Another word about their journals.
I can understand why someone might want to require that their students keep journals. They want them to develop the discipline of reading and musing on the Scriptures. It's a good habit to be into. But there is this thinking among Evangelicals, and especially among Pentecostals, that if one is guided by something other than his own thoughts and feelings, then he isn't being guided by the Spirit, and that's just bunk, and it leads to a lot of other foolish thinking.
As soon as hear someone say, "I asked the Lord what He wanted me to preach today..." it just turns me off. No, you don't have a hotline God, and no, this doesn't lend any more authority to your sermon than the accurate exposition of the Scriptures would. And yet these same folks allow the liturgy of the Roman church to suggest their subject matters at Christmas and Easter, and they welcome the suggestions of secular society to determine their topics on Mothers' Day, Fathers' Day, and Thanksgiving.
I remember a during a particular trying time years ago, that I discovered The Book of Common Prayer. The church had divided the Psalms into small, manageable segments of morning and evening prayers. Followed through with, one prays the entire book of Psalms every thirty days.
What a help that was to me! I discovered that the Psalms are actually the prayers of the Spirit of Christ offered up on my behalf. Where the Psalmist appeals to his own righteousness, that is Christ invoking his righteousness on my behalf. Where the Psalmist mourns his own sins, that is Christ taking and owning mine. There is no aspect of the human experience that is not touched upon in the Psalms.
Anyway, the point is that I've found that the church has a rich tradition from which we may freely draw, and it is very much a help to us in every way, and very much an operation of the Spirit. A liturgy is not a bad thing. I think something like requiring, or strongly suggesting, Spurgeon's Morning and Evening, or even better...the Psalter as divided in The Book of Common Prayer, would have been a better and more manageable help to an overworked student, and would have done more to develop true spirituality than the requirement of those infernal journals. I think his response, even if not in the right spirit, was the deserved one.
