Archive for August, 2008
Funding theological training: the options
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Many churches will support the men and women that they send to college. But few churches are able to find anywhere near £40-£75,000. It is hard to get accurate figures on the amount of support the average student gets from his sending church, but it is often just a few thousand pounds – sometimes less. For many churches even a few thousand pounds is still a considerable sacrifice – but it leaves the student with a lot of money to find.
That means that many students are going into debt in order to fund their training. Many others are forced to ask their wives to work (sometimes full-time) during the training period, perhaps when they would like their wives to train with them. Others spend years employed in secular work, simply saving up the money that they will require. Still others don’t go to college at all, or take a much shorter course than they really need. Can this really be right?
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Training the next generation
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It costs £5.7 million pounds to train a fast jet RAF pilot. It costs almost £250,000 to train a doctor, a similar figure for a dentist. Financial consultants KPMG spend around £92,000 training each graduate they employ. It even costs up to £30,000 to train a guide dog for the blind.
On the other hand, a student training at WEST (Wales Evangelical School of Theology) will pay just over £15,000 for three years full-time training. Donations to the college contribute perhaps another £7,500 per student. Students at LTS (London Theological Seminary), studying on a shorter, two-year course, pay fees of just under £7,000, with gifts adding approximately £3,500.
There is an obvious question, isn’t there? How does it cost less to train a man over three years for the pastoral ministry, than it does to train a dog for a little over a year and a half? And how do you train a pastor, missionary or evangelist for a tenth of what it costs to train a doctor?
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