![Welch Music Department Chairman Making Music During Pandemic]()
by jowens | Oct 10, 2020
Welch College Music Department Chairman James Stevens has stayed busy composing during the pandemic with over 1,000 publications released in the past year with various outlets, according to Provost Matthew McAffee. The publishing outlets include Sheet Music Plus, Shawnee Press/Hal Leonard, Spotify, Pandora Radio, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and others that include music for choral, piano, organ, and various instrumental solo/piano combinations.
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Several of Stevens’s choral anthems over the past year have been released by Shawnee Press of Hal Leonard. These include “Song of Grace and Hope” with Gaye C. Bruce and “Jesus Is the Way” with Karen Crane. These and Stevens’s other recent choral music with Hal Leonard consist of practical compositions and arrangements for the local church choir.
“One publication, ‘Italian Preludes, Nos. 1-8,’ is a piano album and book released in the heart of the pandemic at a time when Italy was suffering great losses with the songs representing various moods of the time,” McAffee said. In July, the “Italian Preludes” was listed as number 10 of The Top 100 Radio Airplay Chart at Music Zone Reporter (http://www.zonemusicreporter.com/charts/top100.asp).
In July of 2020, Stevens was named as a Whisperings Piano Solo Artist at SoloPiano.com, which consists of many of the world’s leading pianists/composers and founded by famed pianist David Nevue. This site carries Stevens’s music from his albums, “Minimal Piano,” “Italian Preludes, Nos. 1-8,” “Quiet Christmas Piano,” and his most recent album and book, “Autumn Moods,” released October 9, 2020.
Since the beginning of 2020, Stevens has also released four new collections of original organ music, much of which has been recorded by Harvard University Organist and Composer in Residence, Carson Cooman, including all the compositions from Stevens’s October 2020 book, “Swan Serenades for Organ, Nos. 1-5.”
Dr. James Michael Stevens has served as Chairman of Welch College’s Department of Music since 2004. For more information on the music department at Welch College and the various programs of study offered by the department, email Mark Lancaster at mlancaster@welch.edu.
by jowens | Oct 8, 2020
Veteran Free Will Baptist missionary to India and humanitarian Carlisle Hanna (Welch College Class of 1952) was recently inducted into the “TICUA Hall of Fame,” according to President Matt Pinson.
“TICUA stands for the ‘Tennessee Independent Colleges and Universities Association’ and represents the private accredited colleges and universities in the state,” Pinson said. “We’re so honored that they have selected Welch alumnus Carlisle Hanna for their Hall of Fame.”
TICUA Executive Director Claude Presnell said, “Tennessee’s Independent Colleges and Universities are home to some of our state’s most distinguished and impressive residents—from Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners to faith leaders, entrepreneurs, and elected officials.”
“The Tennessee Independent Colleges and Universities Association (TICUA) created the TICUA Hall of Fame to honor the distinguished alumni of its 35 member institutions while highlighting their contributions to our state, nation, and world. The honorees exemplify the value of the liberal arts education and how it can be used in a variety of career fields.”
The 2020 inductees can be viewed here.
by jowens | Oct 3, 2020
After a 36-year high enrollment last fall, Welch College enrollment statistics for the Fall semester 2020 showed an expected decline, according to Provost Matthew McAffee. Total enrollment statistics indicate 356 students from 23 states, one territory, and four foreign countries, an 18 percent decrease over last fall’s headcount.
“The good news is that in one key area, the number of full-time students, we’re down by only 6%,” McAffee said. “Last fall the full-time student enrollment was 233 compared to this year’s 219. Full-time students is a key indicator that colleges monitor closely. We’re thankful for these wonderful students the Lord has brought us this year. Owing to COVID-19, like many colleges, we were braced for a much lower enrollment than we have. So we’re grateful that enrollment is as high as it is. The Lord continues to bless our efforts in equipping leaders for Christ’s kingdom work.”
