Academics
Seminary for Everyone
Whether you want to learn more about a particular topic or get a taste of what Bethel Seminary is all about—we have courses covering a variety of relevant interests and passions all year long. Internationally renowned instructors are excited to share their perspectives on topics close to their hearts through these flexible, easily-accessible opportunities. With choices related to both credit seeking (offered in January only) and non-credit seeking endeavors, you get to decide what level of investment suits your life, goals, and learning style.
Delivery
All courses are four weeks, accessible online, and involve a 5-6 hour time commitment per week.
Non-credit option
You’ll have access to a seminar-style class, which will include media, Zoom sessions with the instructors and/or potential guest lecturers, and online group discussions for $195. We offer a discount of $70 off per person if there are five or more participants registered from the same organization (church, Bible study group, etc.). Please email seminary-for-everyone@bethel.edu for more information and to receive the group rate coupon code.
Credit option
For-credit courses are typically offered in January and are marked as "for credit" under the course description. To receive credit for your Seminary for Everyone course, you must be an incoming or current Bethel Seminary student. This means you must first apply to Bethel. Once you are accepted, then you can register for your desired Seminary for Everyone course. These for-credit courses are two credits and cost $1,110.
More info
Still have questions? Want to know more? We’d love to share more about Bethel Seminary and Seminary for Everyone courses.
Courses open for registration
The Evangelical Imagination
June 1-26, 2026
Taught by Karen Swallow Prior, Bethel Seminary's 2025-2026 Karlson Scholar
We all have an imagination. But our individual imaginations are shaped by many things, including our social imaginaries. Social imaginaries are our shared pools of images, stories, myths, metaphors, and expectations. Social imaginaries create and carry assumptions about how life should go and how things should be, assumptions we often don’t even know we have.
In this course, based on the book "The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis," author and instructor Karen Swallow Prior will discuss how social imaginaries and metaphors have shaped evangelicalism over the past 300 years. Drawing on the book, we’ll explore evangelicalism’s defining metaphors, including “awakening,” “conversion,” testimony,” and “reformation.” We’ll also look at how the larger cultural ethos shaped the evangelical movement in its emphasis on improvement, sentimentality, materialism, and empire.