THE FAILURE OF CHRISTIAN COLLEGES
During the 1970?s, a new Christian school opened every seven hours. As a teacher, I had to attend teachers? conferences and noticed that less than half the teachers had entered their third year. This does not include the teacher grads who never got a school to teach in. Decades later, I started looking for former Christian school teachers to help in the ministry, and I found out that most of them are not even attending church.
Continuing my search, I realized that most Bible college graduates are not attending church either. Most of them never get a pastorate and are not serving as laymen. Bible colleges rarely publish their numbers.
Using Wikipedia and other online sources, I was able to find the number of churches in various evangelical groups, their total attendance, and the number of students in their Bible colleges (not all of whom graduated). If you count the drop-outs, the average evangelical church in the US should have 22 former Bible college students, if those students all live to be 65. You know yourself that we?re not even close.
I left teaching in 1989 and have not met a HAC, BJU, or Tennessee Temple grad ever since. I have never met a Maranatha, Oral Roberts, Texas Baptist College, Wheaton, or Philadelphia College of the Bible grad. I have met three Moody grads (including Joe Combs), one Pillsbury grad, two Prairie grads, and one Liberty grad. I have met two HAC, one BJU, and one Tennessee Temple drop-out who attended church, noting that they had dropped out only a few years before.
An angry Assemblies of God missionary challenged my statement, promising publicly to bring proof that the AOG wasn?t like that. She never produced the proof, and after researching the AOG numbers, I concluded that they are about the same as the others.
One Southern Baptist seminary posted that five years after receiving a doctorate, less than half their grads had any ministry at all, including Sunday School teacher. Perhaps replying to my posts, Bob Gray (who graduated from HAC) posted that less than 5% of freshman pastoral theology majors would ever pastor a church. He did not state that the 5% would be able to pastor for the rest of their lives.
Of the HAC grads currently pastoring, a disproportionately large percentage are the sons of pastors?they received training and mentoring that the rest of us didn?t receive.
When I explain this to surprised brethren, I ask how many grads of Bible colleges they have met who are serving as laymen. A small number have met one or two.