A man considering seminary is asking two things: whether he is ready to pastor, and what it will cost his family to find out. The M.Div. is the usual answer to the first. This page is mostly about the second.
What is a Master of Divinity?
A Master of Divinity is a professional graduate degree that prepares a man to pastor a church. "Professional" means what it means in law or social work: the degree is organized around a job. The job is shepherding a congregation, so the coursework covers the Bible and its languages, theology, church history, preaching, and the care of souls. Because it is a graduate degree, it assumes a bachelor's degree first.
Across the United States, M.Div. programs run from about 72 to 90 credit hours, and sometimes more. Three years of full-time study is the common design. Many churches expect a pastor to hold the degree before they call or ordain him, though that expectation varies from one church to the next.
Our M.Div. is 86 credit hours over three years. There are no electives; every course is taken in the order it is scheduled, with the same men for all three years. We admit a new cohort once every three years, and the next one begins in 2028. If you are reading this in 2026 and sensing a call, that gives you time to test it with your church, which is the subject of our guide to becoming a pastor.
How long does an M.Div. take?
Three years full time is the norm. Part-time students commonly take four to six, and many seminaries let a student stretch it further. The degree is large, and time is the cost people underestimate when they look only at the tuition line.
At Faith Bible Seminary the M.Div. takes three years, year-round, and it is built to be finished in three. Classes meet one full day a week in most semesters and two days in some, plus four or five one-week modular courses each year. The other three or four days of the week go to a church internship. Together that is a 50 to 60 hour week. We ask students not to hold outside employment except by special arrangement, because the internship and the reading do not leave room for it.
Men already serving in ministry may enroll without the internship requirement, decided case by case. If you are pastoring now and want the degree, ask before you assume the schedule rules you out.
Transfer credit can shorten the degree. Graduate courses very similar in content to ours, with equal or greater credit hours, may be approved by the registrar before enrollment, up to 40 percent of the program. If you already read Greek or Hebrew, you can test for advanced standing.
What you study
Most M.Div. curricula share a shape: Old and New Testament, the biblical languages, systematic and historical theology, and a block of practical courses in preaching and pastoral care. Programs differ in how much weight each block carries. That weighting tells you what a seminary thinks a pastor is.
Here is ours.
Area | Credits |
|---|---|
New Testament | 22 |
Old Testament | 19 |
Systematic Theology | 13 |
Biblical Counseling | 10 |
Practical Theology | 9 |
Biblical Interpretation | 5 |
Missions and Evangelism | 5 |
Church History and Christian Thought | 3 |
M.Div. curriculum at Faith Bible Seminary, 86 credit hours in eight areas. No electives; courses are taken as scheduled.
Forty-one of the 86 credits are Old and New Testament. We think a pastor's first job is to know the Book he preaches, and that takes years with the text, not a survey course. Ten credits are biblical counseling, because the people you shepherd will bring you their marriages and their grief, and a sermon alone will not carry them. Practical Theology, nine credits, covers the work of pastoring itself.
The classroom is half the education. The other half is the church internship, three or four days a week at Faith Church or at a partnering church that has sent you to us. Each church directs the mentoring of its intern in consultation with the seminary, balancing three things: strengthening his weaknesses, using his gifts, and meeting the needs of that church. The internship page explains how both arrangements work.
M.Div. vs M.A. vs M.Min. vs Th.M.
Seminaries award several master's degrees, and the letters confuse people. The differences are mostly size and purpose.
A Master of Arts in a theological field is usually 36 to 60 credits and focuses on one discipline: biblical studies, theology, counseling, or ministry leadership. It is the right degree for a specific ministry role, or for a pastor adding a competency he lacks. A Master of Ministry is a shorter practical degree, often designed for men already serving. A Master of Theology (Th.M.) comes after the M.Div.; it is a year of advanced research for men headed toward teaching or doctoral work. A Doctor of Ministry also presumes the M.Div. and some years in ministry.
At Faith Bible Seminary the M.Div. prepares men for pastoral ministry, and the Master of Arts in Biblical Counseling trains men and women as biblical counselors. Set side by side, the two look like this.
