When I was 18 years old, I packed my bags and moved to Eastern Nazarene College, just outside of Boston. It was an 8-hour drive from my home in Pennsylvania. When it was time to get my master's degree, I moved to Kansas City so I could attend Nazarene Theological Seminary. I went to where classes were being taught.
What if, instead, the opposite had been true -- if classes had been offered where I was living?
That's the way theological education now works in Europe. European Nazarene College has become decentralized. This means that students no longer need to leave their country and place of ministry in order to attend classes on a central campus; instead the college operates 15 learning centers spread across Europe and the former Soviet Union, offering classes in the students' native language and culture.
As a teacher, I now get to travel to where the students are. I just finished teaching the course “God’s Mission and the Church” for students in Bulgaria. I spent a weekend at the end of March in Razgrad, Bulgaria, teaching through a translator. In addition to these intensive sessions in the classroom, the students' coursework was spread out over a period of six weeks. The remainder of the class sessions were led by a Bulgarian teaching assistant who facilitated learning over the rest of the course.
Here are a few pictures from the course:
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| Teaching in Bulgaria |
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| Students & Participants in the course |
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