Our Distinctives
"Pastors Training Pastors to Proclaim God's Grace."
This phrase aptly sums up Covenant Seminary's distinctive approach to ministry training. Our strong emphasis on building mentoring relationships between faculty and students both in and out of the classroom and our focus on Christ-centered expository preaching in our homiletics program combine to create a unique educational environment that fully equips pastors and ministry leaders to serve Christ's Church effectively.
Pastors Training Pastors ...
One of Covenant Seminary's chief strengths is its faculty. Our Board and Administration have consciously sought to gather a community of "pastor-scholars" who are not only highly qualified teachers and scholars, but who also possess considerable experience in ministry and are dedicated to a pastoral approach to training for ministry.
Every member of Covenant Seminary's faculty has significant ministry experience, whether serving as a solo, senior, or associate pastor of a church, or in church planting, youth and campus ministry, or cross-cultural mission. Many faculty members also have missions experience.
Our faculty continues to serve the Church as well. Professors regularly serve as interim pastors, Sunday school teachers, conference speakers, and worship leaders. Many also minister abroad, taking Reformed theological training to Christians in other countries.
The pastoral background and orientation of our faculty strengthens the practical dimension of instruction throughout the curriculum and enables faculty to model a pastoral approach in every class. As a result, students regularly report that classes challenge not only minds, but also hearts. In addition, this pastoral outlook produces a special degree of faculty unity and harmony, which enables the faculty corporately to model Biblical community for students.
Faculty-student relationships extend beyond the classroom. Professors regularly speak in chapel and meet weekly with students in Covenant Groups for sharing and prayer. Social activities and special campus events also bring faculty and students together outside the classroom. Ministry together in local churches provides opportunities to work side-by-side and receive on-the-job training.
... To Proclaim God's Grace
At Covenant Theological Seminary we hold firmly to the inerrancy and absolute authority of Scripture. One of our primary tasks, then, is equipping pastors to interpret and communicate the Word of God effectively. It is a significant and distinctive feature of Covenant Seminary that we are building upon a long tradition of excellence in homiletics training.
Covenant's homiletics curriculum is unique and extensive. With a total of nine required units for the regular MDiv degree, the program is structured around Dr. Bryan Chapell's highly acclaimed book Christ-Centered Preaching. This influential book, now in its second edition, has been praised by academic journals and leading Christian magazines as the best current work on the value and methods of expository preaching. The book has become a standard homiletics text for many evangelical and Reformed seminaries.
Dr. Chapell's unique emphasis on a redemptive approach to preaching is built upon his assertion that to expound Biblical revelation from any passage, one must relate the explanation to the redeeming work of God in the present. This goal is best accomplished by identifying in each sermon what Dr. Chapell calls the "Fallen Condition Focus," the "mutual human condition that contemporary believers share with those to or for whom the text was written that requires the grace of the passage." This "grace of the passage" is the grace of God in Christ, the fundamental enabling means of obedience without which a sermon becomes simply a "sub-Christian" call "to be" or "to do" something in one's own strength.
