LANGLEY, BC-What started out in 1988 as a partnership of three denominational seminaries at Trinity Western University dedicated to training men and women for the gospel ministry in Canada has now doubled to six.

The latest to join the Associated Canadian Theological Schools (ACTS) consortium is the Canadian Pentecostal Seminary (CPS).

ACTS principal Phil Zylla says CPS’s affiliation with the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada (PAOC) has "huge" implications for all their partners, because it will give them a more accurate picture of the evangelical church in Canada and how ACTS can better respond to try to meet their needs.

"The PAOC is the giant as far as being a national denomination," he says. "They’re coast-to-coast, and certainly will give us a better pulse in that respect. I think that’s huge for ACTS and for them as well."

CPS was founded in 1997 to plug what its president, Jim Lucas, calls "kind of a leak in our system of training leaders"-the loss of Pentecostals who enrolled in non-Pentecostal seminaries and never came back after graduating.

From the start, an agreement with TWU allowed CPS to offer a few denominationally distinctive courses each academic year. In 2002, negotiations began on making it an ACTS partner.

Lucas, who also pastors Christian Life Community Church in Abbotsford, believes ACTS’s multi-denominational model for training church leaders better reflects the new reality of the church in Canada.

"Very few of our churches are purely Pentecostal," he says. "Most of the people who attend the church I pastor come from a variety of denominational backgrounds. If I think I’m just speaking to Pentecostals, for example, I am not only going to offend a lot of people, but I fail really to meet the needs that they represent."

At the same time, all the students will benefit from the opportunity to be taught by Pentecostal academics, says Zylla. "As the CPS faculty expands, they will be brought more into the core teaching faculty of ACTS. And that rounds out our voice, as it were, to have each of the denominational perspectives being brought in."

Joining together
About 90 per cent of the curriculum is core subjects taught by faculty from all six seminaries. "A Pentecostal seminary wouldn’t teach Greek differently from a Baptist seminary, so why not teach it together?" says Lucas. The rest are courses offered by individual seminaries geared specifically to their theological distinctives.

New ACTS students are registered by seminary preference. But if they state no preference-and half do not-then they are assigned a seminary. About 50 students of the 500 currently enrolled identify themselves as Pentecostal.

Lucas says most CPS students are pastors who graduated from Bible college perhaps years ago, but who have a desire to further their education, if only part-time.

"There’s a huge potential for us," he says, "because we have about 300 credential-holders in British Columbia and very, very few have done any seminary training."

Lucas adds the irony of ACTS is that "when our students come out the other side in this multi-denominational mix that they’re in, they don’t lose their Pentecostalism. They’re better defined as to who they are as Pentecostals."

The three original ACTS members comprised the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches of Canada, the Evangelical Free Church of Canada and the Baptist General Conference of Canada. The Christian and Missionary Alliance of Canada and the Canadian Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches joined five years ago.

With the addition of the PAOC, the number of churches represented by the ACTS consortium is close to 3,000.

There are no immediate plans to add any more denominations. "Other parties may be interested, but we don’t have any negotiations in place to add any additional partners," says Zylla.

"But we wouldn’t be closed to that, either. We certainly want this to be something that serves the church in Canada well."