Staff photo by D. Patrick Harding
Kenyan graduate student Dorcas Choge, studies in the small library at the Oxford Graduate School in Dunlap. Choge, who is a social worker at a large teaching hospital in Kenya, is working on her Master's Degree in Family Life Education.

DAYTON, Tenn. — For the last few weeks, Dorcas Choge, a 35-year-old Kenyan, has spent her days alone in the Oxford Graduate School library looking for knowledge she can take back to her native land.

A medical social worker in Africa, Ms. Choge came to the graduate school in Dayton after finding an advertisement online. She said it was the quickest way to earn a graduate degree in a Christian environment.

“The program is actually very nice,” she said. “I am hoping when I go back to tell students to apply to this school.”

Oxford Graduate School in Dayton was founded in 1981 as a school where adult professionals could come and learn how to incorporate their Christian faith into their daily work.

This month the graduate school was awarded its first formal accreditation from the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools, an agency recognized by the U.S. Department of Education.

The school had been a candidate for the accreditation for several years, President Rebecca Tucker said.

“For us it means that a group of our peers from other institutions came here, evaluated the program and determined whether or not we met their standards,” Dr. Tucker said. “We do have a quality educational program going on here.”

The school has around 94 students and 24 part-time faculty. Students come from all over the nation and the globe for master’s degrees in family life education or organizational leadership or a doctorate in the sociological integration of religion and society, she said.

Counselors, nonprofit workers, social workers and financial planners come to the school to research cultures and how Christians can integrate into society, she said.

“We are not training pastors or training them to be leaders in churches,” she said.

Richard Roberts, 57, is a doctoral student at Oxford who has run a Cleveland, Tenn.-based nonprofit called Life Focus Ministries for 20 years.

“The school is meeting a niche that is sorely needed in our community and country,” Mr. Roberts said.

He said his organization works to train pastors and church leaders in management. Over time, Mr. Roberts said, he has seen churches become disconnected from community outreaches such as soup kitchens and homeless shelters.

Often church leaders and members pour their energies into congregational ministries but neglect partnerships with community organizations because, in many cases, they are worried about secular influences, he said.

For his degree, Mr. Roberts said he is researching those issues and working on developing methods to connect churches with the secular social missions in their communities.

“The school allows me to research how to best bridge the gap between congregational ministry and the culture, so that the body of Christ is more powerful in what it is doing,” he said. “There is a general fear of things that are secular. There needs to be a way for them to live their faith in the community.”

Students like Mr. Roberts and Ms. Choge come to the campus for one or two weeks per year in order to complete courses. Dr. Tucker said they also are required to conduct research on their own time at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England.

Like students, part-time faculty travel to the campus to teach. Many of the professors, retired from teaching or businesses, volunteer their time.

“This is not a job where people are counting on full compensation,” Dr. Tucker said.