TORONTO, ON-A special ceremony will "celebrate a new chapter" in the life of Master’s College and Seminary as the primary ministry training centre for Pentecostals in central and eastern Canada formally dedicates its new Toronto campus on October 30.
The day will likely prove satisfying to Master’s board chair Rick Hilsden and president Evon Horton, who have been the principal leaders implementing major changes to the way the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada trains ministers for its churches.
The changes did not come easy and were hugely controversial in some quarters of the church (CW, June 10 and June 24, 2003). Among the disenchanted were some staff, faculty and students at the former Eastern Pentecostal Bible College(EPBC), a beautiful residential campus in Peterborough, which has now been leased to Trent University.
"The greatest challenge we’ve had is to get people to hear the whole story, and to understand the philosophical shift in education we’ve made," explains Hilsden. "This was not just a move to Toronto."
Referring to a meeting of Pentecostal leaders in Newfoundland in 1999, Hilsden describes a sense that EPBC was not meeting the denomination’s needs. "We felt students weren’t getting enough practical training. They were learning good theology, but not the balance of practical hands-on local church ministry.
"We felt there had to be shift to bring the college back to a local church orientation where the practical side of education was delivered within the confines and mandate of a local church," he says.
So they developed a program that assigns every student to a pastor/mentor to work with during their years of education. Students are expected to work through the problems they find in the local church and apply what they learn in the classroom. And that’s where Toronto, which has many more and various types of Pentecostal congregations within commuting distance, makes good sense, says Hilsden.
Campus life
Still, vacating a beautiful residential campus in smalltown Ontario for commercial space in a downtown Toronto office building prompted a lot of questions and concerns. "We argued college life wasn’t preparing [students] for real life. We’ll do our best to keep student life running, but it’s not going to be that high a priority. We want the campus life in the life of a local church.
"The campus is really there to serve the local church. The student goes to campus to take a class, but lives out college life in the context of the local church," says Hilsden. "The challenge is to get the message across that you don’t have to have a campus to make this work. It can happen in a simple environment of classrooms and libraries in partnership with local churches."
Administrators say attendance is holding steady. In mid-September Hilsden reported that 83 per cent of college students who were qualified to come back had been retained ("which is 13 per cent higher than the retention rate in Peterborough," he adds), and that 145 new applicants to the college this year equaled last year’s numbers. Fewer students came from Newfoundland (63), but the number from Toronto was expected to increase.
Financially it’s been a good move, says Hilsden. "A major challenge has been the perception that EPBC sacrificed its property assets and now owns nothing. The truth of the matter is we made an agreement with Trent University for rent over four years for $1.7 million. We haven’t sold the property. We still own it. Above the rent, they’re paying all maintenance costs and have to leave it in the same condition they found it.
"At the same time we’ve rented the 22,000 square feet in Toronto for the same price we paid for heat and utility and maintenance in Peterborough. There is huge financial wisdom in that for the long run for the health of the school. We’re pouring the money into education, not spending huge bucks on infrastructure. We hope this will help us keep the cost to students down."
As for the unrest in the denomination surrounding this issue, Hilsden says: "If I was doing this again, I would have doubled our efforts in communication. If I have a personal regret, it’s that we didn’t tell our story effectively enough. Peterborough to Toronto was not the big message. We didn’t get that through. We produced white papers, but we should have blitzed the denomination.
"It’s obvious some students aren’t happy with this move. But as I see them write, it’s like they missed the point about the philosophical change. And I don’t blame them. They signed up for one form of education, and it shifted on them. I feel sorry for them. We have a church-based campus in Peterborough to help them. Students signing up now know exactly what they’re buying into.
"Institutional change is considered one of the hardest forms of change to do. I don’t think it can ever be flawless, but I wish I had communicated better."
Sidebar Story Caught in the Gears of change