M.Div. | MABC | |
|---|---|---|
Credits | 86 | 39 |
Length | 3 years, year-round | 4 to 5 years for most students |
Format | In person in Lafayette, 1 to 2 class days a week plus a church internship | Online courses plus five one-week residencies in Lafayette |
Who it serves | Men called to pastoral ministry | Pastors, missionaries, and lay men and women training as counselors |
Admission | Next cohort 2028; one intake every three years | Every spring and winter term |
Tuition | $2,000 a year for students in a church internship or full-time ministry; otherwise $250 a credit hour | $310 a credit hour plus a $65 fee per class |
The two degrees at Faith Bible Seminary. Figures from the seminary's program and tuition pages.
The degrees are not rivals. Of the 63 MABC graduates whose ministry positions we have recorded, 15 serve as pastors. Some of them hold an M.Div. from elsewhere and came to us for the counseling. If the pastorate is the call, start with the M.Div.
Online, hybrid, or in person?
You can earn an M.Div. fully online from a number of accredited seminaries. The appeal is obvious for a man with a job and a mortgage. The cost is less obvious. What an online program cannot do is watch you. Nobody sees you lead a prayer meeting badly and tells you so on the drive home. Nobody hears you preach to the same congregation forty times and watches whether they are being fed.
Our M.Div. meets in person at the Northend Community Center in Lafayette, Indiana. Students are active members of a local church in the Lafayette area, or willing to relocate. The reason is the internship: it is half the degree, and it has to happen in a church with pastors who see you every week.
Our fee schedule does list a technology fee for distance students, higher than the local one. If you are asking whether some classes can be taken from a distance, contact the seminary and ask about your situation before you plan around it. We would rather tell you the truth on the phone than let a line in a fee table imply more than it says.
The MABC is our hybrid program, and it shows the same conviction at a different scale. We could offer the MABC entirely online. We do not, because watching a student counsel a real person in the room is too valuable to give up, so every MABC student comes to Lafayette for five one-week residencies.
Admission requirements
Seminary admission usually asks for a bachelor's degree, a minimum grade-point average, a personal testimony, references from people who know your walk with Christ, and a letter from your pastor. Because the M.Div. is for pastors, the pastoral reference carries more weight than it would for an academic degree.
For our M.Div., you need a bachelor's degree from an accredited institution, or the equivalent, with a grade-point average of at least 3.0 on a 4.0 scale. Up to 10 percent of a cohort may enroll without a bachelor's degree. We look for men whose local church has recognized their gifts for full-time pastoral ministry, who are relatively debt-free, and who meet the character standards of 1 Timothy 3:1–7. Students need a Windows laptop with Microsoft Office and Logos Bible Software (Platinum). The application fee is $40.
A complete application has these pieces.
- Online application form
- Personal testimony
- Spouse's testimony, if married
- Ministry experience form
- Three reference letters addressing your spiritual life
- Pastoral reference letter
- Official bachelor's transcripts
- English proficiency test, if English is not your first language
- Church internship application, if applying for a Faith Church internship
- Church partnership application, if your internship will be at another church
Applicants whose native language is not English take the TOEFL (an overall iBT score of 80) or IELTS (overall 6.5), unless they earned a degree in the last 36 months from an institution in an English-speaking country.
Deadlines for the 2028 cohort: Faith Church internship applicants by September 1, 2027, and all other applicants by July 1, 2028. The how-to-apply page walks through the steps, and the admissions page has the rest of the policy.
What does an M.Div. cost?
Graduate tuition at seminaries ranges from a few hundred dollars a credit hour to well over a thousand. Across 80 or more credits, the total climbs fast, before housing and before the income a student gives up to study. Many men graduate owing money, and debt narrows where a pastor can serve: a small church that can only pay a modest salary becomes a church he cannot afford to accept.
We built the seminary around a sentence that still sits on our tuition page: "FBS believes that you cannot have an effective ministry if you are swimming in debt." Lower Cost is the first of our three core values, so that graduates remain available for ministry.
Item | Amount |
|---|---|
Application fee (non-refundable) | $40 |
Annual tuition, students in a church internship or full-time ministry | $2,000 a year |
Tuition, students not in an internship or full-time ministry | $250 a credit hour |
Technology fee, local students | $100 a year |
Technology fee, distance students | $350 a year |
Church contribution for enrolled interns | $1,200 a year ($100 a month) |
Auditing (does not count toward the degree) | $125 a credit hour |
Graduation fee | $50 |
M.Div. tuition and fees at Faith Bible Seminary. The tuition page is current if anything here differs.
