditional seminary students by placing them in internships, but his job is different with InMin students. "All of our InMinistry students are already working in ministries, so we use their current ministry as their internship," he explains.
InMin does all of this ministry training through a distributed learning system that is well-known for educating students both at a distance and on campus. Anderson refers to it as a hybrid program. "If you were to say that we're distance education, that would be less correct because that would mean that students are always far away from us — and they aren't," she says. "We're really committed to our students in every location…I think the future of education is in hybrid models. We don't want to do seminary as usual. We want this to be a really transforming experience for students."
Bethel's InMinistry program was the first model of its kind in the nation to receive accreditation from the Association of Theological Schools (ATS). ATS is the single accrediting body for seminaries in North America. "At first, they took a chance on us," Anderson says. "And now we still are in many respects the industry leader, if you will, among seminaries."
Intense experience
Five master's degree programs are offered in the InMinistry format: Master of Divinity, Master of Arts in Children's and Family Ministry, Master of Arts in Transformational Leadership, Master of Arts in Christian Thought, and Master of Arts in Global and Contextual Studies. Each degree option functions a little differently, but the basic structure is the same. When a student enters the program, he or she immediately begins with an "intensive quarter" in which the student will spend the first few weeks learning at distance, then two weeks on campus for concentrated class time, and then the rest of the quarter back at a distance. Because not all courses incorporate an intensive period, students take two intensives twice a year, either during the winter and summer quarters, or during the spring and fall quarters, depending on the degree program. Each year in a degree program, then, includes two intensive quarters and two quarters in which students study at a distance.
"[On-campus intensives] can be an exhausting experience due to the amount of material covered in such a short time," says Justin Irving, assistant professor of ministry leadership. "[But] they often provide an even better opportunity for continuity in learning as the course develops over the week with the students. While students and faculty come to the end of the week quite tired, we leave with a very genuine and mutual sense that it was worth the effort."
Challenges
photo by Scott Streble
Kristen Anderson is director of Bethel
Seminary’s InMinistry distributed
learning program.
During the distance learning portions of each course, InMin incorporates various technological resources that allow students to study whenever they can. Due to the range of students living across multiple time zones, the times when students participate in synchronized, online learning are few and far between. Indeed, one of the challenges of this program, as with any distance program, is the fact that students do so much of their learning outside of the classroom. Though they have constant interaction with classmates and professors via phone and the internet, students may feel more isolated than traditional seminary students. "For students who are intrinsically motivated, the InMinistry program is a perfect delivery system," Irving says. "For those who need more regular face-to-face contact to encourage involvement, a distributed program such as this may be a challenge at times."
With the goal of walking beside students through their entire academic journey, professors endeavor to make courses as interactive as possible. Still, certain courses are more challenging to teach over long distances. Jeannine Brown, associate professor of New Testament, resolves this conflict by providing the students with language coaches. "A lot of seminaries will have a completely distance Greek or Hebrew program, and you're just doing it on your own," she says. "It's a tutorial essentially. And our course is not like that at all. Students have a coach — one coach, five students. With weekly phone calls, the accountability is actually greater than in our traditional program, and our attrition is less."
Advantages
Despite some challenges, the distance factor often has a positive side. Brown says her students learn to grapple with issues and think on their own when she is not there to assist them. "They [ask] really big questions and [answer] them with each other and not just me answering from the front, which is often what happens in a class context," she says. "With InMinistry, learning often happens at midnight on a discussion board…That's part of why they're most cohesive by the end of a quarter, too, because they've grappled together, and not always with me in the middle of it."
Another strong positive of the InMin program is that all of its students are already involved in ministry contexts where they immediately integrate and apply their new knowledge. They can readily see the value of what they're learning and can bring to their studies relevant applications and examples from their own ministry experience. Far from the fresh-faced, recent college graduate profile of many traditional seminary students, InMinistry students are experienced practitioners looking to hone and expand their ministry skills and pursue deep, transformational change in their personal lives. They are motivated, and that motivation leads to high achievement. "The track record of InMinistry students is…that they have succeeded in being shaped by a seminary curriculum and interacting with that, coming out really high-end, achieving the objectives of courses and of the program as a whole," Brown says. "A couple of our InMinistry students…are entering Ph.D. programs now coming out of InMinistry. The high level of success of the students is really telling."
Built on technology
If we’re going to be relevant in this generation, or train pastors to be relevant, we’ve got to be using technology. It gives us a lot of flexibility. We’re not bound by the classroom; we’re far more mobile.
InMinistry's innovative structure and motivated students contribute to its continuing success, but the program's infrastructure is built on the latest technology delivering instruction to students both nearby and miles away. Bethel is a leader among seminaries in the use of this technology. According to Anderson, today's generation and the generations to follow will expect more incorporation of instructional technology in their educational experience. Keeping up on — and even staying ahead of — modern technology is more than a goal; it is a necessity. The program is first and foremost committed to "being an authentic learning community," she says. "If we're going to be relevant in this generation, or train pastors to be relevant, we've got to be using technology," she explains. "It gives us a lot of flexibility. We're not bound by the classroom; we're far more mobile."