At press time the college reported 157 dormitory students, 59 commuter students, 23 graduate students, 20 Adult Studies students, 41 Online students, and 56 dual enrollment students. The fall’s full-time equivalency (FTE) is 254 students.
“An unusually high number of out-of-town families changed their plans this year,” Daniel Webster, Director of Enrollment Services, said. “It was either because of the ‘fear factor’ surrounding the Coronavirus—just wanting to keep their children close to home—or because of the economic impact of the virus on their families. This was the year we were expecting to have a 38-year record-high in enrollment. But then COVID-19 hit. Not only did it cause families to change their plans, but it also hampered our ability to recruit last spring and summer.”
“We were surprised, though, that our traditional student enrollment (dorm and commuter students) was down only around 10 percent,” Webster continued. “Just as some other colleges and universities expected, local student enrollment held steady, while dorm student enrollment dropped by about 14 percent. Our adult enrollment—in graduate, evening, and online programs—was hit hard, as well as the number of high school students enrolled in dual enrollment courses. The total headcount in those programs decreased by 28 percent.”
This fall 63 new students enrolled in traditional on-campus programs at Welch—25 percent fewer than last fall. A total of 85 new students joined the entire student body for the new school year, including graduate, online, and adult studies enrollments—27 percent fewer than last fall.
“We’re so thankful for the students God has blessed us with this year,” President Matt Pinson said. “They’re eager to learn and are doing such a wonderful job coping with the strange conditions necessitated by the Coronavirus. But they’re doing a great job abiding by our guidelines, and the number of positive cases and quarantined students has been extremely low when compared to other colleges and universities. While I’m pleasantly surprised that our enrollment is as high as it is, given COVID-19, I still appeal to our alumni and supporters to give to the COVID-19 Relief Fund. We’re having to award very large amounts of scholarships this year to make it possible for many of these students to attend, and we’re projecting the largest year-to-year downturn in tuition and gift income in the college’s history. So we need our people to come to our aid now more than ever.”
“Still,” Pinson continued, “this vibrant student body is a reminder that God is bringing students to Welch whose lives will be changed. We will equip them to fulfill the divine purpose to which God has called them, so they can help bring life change to others through the power of the gospel and its impact on individual lives and on our culture. This is the reason we’re here, and we keenly sense God’s blessing, especially in these difficult times.”
For more information about Welch College, email recruit@welch.edu or visit the college’s website at www.welch.edu.
by jowens | Sep 30, 2020
Welch President Matt Pinson announced Monday that the newly established Welch Divinity School would be led by Welch Provost Dr. Matthew McAffee and Dr. Barry Raper, coordinator of Ministry Programs at Welch. McAffee will serve as Dean of the Divinity School, while continuing his role as Provost of the College. Raper will serve as Program Coordinator for the M.Div. degree program, while continuing to administer Welch’s other ministry programs.
Pinson said, “I’m excited about the leadership of Welch Divinity School. Matthew McAffee and Barry Raper are just the sort of young scholar-pastors we need as the face of this new initiative.”
Pinson went on to say, “We believe this new divinity school, under the leadership of McAffee and Raper, will help us get more evangelistically minded pastor-scholars out into the churches, who understand how to stand for truth in an era of increasing secularization when the truths of Christianity are no longer assumed. We also think this presents an opportunity to carve out a bigger footprint in the evangelical community for our unique Reformed Arminian approach to theology.”
“Welch has so much to offer to our denomination, and to those outside our denomination who have gotten excited about the Reformed Arminian approach to theology centered in the Free Will Baptist Church. The singular blend of the best of evangelical theological scholarship from this perspective with a practical, evangelistic mindset that is sensitive to the missional uniqueness of our increasingly secularizing society in the West—that’s a winning combination. And, in addition to our Free Will Baptist ministers, we’re hearing from more and more conservative Arminians who are interested in what we have to offer. Drs. McAffee and Raper make a great combination to attract students to this program with its focus on vibrant ministry and solid scholarship.”