The arithmetic is simple. A student in an internship or full-time ministry pays $2,000 a year for three years, or $6,000 in tuition for the degree, plus the technology, application, and graduation fees. A student outside ministry pays by the credit: 86 credits at $250 is $21,500. The $2,000 rate requires the ministry involvement; outside employment that replaces it moves you to the per-credit rate. The seminary offers no direct financial aid. We are a VA-recognized institution, so veterans' benefits apply.
Faith Church internships are part-time and partially paid. A partnering church that sends a man hires him as a part-time intern for three years and provides housing and a stipend, so that he does not need outside work. That is how a student lives on $2,000 a year in tuition without borrowing. The paying for seminary guide and the tuition page go further.
Accreditation: what to check
Accreditation is the outside review that says a school does what it claims. For a seminary, it matters in four places: whether your credits will transfer, whether a doctoral program will accept your degree, whether veterans' benefits can be used, and whether the state where you live allows the school to enroll you from a distance. Ask any seminary for its accreditor by name and the date of its last review, and check the accreditor's own list, not the school's.
Faith Bible Seminary is accredited by the Association for Biblical Higher Education (ABHE) Commission on Accreditation. Initial accreditation was granted on February 20, 2019, and reaffirmed in 2024. We are approved by the Indiana Commission for Higher Education, recognized for veterans' benefits, and a participant in the State Authorization Reciprocity Agreements (SARA).
What can you do with an M.Div.?
The degree was designed for the pastorate, and that is where most graduates go, as senior or associate pastors. Others plant churches, serve as missionaries or chaplains, or work in parachurch ministry. A smaller number go on to the Th.M. or a doctorate and teach. The degree is also the usual door into a Doctor of Ministry later in life.
Our own numbers, as published on the seminary's facts page: of the 134 men who entered the five cohorts from 2007 through 2019, 102 graduated, a 76 percent completion rate, and 24 withdrew. Graduates have served as 24 senior pastors, 49 assistant pastors, 12 in other full-time ministry, 7 missionaries, and 9 in non-vocational ministry; 18 went on to advanced degrees. The 2022 cohort is still finishing: 22 degrees granted, 26 in progress, 18 withdrawn as of 2026.
We publish the withdrawals alongside the placements. A three-year, in-person, church-embedded program is demanding, and some men discover partway through that the pastorate is not their calling. That discovery is one of the things seminary is for, and it is far cheaper to make in year one of an internship than in year three of a pastorate.
Seminary vs Bible college
A Bible college grants undergraduate degrees; a seminary grants graduate degrees. A man can go to Bible college and then seminary, and many do. He can also come to seminary with a bachelor's in engineering or accounting, which describes several of our own faculty. Our admission requirement is a bachelor's degree from an accredited institution; the field is not specified.
If you are choosing between them, the question is where you are in life. An eighteen-year-old with a sense of call usually belongs in a bachelor's program, Bible college or otherwise, and in a church that will put him to work. A college graduate whose church has affirmed his gifts belongs in seminary. Skipping the bachelor's is possible in a small number of cases; we admit up to 10 percent of a cohort without one.
The church-based M.Div. at Faith Bible Seminary
Faith Bible Seminary is a ministry of Faith Church in Lafayette, Indiana, founded in 2007. Fifty-three men were enrolled in the M.Div. in 2025–26. We describe ourselves as church-based because the seminary sits inside a church and every student trains inside one. Our internship page puts it this way: pastoral ministry requires field work, and "the practical training will not simply be an 'add-on' to the education; it will be half of it."
In practice, that means one or two days a week in class on the second floor of the Northend Community Center and three or four days in a church. A Faith Church intern serves at the church and at one of the Faith Community Center campuses; a student from a partnering church serves at home, under his own pastors, with the seminary consulting on his training. Either way he is preaching and counseling while he is still being taught how, and the men who taught him are watching.
That is the whole idea, and it is the reason for the odd schedule, the three-year commitment, the in-person requirement, and the $2,000 tuition. The M.Div. page has the program in full, and the church-based seminary guide explains how the model works for a family. If you want the deadlines and the application in one place, start at how to apply.