BY EARL ALDEN
BERRIEN SPRINGS—Effective next semester, the Seminary is adding GSEM 500, Student Homiletics for the Classroom, as a graduation requirement for the MDiv Program. The class will teach students how to assume lectureship authority in the classroom. It will teach them how to share their opinions and daydreams with anyone, at any time, and will develop their skills in interrupting professors and maneuvering topics to be what they wish to discuss.
“With outbreaks like this being such an integral, core, inescapable part of the seminary experience, we added this course to ensure that our students are fully qualified and prepared for their time in the classroom,” said Naomi Watkins, a spokeswoman for the MDiv Program Committee.
The class will cover techniques such as the question-comment, the question-critique, and the question-contextualizer, an advanced technique which involves using the setup of a question as a forum to preach and share opinions. Students will learn firsthand how to segue from a professor’s lecture on the Doctrine of the Sanctuary to a question-comment about Adventist Bureaucratic Hypocrisy, or from a lecture on New Testament Exegesis to a five-minute-long musing on what happened in church last Sabbath. Students will also gain the confidence they need to lecture professors on the professor’s own expertise.
“Our goal with this class is to empower students to say what they want to, when they want to, to whoever they want to, with the maximum amount of authority possible,” said Watkins. “Students will learn to treat everyone else around them as adoring listeners eagerly waiting to hear their views.”
The new class has met some student skepticism, however. Jonas Sprucemann is a first-year MDiv Student who previously worked as a youth pastor.
“I already know how to do all this,” Sprucemann commented. “I learned it all in ministry. I know how to dominate a conversation, how to interrupt and talk over anyone else who is talking, how to condemn my enemies, and how to take a position of moral righteousness that makes any opponent unintelligent, immature, and dismissible. This class is just another example of the Seminary making us learn what we’ve already learned in the field.”
Spruceman says his skills transferred to the classroom naturally.
“See, if a Greek professor mentions how Greek can benefit our sermons in church, I grab a hold of the word church to say this in class: ‘I don’t mean to get on a soapbox, or distract from the topic at hand, but since you brought up church services, if you’ll just let me have thirty seconds, there’s something I must say. Brethren, we need to change the way we do church services! If you persist in running traditional services, you will drive the youth right out of your church! I am begging you not to do that! I know most of you don’t want to pay attention to the youth in your church, but they’re the future. Please, please don’t shove them aside!’ See, there’s a pivot, opinion, implication, and condemnation neat as can be.”
However, unlike Sprucemann, the majority of the students are eager to take the new class.
“I wouldn’t mind getting those skills,” commented Mary Tamawa, a second-year MDiv student. “If everyone has them, it’ll stop those one or two students from dominating the discussion like they always do. Plus, when everybody is interrupting like that in class, perhaps those dominating students will realize how annoying their habits are, and just shut up.”
