New Creation Certificate in Biblical Studies (2026-2027)

• Dates:
  • Part One: August 31 – December 21, 2026
  • Part Two: January 18 – May 3, 2027
• Time: Mondays, 6:30 – 8:30 pm
• Location: Sacred Heart Parish Hall (north of the Church and Friary)
• Class sessions are offered in person, live online, and by video (usually) the day following each class.

This one-year program is designed to immerse students in the study of Sacred Scripture. It will equip them to read, understand, pray, live, and teach God’s Word, which is the Church’s primary and most valuable text. The two-semester sequence of courses progresses from theory to practice in three stages: Opening the Word: Introduction and Interpretation (what the Bible is, how we got it, how to read it, and how to pray with it); Hearing the Word: Survey and Summary (an overview of all 73 biblical books and their harmonious contributions to divine revelation); and Ministering the Word: Practice and Proclamation (living and leading others to live God’s Word in our post-Christendom age).

Unique to this program is a Christo-Canonical approach to the study of Scripture in which the person of Christ as the one who reveals God to creation is the subject matter that gives order to the entire Bible, which is the ‘canon’ (the authoritative collection) of Sacred Scripture (hence ‘Christo-canonical’). This offers an important alternative to standard historical-critical and salvation-historical (e.g., Bible timeline) models. The biblical texts, we will see, often speak in ways unconstrained by history or time, since the God to which they point comes to us from outside of both.

The program culminates in a distinguished certificate of achievement, recognizing graduates as those who, by virtue of their studies, have been equipped to love, live, and minister God’s Word in the context of home, church, school, and world. The program is especially designed for parents, catechists, teachers, missionaries, clergy, and consecrated religious.

Chad Steiner Author

About the instructor

Chad completed his undergraduate studies in Philosophy at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln while studying the biblical languages and biblical introduction and interpretation on the side. Following graduation, he taught with his father at a small Bible institute in Lincoln for a number of years before moving to England with his wife Kacy to begin graduate work in biblical studies. Upon their return to Lincoln in 2005, Chad resumed teaching and writing full time with the institute where he remained until its closure in 2013. His interests lie especially in cultivating Christian unity, and in sharing the task of interpreting Sacred Scripture with Christians across denominational lines. He and his family were received into the Roman Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil at St. Peter in 2011. Since then he has enjoyed singing in the choir and serving as a regular catechist for the OCIA program at the parish. He and Kacy have eight children, a goofy pyredoodle, an opinionated Quaker parrot, an easier-going rabbit, a growing population of fish in multiple aquariums, and an ark under construction.