Models and Methods of Education at Mid-America

Bradley Thompson, PhD, EdD

Bradley Thompson is the dean of the College at Mid-America. He is a graduate of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (PhD) and Columbia University (EdD). He speaks and writes in the areas of educational methodology, critical thinking, reflective practice, and matters of education, growth, and leadership.

Since its inception in 1972, Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary has soughtfaithfully to prepare men and women for effective, biblical ministry through personal mentoring and informed educational methodology. Adrian Rogers, the past president of the Southern Baptist Convention and pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church described the Mid-America experience as “scholarship on fire.” As neo-orthodoxy took a stranglehold on most seminaries through liberal faculties in the 1960s and 1970s, foundational doctrines to Christian belief were summarily attacked and rejected: the inspiration and authority of Scripture, the virgin birth of Christ, the substitutionary atonement of Christ, the bodily resurrection of Christ, and the historicity of miracles. This climate of doubt and rejection in the sufficiency of Scripture gave birth to a need for institutions who would return to a commitment of academic integrity based upon Scriptural fidelity. As its founding president, B. Gray Allison was fond of saying, Mid-America Seminary is more of a movement that functions as a school. His belief was that a seminary should focus on the faculty and students more than buildings and property. As faculty taught evangelism and missions, it would help fan the flames in the hearts of students to win the lost to Christ. In a day of widespread theological liberalism, Dr. Allison had the foresight to help create a school that would function and thrive in today’s post-denominational environment by centering its heartbeat on the Bible, evangelism, and missions. Prophetically, he envisioned a day when the theological pendulum would arc back to a time when churches, denominations, and Christian higher education would wander away from its mission and focus on popular thinking and ancillary issues. That time has come a half-century later.

Even in its earliest days, the leadership of Mid-America realized the important connection between faculty and subject matter, so an emphasis was placed on hiring those who would teach at the highest level of scholarship through the lens of Scriptural integrity. This fine filter has been and is still a hallmark of the institution.

Today, the school once again faces a different kind of liberalism as Christian higher education capitulates to popular sociological doctrine. Many seminaries today publicly espouse the idea that Scripture is inspired, inerrant, and the final authority for Christians for faith and godliness, yet at the same time advocate the notion that it must be interpreted through a lens of gender, race, or a sociological viewpoint to be understood. Mid-America continues to raise the standard that the truth of Scripture is solely sufficient, and that the identity of students and faculty rests squarely on who they are in Christ, not in their gender or sociological group.

Mid-America has successfully maintained the balance of academic rigor and practical application of learning through its Practical Missions program, now called Missions 1:7 (students sharing the gospel message with one person on average every seven days). All students are required to take a class in personal evangelism, as is true of most seminaries, but the importance of this course is highlighted by its professor, Michael Spradlin, the president. In addition to learning principles of winning the lost to Christ, students are required to share their faith an average of once per week, including a presentation of the gospel and an invitation to be saved. In Christian higher education today, especially in seminaries, this is unique. Many students who enroll at Mid-America have little to no experience sharing their faith and have found this class and the Missions 1:7 program to be invaluable, especially as they graduate and enter local church ministry. Evangelism courses today include theory and subject matter in the classroom without connecting learning to life. At Mid-America, learning is reinforced in weekly chapel sessions by devoting time for students and faculty to report on their weekly evangelistic endeavors. The sharing of these experiences by faculty and students strengthens a commitment to be “doers of the Word, not just hearers only” (James 1:22).

In addition to the Missions 1:7 program, Mid-America instituted the GO! program in 2017. As in the seminary, The College at Mid-America’s heartbeat is also to connect the classroom to the community. Reaching people for Christ is the basis upon which the school was founded, and this passion motivates the president, the faculty, the curriculum, and even the chapel programs. The GO! Program exists to provide students with the opportunity to fulfill the mission of the school through community service and is the demonstration of what the student learns in the classroom. Students are expected to fulfill the biblical command to love their neighbor and thus are required to serve in community service sites each week and report on the work completed. By serving weekly, the student connects classroom learning to the practical aspects of community service. Each student enrolled in the GO! Program must complete an average of one service hour per week during the semester, and a list of service sites is provided by the college. Students must fulfill fifteen hours of service each semester, and opportunities for service include work with prison ministries, urban outreach, Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Campus

Crusade, hospital ministries, rescue mission ministries, church survey work, nonprofit ministries, and more.

The school’s educational philosophy is rooted in the belief that course content and the student-teacher relationship should directly inform instructional methodology. As Mid-America transitioned from a no-tech/low tech residential instructional model in the 1970s and 1980s to a high-tech digital blended model in the 1990s to present, they have maintained a commitment to provide meaningful course content using cutting-edge technology. Both the college and seminary have become leaders in the use of diverse instructional methodologies. While other institutions rely heavily on “banking” information through lectures, mainly due to over-populated classrooms, Mid-America has committed itself to a manageable class size where collaborative and participatory approaches to learning can be employed. Action learning is simply an instructional method to close the theory-practice gap,1 and the school actively seeks to promote reflective practice in action learning to produce a greater sense of autonomy and problem-solving in students. Because the seminary primarily trains students for local church ministry, it is important that their faculty have rich church leadership experience. Instead of solely teaching ministry methods and principles, from the seminary’s first day to present, each faculty member is required to be a committed soulwinner and an active member in a local church. This connects theory to practice, allowing faculty to act as valuable mentors and guides-on-the-side, helping students understand current and possible future ministry situations.