For example, communication between students and faculty takes place in an online program called Blackboard, which can include email, online discussion boards, streamed audio/video presentations, and the use of the SmartBoard, new technology that allows professors to upload images and texts onto a screen. The SmartBoard records images drawn onto the screen with colored pens, and the recording is passed along to InMinistry students, who then view it and are able to see the process of the markings made by the professor. Brown uses the SmartBoard to demonstrate Greek exegesis, pointing out verbs, nouns, and other grammar to her InMinistry students. "[We] have the traditional phone calls every week…[but] what we don't have in that context that we have in the classroom is the visualization," Brown says. "Students have found the SmartBoard really helpful. Somebody says, ‘I don't get how these words are functioning,' and I go up and write on the board and we get to process it visually, which is exactly what we don't have in a phone call."
In addition, professors sometimes record lectures to send to students and participate in conference phone calls with groups from time to time. Many professors also are proactive about their personal interactions with students. Meland, for example, makes sure to meet with his students individually when they are on campus.
Focus on relationships
photo by Scott Streble
"Even online you are connecting
with one another. All of us have
made friendships that will last."
The media that InMin has chosen to incorporate thus far have, in many ways, required constant transformation. During Anderson's six years as director, there has yet to be a six-month period of time during which the program didn't make some sort of significant adaptation. Between increases in enrollment and adjustments in technology, InMinistry has been in a constant state of change. The only thing that hasn't changed is its emphasis on interpersonal communication. A focus on relationships rather than technology sets this program apart. "Everything about the atmosphere we create says, ‘You matter as a person, and we want to know your name, we want to know your story,'" says Anderson. "‘We are not here to be an academic bureaucracy; we're here to come alongside you on this journey and help you pay attention to the ways God is alive and well in your life'…So we just try to communicate that from the get-go."
Faculty are intentional about building relationships with students and encouraging a sense of community. "Face-to-face time matters," Anderson says. "It impacts everything we do about how we serve students while they're at a distance…Clearly we use technology to serve them, and we're always integrating new technologies, but it's really in the service of teaching and learning, in the service of building community with our students."
Indeed, a strong sense of community seems to be one of the rather unexpected advantages of the program. Because of the intensity of their on-campus experiences and the virtual community they share online, InMinistry students often bond together and experience a richer and stronger sense of unity than traditional students usually do. "InMinistry students do experience a rich community life together," Irving says, "both when they are on campus for intensives and as they maintain these friendships and academic partnerships through email and the internet. The depth of friendships seems to be even stronger for those who are a part of a cohort of students throughout their program."
"Within the two-week intensives, people are just living together and hanging out in the evenings, and doing things that our traditional students never do anymore," says Brown. "And sometimes students will be having major, significant issues at home. Students band together in a way that is just hard to understand until you see it and say, ‘Wow, there's a lot of community that goes on here.' It's fun to be a part of that."
InMinistry staff work creatively to provide every opportunity for deep, authentic connection. During on-campus intensives, for example, students have structured time to fellowship and worship together. "We try to serve students… [by having] chapel," Anderson says. "That seems sort of self-evident except that most people who are active in ministry don't actually get to worship. We learned pretty quickly not to set up chapel as a time when speakers came and talked to students more, because they're already in class; they're getting plenty of content. We really just want students to worship."
Innovation informed by love
There are other seminaries around the country that are incorporating advanced technologies, but what makes Bethel innovative is the way it uses what it has, says Anderson. "I would say that lots of schools are starting to do distance courses and integrate technology into their courses in really exceptional ways," she says. "What we have that other schools don't have is a focus on serving students within a whole degree program. It's that model that I think makes us distinct…What's going to keep us on the cutting edge and keep our enrollments up is that we're going to be smart about how we do technology. There may be schools offering more classes fully at a distance than we do, but that sense of wanting to shepherd a student from the moment that they've been accepted into the program to the time they graduate, and really looking at the whole of their experience, makes us pretty unique."
InMin is committed to anticipating change and adapting to emerging possibilities. However, the goal is never to be driven by the latest technology or the culture it inhabits. Anderson wants to look at what is possible, examine the values and desired outcomes of the program, and use wisdom in the technology Bethel chooses. "Honestly, what makes for a great course often is really strong interpersonals, rather than really fabulous media," she notes. "The Apostle Paul talks about how you can have all the gifts in the world, but if you don't have love, you are only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. My take is that you can have the most fabulous media in the world, but if the faculty aren't present to students, it really doesn't matter. It's just noise."
So that "noise" that your youth pastor is listening to on his iPod? It's just Bethel Seminary's quest to reach out in authentic relationship and make a world class seminary education as close as your nearest headphones.
Steph Schmidt is a 2007 graduate of the College of Arts & Sciences at Bethel University. She resides in Montgomery, Minn. Rachel Finsaas is an English literature and writing major in the College of Arts & Sciences. She eventually plans to study anthropology in graduate school.
