RELIGION / JOHN DART : Valley Seminaries Are on the Rise : Education: Enrollment at The Master’s in Sun Valley is expected to top 200 by spring. Meanwhile, a Protestant school has relocated in West Hills.

California’s oldest Protestant seminary was founded in San Fernando in 1885 and named the Maclay College of Theology after its minister-politician-businessman benefactor. But financial troubles caused the Methodist school to shut down 100 years ago and relocate the next year on the USC campus.

After name changes and another move in 1957, it became the School of Theology at Claremont, a mainline seminary with a national reputation for its scholarship.

It was a long time before anyone thought the Valley could provide hallowed ground for educating future clergy at the graduate level.

But in 1986, the Rev. John MacArthur decided to create The Master’s Seminary on his large Grace Community Church complex in Sun Valley. Enrollment at the fundamentalist-oriented school nearly reached 200 students, all men, this fall--a 12% jump from last year in a pattern of continuous growth since its founding.

“We will no doubt go over 200 in the spring semester,” predicted Richard Mayhue, vice president and dean of The Master’s Seminary. The school plans to build a 30,000-square-foot library and faculty office center on campus to allow future expansion to as many as 400 students.

Now, a second Protestant seminary has started classes in the Valley. Two dozen students of Faith Seminary in California this week began studies in rented space at a closed-down public school in West Hills. The Rev. Hae Soung Kim, the seminary president, moved the school this summer from crowded quarters at his Los Angeles church.

“The area here is very good,” said Kim, referring to the quiet residential streets bordering the old Highlander Road School. The seminary shares space with a Christian school run by West Valley Christian Church.

“I have only Korean students, but I’d like to accept students from any ethnic group,” Kim said. He emphasized that the school has a conservative theology and no ties to any denomination.

Kim, 61, has been pastor of Young Sang Presbyterian Church on Western Avenue in Koreatown for 12 years. Despite the seminary’s move to a distant location, Kim said the student body has remained about the same size. Faith Seminary’s faculty has four full-time and seven part-time teachers, he said.

The Master’s Seminary started its eighth year with 12 full-time faculty members, nine adjunct teachers and students from around the country. “Half of them are from states east of the Rockies,” Dean Mayhue said.

Many potential students hear of the seminary from the radio programs and personal speaking appearances by MacArthur, a nationally known pastor whose congregation often averages 9,000 worshipers each Sunday.

Another source for seminarians is The Master’s College, formerly Los Angeles Baptist College. MacArthur was invited to assume the presidency of the struggling liberal arts college in Newhall’s Placerita Canyon in 1985. In so doing, MacArthur and the board incorporated the four-year college and the envisioned seminary as one entity, despite the fact that the seminary was to be located on church grounds 20 miles to the south.

Each year, 10 to 20 students who earn a bachelor’s degree in the college’s biblical studies department decide to take advanced studies at the seminary, usually the Master of Divinity degree, according to Mayhue.

One of those students is Chris Hollowaty, 23, who lives in Santa Clarita and works as the youth pastor at Shepherd of the Hills Church in Porter Ranch. Some biblical studies graduates at The Master’s College are accepted and ordained as ministers by independent Christian churches, but Hollowaty said he did not want to cut short his opportunities.

“Some churches won’t even look at you unless you have a master’s degree,” he said.

Hollowaty, now in his second year, said it will probably take him four years to complete seminary because he is working part time.

The relatively small campus is a plus, he said. “The professors are remarkably friendly and there is a lot of teacher-student interaction.”

MacArthur and faculty members set out their approach to ministry in “Rediscovering Expository Preaching,” published a year ago by Word Books. That school of preaching believes in detailed explanation and application of Scripture, followed by admonitions of the Bible’s call for obedience.

The Master’s Seminary has an all-male student body. “Our statement of purpose is to produce ordained men for the ministry,” Mayhue said, “and believing as we do that God did not will that women be ordained, we don’t admit women students. It has nothing to do with their abilities, but the will of God.”

In West Hills, Faith Seminary of California has half a dozen women students, but they are all studying to go into religious education, Kim said. “We don’t ordain women to the ministry,” he added.

Valley women interested in graduate studies leading to ordination can commute to Pasadena, where about 35% of the 1,500 students at interdenominational Fuller Theological Seminary are women, a fair number of them planning on joining clergy ranks.

Or, another possibility is in Claremont at the old Maclay College of Theology, still a primarily Methodist-run seminary, where 43% of the 365-member student body are women, many of them heading for ordination.