The Middles States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE) voted on Thursday, June 25, 2009, to grant institutional accreditation to Calvary Baptist Theological Seminary. The vote culminates five years of labor invested by the seminary community into this important milestone.

In March, an MSCHE team of representatives from regionally-accredited institutions conducted an on-site review of the seminary’s institutional self-study. The team was comprised of team chair Dr. Wayne McCown (Northeastern Seminary), Dr. Patricia Coward (Canisius College), Dr. Ellen F. Falduto (The College of Wooster), and Dr. Lucy Lind Hogan (Wesley Theological Seminary). During their visit, the team members met with the seminary administration, trustees, faculty, and students in order to get a broad and representative perspective of the seminary’s mission and educational activities. The purpose for the team's visit was to review the seminary’s self-study document and assess how well the seminary is aligned with MSCHE's accreditation standards. The seminary’s self-study report, detailing the results, analyses, and recommendations from the self-study process, is available here .

Calvary will host its first online courses in Fall 2009, launching TH501 Prolegomena/Bibliology (Prof. George Coon) and CH503 American Fundamentalism/Evangelicalism (Prof. Mark Farnham) as pilot courses. Contact the seminary office for more information on registering for these courses.

The course format will be entirely online and will feature required weekly video content found in the seminary's successful video studies program. The course schedule will closely follow the semester's live classes in content and sequence, and Prof. Coon's course will integrate both online and resident students in the same virtual classroom, allowing the two groups to interact around course content and comment on each other's work.

The courses will be hosted in the Sakai (pronounced "sa-KAI") learning environment, an online learning tool used widely by universities around the world. The development of an online environment marks a significant milestone in Calvary's multi-faceted approach to bringing quality education to local church leaders, bringing together the best qualities of its existing video studies program with the interactive dynamic found in the videoconferencing approach used at its Canadian outreach.

From Calvary's president, Sam Harbin:

This summer, CBTS is embarking on a new partnership initiative that will be exciting news for all of our constituents. We are seeking to build on the vision of our founder, Dr. E. Robert Jordan, whose dream of one hundred new churches was realized through the graduates of CBTS. We’re asking the Lord to enable us to train one hundred new church planters by the year 2020. We're calling this our "20/20 Vision" for the future.

More information will be made available over the course of the summer.