BLENDED LEARNING
All Learning is Distance Education
All education is distance learning of some kind. Whether it involves temporal distance (studying works published last week or millennia ago) or spatial distance (studying close to home or many miles away), all education involves distance learning. When it comes to educating pastors and church leaders, however, not all forms of distance learning are equal.
Reformed Evangelical Seminary offers a church-centered, place-based education. We give the local church priority over our institutional interests and deliver our classes and programs to the place where our students live rather than making them uproot and come to us. RES assists the church and equips our students in a way that keeps them both united and rooted in their local covenant community.
Learn to Serve the Church, Not Leave Yours
To learn to serve the church, aspiring pastors and church leaders shouldn’t have to leave their church. To study how to reach communities, students shouldn’t have to relocate far from their own communities. Reformed Evangelical Seminary is an affordable, church-centered, place-based alternative that teaches you to serve the church without leaving yours.
Church-centered: When you enroll at RES, you stay rooted in your home church under the mentorship and nurture of your own pastor, church session, and covenant community. We assist your home church in your ministry training. We don’t tear you away from her.
Place-based: As an RES student, you learn in the place you call home, where you live, work, serve, and worship. Instead of coming to us, we come to you with the best the Reformed heritage has to offer through live, online classes taught by faithful pastor-scholars from around the world.
B.B. Warfield, a legendary professor at Old Princeton Theological Seminary (1887-1921), recognized the host of problems with residential seminaries as far back as 1911:
“You are gathered together here [at the seminary], separated from your homes and all that home means; from the churches in which you have been brought up, and all that church fellowship means; from all the powerful natural influences of social religion . . . Nothing can take the place of this common organic worship of the community as a community . . . What I am exhorting you to do is to go to your own church . . . for your own personal religious life which you can get nowhere else and which you cannot afford to miss.”
A Church-Centered, Place-Based Alternative
A church-centered, placed-based education for pastors and church leaders . . .
Keeps students at their home churches, where they already worship, contribute, and serve
Partners with students’ own pastors and elders, who know them best, for mentoring, shepherding, and keeping them accountable within their home congregation and community,
Encourages pastoral students, when mature, to be like their pastors (Luke 6:40), not like academic specialists or research professors, and
Brings biblical and theological instruction to the students and their pastors and congregations, without wrenching students away from their homes and churches.
Church-centered learning brings people together for ministry training in the right way and at the right place—the local church—where the work of ministry is actually done. It reduces the distance between instructors, local congregations, local ministries, local pastors, and aspiring pastors- and church leaders-in-training. It empowers local churches of all sizes anywhere in the world by assisting them in equipping the next generation of pastors and church leaders right in their own church communities under the oversight and encouragement of their own pastors, elders, and congregants.
RES’s place-based learning approach to pastoral and theological education combines the best of both live, synchronous distance learning (with asynchronous access to lecture videos also available) and live, local, face-to-face pastoral mentoring from the student’s own pastor. The Seminary’s live-video classes use Zoom technology, with easy-access, easy-to-use Populi academic software for instructional materials, online books through the Logos Library, and other learning tools. Together, these resources allow students anywhere to join the instructor and other students face-to-face in a synchronous classroom, where all participants can be seen and heard for lectures and discussions. Students in more remote time zones can view (or review) videos of live sessions at more reasonable times that fit their schedules. Most importantly,
RES keeps face-to-face pastoral mentoring and accountability rooted in the students’ home churches with their own pastors who truly know them, their families, their strengths, their weaknesses, and their potential for ministry. No administrator or instructor at RES will presume or pretend to replace them.
RES students meet online with many faithful saints from around the world for their classes and regular student-teacher interactions. But they never lose face-to-face engagement with their local pastor-mentors, members of their home congregations, and others in their local community.
Throughout the year, the RES encourages students to attend in-person church events (like presbytery meetings and conferences). RES also hosts an annual REFRESH Retreat for students and staff to deepen their fellowship and friendship as members of the RES community of aspiring pastors and church leaders.
Join Reformed Evangelical Seminary for a church-centered, place-based biblical theological education that keeps students rooted in their home churches, maintains the mentorship of their local pastor(s), and brings faithful pastor-teachers from around the world right into the student’s home study.