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Of Mice and Ministry
An Historical Critique of Campus Ministry
Open just about any collection of Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes and you will
likely come across the following verse:
Pussy cat, pussy cat, where have you been?
I’ve been to London to visit the Queen.
Pussy cat, pussy cat what did you there?
I frightened a little mouse under her chair.
I ran across this a few years ago when my youngest son – now 6 – was moving
through the nursery rhyme phase. I was quite taken by it and actually did
some research on it. To my surprise I learned that: We don’t know who
wrote it but most people believe it describes an actual historic event.
Apparently, during the reign of Elizabeth I a cat chased a mouse under her
chair.
I thought it was an allegory. Now I’d be lying if I told you that I
thought it was written with college ministry in mind, but I did think it
described it quite well. You see, in many ways, those of us in college
ministry, those of us who live and work in the shadows of the great halls
of learning, are walking in the courts of kings and queens. We have daily
access to one of the great epicenters of power and influence – the Western
University, But I fear that instead of being engaged in matters of state,
we are content to chase small animals. That may be an overstatement – you
can decide when I’m through. It’s certainly not a very warm introduction – but I’m afraid it will have to do.
I had initially entitled this lecture “Ministering at the Cross Road of
Jerusalem AND Athens: An Apology for College Ministry.” And I was planning
to argue that college ministry is worth your life. It was going to be an
“apology” in a classic sense of Plato and Socrates, not in the contemporary
sense of “I’m sorry.” In fact, it was suppose to be a feel good piece.
I am invited to a number of gatherings like yours and typically end up in
some sort of assessment of college ministry. It’s not small stuff, but
it’s not big picture stuff. The question is generally, “How have we been
doing over the last five years?” I’ve wanted to take a broader view.
What I really want to do is encourage campus ministers that their labors
are worth it even if it’s hard. “You may be struggling. You may have come
here thinking it’s time to move on. Get a “real” job. Be a senior pastor.
But I wanted to say, “Not so fast. This is where the action is. Campus
Ministry is the cutting-edge of the church.”
That was why I had chosen the title I did: Ministry at the Crossroads of
Jerusalem AND Athens. Jerusalem was, of course, the center of the church.
And although Alexandria was the intellectual hub, Athens was the college
town of its day. And my title, as I had initially written it out, had
capitalized the AND between Jerusalem and Athens.
My interest is on the intersection of the two – the soul and the mind, the
heart and the head, the church and the academy. Call it what you want, I
think it’s the place where college ministry lives or dies. And I was going
to argue that:
. This is the most exciting place to be because the University is the
most strategic institution in the world.
. College students – and college age students – have historically been
on the vanguard of God’s work in the world.
. Ministry of this kind is desperately needed.
Under the first category I was prepared to say that college ministry is
strategic because the university is strategic, and to build the case around
Malik’s observations in A Christian Critique of the University. If you
don’t know of Malik, you should try to find his work. He was an impressive
figure by any measure, starting with his Harvard Ph.D, his numerous
teaching posts around the US and Lebanon, his published works on all kind
of topics in journals in the US, Europe and the Near East and his 50
honorary doctorates from all of the most impressive schools. And in
addition to those accomplishments Malik is – or at least was – the only
person in the history of the UN to hold the top five spots.
In his book, A Christian Critique of the University, which is a rewrite of
two lectures he gave at the University of Waterloo back in 1982, Malik
states that the University is one of the greatest creations of Western
Civilization. He lists seven major institutions – family, church, state,
business, the professions, media, and the university. He then goes on to
write, “This great Western institution, the university, dominates the world
today more than any other institution: more than the church, more than the
government, more than all other institutions.” And the main question he
asks and does a pretty thoughtful job of initially exploring is, “What does
Jesus think of the university?” And in fact he writes:
In view of the unique place and power of the university today I know
of no more important question to ask than: What does Jesus Christ
think of the university? All other questions, without exception, are
relatively silly when this question looms in the mind.
