Associate Canadian Theological Schools began in 1988 as a partnership of three Canadian denominations seeking to pool resources in order to provide strong seminary education. Now five denominational seminaries, each with its own identity but working together for the common cause of theological education, ACTS is the graduate theological division of Trinity Western University, the largest Christian university in Canada.
ACTS has some 400 students, of which a quarter are from outside of Canada. They take programs in ministerial development, chaplaincy, counselling, and academic research.
Our programs are a mixture of full and part-time, although the majority of our students do their programs part-time.
Funding comes from a wide variety of sources, include personal savings, student loans, denominational support, working spouses, and scholarships.
ACTS has always had a strong contingent of students from overseas, primarily from Asia but also from many far-flung countries on all continents.
The list in 6. encompasses the majority of ministries our students go into.
The primary distinctive of ACTS is its unique cooperative structure that enables denominational seminaries to maintain their identities and missions while at the same time sharing faculty and resources in order to strengthen theological education. Critics said it couldn’t be done, but now, with over a quarter century behind us, the consortium is flourishing.
With a country of the breadth of Canada, it is inevitable that students at a distance will want to access seminary education from where they are. Thus ACTS provides a wide variety of online and modular (one week, on campus) courses to enable students at a distance to access their programs without long residential requirements.
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My thanks to William Badke for his contribution to this series.
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