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The Future of the Seminary: The Challenges

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At the beginning of the last academic year our seminary hit a point of crisis. For a long time our enrollment has been low, finances have been sparce and our faculty has been small, but last year we lost two teachers and all of a sudden we had to start cutting corners. We realized we could no longer continue according to the status quo. At the beginning of this year, the founder of our seminary (The Slovak Evangelical Alliance) appointed a task force and gave us the job of putting together a strategy for the future of the seminary.

In this post I’ll describe the challenges we’ve been facing that have brought us to our current situation. In the following posts we’ll look at the special place our seminary has not just in Slovakia but in our region of Central Europe and then in a third post I’ll look at the strategy we have for moving towards sustainability.

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Watching the Church in Slovakia Grow Through Local Teaching and Biblical Preaching

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Ever since my early years as a believer I’ve wanted to understand Scripture better. During the M.Div. program at Trinity I couldn’t get enough of the theology or the Bible intro classes. At the end of the M.Div. I felt like much of what I had learned, I really should have learned in Sunday School. Why didn’t we talk more in depth about the Trinity in Sunday School? Why didn’t we open up the book of Genesis the way we did at seminary? I felt like God’s people should have this same access to solid teaching like we got at seminary.

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Has Anyone Ever Read Genesis 1 Like this Before?

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Hasn’t the church always read the creation account in Genesis 1 as a straightfoward narrative? Haven’t Christians always believed that the earth is relatively young and that the creation days were twenty-four hour days? How do I just up and think I can read this text anyway I want to? Where has the Holy Spirit been all these years?

Todd Patterson
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Reading Genesis 1 as Literature and Three Problems it Creates for Evangelicals

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Evangelicals often read the creation account in Genesis 1 as straightforward history but I’ve been suggesting that we need to pay attention to the literary features of the text and its ancient Near Eastern background. The text is historical narrative, I affirm, but also literary and figurative. This raises three questions that we need to address.

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When a Day Might not be a Day

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The creation account of Genesis 1 is divided into six days of creation and one day of rest. Each day of creation ends with the same two clauses: “And there was evening and there was morning, day 1,” “…evening…morning…the second day,” etc. To us, it seems perfectly clear that day means a 24 hour period. Why else would he say, “And there was evening, and there was morning…?” So why do some interpreters, like myself, say it’s possible that Moses uses “day” in a non plain-language way?

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Creation is a Temple: The Temple as a Meme in the Ancient Near East and Genesis 1

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Memes are a modern phenomenon that we associate with social media. But in a way, memes are as old as human culture. In this post, I want to think about the idea of “temple” as a meme in the ancient Near East that served as a way for people to understand their place in creation, especially their place in relation to God. We’ll see how the idea of temple, like a meme, was transferrable to different contexts. Then we’ll be ready for the next post, when we’ll see how Genesis 1 uses the temple meme to communicate theological truths about creation.

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Todd’s Ministry Plans for 2020

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Sometimes it seems like at the seminary it’s just the same ol’, same ol’ since I’ve been teaching the same classes for at least eight years. On the other hand, there are always new students and that’s what makes everything new every year. Along with new students, this year I’m hoping to do some new publishing, new coaching, new service for the denomination, and we’re hoping new partners will join our team.

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