Now, we are free to disagree with Malik, and many would. Today, more than
a few would suggest that the media has surpassed the University in terms of
sheer influence and others would argue that business has, but I’m not ready
to join either camp. The media is powerful because it is ubiquitous and
because it broadcasts ideas-but I think it seldom develops them. And
business is a mighty force, in many cases eclipsing government, but I’d
still point to the academy for two reasons. The university is the locus of
much of the thinking that hits the airwaves and drives the economy and the
university shapes the leaders of all seven institutions.
The University is the center of thought in the world. There are thoughtful
people outside the academies. There are centers of R & D outside the
Universities, but, there is a lot more thinking and a lot more research
being done in or through universities than anywhere else. So, the
University provides the ideas that shape the world. And the University
shapes the leaders that shape the world. Bill Gates and Michael Dell
aside, most of the leaders in most of the fields are college graduates.
And in the world the situation is even more pronounced. Only one percent
of the world’s population attends college. Those one percent lead. So,
college ministry is strategic because the University is strategic.
I was then going to argue that College Ministry is strategic because
Christian college students are strategic (I mean Christian students at both
Christian and non-Christian schools). I was basically going to build my
case on the history of missions. Looking at a number of student movements – both European and US – such as The Hay Stack Prayer Movement of 1806.
Thirdly I was going to argue that University Ministry is worth your life
because it’s so necessary. Students need College Ministers because college
is a very unique time in someone’s life. It’s a time of freedom, free-
thinking and dis-equilibrium. It’s a time when we are exposed to different
ideas, values and people. Many students loose their way. Many find their
way. And they both need someone who loves Christ and who loves them
standing beside them. These are important years. It’s a time to make
important decisions, jobs, spouses, etc. One psychologist has noted that:
“a critical decade exists between the ages of 16 and 26 where most of
the decisions that will shape the next fifty years are
made…including the choice of occupation, the decision to marry, and
the establishment of values and principles by which life is governed.
What makes this period of even more significance is the impact of
early mistakes and errors in judgment. They can undermine all that is
to follow.”
Students need someone to stand along side them. College Ministry is
important because students need us. College Ministry is important because
the Church needs us. College students are its future.
Finally, I was going to say, you should choose college ministry because it
is a privilege. There is no better place to be in the Fall than on a
campus. I love the idea of the university and I love the ideas of the
university. And if there is a better place to find a large number of
people, all about the same age, all exploring – at least occasionally – the
big issues of life, many of them without much by way of obligations on
their time and many of them willing and able to respond immediately to a
challenge, I don’t know where it is.
Yes, more students are working. Yes, more are broken. And yes, this makes
our work even harder. But they are university students. They are starting
out life. They are alive and free. They are often not married. They are
not raising kids. They are not paying a mortgage. They are not caring for
elderly parents. They are not even cooking their own meals. And they are
all together. College Ministry is wonderful.
I was going to say all of that and more because I love college ministry.
And I really don’t think there is a higher calling than that given to those
who have been called to ministry at the crossroads of Jerusalem and Athens.
But….there is this issue of chasing mice.
College ministry is – on the one hand – doing fairly well these days. There
is a heightened increase in spirituality on campus. The number of students
who are attending both large and small group gatherings is up. The number
of students who are involved in some type of mission project or outreach to
the poor is up. Interest in racial reconciliation is up. In fact, there
is a growing sense of the need to marry the best of the recent past – evangelism and discipleship – with a broader call to social action.
On the one hand, good things are happening, and I am thrilled. However, on
balance I don’t think I am as optimistic about our situation as most people
appear to be. I’m not impressed with the larger numbers for a couple
reasons. For starters, there are more students attending college – so our
growth doesn’t reflect as much of an increased market share as we might
think. And secondarily I believe that some of this growth reflects
sociology not regeneration. Campuses ministries are increasingly the last
vestiges of good around and those folks who do not want to drink or sleep
around are drawn to our events in order to do something not out of a love
for Jesus.
But the real reason I am a bit frustrated with campus ministry is because I
believe that most people in college ministry define their calling too
narrowly. And, as a result, I think that they (we) feel better about things
than we should. The truth is, we’ve lost the University. She is not what
she once was.
