Weekly Email: January 12, 2026
Student Tip: Make the Right Things Easier
My wife and I recently moved into a new house and for the first time we had some room to add a coffee bar to the kitchen area. We filled it out with an espresso machine and my personal favorite, an automatic pour-over machine called the xBloom.
The xBloom makes a human-quality pour-over with the press of a button. Add your beans, tap a recipe, and it handles the grind, water temperature, and pours.
I still do manual pour-overs regularly. I love the pace, attention it requires, and of course the taste. But for awhile I never really made a pour-over early in the morning. In fact, I would just skip the coffee first thing in the morning because 10–15 minutes extra in the morning when you have limited time trying to do bible reading, prayer, and working out can add up.
Now that friction is gone, yes my mornings now include a cup of coffee but I also noticed that when that friction disappeared, I was now drinking more coffee at other times. Before leaving the house, another one in the morning, and more because the ease of making good quality coffee had some friction removed. Without thinking I’m drinking more coffee than I was before.
Ease changes frequency. Frequency shapes formation.
James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits, forces you to look at the systems underneath your daily life. Goals and motivation are attractive and can be helpful but systems are decisive. Clear has a famous quote from his book that says:
You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
…and, as he argues, the easiest path becomes the most repeated path and repetition is formation.
A system that is easy to get into will be entered more frequently and what you enter more frequently will start shaping you into a certain kind of person. Not overnight but over time. The compounding happens whether you like it or not.
Now think about your seminary experience.
A lot of students think…and you may be one of them(!)…that they have a discipline problem when they really have a starting problem. Studying is often vague and harder than it needs to be when you begin. You sit down and you have to find the assignment directions, open the right document, remember where you left off, decide what matters, and rebuild momentum every time.
It can feel like work before the work. Meanwhile, distraction is already open. Your phone is sitting next to you , maybe out of sight, but still buzzing every once in awhile catching your attention. Email sitting there like a slot machine…there might be something you need to examine at some point but it could just be 20 other emails you don’t need to read.
You don’t have to choose distraction. You just walk into it because the entrance fee is free.
If you want to study more consistently, adjust your system. Lower the cost of starting and make the next step obvious before you stop for the day. Leave yourself a clear on-ramp so starting is easy the next time. Studying is still hard work but don’t make the start unnecessarily hard.
The same principle shows up in your personal growth as a Christian.
Many of us want to grow in more consistent Bible reading and prayer but we keep those practices behind a wall of inconvenience. The Bible is out of sight. Prayer has no time scheduled because we think that this might be unspiritual so it becomes something you want to do but then the days and weeks go by and you’re inconsistent at best.
Meanwhile, you have a perfectly engineered system for distraction. The phone is right there. Notifications are waiting. You can access a hundred voices before you’ve heard from the Lord once. That is not neutral. That’s a system. And it is shaping you.
So treat Scripture and prayer like they deserve to be treated and not as vague aspiration but as something you give a real place in your day. Give it a time. Give it a location. Give it an on-ramp so small you can do it even when you’re tired.
A simple starting point I learned in my MDiv from Dr. Don Whitney is praying through the Psalms using the date on the calendar. Read the Psalm that matches the day of the month, and then add 30 for additional options. If today is the 12th, that gives you Psalm 12, 42, 72, 102, or 132.
The point is not to be impressive. The point is to make faithfulness easier to begin because beginnings are where most people lose.
This is where as a seminary student you need to be honest with yourself. You’re not just learning good biblical and theological content but you’re building defaults for your life in ministry.
Sermons come quickly each week. Counseling needs show up uninvited. Leadership decisions pile up when you are already stretched thin. In those moments you will not suddenly become a different person because the stakes are higher. You will run the system you already built. If your system trains you to start late, scramble, and live on reactive attention, you will bring that into sermon preparation, shepherding, and leadership. You will feel the pressure and call it normal. But often it is a preventable pattern you practiced for years.
A small change in ease can create a large change in repetition. A large change in repetition creates formation. Formation shows up in the kind of student you become, the kind of Christian you become, and eventually the kind of ministry leader you become.
So make the right things easier to start. Make studying easier to enter. Make Scripture and prayer easier to begin. Make the first step obvious and close at hand.
Then make the wrong things harder to access. Put the phone out of reach during study and prayer. Turn off notifications for blocks of time. Close what distracts you before you sit down. Add friction to the things that pull you away because a frictionless distraction will always win against a difficult, vague, hard-to-start good intention.
Program News: A New Way to Experience an Online Course
Last summer, under the leadership of Jonathan Ahlgren, our Associate Vice President for Online Learning, we recorded 25210WW Early Christian Biographies in Spring 2 with Dr. Stephen Presley in a new format designed for one main reason: to make your online learning experience more engaging and more connected to real classroom dialogue.
Instead of recording only a straight-to-camera lecture or only capturing a traditional on-campus class, we tried a seminar-style recording built with online students in mind. We invited six online students to spend a week with Dr. Presley in a small classroom setting, and we recorded the whole experience: the teaching, the questions, the back-and-forth discussion, and the moments where one good question helps everyone see the material more clearly.
On-campus and online will always be different and we are not pretending they are the same. Online has real strengths you rely on such as flexibility, accessibility, the ability to learn from anywhere, and equip yourself in your current ministry. At the same time, online students can miss the texture of a live classroom, especially the way faculty and students think out loud together.
This is especially true for certain electives. Some courses are primarily built on content delivery. Others are enhanced by discussion, dialogue, and the give-and-take that happens when students are processing ideas in real time. Early Christian Biographies fits that second category. Hearing how other students ask questions, make connections, and press into the text can deepen understanding and make the learning stick.
This format is one of the ways we’re trying to close that gap even more. We want to thoughtfully create experiences that make online learning feel less isolated, while still being true to the medium and the reality of your life. The goal is a rich, serious learning experience that helps you understand, retain, and apply what you’re studying.
If you take the course, I’d love your feedback. If this format serves you well, we want to keep developing courses this way. We're planning to record another elective in this format with Dr. Andrew Walker this summer as well.
The course is 25210WW Early Christian Biographies in Spring 2.
You can view the Course Snapshot and sample lectures here.
Quick Reference of Upcoming Term Dates:
Current Week: Winter, Week 6 (January 12-19)
Spring 1 Term Begins: February 2, 2026
Spring 2 Term Begins: April 6, 2026
Register for Courses →
Spring Experiential Modular courses are full, so be on the lookout for the fall schedule if you would like a spot.
As always, thank you for reading. I’ll be back with you next week.
Brian Renshaw
Vice President, Enrollment Strategy and Global Campus
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
Resources for Online Students | Preview an Online Course | View Online Course Catalog
