July 01, 1992 by Ralph D. Winter

The Perspectives Study Program (which is under the Training Division of the USCWM) is being forced to expand, as you can see explained on the previous page. We feel we must concentrate now on the development of a completely off-campus M.A. in basic seminary knowledge and missiological orientation.

With such an expansion in place we can then go up or down. We can expect graduates of this program to help us with Perspective courses, even teaching in them. They will be the best ones to help us recruit B.A. level "6/6" students, who will work six months a year overseas each year. We also can expect these people to be the best prepared to go on to a Ph.D.

This new M.A. has now cleared all the hurdles internally here. It is an upgrade of our Year of Bible. It is now the academic dimension of our short and long internship programs.

People can enroll anywhere in the world. They must have a good grasp of English as well as have available a qualified Mentor with whom they can meet weekly.

The program at this point is mainly a design and a structure, not a detailed mass of content. We have two months to begin developing it on campus in a laboratory mode, and another two months after that to package it for export to field-based students. The on-campus lab portion--a "Course Creation Project"--will begin the first week of November, and the normal field-based students will begin their studies the first week of January 1993.

It allows for special flavors. A mission could adopt it and load in a lot of stuff on Islam, for example, or other things about the internal culture of the organization itself, and do so as part of the credit bearing content, with the basic structure and coverage--and degree--still intact. Mission candidates might be required to take the first semester wherever they are located in this country before leaving for the field, and then finish the next three semesters on the field.

This expanded dimension of the Perspectives Study Program is being prepared with five different kinds of students in mind:

1. Those who are serious about the cause of missions but who are not clear yet about God's specific will for their lives. This version of the program could be called a "Career Foundations" degree.
2. Those who feel God has made clear to them that they should be field missionaries--including candidates. Individual missions may wish to take this program over and tailor it in their own way.
3. Those who feel God wants them to be knowledgeable missionary mobilizers working within the churches either at home or abroad.
4. Field missionaries who want a broader missiological foundation for what they are doing.
5. National church leaders who are concerned to get Biblical, theological, and missiological training.

This curriculum is essentially a basic missiological/seminary introduction that is systematic, comprehensive, integrated, missiologically oriented and field-based.

Basically it cuts a two year period into four six-month parts, with 8 semester-units of credit for each of the four "semesters." Each "work week" contains seven 3-hr. lessons. Each semester contains five modules of three "work weeks" each followed by one "breather" week, plus a two work-week module followed by a four-week vacation which ends each six-month period. Thus, there are 17 "work weeks" within the 26 weeks of each six month period.

The amount of the load is exactly half a full time load, and will give 8x4=32 semester-units for the two year M.A. degree. It will be a basic education for the serious Christian--a basic re-education. But it will assume no highly technical knowledge about anything other than the ability to read English. It can be studied by those who do not have a college degree, but in that case it will lead to a certificate not an M.A., although the work done can count toward a B. A.

The four semesters will each be structured on a "time frame" basis, integrating everything taught into four historic periods:

1. Creation to 400 BC 2. 400 BC to 200 AD 3. 200 AD to 1980 AD 4. The world today plus the thesis.

Each of the four semesters will have at least one "core" course coming from one or another of the schools mentioned below. The 17 work weeks will be an interdisciplinary mesh, such as the actual study and use of the Hebrew and Greek alphabets, Anthropology, science, math, philosophy, Bible, theology, hermeneutics, etc., all of it with a consistent missiological slant relating point by point to the course and time frame.

This corpus of study will provide a broad and solid foundation for Ph. D. studies and will also be the corpus through which a Ph.D. candidate will later be Mentoring someone else in the period of his or her practice mentoring.

This is being coordinated by the Perspectives Study Program of the USCWM and is working with any and all schools willing to participate, such as Columbia Biblical Seminary, Wheaton, Fuller, etc.

Existing schools can participate in any one of four ways (transcription of credit, grading papers, provision of course materials, selection and approval of the on-sight mentors and their weekly meetings with students.

Obviously, in view of the expected student load, we need as many schools as possible to help--just as we currently draw on about 500 professors from many different schools to teach in our various Perspectives classes (see pages 13 and 14). For some time to come we will have a large backlog of Perspectives students, but we hope and expect that gradually the larger proportion of the students in this kind of a program will be mission candidates, field missionaries, and national leaders worldwide.