A pastor considering online seminary while working full time usually does not need to be told that graduate study is demanding. What is harder to find is a plain account of the hours involved, what a family calendar can actually absorb, and what the degree sitting at the end of it is meant to do. This article is an attempt at that account, specific to a master's or doctoral track in grief counseling or group wellness counseling for ministry.
Start With the Limitation, Not the Benefit
A program like this does not prepare a graduate for state licensure as a clinical counselor, therapist, psychologist, or social worker. It does not lead to an LPC, LMHC, or LCSW. South Geauga Theological University is registered in Florida under Florida Statute 1005.06(1)(f) and authorized by the Commission for Independent Education to confer religious degrees for religious vocational purposes. That authorization is not accreditation, not a state endorsement of quality, and not a general professional credential. A pastor weighing enrollment should settle that point first, because every scheduling decision that follows depends on knowing what the degree is actually for.
What it is for is this: equipping someone already working in pastoral care, chaplaincy, or lay ministry to carry bereavement support and group facilitation with more theological depth and more structured skill. It is training for the hospital hallway, the funeral home conversation, the small group that meets monthly for people who have lost a spouse. It is not training to replace a licensed clinician when a parishioner needs one.
The Actual Hours
A typical graduate course in this kind of program runs eight weeks and asks for somewhere between six and nine hours a week — reading, a discussion post or two, a written assignment. Multiply by a normal full course load and the number gets uncomfortable fast, which is why most working pastors take one course at a time rather than two. At one course per eight-week term, a 36-credit master's built from twelve courses takes roughly two years, assuming no breaks between terms. A doctoral program built around a longer project adds time at the end for research and writing that does not fit neatly into eight-week blocks.
Those six to nine hours have to come from somewhere in a week that already includes sermon preparation, hospital visits, staff meetings, and family dinners. The honest places to find them are early mornings before the house wakes up, one weekday evening set aside and defended, and a longer block on Saturday morning. Lunch hours rarely work for sustained reading. Sunday afternoons after a service morning rarely work either, because the tank is empty by then.
What a Family Calendar Can Absorb
A spouse and children notice a new six-hour weekly commitment whether or not it is named out loud. The pastors who finish these programs without family strain tend to do three things early: they tell the household which specific hours are claimed by coursework, they keep those hours fixed rather than floating, and they build in one term off — Christmas, a sabbatical month, a season with a new baby — rather than treating the degree as something that must run uninterrupted. A program with no built-in flexibility for a pastor's actual year is a program that will eventually collide with a funeral week or a church crisis.
Cost as Part of the Math
Tuition in religious-exempt programs like this one is commonly structured per course rather than per credit hour, often in the range of a few hundred dollars per course rather than the thousands charged by regionally accredited graduate programs. That lower cost is tied directly to the lack of regional or national accreditation — it is not a discounted version of an accredited degree, it is a different kind of credential altogether, priced and authorized accordingly. A pastor comparing this option to a seminary with regional accreditation should compare the credentials themselves, not just the price tags, since credits earned here are unlikely to transfer to a regionally accredited institution — that decision belongs entirely to the receiving school, not to SGTU.
A Short List Before Enrolling
- Confirm in writing from your denomination or employer whether a religious degree without regional accreditation satisfies any ordination or continuing education requirement you hold.
- Block the specific weekly hours on a shared calendar before the first course starts, not after the second one is already late.
- Decide now which eight-week terms you will skip for predictable high-demand seasons — Advent, Holy Week, a mission trip.
- Ask whether the grief or group wellness courses you are considering include any content on when to refer a parishioner to licensed clinical care, since that referral judgment matters more than almost anything else taught.
Vocational ministry already asks a great deal of a person's week. Graduate study added on top of it is survivable when the hours are named honestly in advance and the degree's actual purpose — pastoral and chaplaincy formation, not clinical licensure — is kept in view from the first course to the last. The question worth asking before enrollment is not whether the work is possible, but whether this particular week, as it is actually lived, has six defensible hours in it.