The Indispensable Christian College

The Indispensable Christian College

What a difference a decade makes! Ten years ago Christian colleges ducked into the 1970s under the cloud of the question, “Would they survive the decade with strength and quality?” Economically, a “New Depression” had been declared in American higher education and Christian colleges were predicted to be the first victims. A “shrinking pool” of high school graduates was forecast for the middle of the decade, with a devastating impact upon smaller institutions. Worse yet, most Christian colleges had been written off as “invisible” in a national study of educational impact.

All of these doses of doom were being spooned out in the violent days of student revolt. Although Christian colleges were relatively immune from the rebellion, they were expected to feel the aftershock in changing moral values that would render them obsolete. No wonder grossly exaggerated rumors about the death of the Christian college circulated far and wide at the opening of the 70s.

Experts are still trying to figure out where their predictions went wrong. The 1970s was a decade of birth, growth, and maturity for Christian higher education. Enrollment increased ahead of the national average. Parents and students sacrificed for the values of the Christian campus despite rising tuition costs. After a period of adjustment and financial self-discipline, the ink on the books for the average Christian college changed from red to gray to black.

Most amazing of all against the malaise of moral deterioration in the secular culture, Christian colleges became centers for spiritual and intellectual renewal. Students who were products of the born-again movement led the way with fresh and joyful experiences in the body of Christ around the Word of God. Faculties followed with serious attempts to integrate faith and learning in the classroom. Students and faculty began to explore the dimension of Christian witness in the secular world.

Not without significance, 1979 saw the National Congress on Church-Related Colleges, an event that would have been impossible in 1969. Seven hundred delegates from every stripe of Christian college came together at the University of Notre Dame to pursue the meaning of the Christian faith in higher learning.

In the opening session, the chaplain of Furman University preached from the text, “No man can call Jesus Christ Lord except the Holy Spirit lead him.” His final plea was for a common confession around the biblical truth “Jesus Christ is Lord. We may say more but we cannot say less.” Most evangelical Christian college leaders would think it important to say more rather than less, but certainly no college that dares to claim the label Christian could say less.

As we move into the 1980s, the question for the future changes: What role will the Christian college play in the future of the church? Will the church need it to help resolve future issues, meet future needs, and achieve future goals? Yes.

Future issues in the church are already surfacing. From every sector, there are cries for help on ethical issues. Yet when codes of ethics are written and courses in ethics are proposed, the efforts founder in the absence of absolutes. One cannot stand on moral quicksand. Sooner or later the church will have to extract itself from the easy alliance with the secular culture and address these moral concerns. When it does, the Christian college will be indispensable because enlightened understanding of complicated issues cannot be separated from revealed understanding of the Word of God. As the church works its way through the quagmire of a culture in conflict with its faith, the Christian college will serve as a guide.

Future needs of the church in the 1980s are also becoming evident. Spirit-filled, visionary leadership for the ministry and the laity will be needed. At Christian college campuses at the present time is a generation of students who have the qualities to take the church far beyond its present ministry. In twentieth-century versions of the Holy Club and the Haystack Group, they pray early in the morning, study throughout the day, and search the Scriptures late at night. Without reservation, they are willing to see what God can do with the fully committed life.

If world evangelization is the goal of the church for the 1980s, the Christian college is indispensable. Evangelization is a method that reaches far beyond passing out tracts and preaching in the streets. To evangelize the world, we must develop and use every resource for Christian witness. Missionaries without portfolio in government, economics, and communications will stand alongside missionaries under appointment with stethoscopes, textbooks, and hammers, and Bibles in their hands. Across the country, Christian colleges are already gearing up for that future with career development programs that bring faith and work together.

No other institution can resolve these future issues as well as the Christian college. Our churches, homes, and secular schools are not equipped to integrate faith and learning on moral issues, to identify and develop future Christian leaders, or to relate professional careers to world evangelization. If the Christian college did not exist, it would have to be invented. It does exist with honor and strength. Thus, in the 1980s the Christian college deserves more friends, funds, and freshmen. □

Others Say

Calling for a Yardstick for Excellence

When Parsons College was alive, it shared two things with Harvard University. Both boasted of the beauty of their campuses and the excellence of their academics. Beauty, of course, is a relative thing. Excellence need not be as relative, particularly if one recognizes a distinction between the “excellence of rhetoric” and the “excellence of record.” In their academic bulletins and brochures, Harvard and Parsons both had the rhetoric, but only Harvard had the record. The point of that distinction impinges most painfully on today’s evangelical Christian colleges.

