ATLANTA (ABP) — In an effort to pull back the veil on theological education, Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology is set to debut “The 30-Minute Seminary,” a series of 14 programs to be broadcast to more than one million homes in the metro Atlanta area.
The half-hour-long surveys of seminary courses, carried on the local Atlanta Interfaith Broadcasting (AIB) cable network, will start airing Jan. 28.
The project features professors from the Baptist seminary and has several goals, according to McAfee officials. They include giving viewers a glimpse of the school and an overview of formal, systematic theological education as well as providing a free resource for lay theological education in the local church. The series will air initially on the local ecumenical channel, with later rebroadcasts on the Internet via the channel’s website.
Alan Culpepper
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Alan Culpepper, McAfee’s dean and a member of the board of directors of AIB, said network representatives initially approached him with the concept of doing some sort of educational programming.
“We brought the initial idea back to the faculty,” Culpepper said. “They asked us to do 13 hours of programming, possibly filming one class. To that point, our experience working with AIB had been filming special events and guest speakers for rebroadcast.”
Culpepper said the faculty decided creating new content based on sound theological principles was the best strategy, and professor Brett Younger came up with the name: “The 30-Minute Seminary.”
A student host was selected to introduce each session, Culpepper said, and in the fall, faculty members taped two episodes a week for seven weeks in front of a live audience of students.
Each episode features professors with years of classroom experience conducting lectures, but Culpepper said the series proved more challenging than the faculty members first anticipated. For example, the dean himself normally takes an entire semester delving into the Gospel of John with his students, but for the series he had to distill all four gospels into one 30-minute episode.
“It was very challenging,” he said. “Many professors said they devoted much more time than they first anticipated preparing for their programs. In my case, the challenge was conveying what was most important from each of the four gospels and showing the distinctiveness of each.
“The goal is to whet the appetite of viewers so that they will want to know more, to find out more, whether that brings them to McAfee as a student, to another seminary or school, or to just do some more reading on their own.”
As the nation’s largest regional interfaith cable network, AIB is celebrating its 40th anniversary. It reaches homes in 19 counties in Atlanta’s sprawling metropolitan area. Patty Mosteller, the network’s director of marketing and communications, said she thinks “The 30-Minute Seminary” has the opportunity to reach a wide-ranging audience.
“The goal is to provide viewers with an educational tool and a glimpse inside classes at seminary,” Mosteller said. “I think it will be interesting not only to prospective students, but a great resource for churches, Sunday school classes and other groups.”
Culpepper said McAfee’s relationship with AIB has been mutually beneficial. “Their charter is to promote religion and religious understanding in metro Atlanta, across a diverse spectrum” of religious traditions, he said. “For McAfee, it allows us to reach out into the community and raise our visibility among faith groups.”
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Bob Perkins Jr. is a freelance writer in Atlanta.