InMinistry Program Attracts Diversity of Students
by Christopher Richmann
When InMinistry students congregate on Bethel Seminary’s campus for intensive weeks of study, lunchtime in the campus center buzzes with an odd mixture of the excitement of a church summer camp and the seriousness of a Fortune 500 board meeting. The more than 300 students who come to campus twice a year to participate in the classroom component of their distance learning program find these two-week intensives to be perhaps the most important part of their InMinistry experience. This is their time to interact face-to-face with other students across denominational, geographic, and cultural lines.
The backgrounds and experiences of students from 18 countries, 44 states, and more than 40 denominations all contribute to the vibrancy of the program (see box on page 16). “It is an exciting program to be a part of because of the vast array of students,” says Danielle Dworak, InMinistry student services coordinator. “The learning atmosphere is enhanced by their diversity.”
Marilyn Smith of Irvine, Calif., is pursuing a master of arts in children’s and family ministry. She notes the camaraderie and connection among the students in spite of their many differences “Even online,” she says, “you are connecting with one another. All of us have made friendships that will last.”
Christopher Richmann graduated from Bethel University’s College of Arts & Sciences in December of 2006 with a B.A. in writing. He currently writes for Metro Lutheran, is a youth ministries associate at Peace Lutheran Church in Bloomington, Minn., and is a guitar instructor working throughout the Twin Cities.
Even online you are connecting with one another. All of us have made friendships that will last.
What Does an InMinistry Student Look Like?
InMinistry Student Stats
InMinistry students represent nearly 30 percent of total seminary enrollment.
Male.....200 Female.....106
Race/Ethnicity.....25 students from different races/ethnicities, including African American, Asian, Pacific-Islander, and Hispanic
Denominations represented.....40+
States represented.....44 (from Maine to Florida, Washington state to California, Hawaii, and Alaska in addition to Puerto Rico)
Countries represented.....18 (including Canada, England, South Africa, Central America, Japan, Germany)
Age:
60+....................2
55+..................14
50-55...............26
45-50...............38
40-45...............51
35-40...............51
30-35...............62
25-30...............54
Under 25............8
Ministry involvement:
| Adult Ministry College/Campus Ministry Assistant or Associate Pastor Chaplain Children’s Ministry Christian Education Church Planting Deacon/Elder Evangelism/Outreach Family Ministry Missionary Music/Worship Pastor Other Pastor/Senior Pastor Support Staff Teacher Women’s Ministry Youth Pastor/Youth Ministry Unknown |
8 11 15 4 56 9 5 6 10 4 6 8 30 41 3 5 2 44 39 |
Statistics researched by Christopher Richmann.
InMinistry Technology: Cutting Edge without Cutting into Students’ Wallets
by Alicia Quie
In today’s world of Blackberries, iPods, and GPS systems, it’s no surprise that educational systems have come to rely heavily on technological tools. Bethel Seminary’s InMinistry program is no exception, using the internet to reach students across the United States and around the world.
Scott Strand, instructional technology consultant for InMinistry, says the program works on several different levels. Some classes are carried out entirely on the internet using Blackboard, an online networking tool, as an interface. Professors can post assignments, tests, and lecture notes for students to read and study. Other classes are conducted after students complete two to three weeks of preload material online, then travel from their various ministry locations to Bethel Seminary for two intensive weeks of classes on campus.
InMinistry’s online classes are taught through several different media, including audio lectures, video lectures, and online discussions. Professors may ask students to watch video lectures, for instance, and then have students post responses or questions online. Strand said he thinks this teaching method is accommodating to many personalities and learning types, and eases tensions that sometimes come up in the classroom. “It kind of evens the playing field,” he says. “In classes, you have the extroverts and the introverts — one thinks out loud and one thinks internally. In the discussion forums, extroverts are the first to post; then introverts post a little later. It works really well.”
The technology InMinistry employs today has come a long way since the program started in 1995. Then, everything was sent to students and returned to professors through “snail mail.” Tests, homework, and lectures were available only on VHS tapes or audiocassettes. “I started working with the program in 1998,” Strand remembers. “I look back at the kind of stuff we did then, and just kind of shake my head and wonder how it worked.”
With all the technological advances since, InMinistry staff must discern the difficulty level of the technology they use. “We are very aware of what students need, and we try to keep it as simple as we can,” says Strand. He also mentions that the program is in the process of developing some pre-seminary courses that would teach struggling InMinistry students how to send email attachments, navigate BlackBoard, and download material. “As new technologies come along, we make sure that [students] are able to get them at little or no cost,” Strand adds. InMinistry’s audio and video software are available for free download.
While the implementation of the latest technology is beneficial, “We don’t do technology just because we can,” says Strand. The program takes a realistic approach to the equipment they will adopt. “There’s a lot of great stuff out there, but in reality, not all of it enhances the educational experience of the students.” In technology, as in all of InMinistry’s endeavors, the goal is to serve students and engage them in a transforming educational experience.
Alicia (Zimdars) Quie graduated from Bethel University’s College of Arts & Sciences in May 2007 with a bachelor’s degree in English literature and writing. She is a policy services technician for Berkley Risk Administrators, the workers’ compensation segment of W.R. Berkley Corporation, in Minneapolis.