It is the season of the year during which it is both my responsibility and joy to appeal to you for a contribution to The Serious Joy Scholarship at Bethlehem College and Seminary, the financial instrument that permits our students to receive a God-centered, Bible-saturated, historically rooted, academically rigorous education at a remarkably affordable tuition rate—about $8,000 a year—then launch into lives of responsibility in adulthood, vocation, and ministry without a burden of federal student loan debt.
Whether you have been a generous contributor to The Serious Joy Scholarship in the past, or are considering this ministry for the first time, we hope you will be part of our 2025. When the long history of this place is written, you will be regarded among the founders of Bethlehem College and Seminary. Please join the ranks of those whose joy in Jesus is such that it overflows to the blessing of our students and their godly teachers.
“Their God is too small, and their reading is too passive.” – John Piper
This was Pastor John Piper’s observation fifteen-plus years ago as he and other local church elders pondered the need to create an alternative approach to Christian higher education. They set out to build into the lives of rising generations a massive, glorious, all-satisfying, sovereign God of grace, and to train them in assiduous attentiveness in all their reading—whether they’re reading the Bible or the world—so that they might all be fruitful for a lifetime.
This alternative approach to Christian higher education became expressed as Bethlehem College and Seminary, an intentionally small, church-based school seeking to equip men to shepherd God’s people, and prepare young men and women to treasure Christ above all things with an aim of disproportionate impact for him in every sphere of life. We can report to you:
Pulpits are being filled.
Ministries are being staffed.
Nations are being reached.
Classical Christian K-12 students are being taught.
Workplaces of all varieties are being evangelized.
The theological academy is being held to biblical fidelity.
All by, now hundreds of, graduates of Bethlehem College and Seminary.
We enjoyed a significant admissions boost this fall, with twice as many college students enrolling here as in the year prior. The seminary has a new, full cohort. Our evening degree programs are growing as well. By God’s grace we have retained a truly world-class faculty to teach these students. The outcomes that you have desired in supporting this school are the outcomes that are being produced.
You need to understand the unique economic model of Bethlehem College and Seminary; how we’re delivering a high quality education at a remarkably low tuition rate. But before we get to that math lesson, a bit about what’s happening in the classroom.
Students are being taught by Ph.D.-level professors, not just teaching assistants. There they are reading old books, the Great Books, and most importantly The Greatest Book—The Bible. And these are not just run-of-the-mill professors. They are well-credentialed pastor-scholars who are as interested in their students spiritual formation as they are in their academic performance. That said, the academic performance standards are high. The students are doing truly heavy academic lifting, learning ancient languages like Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. They are “arcing” the arguments of biblical texts, as well as plumbing weighty texts of theology, philosophy, history, and literature.
And they are writing. Oh, are they writing. The program demands of them the formation of skills of oral and written expression such that, once graduated, they will be fully capable of giving reason for the hope that is in them, able to contend for the faith once for all given to the saints, able to explain what they believe and why they believe it.
An undergraduate student expressed the experience here well when he observed, “I came here and…Surprise!…I learned that I actually do have an attention span.” Another student reported at graduation a couple years ago that she had read some 50,000 pages of material in pursuit of her undergraduate degree!
And they’re doing all this amid the life and members of the local church. They’re being prepared not only to be adults, spouses, parents, citizens, and responsible contributors to society—they are most importantly be prepared to be good and solid church men and women. It is the church that is the one social institution in which the believer will live until earthly death or Christ’s return. These students are being readied for this essential life delight—worship.
A visitor—from what we would regard as a distinguished peer institution—told me recently that he wasn’t inclined to teach in his school’s undergraduate program because of the students it attracts. He characterized them as “8th graders,” and he wasn’t being pompous. I’ve been in the classroom with our students, and they don’t talk like 8th graders. Take a moment to consider our new “mini-cast” called Great Books Briefly. You’ll see what I mean. It’s not only astonishing that these 20-something faces know these books, they also have cogent observations to make about them.
In these last fifteen years, Bethlehem Seminary has served to fill dozens and dozens of pulpits with “Big God Preachers,” men who are exceedingly careful and faithful in handling God’s word as they shepherd God’s people. Many of them have headed to the nations to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ. Abundant fruit is being borne.
At this writing, I’m just as confident that in the coming years Bethlehem College will mint a collection of well-trained Classical Christian K-12 teachers. This is one of the fastest-growing, public school alternatives in the U.S., today. But that growth may well be stemmed if the array of new Classical Christian K-12 schools can’t find a sufficient number of teachers capable of handling such demanding classical curriculum. Our Bethlehem College graduates are rising as equal to this task, and your support of The Serious Joy Scholarship fuels not only their educations, but the generation of those coming up behind them—for many of us, our grandchildren and great grandchildren. It is a very hopeful trend.
So, how do we do it? How, when the average cost of four years of college tuition now stands at $84,520, with a Master’s Degree requiring another $60,000, do we manage to deliver such a quality education to students over four years for only $32,000?
Well, in one important respect it begins with our being open-handed enough in our compensation and care of gifted faculty that we succeed in recruiting them here to teach—and they stay to continue to do so over many years. We’re pleased to announce that for the fifth time in six years, Bethlehem College and Seminary has been certified by Best Christian Workplaces as being among the nation’s most flourishing Christian work environments.
But to deliver a tuition rate that is only two-fifths of that charged by the average institution also requires of us an extreme, “war time” approach to overhead and administrative expenses. Every penny gets its squeeze. Unentangled as we are from government mandates associated with the federal student loan program, we also don’t have to fund an administrative bureaucracy here to chase after the compliance of our teachers. We do our work in close proximity to each other in the unadorned simplicity of un-used Sunday school rooms without the substantial sunk costs associated with endlessly tricking out the campus with pop culture’s every new student entertainment “requirement.”
We like to say that the lion’s share of every dollar contributed to The Serious Joy Scholarship gets taped to the back of a student such that they can receive an excellent education—dare we say a better education than that available from many other public and private peers—then graduate without debt and launch into life.
In 1739, the evangelist George Whitefield visited a tiny little college in Neshaminy, Pennsylvania. They called it The Log College. Whitefield called it a “Little School of Prophets,” built of logs, twenty feet long and nearly as long. William Tennant built it to educate his sons and other young men from the area. It only operated for 19 years, but produced not only some of the notable preachers of The Great Awakening, but also God-entranced men who contributed to the debates over America’s Declaration of Independence and Constitution at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. They had a “disproportionate impact for Christ” in the day, though emanating from this tiny school. 150 years later, no less 25,000 people gathered at what had been the site of Tennant’s Log College to hear President Benjamin Harrison pay tribute to the impact this faithful little school, grounded in Reformed Protestant “Big God” theology.
Dare we pray that on our little corner of downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota, saints may gather to raise thanksgiving to God for stirring a similar period of impact, even revival, on a land yet so desperate for truth?
May I simply suggest, this is why it’s so important, and why you can have the confidence that God’s purposes are being well-advanced in this place. We know you sort through an avalanche of requests at this season, but ask you will consider this material, pray, and then act on what the Lord seems to be urging with respect to your generosity. It’s all we can ask. We’re all in his hands.
Rick Segal
VP of Advancement & Lecturer of History and Political Philosophy