I am going to set aside any focus on European higher education because, as
I understand it, Oxford, Cambridge, Heidelberg and Sorbonne were initially
based on the Brotherhood of Pythagoras and the Academy of Plato, two
ancient Greek intellectual communities. Instead I’m going to limit our
focus to the origins of higher education of US institutions. And, as the
record will show, these were unabashedly Christian endeavors from their
beginning, but, for the most part, are not now.
Consider Harvard. Founded in 1636, it was the first college in the New
World and for 60 years it was the only college in the New World. As you
probably well know, Harvard was founded to train ministers for the new
land. And its initial vision drips with evangelical zeal. Its
motto was “In Christi Gloriam.” The word on its shield was “veritas” or
“truth” – which to the founders was not an abstract social construct but a
Person. It was synonymous with Christ-and the mission of the school was to
train clergy. John Harvard stated in his bequest:
Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to
consider well the main ends of his life and studies: to know God and
Jesus Christ, which is eternal life; and to lay Christ in the bottom
as the only foundation of knowledge and learning, and to see the Lord
as the giver of all wisdom. Let everyone seriously set himself by
prayer in secret to see Christ as Lord and Master.
Initially all the school taught was the Bible, with a little Greek and
Latin on the side. I mean, if you were really wild you took algebra. And
its primary purpose was to perpetuate the clergy. The same was true of
William & Mary, Yale, Princeton, Brown and the first wave of state schools.
William and Mary was the second college founded. It came into being in
1693 as an Anglican school and the president, the Rev. William Smith, “gave
the students all the Anglicanism (read Christianity) the traffic would
bear.”
Yale was third, founded in 1701 as a Congregationalist school, and founded
because it was felt that Harvard was already slipping from orthodoxy.
Cotton Mather was the first president and he stated that the primary goal
was “that every student shall consider the main end of his study to wit to
know God in Jesus Christ and answerably lead a godly, sober life.
Princeton came in 1746 as a Presbyterian School. The University of
Pennsylvania was founded in 1751. (Or 1755, I’ve read both dates). And
while Benjamin Franklin was the key figure – and didn’t have the same kind
of Christian zeal other founders had at the time – George Whitefield,
the evangelist, was very prominent. In fact, in 1914, the University
unveiled a statue of Whitefield, calling him the inspirer and original
trustee of the University.
I could go on. In an advertisement for Columbia University, which was
founded in 1754, the President, Samuel Johnson, said that the school’s
primary purpose was to:
…to teach and engage the children to know God in Jesus Christ and to
love and serve Him in all sobriety, godliness, and righteousness of
life with a perfect heart and willing mind…
Brown was founded in 1764 as a Baptist School. Rutgers was founded in 1766
as a Dutch Reformed School. Dartmouth in 1769 as a Congregationalist
school. These were institutions where there was no campus ministers per se – at least not as we think of them today – because there was no
demonstrable need for any. The development of mature Christians was
organic to the mission of the university. And to that end the faculty were
campus ministers. Virtually everyone was a Christian. The President
was almost always a prominent pastor. Chapel was required. And the
education you received was decidedly Christian.
This basis for higher education continued for years, really up until the
emergence of higher education around the Civil War, when a Vermont
congressman by the name of Justin Smith Morrill pushed the Morrill Act.
This bill, which was signed into law by Lincoln in 1862, changed things
quite a bit. Prior to the legislation, education was focused on the
classics, ancient languages and moral philosophy. Morrill wanted practical
help for farmers. But the unintended consequence of the bill was that the
church lost its role in shaping higher education because they were no
longer signing the biggest donation checks, the government was.
And to further exacerbate the situation, at the same time that government
began to provide major funding, a number of folks, such as Rockefeller,
Johns Hopkins, Leland Stanford, Duke and Cornell made large gifts to
universities, most of which now bear their name. These folks were more
given to social Darwinism than biblical altruism. So the Christian
foundation was further eroded.
But, don’t miss the bigger point. In its genesis, higher education in the
United States was a Christian endeavor. And even until the late 19th
century the church’s role in education was profound. In fact, in 1840, 67
percent of state universities had ministers serving as presidents. And in
1885, a University of Illinois student was expelled from the school for
willfully missing compulsory chapel. I don’t know if you’ve been to the U
of I lately – but with the exception of the Urbana Missions Conference
every three years nothing they do suggests they are requiring chapel.
