Scores of Evangelical Bible colleges and institutes dot the American landscape. Some are accredited, and many are not; some have thousands of students, and others have a handful. While Evangelical Bible colleges are Fundamentalist in theology and practice, how much so varies greatly. (Please see Are Evangelicals Fundamentalists?) My partner and I attended an unaccredited Bible college in the 1970s. Academic quality varied from class to class, and teacher to teacher. Some classes were intellectually challenging, others were little more than over-glorified Sunday school classes.
What is the purpose of Evangelical Bible colleges? Most students come from Evangelical churches, so the goal is to reinforce the beliefs students were taught in their home churches. Colleges continue the indoctrination and conditioning that students experienced before college. The goal is reinforcement, not education. In fact, many students graduate from Bible colleges without ever learning doctrines and teachings contrary to those held by their home churches and colleges. For example, I was never taught anything about Calvinism, eschatological views other than dispensational premillennalism, Arminianism, or beliefs other than those held by Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) churches. The objective, then, is for students to believe and do the right things.
Sadly, Evangelical Bible colleges turn out woefully uneducated or under-educated students. Worse, these students think they know more than liberal preachers who have masters and PhD. degrees. They have been taught over and over that the Holy Spirit lives inside of them as their teacher and guide and that the Bible is the inerrant, infallible Word of God. What more does a preacher need? Here’s what I know: an Evangelical preacher with a two-year Bible institute or a three-year Bible college education is no match against a seminary-trained preacher.
Evangelical colleges often promote ignorance. By not teaching students all sides of an issue, they continue to indoctrinate and condition them. Students with different beliefs are marginalized or kicked out. Doctrinal purity is essential. Instead of teaching students how to think, they are taught what to think. I attended Midwestern Baptist College in Pontiac, Michigan. Senior men were ordained by nearby Emmanuel Baptist Church. Ordination prospects were required to affirm certain doctrinal beliefs. If a student was unable to do so out of differences of belief, they were not ordained. Remember, the grand objective is to reinforce beliefs.
This system turns out grievously ignorant preachers. Education is the cure for this ignorance, but non-Evangelical colleges are routinely criticized and demonized, so preachers rarely attend such schools. I am not suggesting that there’s no value in a Bible college education, but I am saying, for a preacher, it is not enough. Preachers need multiple years of training in Hebrew and Greek, along with exposure to as wide a spectrum of theology as possible.
Many Evangelical churches believe calling is all that matters. Lots of Evangelical churches are pastored by men without any formal training. No need, the thinking goes. All a God-called, Holy Spirit-filled man needs is a Bible. This leads to sorely ignorant preachers and church members.
Let me be clear, some Evangelical preachers value education. Some of them have legitimate, accredited degrees. However, just because a preacher says he has a master’s or doctorate doesn’t mean he has a quality, comprehensive education. Diploma mills are common. Many Evangelical preachers sporting doctorates actually have degrees “earned” from mills or mail-order schools. There’s no comparison between a doctorate from Harvard Divinity School and Pensacola Christian College. (Please see IFB Doctorates: Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, Everyone’s a Doctor.)
Did you attend an Evangelical Bible college? Please share your thoughts in the comment section.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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I know ine evangelical pastor who has an undergraduate degree from Vanderbilt University and MDiv and DMin from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. I knew him in person when he was a young man before he got his MDiv. He was a Sunday School director and teacher at the Southern Baptist church I attended growing up. I still follow him on social media. He’s a pastor of a Baptist church, and it’s apparent from his posts that he’s not a MAGA or ultra-conservative supporter. I don’t know what he’s preaching at his church, but he has talked against Christian Nationalism.
I can’t think of another non-evangelical pastor i know of who isn’t caught in the evangelical low information bubble.
I didn’t go to Christian college, but evangelical church and school strongly cautioned against any books, shows, schools, music, movies, magazines, etc, that were outside the evangelical Christian bubble. And you know what? They were correct. Exposure to “the world” opened up my mind to examining what I had been taught vs what I was experiencing in reality.
I can’t recall exactly when this happend in the UK, back in the 1980s maybe, but till then, one could leave high school at 18yo and go straight into theological college to train for the ministry in some denominations. Then, the powers-that-be began to realise that experiences of life and work and people in the ‘real world’ were important for those seeking a pastoral, counselling or leadership role in churches, and young applicants were told to do a secular job for a few years before entering their colleges…..which makes a whole lot of sense to me.
I attended a college in the Pacific Northwest in 1980-81 after I graduated from a secular university. I was in the grad course, preparing for missionary service. I did notice that the undergrads were woefully low in skill level, particularly in reading comprehension and writing. However, most of us in the grad course had been to a secular university or accredited Christian university. The quality of teaching and reading material (some of it secular writers, especially for worldview/linguistics) was much better.
Fast forward ten years later and did my masters degree at an accredited Christian grad school in the midwest. All of the work was graduate level, we were encouraged to explore lots of different views on a topic, and the coursework was as rigorous as anything I ever did in university/teacher credential program. If you’re not evangelical, you wouldn’t agree with the point of view, but the instruction was high caliber.
I think the difference is that both schools were not run by IFB churches. In fact, most IFB churches wouldn’t recommend them. Having come out of an IFB church, I didn’t want to attend one of their schools, anyway. Choosing these schools put me on the naughty list in my IFB church. For the record, I am a strong evangelical, but not a stupid one.
In a recent article by Jerry Coyne on Why Evolution is True Jerry refers to the divinity faculty at his Chicago university. He refers to its being divided into effectively two parts. The first were the actual bible scholars, who studied the bible, looking at it from any aspect, trying to determine those parts that might contain some truth. His quote was “There were the Biblical scholars, who addressed themselves wholly to figuring out how the Bible was made, the chronology of its writing, comparisons of different religions, and so on. Their questions were basically historical and sociological, and I found that, as far as I could tell, most of this group were atheists.” He compared these with “Then there were the real theologians: the believers who engaged in prizing truth out of the Bible, and taking for granted that yes, there was a god and somehow the Bible had something to tell us about him”.
That’s the problem, at least insofar as theology schools are concerned, with actually educating people about the bible in the way that education is supposed to happen. People who actually understand the bible are much more likely to be atheists than people who have simply been indoctrinated into it.