It was an interesting question posed at our recent trustee meeting. The subject was Bethel Seminary. “Why does Bethel Seminary matter?” he asked. “Who needs Bethel Seminary to do its work well?” As I thought through my own experiences with the seminary prior to becoming president, I realized that I had an answer to his questions.

For Bethel University, Bethel Seminary matters for several reasons. To state the obvious, it came first. It was the preparation of pastors that John Alexis Edgren had in mind when he called students to Chicago to study in 1871. Edgren’s big picture of pastoral education has become the big picture of all education at Bethel: grounded in faith in Christ, broad and deep knowledge, a heart for the things of God, and a mentoring relationship with a teacher. The irenic spirit that we often reference at Bethel—peace-seeking, grace-filled approaches to others—also springs from our seminary history and our Pietist heritage.

In more recent times, Bethel Seminary has been a leader in nontraditional delivery systems of education. In addition to encouraging the Association of Theological Schools to broaden its approach, it modeled different ways of reaching adult learners at Bethel, planting the seeds that gave life to our graduate and adult programs.

Although it is oriented first toward the church, the seminary has also advanced scholarship at the university. It has done that through some of the top level work being done by seminary faculty and also through the mentoring that occurred when some of the current College of Arts & Sciences faculty went through Bethel Seminary. These mentored faculty have become top tier scholars in their own right.

God has chosen to do His work in the world today through the church. Bethel Seminary’s model of education is ideally suited to developing the type of church leader who is equipped for ministry success. Like its distributed learning model, the Seminary’s holistic three-centers model of education (biblical/theological foundations, personal/spiritual formation, and transformational leadership) is being copied by others.

Bethel Seminary matters—to the church, to the realm of seminary education, to the field of scholarship, to Bethel University, and to me.