Contributed by Admissions and Marketing Director, Liz Tvedt.
My dear VBC students, we are entering the second full week of classes! The ship has officially set sail!
You’ve probably had a first movie night with your new roomies, made a trip or two to the Sonic down the street, and are well on your way to having a real “collegiate” experience! What you most likely have NOT Instagrammed about yet, is that little thing called HOMEWORK!
Wait, you mean there is homework at Bible College?! YES. You still have homework! Practical ministry training is the focus at VBC, so you can be assured you will not be turning in 20-page papers every week. (Feel free to Amen about that! ) The heart of the administration is that the entire experience at VBC would be educational and it wouldn’t be so academically rigorous that students are burdened by busy work. That being said, there is still homework that will be required! Depending on the teacher, there may be short papers, responses, or projects that get assigned over the course of the quarter. And something that every class will require, is the reading of a book!
We don’t have math classes at VBC, but I would hope your addition skills are still in tact and you can do the quick calculation to realize that you will need to read NINE books this quarter. Nine books in eight weeks. Maybe you’ve only read nine books in the last nine years! Maybe you’ve never actually read a book that wasn’t a text book! Before you call home scared, let’s get a game plan to make reading machines of us all.
- First of all, you won’t be reading any 500 page Organic Chemistry textbooks! All of the books you’ll be assigned will be ministry related books that are written in language that is easy to follow and will not total more than 200 pages. Go ahead and let out that sign of relief!
- Have you ever heard the question, “How do you eat an elephant?”? The answer is “one bite at a time.” Similarly, the secret to knocking out all of your reading assignments is to do just a few chapters a day. Say you have a 12 chapter book: read two chapters for the first four days of the week and then one chapter for the last three days. Maybe you’d rather read several books at once? Choose two or three to read at the same time, and figure out how many pages to read of each to finish them in two to three weeks.
- Make a reading priority list! Take some time this week to thumb through each of the books, read the back descriptions, and figure out the order you want to read them in! Does one sound a little less interesting than the others? Read that one first! You’ll have more motivation to read books you are interested in that last two weeks than books you aren’t interested in!
You may be thinking, But Liz, I am NOT a reader! That may be very true, but this is the season of change! You are at VBC to be prepared for a future of ministry, right? Doing ministry in a church or in the work place is often going to require you to do things that you don’t particularly like. These reading assignments will not only fill you with knowledge and revelation, but will also help you cultivate a discipline that will benefit you for a lifetime.
Let’s get those syllabi out, make a trip to the bookstore, map out the next eight weeks, and READ! READ! READ!
VICTORY BIBLE COLLEGE
School of Ministry, Worship, Missions & Media