The Annual Meeting of the Winebrenner Seminary Board of Trustees was held last week. We held the meeting “retreat style” with full participation of the Board members, faculty, staff, and administration. Everyone was in the same room to hear everything. This approach has opened up healthy conversational space as we steward our mission together.
Three questions framed our time together:
- What are we entrusted with?
- What is God doing?
- In order to participate, who are we becoming?
Over the next few posts, I want to use these questions to share what we discussed together. Let’s begin with the first: What are we entrusted with?
There are many ways to answer that question. We have been entrusted with a mission. We have been entrusted with people. We have been entrusted with financial resources. We have been entrusted with an organization that has served the church for generations. And, right now, we have been entrusted with 239 students who are pursuing education through Winebrenner.
That final number is worth considering carefully.
Several years ago, I wrote about the danger of celebrating enrollment simply because it was growing. Author Eric Ries uses the phrase “vanity metric” for a number that makes us feel good but tells us relatively little about actual performance or organizational health. Enrollment matters, but there is always more to the story. One way we have tried to understand more of that story is through a very simple calculation: Cost to Educate (CTE).
The formula is straightforward:
Total Expenses ÷ Total Students Served = Cost to Educate
For the 2026–2027 fiscal year, Winebrenner has projected budgeted expenses of $1,335,489. We are currently serving 239 students. That results in a projected:
2026–2027 Cost to Educate: $5,587.82
Why does that number matter?
For some historical perspective, in 2007, a previous high point for Winebrenner enrollment, the Cost to Educate a student was $15,644.19. When we returned to this calculation in 2021–2022, the CTE was $7,718.67. In 2022–2023 it was $7,105.89, and in 2023–2024 it was $6,423.
We don’t have comparable calculations for every academic year between then and now, so I’m hesitant to suggest a year-by-year trend that we can’t demonstrate. But we can say something significant: our projected Cost to Educate in 2026–2027 is approximately 64% lower than it was in 2007 and is lower than the last figure we reported in 2023–2024.
That brings us back to the question: What are we entrusted with?
We have been entrusted with resources, but stewardship doesn’t simply mean spending less. We have been entrusted with students, but faithfulness doesn’t simply mean enrolling more. We have been entrusted with a mission, and that requires us to ask whether we are using the resources God provides to serve students well. For Winebrenner, that continues to mean holding together three important commitments: affordability, accessibility, and quality.
Our tuition structure provides one example. Of the 239 students currently being served, 132 are graduate students who pay $300 per month, while 107 pay $200 per course (or, like the students in our prison contexts, students receive a scholarship for their tuition). Those tuition levels are intentional. We want theological education to be financially accessible to the pastors, counselors, ministry leaders, and others God is calling us to equip.
At the same time, those tuition models mean that what students pay does not represent the full cost of providing their education. The difference is supported through the faithful stewardship of Winebrenner’s resources and the generosity of the churches, givers, denominational partners, and others who participate with us in this mission. That’s an important part of the Cost to Educate story.
Affordability requires stewardship. Accessibility requires stewardship. Quality requires stewardship.
The goal isn’t simply to make education less expensive. If lowering the Cost to Educate meant diminishing the quality of education or formation our students receive, it would be difficult to call that faithful stewardship. Instead, we continue to ask how the resources entrusted to Winebrenner can be used to equip as many students as possible, provide education at an accessible cost, and maintain the quality and whole-life transformation that should characterize theological education.
This is why I find Cost to Educate to be such a helpful number. By itself, an enrollment of 239 students could become a vanity metric. By itself, an annual budget of $1,335,489 tells us little about how effectively those resources are being used. Even $5,587.82 is simply a number until we connect it to the people and mission those dollars serve. Together, however, these numbers help us better understand what has been entrusted to us.
They also remind us that stewardship isn’t ultimately about protecting what we have been given. Biblical stewardship asks how what we have been given can be faithfully used for God’s purposes.
So, what are we entrusted with? Among many other things, we have been entrusted with 239 students, the resources necessary to serve them, a community that helps make their education possible, and a mission that gives purpose to it all. Our responsibility is to steward all of it well as we continue to equip leaders for service in God’s kingdom.
And perhaps that naturally moves us toward the second question we considered together and I’ll write about next week:
What is God doing?
- Brent C. Sleasman, President