A letter circulating that MBS should respond to

The e-mail (in red) is being passed around. Perhaps MBS (ED) should post a response?

Some personal comments of mine can be found after the e-mail

Dear brothers & sisters in Christ at MBS,

I have been a keen prayer supporter of MBS for many years. I have just check in on the MBS website and what I saw thoroughly disappoints me.

First of all, your faculty standard has gone down the drain. You have lecturers with no degrees such as Jack Mock and Tan Geok Hock. Just their experiences alone do not count at all. The white missionary couple you have as lecturers are also poorly qualified, Rog having only a MA and his wife just a BA. It was Pastor Eddy Ho who told our church several years ago that the minimum qualification is a M.Div. Does Jack Mock and Tan Geok Hock have the qualification. As a seminary, you have state the academic qualifications of your lecturers. Just compare MBS withe the STM and BCM websites and see the way they display their qualified lecturers' qualification. You have so few lecturers and your timetable have only 3 or 4 subjects a week!

I think there is some inconsistency in your lecturer qualification requirement. A Malaysian will not be acceptable with less than a M.Div yet, a white couple with just an MA and BA respectively and an Australian pastor without any degree are allowed to teach.Also, the dean's D.Min is not an academic degree but a skill-based one, so how can he be a good academic lecturer. Actually, nobody in the academic world respect the D.Min holder. It is so easily gained that even people with no basic theological degrees can get a D.Min. This was what the good old Rev Loh Soon Choy told some of us after preaching in our church a few years back when we asked why he didnt go for a D.Min.

Just look at the academic credentials of the BCM alone, no need to compare with the high-powered STM. The ordinary BCM lecturers have higher qualifications than the MBS dean! And they have a large pool of lecturers while MBS has only 5! The STM, of course, is way above the MBS with so many with PhDs from world-class unversities and seminaries like London University and Fuller.

The less than a handful lecturers is a disgrace and is shortchanging the students. I will ask my church to stop sending students and supporting MBS in view of its poor faculty. I think BCM and STM are much better seminaries.

I feel that you should do something about the situation.

This message is being sent to pastors and church leaders to start a debate on whether MBS is worth supporting or not. Please help to promote this debate by forward to other concerned Christians.

KR Wee

There has been a lot of major changes over the years and I think it would be good for MBS to make some kind of statement. Perhaps there is a strong adjunct faculty (and if so, this needs to be made clear on the MBS website)

I remember that even when I was doing my B.Th (graduated in 1990) I had the chance to study under many lecturers with M.Ths and PhDs.

Some PhDs I remember and enjoyed studying under(when I was doing my B.Th and later M.Min and MCS ) were

Ng Kam Weng (theology) * I remember even requesting permission (and being granted) to sit in the then MDiv classes when I was doing my B.Th.

Wong Hoong Hing (NT)

Philip .... oops name slips my mind but he was OT grad from Sheffield University.

For many of the courses in which I did my MCS, I made sure I picked courses that had special guest lecturers (many of whom were PhD holders or specialists in their fields)

For example, I thoroughly enjoyed counselling courses with the late Anthony Yeo, CE with Saik Oy Mooi (PhD in CE), "religion" with an Arabic speaking Middle Eastern PhD holder and missions with Peter Rowan (who is still a missionary). I also had some interesting classes with Allan Harkness (back when he only had his Masters)

Back to my BTh years ... As frustrating as I sometimes found some classes with Rev. Loh SC, :-) I enjoyed his friendship and learned much from the wealth of knowledge he had on Church history. Through him I still believe that church history is interesting and relevant!

For OT, I fondly remember the late Lee Hong Kwang (yes I know he only had an MA in OT from TEDS) but there was no doubt about his deep knowledge and practical application of the OT. And I know that Low Chai Hok never formally completed his MCS from Regent College but he certainly has a better grasp of OT and Hebrew than many OT grads I have met (MTh no less) from some big names seminaries. They gave me a great foundation and love for the OT. Back then, to get a B from Chai Hok was a thrill as his standard was so high :-)

In NT, I had a couple of personal issues with Rev Tan Jin Huat (now Rev Dr.) but that I can honestly say was due to my immaturity back then and not his ability or character! :-) Back then he only had his MTh (Aberdeen) but he was very knowledgeable.

Andrew Lim had a MA (philosophy I believe) but he gave me a great foundation and love for philosophy of religion, and I learned a lot from his pastoral ministry and homiletics classes.

I also had the chance to restudy hermeneutics with Dr. Lim Kar Yong (when doing my MCS) and it is still to me the best course on the subject I have ever taken. (And I still wish that I had the opportunity to learn Greek from him - maybe then I would keep whatever little Greek I managed to learn)