Starting this fall Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary will offer a program in Christian homemaking, the seminary’s president said Tuesday. “We are moving against the tide in order to establish family and gender roles as described in God’s word for the home and the family,” seminary President Paige Patterson said in his prepared report to the Southern Baptist Convention this week in San Antonio, Texas.

According to the seminary Web site, the bachelor-of-arts in humanities degree, with a concentration in homemaking, will be offered through the seminary’s undergraduate college program.

“The College at Southwestern endeavors to prepare women to model the characteristics of the godly woman as outlined in Scripture,” a description of the program reads. “This is accomplished through instruction in homemaking skills, developing insights into home and family while continuing to equip women to understand and engage the culture of today.”

Course work includes three hours of “general homemaking,” three hours on “the value of a child,” seven hours of “design and apparel”–including a four-hour “clothing construction with lab”–seven hours of nutrition and meal preparation and a three-hour course on the “Biblical Model for the Home and Family.”

Responding to a question at the SBC annual meeting about the program, Patterson said many wives of future preachers have said, “We need to know in a day when homemaking is no longer honored whether or not it would be possible for us to have a course of study that would lead to a degree in homemaking.”

“It is homemaking for the sake of the church and the ministry and homemaking for the sake of our society,” Patterson said. “If we do not do something to salvage the future of the home, both our denomination and our nation will be destroyed.”

Full Article        Degree Plan