My respected, long-time friend Joel Arnold has set up the Asia Center for Advanced Christian Studies, an online school aimed at men who don’t have access to PhD-level courses but who can benefit from them. ACACS uses live video in Zoom.us meetings. And multiple other respected, long-term friends are involved, such as Kevin Oberlin, Brian Collins, Randy Leedy—well, pretty much everybody you see on that site.
I applaud what Joel is doing, and I applaud it enough that I got up at 4:40 a.m. on Memorial Day to deliver the first lecture of his newest course, Advanced Hermeneutics. I love Prolegomena, and I volunteered for this lecture. Other friends will teach other two-hour lectures in coming weeks. I’ll be speaking on the following schedule (all lectures take place from 8–10 am Eastern Time):
- Monday, May 29: Prolegomena
- Monday, June 5: Original Languages
- Thursday, June 15: Using Tools: Grammars, Lexicons, Translations, Commentaries, Software
- Monday, June 19: Exegetical Fallacies
Mark, this just thrilled my soul when I read your blog article and saw who some of the faculty will be. What an impact this will make for the cause of Christ in Asia and of course other areas of the world. Dr. Leedy was my roommate at BJU back in the dark ages and each of my children had him for a class when they were students in the seminary. After seeing your prolegomena lecture posted, I am wondering if each of the lectures that you will be doing will be posted on your site as they are available. I cannot watch them live due to my post office schedule, but I would like to watch each of them. I want to always continue learning.
Pastor Galvan, I’m not sure how much help this lecture would actually provide to someone who already has a D.Min., but if I can be a blessing to you, I’m thrilled to do so.
FWIW, I can’t watch YouTube lectures either, so I use https://www.onlinevideoconverter.com/ to turn them into audio files and put them on my phone.
(For even more nerdy details on this, see this post. =)
Just finished Prolegomena I. I know I will not have time to sit down and watch all of the lectures for two hours straight. But, especially with the converting tool you linked to, I can listen to portions of the lectures at different times on my phone – when exercising, walking, etc. Degree or not, I believe the lectures will help me. First, they will, everything else aside, delight my soul – I love listening and learning on a level that challenges me. I was thrilled to see that all the videos from the various teachers are online. While I have heard some things on the video that “I knew already,” I have been reminded of some things I forgot (my brain “leaks”), learned some new truths, (always something new to learn), been spiritually challenged (my love for God and neighbor driving my study and preaching), and given materials that will help me as I presently mentor some men who are studying for the ministry as their future vocations. I even got your joke May God bless you and all the other teachers who are using their gifts to further equip men. This is the type of teaching that is needed for men preparing to enter full time Gospel ministry.. I grieve over what some schools call “seminary training” because they come woefully short of this level of training. May the influence of the Asia center spread more and more This type of training will enable men to “rightly divide the Word of truth”
Wow—thanks for the kind words! It’s a thrill to have been a help to a faithful pastor.