After more than a decade of study, 10 Seventh-day Adventist pastors and church workers recently received their bachelor of arts degrees in religion at a ceremony in Riga, Latvia.

The degrees were awarded by Griggs University, a church-owned and nationally accredited institution of higher learning in the United States. Griggs took over the previous effort by the church’s Trans-European region and Newbold College, located in Binfield, Bracknell, England, a London suburb.

Many of the new graduates have been Adventist church pastors, or served in other capacities for many years, but lacked the formal training church workers in other parts of the world generally have obtained. The program offered students four two-week study sessions each year, as well as optional home study courses from Griggs.

Studying in a traditional classroom setting would mean students facing “long absences from family during summer holidays, few scholarly resources, no real classrooms and, always, the same classmates,” said Dr. Gudmundur Olafsson, director of the Pastoral Education Program at Newbold.

But in this case, Dr. Olafsson said students didn’t travel to the various schools where the course’s instructors were based. Instead, the teachers, from New Zealand, Iceland and the United States, came to them. The students in each class represented a broad range of nationalities: five of the graduates are from Latvia, three from Estonia, and one each from Lithuania and Albania.

“It is really exciting to celebrate with these students who have finished their academic training,” said Bertold Hibner, president of the Adventist Church in Lithuania.

He added, “Ministry in Lithuanian society today demands from Adventist pastors not only the ability to help people find Biblical answers, but also to guide in areas of church history, relationships between different denominations, and provide pastoral counseling in personal life and family issues. This program has provided the necessary training in all of these areas.”

Viesturs Rekis, president of the Adventist Church in Latvia, said, “We are very glad that Latvia has five graduates. Not all of them are or will be pastors, but they are all involved in church work in different capacities.”

“I think this was a very good program,” said Valdis Zilgalvis, president of the Adventist Church in the Baltic region. “It put considerable emphasis on church history and Bible theology. Most of our students are already ministers of local churches and they study to receive the necessary knowledge for their work.”