Our Year-End Appeal for The Serious Joy Scholarship

We are writing again about a job only the church can do.

If you are already a generous contributor to this fund, please consider another gift. If not, please pray whether you may be called to make The Serious Joy Scholarship a work of your personal ministry for Jesus Christ.

Our recurring task is to fund God-centered, Bible-saturated, academically rigorous, graduate and undergraduate education for men and women in the Reformed, intellectual tradition emphasizing the absolute sovereignty of God, the authority of the Bible, and the Calvinist doctrines of grace—all inclined toward the happy, Reformed view that “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.”

It’s Up to the Saints

Funding this task is something that no government agency is prepared to undertake, publicly traded companies are likely to avoid, and mainstream philanthropic organizations more often eschew. It’s up to the saints—“the excellent ones”—whom God has marshaled before the foundations of the world and then filled with a joy so abundant that it overflows to his purposes worked out in the classrooms of Bethlehem College and Seminary.

Your generosity serves to make tuition “remarkably affordable,” so that would-be pastors, missionaries, and workplace and hearth-and-home evangelists may launch immediately into life, ministry, and vocation without a decades-long, labor-consuming, ambition-crushing burden of federal student loan debt.

The Serious Joy Scholarship at Bethlehem College and Seminary is the instrument of this aim. It is a $10,000 per student, per year stipend that allows students to pay only about $8,000 a year in tuition—one of the lowest tuition rates in American Christian higher education. Your support of this program has, by God’s grace, allowed us to persevere in this great cause since 2009. We thank God for you!

How do we do it?

Just how do we offer a four-year, quality, private higher education at a price 87.5% less than the current national average? That’s right. According to a report published in August by Northwestern Mutual, the average cost of a four-year degree from a private institution in the United States is now $255,858! Bethlehem students pay only about $32,000. How can we possibly make that work?

We’re small that we might be intentionally relational. We’re focused on the core educational work of students engaging with texts, their professors, each other, and little else. It’s not as if it’s “no fun,” but it is most-assuredly “no frills.” We do our work in the unadorned simplicity of unused Sunday school rooms such that nearly every dollar of generosity is taped to the backs of these students and their teachers as our contributors help to complete this act of grace.

And God is working

Pulpits are being filled, ministries resourced, nations reached, families formed, Classical and Christian K-12 schools supplied with teachers, workplaces influenced, and the theological academy seasoned by a new generation of men and women committed to spreading a passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples through Jesus Christ.

And all this against the grain of an unprecedented 15,000 American churches shuttered in 2025, and a record number of Americans identifying as “religiously unaffiliated,” according to Pew Research Center. Nearly all American church closings in 2025 were among Mainline Protestant denominations regrettably too willing to stand for contemporary relevance in the stead of ancient biblical truth.

Bethlehem Seminary remains distinguished among our Reformed Protestant peers by its un-abandoned commitment to rigorous Greek and Hebrew instruction, exegesis, and perhaps the most robust Resident Pastoral Apprenticeship available to men eager to prepare well to “preach a Big God” and shepherd God’s people. We stand athwart the cultural winds of technology-enabled, impersonal, utilitarian techniques of online, hybrid, and AI delivery favoring instead “embodied education”—education that happens in close relationship with other people. If a pastor is to one day shepherd a flock of people, might he do well to prepare among such a flock in a churches-based seminary like Bethlehem?

We love our city

It’s actually a great venue in which to undertake such an education. The quake of the so-called Reformed Resurgence that registered Richter Scale levels at Bethlehem Baptist Church’s little corner during the 90’s and 00’s, now gloriously reverberates around the region, nation, and the world.

Here that atomization is now dense with dozens of new church plants led by Bethlehem-equipped and -influenced biblical elders, rightly handling the Word of Truth, “doing church” in the manner God commands, making disciples, and sending to the nations. It is not at all a stretch to suggest that in little more than just a few decades the greater Minneapolis-Saint Paul region has become a substantial “Enclave of Reformed Theology” not unlike several areas like it in Western Michigan, Northwest Iowa, and other places across the Bible Belt. If the Reformed life is one to which you aspire, what better place to learn of it?

Leading in Classical Christian Education

Bethlehem College at this season finds itself well-poised to both enjoy and serve a tsunami of growth underway in Classical and Christian education. We had our largest college enrollment ever this Fall as our well-established “Great Books in Light of the Greatest Book for the sake of the Great Commission” program exhibited magnetism toward this growing universe of new students.

And we’ll not only teach them in this God-centered, Bible-saturated, historically rooted manner—we’ll teach them to teach. In doing so, Bethlehem College is producing graduates ready to move immediately into teaching positions in Classical and Christian K-12 schools, and they are already doing so—qualified and made affordable to these start-up schools because they are not carrying a backpack of federal student loan debt. We are also forming plans for Master’s-level education in Classical and Christian Education, providing existing teachers in that world an avenue to improve their skills, and perhaps maybe even some Christian public school teachers an opportunity to “switch teams.”

Dispatching Men to Herald the Word

We have been here long enough now to report to you of “…that which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands.” A new generation of godly, sturdy, winsome, mature, passionate men and women are being molded here to contend for the faith once for all given to the saints. As we travel the country and visit churches pastored by Bethlehem men, we see unique individuals and personalities—men who handle the Word of God with similar precision, care, and Christ-exalting affection.

We also hear reports from our alumni on the mission field at work in some of the darkest and most challenging places for gospel endeavors—men and women who place themselves at risk of persecution and imprisonment in order to spread a passion ignited during their Bethlehem years. Just as encouraging are the reports from those whose ministries are being conducted around corporate water coolers, construction sites, entrepreneurial endeavors, and most importantly at the family tables with spouses, children and well-loved neighbors.

Like you, Adrien and I have had opportunities over the years to invest in all manner of civic good-doing: patronage of the arts, political action, youth sports, conservation, etc., etc., etc. Without qualification we can testify that there is nothing—not one thing—in which we’ve ever invested prayer, time, and treasure that has yielded more abundant fruit for either the Common Good or The Greatest Cause of All than our support of The Serious Joy Scholarship at Bethlehem College and Seminary.

Your personal faithfulness to this work has yielded much. Together, with God’s superintending grace over it all, stories have been composed of joy, hope, and redemption that we’ll be telling each other a million years from now, only made the more complete in all the expanding tributaries that the evangelism of many will carve in years to come. It is no “Spoiler Alert” for us to tell you now that the work we’re doing together will appear ever more astounding in eternity to come.