How Do You Choose a Seminary?

Start with what the seminary confesses, not what it offers

Every seminary teaches Scripture. They do not all read it the same way. Before comparing programs or prices, read the school’s doctrinal standard and ask whether you could sign it honestly at the end of three years, not just at the start.

A confessional seminary states its convictions in a historic document and teaches from within it. New Geneva Theological Seminary holds the Westminster Standards — the Confession of Faith together with the Larger and Shorter Catechisms. Other schools are deliberately broader, presenting several positions without committing to one. Neither approach is dishonest, but they produce very different graduates, and you should know which you are choosing.

⭐ The practical test: find the seminary’s statement of faith and read it in full. If it takes you more than a minute to locate, that is itself an answer.

Match the degree to the calling, not the calling to the degree

The most common mistake is choosing a school first and a program second. The programs are not interchangeable, and picking the wrong one costs years.

If you are pursuing ordination as a pastor, you almost certainly need the Master of Divinity — the standard professional degree, and the only one that carries the full biblical-languages and systematic-theology sequence most churches expect. If you are a lay leader who wants serious theological grounding without the ordination track, a Master of Arts in Christian Ministry does that in roughly half the credits. If you are already ordained and want advanced study, that is a Th.M. or a Doctor of Ministry. And if you simply want to find out whether this is for you at all, a certificate is a real credential rather than a consolation prize.

Ask your church before you enroll, not after

This is the question prospective students most often skip, and the one that causes the most grief. Acceptance of any seminary degree for ordination is determined by your own church, and requirements are not identical from one to the next.

Ask your church now, while you are still comparing schools, and ask plainly: which seminaries do you accept, and what do you require of a candidate? An afternoon spent on that question can save you three years of study that does not count where you intend to serve.

Count the whole cost, not the tuition line

Tuition is the number schools advertise. It is rarely the number that decides anything.

The real figure is tuition plus everything that changes about your life: relocation, housing, the income you stop earning, the church you leave, the spouse who changes jobs. A residential program with generous aid can still cost far more in total than a higher-tuition program you complete from home. Work out both numbers before comparing any two schools.

Look at who will actually teach you

Faculty pages are easy to skim and worth reading slowly. You are looking for two things: whether the people teaching you have served in the ministry you are training for, and how many students they carry.

A large faculty is not automatically better. A small seminary, where the teaching is done by a handful of people who know your name and follow your progress, is a different education from a large one where much of the instruction falls to adjuncts you never meet. Decide which you want — but decide it deliberately, rather than discovering it in your second year.

Test the fit before you commit to it

You would not accept a call to a church you had never visited. The same instinct applies here, and most seminaries make it easy to try: an open class, a sample lecture, a conversation with the registrar.

Sit in on an actual class if you can. Fifteen minutes in a live session tells you more about a school’s seriousness, its warmth, and whether you can follow the teaching than any amount of catalogue reading.

At New Geneva, your first course is free to audit — a real course with the real professor, with no application and no examinations. Additional courses are $100 each. It is the least expensive way to find out whether a seminary is the right one before committing several years to it.

A short checklist

If you are comparing schools this week, these are the six questions worth answering for each of them, in this order:

• What does it confess? Could you sign that document at the end, not just the beginning?
• Which degree does your calling require? Ordination usually means an M.Div.
• What does your church accept? Ask them directly, before enrolling.
• What is the total cost? Tuition plus relocation, lost income, and the years.
• Who teaches, and how many students do they carry?
• Can you try it first? A free audit answers what a brochure cannot.

How New Geneva fits

New Geneva Theological Seminary was founded in 1993 in Colorado Springs and is an independent, confessional Reformed seminary holding the Westminster Standards. It is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and an affiliate member of ARTS.

It is not the right school for everyone, and it does not try to be. It trains students from across the Reformed and evangelical church who want rigorous confessional training they can complete without leaving the church they already serve. If that is the education you are looking for, the free audit is the honest place to start.