Thursday, June 14, 2012

Heartland Baptist "Bible" College

Next in our installment of Bible colleges is Heartland Baptist Bible College (formerly known as Pacific Coast Baptist Bible College) in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma where Sam Davison is in the president.

As we said before, we based the results on the 4-year prescribed plan for those thinking they are called to be pastors.

As with Crown, you can get a feel for the direction of the school by certain introductory statements that are made on their website such as thew following:

"We realize there are good, fundamental Bible colleges across America that emphasize Baptist distinctives, separation, soul-winning, and world missions."

  • Since no Christian in the Bible ever called themselves a baptist, emphasizing "Baptist" distinctives is called philosophy, not Bible.  The emphasis should be Bible doctrine.  I know everyone that loves the Baptist distinctives more than the Bible itself would say that all the distinctives are biblical, but we know better.

"These three majors are designed to promote the development of character, spiritual maturity, and commitment to the local New Testament Baptist church."
  •  You can develop your character, become more spiritually mature, and learn commitment to a temporal church organization without spending thousands at a Bible college: so why go? 
So for Heartland, here is your Bible education:

FRESHMAN: 3 Bible Courses - Gospels, Genesis, Acts/Life of Paul
SOPHOMORE: 4 Bible Courses - Bibliology, Pneumatology/Angelology, 2 Bible electives
JUNIOR: 5 Bible Courses - Ecclesiology, Christology/Soteriology, Eschatology, Anthropology/Hamartiology, 1 Bible elective
SENIOR: 5 Bible Courses - Major Prophets, Minor Prophets, Dispensationalism, 2 Bible electives

This yields a result of 17 Bible courses in a 4-year program of study.  However, in addition to the aforementioned Bible electives, the student will also have the opportunity to take up to 6 more Bible electives.  We did not include these in the count since they student can choose between taking a Bible course, course on youth work, a missions course, or Greek.  We also felt it was unlikely that a student would use all 6 opportunities to take a Bible course.  The total number of classes required is 56: which leads to a result of 30% using just the required classes.  If we are gracious and assume some Bible loving student would use all 6 electives to take a Bible course, that percentage jumps up to 41%.  

Either way you slice it, less than 2 full years of education time is spent educating future pastors to perform their primary duty: "FEED MY SHEEP."

While we do commend HBBC for having a course specifically on dispensationalism, they too spend too much time acting like a worldly university.  They waste time with subjects such as grammer, composition, American Lit., and Speech & Debate to name a few.  Again, not all of these classes is a complete waste of time; but as a substitution for teaching through Paul's epistles verse-by-verse?  We think not.

Nevertheless, this is what happens when Christianity takes on worldly institutions and tries to "christianize" it: it didn't work for the papists, it work for the Baptist's either. 

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