With the rapid growth of the evangelical movement, many established Christian liberal arts colleges are growing and new ones are being founded. All go under the label “Christian colleges.” All make a claim of academic excellence.

In order to qualify to be on the faculty of a Christian college, the candidates must have a firm commitment to the Christian doctrines and mission of the school and hold a good command of their academic disciplines. The spiritual commitment comes first, for all Christian colleges insist that their professors integrate the Christ of their faith with the concepts of their discipline.

Most Christian liberal arts colleges now are able to boast of regional accreditation. Unfortunately, the impression is often given that accreditation, the minimum level of “excellence,” has been elevated to the maximum. Full accreditation, which frequently took a long time to attain, became not only a worthy goal, but the final goal. Because most of the Christian colleges boast of regional accreditation, the distinction between the “excellence of rhetoric” and the “excellence of record” tilts heavily in favor of rhetoric. What can be done, then, to isolate from the pack the colleges with the recognized record of academic excellence?

The solution is simple. Just as the Christian liberal arts colleges decided to join the secular and private institutions in seeking regional accreditation, they should also join these colleges in seeking to establish chapters of Phi Beta Kappa, the society that has stood for academic excellence in the liberal arts as far back as 1776. Such chapters on campuses are more than window dressing; their presence testifies that the honored colleges have passed the society’s academic scrutiny for the “excellence of record.” The presence or absence of a Phi Beta Kappa chapter is certainly not the only way to measure excellence. But of some 2,000 four-year colleges, only 225 have Phi Beta chapters, and almost anyone’s list of top schools is drawn from their number.

It is important to note that to be considered for membership, the Christian liberal arts colleges will not be asked to violate the integrity of their purpose or mission. This is made clear in Phi Beta Kappa’s stated criteria for “The Founding of New Chapters.” Those criteria state in part; “Because of the great difference among institutions and even among the various aspects of an institution, such as the number and kind of books in the library, the nature of the teaching and the publications of the faculty, the character of the students, the careers of the graduates, and the general attitude toward scholarship, no absolute standards can be formulated. The Society is above all interested in the development of the liberally educated men and women. In measuring the success with which institutions work toward this goal, the [review] Committee evaluates each institution individually.”

“Each institution,” the criteria go on to note, “is expected to produce both qualitative and quantitative evidence that it has a promising student body, a scholarly faculty, a library and other educational facilities sufficient for the course offerings, an adequate and dependable income, and most significant of all, an educational program that is liberal in emphasis and objectives.”

“Phi Beta Kappa holds that a liberal education is not primarily vocational. A liberal education seeks to quicken man’s mind and spirit by encouraging him to achieve his full capacities.” No reasonable Christian institution will disagree with this general concept of a liberal education. “The greater part of an undergraduate’s time, if he is getting a liberal education, … will be devoted to subjects which reveal man in his relations to the world around him, subjects which necessarily bring into view problems of taste and feeling, of individual and group responsibility, of the meaning of life as a whole.… It may be assumed that courses in literature, languages, philosophy, religion, the fine arts, history, the social sciences, mathematics, and the natural sciences will fall within these areas.”

All such subjects and courses are taught at most Christian colleges. Some questions remain: Are they taught to promising students or to recruits who are highly deficient in the basics of reading and writing, let alone science and mathematics? Are they taught by competent faculty members who stay abreast of their disciplines and contribute to them by their scholarly pursuits, or are they taught by connoisseurs of dated knowledge? Are the library and financial resources good enough to support the demands of the college, or are these resources so weak that the college struggles from year to year?

Needless to say, not all colleges can reply to such questions in a satisfactory way. The road to academic mediocrity—even accreditation—is wide and easy, but the road to excellenge is narrow and difficult. No Christian college has taken the Phi Beta Kappa road and arrived at the summit. Some Christian colleges should try.

Such excellence, the Phi Beta Kappa society assumes, begins at the faculty level. Accordingly, a committee of five society members who teach at a given college must initiate the application for the society’s rigorous evaluation process. Surely there are many Christians who are also members of Phi Beta Kappa and who are pursuing a college teaching career. One relatively new and staunchly conservative college of which I know recently added two Phi Beta members to its English faculty. The older, more prestigious, Christian colleges certainly can attract such faculty.

Until a Christian liberal arts college achieves the status of Phi Beta Kappa excellence, or something equivalent, the non-Christian world is entitled to bypass all our rhetoric and ask: “Is there really an excellent Christian college?”

SUHAIL HANNA

Chairman, Division of Humanities

Sterling College, Sterling, Kansas

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