Eden Experience 

It’s difficult in a two-dimensional format like the web to give you the full sense of Eden Theological Seminary. So, we want you to come visit us. To understand what happens here, you need to come here and experience it for yourself. We’d be delighted to host you. We are a place that is hospitable and friendly. We have comfortable places to stay, good food to eat, lots of lively conversation.

So please plan to join us—at one of the 24 hours at Eden or Come and See Saturday events for perspective students, by arranging a visit or by attending any of the activities that take place on campus.

Part of the difficulty of a two-dimensional website is the tendency to think that theological education involves taking a series of courses, punching a ticket with each course and then turning in a completely punched ticket at the end to get your diploma.

Nothing could be further from the truth about the experience of Eden. Instead our curriculum is more like overlapping, interacting circles:

At one moment, classes are at the center of everything you’re doing and then everything else relates to your classes

At another moment, worship is the center of your life and your classes and other experiences relate to worship

At another moment it’s living across the hall from other students, meeting with classmates in the library to do research for a course project or joining them for lunch in the Commons

In contextual education—when you’re serving in a local congregation, doing work in a ministry setting like the city jail or in travel to a developing country like Ghana, Costa Rica, China or India—you draw on what you have learned in your coursework and make connections to conversations you have had with faculty and student colleagues.

These interrelated experiences are a part of your education because they help you learn about the richness of God’s world and the diversity of the church.

Each of these experiences takes center stage at one moment, but never in a way that displaces the others. They are connected and relate to one another. We have designed this viewbook to give you a sense of the overlapping and connecting experiences that make up theological education at Eden.

Throughout this website we will focus on different aspects of our educational programs and community life. What we talk about at any one moment is not the whole—it’s only a piece, a slice, a moment to be reflected on in the larger, thick, interactive, rich context of theological education at Eden Theological Seminary.

At Eden education happens in the mix.