Pinson explained: “We need the sort of competence Dr. McAffee has brought to the Office of the Provost. But we also need a face for the new divinity school that signals to our denomination and to the entire evangelical community the sort of scholarship we will feature at the Divinity School. The grant from the Kern Family Foundation provides funds for a new full-time faculty member, a new full-time program coordinator/recruiter, and a new half-time assistant. This support will allow Dr. McAffee to bring his unique gifts to the new Divinity School while maintaining his important role as Chief Academic Officer of Welch College. It will also allow Dr. Raper to give leadership to the M.Div. in addition to Welch’s other baccalaureate and master’s programs in ministry.”
McAffee, a native of Jacksontown, New Brunswick, Canada, has taught at Welch College for thirteen years and has served as Provost for the last three years. Thought of as a leading younger scholar of the language, literature, and culture of the Old Testament, he has also been intimately involved in pastoral ministry, having served several years in church ministry as well as seven years as campus pastor at Welch College. A Welch graduate, he holds the M.Div. from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and the M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
Penn State University Press recently published his book, Life and Mortality in Ugaritic: A Lexical and Literary Study. B&H Academic is scheduled to publish an intermediate Hebrew grammar he is writing with Dr. Chip Hardy of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has also jointly authoredSexuality, Gender, and the Church (Welch College Press) and contributed a chapter to The Promise of Arminian Theology: Essays in Honor of F. Leroy Forlines (Randall House Academic). Co-chairman of the Ancient Near Eastern Study Group of the Evangelical Theological Society, McAffee has gained a reputation as a solid scholar through papers delivered at ETS, the Society of Biblical Literature, and other venues, as well as articles published in journals such as the Journal of Biblical Literature, the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, the Journal of the American Oriental Society, the Bulletin for Biblical Research, Integrity: A Journal of Christian Thought, Ugarit-Forschungen, and the Southeastern Journal of Theology.
Raper, a native of Red Bay, Alabama, and Professor of Ministry at Welch, has established a reputation as the leading ministry educator in the Free Will Baptist denomination as well as one of the leading Free Will Baptist pastors in the mid-South. He has taught at Welch for the past fourteen years. During his first nine years, he administered the Youth and Family Ministry program, which he moved from a conventional youth ministry program to an intergenerational youth-and-family program geared to combining evangelism with the cultivation of biblical truth in the context of a secularizing culture. For the past five years, he has administered all ministry programs at Welch, including the pastoral ministry program, with the assistance of Chris Talbot, Welch’s coordinator of Youth and Family Ministry.
Raper has twenty years of ministry experience, the past eleven as Pastor of Bethel Free Will Baptist Church in Chapmansboro, Tennessee. His academic emphasis has been spiritual formation in ministry, with his dissertation focusing on biblical meditation. A Welch graduate, he holds the M.Div. and D.Min. from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is author of several articles, has contributed a chapter to The Promise of Arminian Theology: Essays in Honor of F. Leroy Forlines (Randall House Academic), and is a columnist for ONE Magazine.
In other action, the Board named Dr. Kevin L. Hester Senior Professor of Divinity and Special Advisor to the Dean. Hester will continue as Dean of the School of Theology, thus administering all undergraduate programs in theology as well as the M.A. degree in Theology and Ministry, which will serve as a feeder to the M.Div. Hester will also continue serving on Welch’s Leadership Team as Vice President for Institutional Effectiveness and will offer seasoned counsel to the new Divinity School.
Hester, a native of Russellville, Alabama, has taught at Welch for 17 years, administering theological programs for eight years and serving as vice president for the past three. He has established himself as a leader in the world of higher education accreditation, having been on numerous accrediting visits and having served on the Commission on Accreditation of the Association for Biblical Higher Education (ABHE) for many years, now as chairman of the Commission. An expert on the church fathers, he is author of Eschatology and Pain in St. Gregory the Great: The Christological Synthesis of Gregory’s “Morals on the Book of Job” (Paternoster), is author of several articles as well as a booklet on “Free Will Baptists and the Priesthood of All Believers,” and has contributed a chapter to The Promise of Arminian Theology: Essays in Honor of F. Leroy Forlines (Randall House Academic). He serves on the editorial board of ABHE’s Biblical Higher Education Journal.
