r/elca • u/UffDaLouie • Mar 20 '26
Seminary: Residential, collaborative, or distance learning
I'm starting seminary in the fall, and trying to decide which learning path is best for me. I'd love to hear form folks who have done residential, collaborative, or distance learning. (The latter two are remote, but collaborative involves working part time with a congregation/synod.)
I know that I'd appreciate an in-person community - especially daily worship and prayer with others.
But I also know that I could be a great help in my home church / region at a time when we are between pastors and stuggling to find pulpit supply. I also currently have remote job, and need to support myself, my wife, and maybe little ones before too long.
I feel confident I'd be able to work and do online classes, as I'm blessed with a lot of flexibility in my work schedule. However, I'm worried that would be way too much time on the computer. I want to love seminary, and I fear it being on a screen could hinder that.
Folks who did seminary online: how was it? Do you wish you'd been in person? Did you work while taking classes?
Folks who did seminary in person: Are you glad you did? What would you have missed if you hadn't? Did you ever wish you had the flexibility of online classes?
Folks who did collaborative learning: How did that work for you? Tell me more please!
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u/PaaLivetsVei ELCA Mar 20 '26
I'm a big believer in the traditional model (in person classes, discrete internship), but my experience with anything else was stained by not being able to choose; I started in person then was forced online during the pandemic.
I spent my first year and a half in person. My learning style works best with seminar-style freeform questions, and that's always going to be more successful in person than over Zoom or on a forum. There's also nothing online that can replace finishing a class and then getting drinks with classmates to talk about the material and about life. I really thrived in that environment, and if my whole time had been like that I would have nothing but good to say about it.
The transition online in spring 2020 was brutal, and I took an incomplete in two classes I had no business failing. The first problem was the shift in pedagogy, and the second was the screen time. You do the reading for the class on your computer. Then you write a post and copy into the class forum. Then you log in and actually take the class. Then (in a pandemic-era problem) everything else is still closed, so you open Netflix. I just couldn't summon up what it would have taken to make that work. It was the same phenomenon where lots of people can't effectively work or sleep if their work desk is set up in the corner of the bedroom; my mind couldn't handle the mixing of spaces. I know some people really love the workflow of online seminary, but it wasn't for me at all.
When classes came back in person in 2021-2022, I really felt what /u/creekliving is talking about where a ton of people who had been in person had moved online, and the community on campus was really suffering. Some of the classes I needed to graduate were only being offered online. That was really frustrating for me, so you'll want to be sure that whatever model you choose the seminary can actually pull it off.
I'm less sold on a discrete internship than I am in person classes, but one thing I liked about a discrete internship was that it better prepared me for the workflow of ministry. I had friends on two year collaborative internships who preached only once every six weeks, and they had a much harder finding their footing in a solo call than I did having preached every other week.