The Future of Theological Education is YouTube?

The demand for degrees is declining precipitously.  But there is an expanding demand for theological education among students seeking either specific kinds of theological knowledge or formation of a Christian perspective on their particular secular vocation. These two facts comprise the reality that will shape our future as theological educators.

I recently sat down with an executive with Austria’s largest TV network, itself part of a larger German network

The executive described their challenge in terms that resonate with seminaries. They are in a declining market which makes it almost impossible to increase market share. The market decline comes from the rise of YouTube, which is expanding to eclipse Netflix, Amazon, and Apple as a video content provider. 

So rather than compete with YouTube they will find ways to use it to both generate revenue and attract viewers to their more traditional online and broadcast offerings.

Essentially they have recognized that their business isn’t broadcasting. Their business is attracting people’s attention to their unique content. It is eyeballs on content that advertisers pay for.

It seems to me that many seminaries have lost sight of “preparing men and women for Christian ministry” because for so long we accomplished this goal by granting degrees that served as credentials. The means, degree programs and credentialing, have become the end. 

This limits theological education in two ways. We only generate real revenue through tuition from students in degree programs. Secondly we only use our considerable instructional assets in classroom or quasi-classroom environments for accredited courses toward degrees. Because we have no continual, ongoing engagement in preparing men and women for Christian ministry outside our degree programs, we fail to fully use our instructional capacity and we fail to generate all the revenue possible from using that capacity. 

Granted, for many schools lay training events and clergy continuing education events provide some ongoing engagement with the church. But these programs are geographically and temporally limited by the same focus on the classroom environment found in degree programs. More importantly rather than generating real income they are frequently funded by grants and barely recover their operating costs through registrations. And even that excludes the cost of administrative staff. 

And this is where YouTube becomes relevant.  We prepare men and women for Christian ministry by teaching, and YouTube is the largest and fastest growing source of instruction in every field, followed by various online learning venues (Coursera, EdX, etc.)

While the demand for degrees is declining precipitously, there is an expanding demand for theological education among students seeking either specific kinds of theological knowledge or formation of a Christian perspective on their particular secular vocation. Such students aren’t necessarily looking for a degree program. And they don’t need a degree to do ministry in an increasing number of ministry settings, not least churches. What students are looking for is high quality, systematic instruction that is easily accessible.

The reason seminaries draw increasing number of students to fully online and hybrid programs is because they combine high quality, systematic instruction with much greater accessibility.  The reason seminaries have fewer and fewer students in the classroom is that while classroom provides quality, systematic instruction it is inaccessible to the vast majority of potential students. 

Yet whether the focus is online or in a classroom access to theological education is limited by a focus on 3 semester hour courses locked into traditional semesters.

YouTube and other online instruction providers offer something quite different. Teaching is available constantly in a variety of formats on almost any device from a smart television to a smart phone. Some examples:

The Bible Project YouTube channel has nearly 2 million subscribers taking short (5 – 10 minute) lessons on things like literary forms and historical context. A channel called What is Theology has over 2000 subscribers but tens of thousands of views for its videos. Religion for Breakfast has over 100,000 subscribers. Christian podcasts on everything from spiritual direction to meditation to contemporary theological reflection draw million listeners and hundreds of thousands of subscribers. 

By any count YouTube and other online instruction providers prepare far more people for Christian ministry than all the theological schools in the US put together and its content providers have a far wider reach that Christian publishing houses.  

Put bluntly, the real competition for seminaries in “preparing men and women for Christian ministry” isn’t other Christian seminaries, all of whom face the same problems. The real competition for students comes from YouTube, EdX, Coursera, Masterclass, and a dozen other platforms for teaching online that offer huge flexibility in making instruction accessible.

Contemporary Christian seminaries face a stark choice. We either compete in the online spaces led by YouTube and followed by Coursera, EdX, Masterclass and so on or we hope that other seminaries die fast enough that we can cannibalize their markets. Our endowments may allow the latter, but it is hardly forward thinking to become the carrion birds of theological education. 

And we don’t have to be. Almost all of us have enormous unused assets that could be used to create instructional material properly formatted for online access. We almost all have access to considerable and growing expertise in these emerging pedagogies. And we have the ability to use our assets to not only prepare new generations of Christian leaders, but to generate revenue as well.

Doing this however will take a significant two-pronged effort. The first will be to identify how we can transform our current modes of instruction into forms suitable to distribution in asynchronous educational environments while maintaining accreditation standards necessary for credentialing. The second will be to identify how deploying these instructional assets can be used to generate revenue or attract students to revenue generating programs.

But there is more to a sustainable future than just "going online." We will have to eventually abandon almost entirely the business model now dominant in theological education and adopt, as all the major providers of entertainment content have done of necessity, a new business model. More on that in the next blog.