Clarks Summit University Furloughs Employees

The full administration—president and cabinet members—has already committed to volunteer at CSU without pay during this temporary furlough. Other employees have been joining the commitment to volunteer. I am not surprised. The faculty and staff members of CSU are deeply committed to serving students well, and this challenging time won’t be an exception.

That’s commitment!

I received my MDiv from BBS Clarks Summit in 2016. The seminary went through a major restructuring a year or two after I graduated. They downsized and sold their seminary building. I believe their program became significantly weaker as a result of that as well as losing some key faculty.

The issue then (as I was told) was a lack of differentiation with other seminaries, and students who would have typically gone to BBS (i.e. GARBC guys) were deciding to attend SBC seminaries instead. Also, most of their seminary students shifted from in-person to on-line, which meant there was no longer a need for a separate seminary building.

Not sure what the core issues are with CSU, but I would imagine they are competing with places like Liberty, Boyce, and Cedarville. All of those schools appear to be experiencing continued growth.

Lord willing, I will pursue a DMin or Ph.D. in the next several years. If so, I would no longer consider BBS. Most likely, I would attend SBTS or SEBTS.

Long time reader of Sharper Iron, 2nd time poster...

I finished my MDiv at BBS in 2015. That was the year they changed their name to Summit University---still have the Summit University polo shirt---only to have to change it to Clarks Summit University a few months later. They were struggling then. I went back in 2018 to work on a DMin in pastoral ministry (graduated in 2022).

I hope they can weather this. I agree, Aaron, that this is commitment on the part of the faculty. My concern is that they will not be able to identify a sufficient distinctive for themselves in order to draw in the students to overcome this in the long-term. At the risk of starting something here, they are fiercely classical dispensational and, I believe, will struggle to gain further "market share" of Bible college students. IMHO.

I understand the identity/niche tradeoffs. There’s a term I can’t fully recall—maybe it’s inverse correlation. But with a lot of things, there’s this reverse trade off: the broader your appeal, the less of your identity you retain. The you focus on what you are, the clearer your identity is, but your appeal is narrower.

It’s not always a bad thing or always a good thing.

But we do it all the time with faithful, New Testament driven, local churches. If you lead a small church, or ministry of any kind really, you become very aware of things you could do to broaden your appeal—but which would not be faithful to your core convictions (aka “identity” here). It may be that your core convictions need revision. But maybe you just embrace that you are going to be a small, niche ministry, and do what you love and believe in as well as you possibly can.

Aaron, I don't think you're wrong. I've definitely seen this before as a pastor myself. I'm not suggesting that they lose their specific niche. I just believe that that particular niche becoming even more niche.

I was just texting with another BBS grad / classmate of mine to see if he'd heard about this. He pointed out that BBS is also having accreditation troubles.

https://fox56.com/news/local/clarks-summit-university-temporarily-furlo…

they are fiercely classical dispensational and, I believe, will struggle to gain further "market share" of Bible college students. IMHO.

Agreed. There is not much respect for or desire to learn classic dispensationalism today. That narrows the student pool significantly.

That said, I did not choose BBS because of their dispensational position. I chose BBS because a pastor at my church was a graduate and recommended it and because BBS was one of the only seminaries I was considering who offered the complete MDiv online. I was accepted to SBTS, but SBTS only offered the first 30+ credits online; you still had to move to Louisville to complete your MDiv. That wasn't an option for my family. Once I began BBS, I immediately gravitated to Dr. Rodney Decker. If he were still alive and teaching at BBS, I would consider returning for my DMin or PhD.

While at BBS, I took one class on dispensationalism. It was taught by the seminary dean, Mike Stallard. I'll just say I wasn't impressed. His commentary on Thessalonians was also a disappointment.

Though I've got friends who've been at Clark's Summit, I'm not really personally knowledgeable or invested. That noted, one question I have is that if fundamentalism is supposed to be a fairly broad tent, how much "niche" should a given seminary have? Yes, you might have some slight differences in missiology or something like that, but we're supposed to have some broad agreements, no?

And in light of that, my thought is that the distribution of Bible colleges and seminaries really ought to primarily be of geographical opportunity--say we might have a college in Wisconsin so prospective young pastors don't need to go all the way to Pennsylvania or California to study, that sort of thing.

The challenge to that, then, is that for so many of our "fundagelical" churches, we're moving to an ever greater number of congregants per pastor, which means we might not need as many pastors to handle our congregants. And the drop in attendance isn't helpful either.

Do you think it would help if they gave the amount of the financial need? Maybe they're taking a kind of George Muller approach and leaving it up to God. Maybe the amount is shockingly large. But it seems to me that it would help to know.

That said, I did not choose BBS because of their dispensational position. I chose BBS because a pastor at my church was a graduate and recommended it and because BBS was one of the only seminaries I was considering who offered the complete MDiv online.

Actually, this mirrors my experience very closely. It was my pastor at the time who recommended BBS to me. He was not a grad, but we were not too far away, and he trusted them. Also, I could and did do my MDiv entirely online. Though, for me, it was the only school to which I applied.

And, I will likewise agree with the comment about Dr. Decker. I loved him, and I genuinely wept when he went home to be with the Lord.

Finally, in agreement, it was the dispensational class there that convinced me personally that dispensationalism is a theological grid read over Scripture and that it does not, in my opinion, fit the Scriptures very well. (The less polite way of saying that is that Dr. Stallard convinced me dispensationalism is incorrect.) <Cue the hand grenades in my direction.>

I still returned for my DMin, and I loved working under Dr. Mark McGinniss for my dissertation project. I really did value (most of) my doctoral classes.

However, I wasn't saying that students only go there for the school's dispensationalism. I was speaking to the idea of the school's niche, that which sets it off from other schools and gives them a distinctive that will possibly draw students from likeminded feeder churches. Without dispensationalism (which is not much of a draw these days, it seems), the school seems to lack a sufficient distinctive. I wish that geography mattered more, but the advent of entirely distance education makes that a moot point. Finally, I had a young man in my church who wanted to start Bible college. Because of my experience there, he wanted to apply to BBS. However, he found out---and I verified---that BBS could no longer offer online / distance classes in New York State (where we are). NYS Dept. of Ed. changed some rule that meant BBS could not offer online classes to NY based students. So, this young guy ended up applying to, being accepted, and starting at Spurgeon College (undergrad school of Mid-Western Baptist Seminary). So, BBS does not even have geography on their side if they cannot offer their distance learning format just a few miles away in NYS.