“I hope our alumni and supporters will pray for these men as they lead in getting the Divinity School started,” Pinson said. For more information on Welch Divinity School and the M.Div. program, please email Barry Raper at braper@welch.edu.
by jowens | Sep 29, 2020
Welch College President Matt Pinson announced to faculty Monday that Welch had received a grant of nearly $500,000 from the Kern Family Foundation to start a five-year B.A.-to-M.Div. program, and that the college’s Board of Trustees approved the program and voted to start a new school of Welch College, Welch Divinity School, next year. This grant will allow Welch to begin offering the Master of Divinity (M.Div.) degree in fall of 2021.
Pinson said, “The offering of an M.Div., the first one offered by a Free Will Baptist institution, and the establishment of a divinity school attached to Welch College, is a dream come true for us. No longer will Free Will Baptists have to go outside our denomination for their M.Div. We have hoped and dreamt for an M.Div. program for many years, and many in our denomination have wanted us to start one. Frankly, I didn’t imagine we’d be doing this so soon. Yet this grant gives us the wonderful opportunity to initiate the M.Div. now. I want to thank Mrs. Anna McAffee, our grants administrator, for her diligent and creative work in helping us get this grant.”
Provost Matthew McAffee said, “We’re so thankful that we were approached about putting together a proposal to offer a five-year B.A.-to-M.Div. degree and then were awarded this grant. This also opens up the possibility for graduates of other colleges to earn an M.Div. at Welch. There have been so many requests from pastors and churches for a Free Will Baptist M.Div. program at Welch. With this new program, it’s possible for students to begin at Welch and complete a B.A. and a regionally accredited M.Div. in five years—something that normally takes seven.”
“But people who already have a bachelor’s degree, even if it’s not in a theological field, are eligible to study for and complete this M.Div.,” McAffee continued. “We’ve been hearing from more and more people in our denomination who feel the need for further ministry education in our increasingly secular society, and this grant allows us to meet this growing need.”
The Divinity School will be structured similarly to those of institutions such as Samford University, which has a Department of Biblical and Religious Studies and also Beeson Divinity School, a graduate professional school that offers the M.Div. degree. Thus Welch’s existing School of Theology will continue to offer the baccalaureate programs in theology and ministry as well as the M.A. in Theology and Ministry, a hybrid degree that utilizes both online and on-campus delivery systems. Welch Divinity School, which will house the M.Div. degree, will build on the upper-level undergraduate coursework and the M.A. core provided by the School of Theology.
“We’re conceiving of the M.Div. program as a full on-campus program,” McAffee said. “The upper-level undergraduate coursework can be earned on campus by traditional college-age students or online by students age 23 or older. The core in the M.A. will be earned in a hybrid format through both online work and one-week, on-campus intensive sessions. The M.Div.-only coursework will be earned entirely on campus. Eventually, we hope donor funding will allow us to move the entirety of the coursework for this program on campus. Furthermore, we want to emphasize that the M.Div. will be open to graduates of other colleges who want to earn an M.Div., as well as to undergraduate students who want to pursue the B.A.-to-M.Div. program.”
The Kern grant will provide funding for a new full-time faculty member, a new full-time administrator/recruiter, and a half-time assistant. College officials hope to have administrative staff in place by January 2021 to begin recruiting for the first incoming class in the Fall semester of 2021. Free Will Baptists on the ordination track who begin the program as an undergraduate are eligible for $10,000 per year in scholarships for the first eight semesters of the program.
Pinson said, “I ask the denomination and our alumni and supporters to pray for this new initiative that will move the Free Will Baptist Church into an exciting new era of ministerial and theological education.”
Details will be forthcoming. In the meantime, for more information, please contact Dr. Barry Raper at braper@welch.edu.
