COVID-19 Shutdowns Are Shifting Seminary Education

With layoffs at Fuller and Southern, theological schools navigate financial pressures to keep training “spiritual responders.”

Dropping enrollment. Students stressed about tuition. Professors moving classes online and offering more flexible schedules. Administrators tightening budgets and wondering how to adapt to a new paradigm for ministry.

And that was before the pandemic.

For years, evangelical seminaries have been making strategic changes to deal with trends in theological education, financial constraints, or both. Some had restructured curricula, reduced campus sites, sold property, cut budgets, and deepened partnerships with fellow ministries and churches. Across the board, they’re offering more degree programs online, and strategizing on how to train more Christian leaders more effectively.

Then the coronavirus sent those plans into overdrive.

“The way you respond to a crisis is always determined by what happened before the crisis occurs,” said Mark Young, president of Denver Seminary. “We came into this crisis with the mentality that we must continue to adapt and make theological education more accessible anyway, so our staff and faculty were already in the mode of creative change that this pandemic has already accelerated to a degree.”

Higher education is still grappling with the size and scope of the changes this crisis will bring. But seminary presidents hope that, whatever changes come, their schools will offer theological education that prepares a generation of faithful, resilient, and savvy Christian leaders.

“We are training the frontline spiritual responders. These are the people who are going to go out and provide hope and help to people,” said Ed Herrelko, spokesman for Dallas Theological Seminary. “It’s probably too early to grasp how this will change the seminary curriculum, but ...