The seminary has provided training for students at the undergraduate level through its Associate of Divinity degree and various certificate programs dating back to 1972. In 2017, realizing the need to expand its reach into other disciplines, The College at Mid-America launched with four degree programs in Biblical Counseling, Christian Ministry, Organizational Leadership, and Business Administration. Two additional degree programs are planned for the 2022–23 academic year and a plan to offer master’s degrees in all fields is in the making. Most students enrolled in the college come directly from high school, and some are dually enrolled as high school students. This provides Mid-America with the wonderful opportunity to help students form spiritual disciplines as organized Bible study and discipleship in churches are on the wane. According to the Barna Group, this is expressed by a declining percentage of pastors who claim that Sunday school is their top priority and the fact that fewer churches offer a Bible training program for junior-high or high-school students).2 Each week, college students meet for student-led chapel and a chance to learn and strengthen spiritual disciplines through personal mentoring by faculty. This added dimension of relationship helps students grow spiritually and reflect critically outside the classroom experience as they notice the authentic relationship between what faculty say they believe and what they.3

Although the college and seminary have relied heavily on residential mentoring, they have become leaders in non-traditional and distance-based models of education while remaining true to their commitment to personal mentoring and retaining students. In 2006, Mid-America began offering online classes. Later, this teaching methodology developed as instructional faculty focused on distance learning through the Internet. Today, online learning is a vital component of every program, which was especially invaluable during the pandemic of 2019–20 and has furthered its ministry to educate inmates in high-security prisons. In 2017, The Arkansas Baptist Convention, in partnership with The Global Prison Seminaries Foundation, invited Mid-America to offer their Bachelor of Arts in Christian Ministry degree to inmates at the Varner Supermax Prison near Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Because of its success, they were again asked to launch the same degree program at Limon Correctional Facility in Limon, Colorado, in 2021. The teaching methodologies for these two prison programs differ greatly in that the Varner Prison is a closed, asynchronous system that requires all lessons to be video recorded and administered by a credentialed director. All students communicate with their instructors through the director, who acts as a liaison for all academic matters. The Limon Correctional Facility operates differently, in that inmate students have access to classes at the MidAmerica classroom synchronously through a credentialed director of the program. Once these students graduate, they minister to other inmates within the state prison systems.

As the college and seminary continue to extend their reach, Mid-America is committed to keeping current in emergent teaching methodologies. Recently, homeschool groups from different states have contacted the college to create online and residential dual-enrollment partnerships. With the annual average cost of tuition and fees at $43,775 for private colleges 4 students today are looking earlier for affordable, faith-based education with faculty who are focused on leaning into undergraduate instruction rather than those who see it as an intrusion.5 As the landscape of higher education continues to change, students at the College at Mid-America contend with the timeless truths of Scripture as they relate to subject matter, vocation, and the question of what it means to be a committed believer in the world today. With the rapid increase of online instruction, new opportunities have become available for students around the globe to participate in the MidAmerica experience. The seminary is partnering with a school in Eastern Europe to train teaching faculty through distance education; and leaders from other schools in Africa, Asia, Indonesia and other parts of the world have come to Mid-America to learn the most current teaching methods and course content.

Mid-America also partners with local churches and businesses to provide meaningful practicums for seminary and college students. Guided instruction is provided in the workplace for ministry, missions, counseling, and business students to help bridge the theory-practice gap. Accomplished practitioners in these fields guide students through weekly sessions of instruction, helping them to understand how to apply classroom and textbook learning to vocation. In 2019, Mid-America introduced Mentored Online Virtual Education (MOVE) for students in the Northeast where groups of online students are placed under the guidance of a capable ministry mentor. These mentor groups meet regularly for prayer and encouragement as mentors and mentees discuss the integration of academic subject matter with practical ministry and church life. Mid-America has come a long way in fifty years. Teaching methods in adult learning have changed dramatically due to technology, and the school has embraced the best of thesemethods while remaining firmly committed to its first principles of Scripture, evangelism, and missions. As the college and seminary prepare to face the coming years of teaching and leading students, they have committed themselves to their transformation, and not merely transactional learning, as students develop in critical thinking and autonomy, and ultimately as they become fully devoted followers of Christ.

1. Jean McNiff, Action Research in Organisations (New York: Routledge, 2000).

2. “Sunday School is Changing in Under-the-Radar But Significant Ways,” Faith & Christianity, Barna , accessed September 2021, https://www.barna.com/research/sundayschool-is-changing-in-under-the-radar-but-significant-ways/

3. Stephen Brookfield, Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher (San Francisco, CA: JosseyBass, A Wiley Brand, 2017).

4. Farran Powell, Emma Kerr, and Sarah Wood, “What You Need to Know About College Tuition Costs,” US News, September 17, 2021, usnews.com/education/best-colleges/payingfor-college/articles/what-you-need-to-know-about-college-tuition-costs

5. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011).