We’ve come a long way.
I don’t mean to overstate my point. Not everything about school back then
was wonderful. The schools were, for the most part, only for men – white
men at that. And quite frankly, I’m not a big fan of compulsory chapel and
I’m a pastor. But we’ve come a long way and it’s been mostly south.
Consider the state of higher education today.
Today, universities are not only not concerned with training pastors, but
with the exception of certain prohibitions against cheating and additional
prohibitions against murder and rape (and a few other extreme anti-social
behaviors that residential schools have to enforce to prevent anarchy) most
schools have given up advocating any kind of character development.
It’s not part of their mission.
In fact, at most schools the faculty would spend the rest of their lives
trying to agree on what kind of character they should be trying to develop.
Who defines character? What morals are we after? How – and who – would
decide what behaviors were positive and on what basis would they make their
case?
Secondly, today, universities are not only not basing their definition of
truth on the Bible, but they are likely to have a difficult time accepting
the idea of truth. Furthermore, the fundamental epistemological
assumptions of the University invalidate the very idea of special
revelation. If you suggest that God spoke to you through a book you
are likely to not get a degree. You are almost certainly not going to be
allowed to stick around and teach. The modernist doesn’t like the idea of
special revelation because it violates their scientific approach to
establishing truth. And the postmodernist may approve of spirituality but
not an exclusive truth claim that violates their celebration of tolerance.
Thirdly – and largely to the same point – today’s universities are not only
not recognizing theology as the Queen of Sciences, but they are not
teaching it at all. It has been replaced by religion, which is an
altogether different discipline.
Now I hesitate to try to offer a quick definition of religion because the
word doesn’t lend itself to quick definitions. The truth is we don’t
even know its derivation. (Religion is from religio which means “to bind.”
But, to bind to what? God? Each other?) Religion is anthropocentric
while theology is theocentric. And religion buys into the dualistic
epistemology of the Enlightenment, which presumes that knowledge is best
gained by objectifying the world by viewing it as an externality. It’s
approached as a scientific discipline-something to be known about but not
known or experienced. And not acted on. You can get an “A” in a religion
class without any faith at all. And receiving an “A” without any life
change could be in keeping with the goals of the class. The question is
did you learn the information. But the same could not be said for
theology. I suppose you could ace the class without having your heart
changed, but any Christian teaching the class would say that they had
failed. The goal is not to know about God, but, as Jeremiah writes, to
know Him. It’s not knowledge for knowledge sake, but as Paul said,
that we might hold every thought captive to Christ.
This is different from how things were initially established. Remember
Cotton Mather’s words: “every student shall consider the main end of his
study to know God in Jesus Christ and answerably lead a godly, sober life.”
Fourthly, it’s not just that theology is dethroned and dismissed, having
been replaced by religion, but today religion departments are either being
folded under sociology, anthropology or dropped altogether.
Finally, at today’s universities – with the exception of some Christian or
historically Christian private schools – not only do they not require
or even offer chapel services, but the University is occasionally denying
Christian groups the right to meet on campus.
Forget the Christian origins of the school. Forget academic freedom and
free speech. The University is de-recognizing groups or requiring them to
sell their soul to be allowed to remain. There are actual tolerance
statements that – by their very nature are intolerant – that some groups
are being asked to sign or they are being threatened with being “de-
recognized.”
Do you see what has happened? If we go to 30,000 feet and look down on the
University with a broader view, we can tell that we have a mess. What
started out as an effort to train God-fearing, Christ-honoring, disciplined
scholars and servants, has become something altogether different.
I don’t think I am out of place in pointing out that higher education today
is a multi-billion dollar financial enterprise that is driven almost
exclusively by money. And I don’t mean this in terms of sports teams being
the tail that wags the dog – though that happens. What I mean is that
truth is now increasingly defined by the market. The programs that bring
in revenue are the ones that are fed. And truth is defined by market
value.
What started as a program that developed young men and women as people – that helped them develop a philosophy of life so that they could think and
contribute to the greater good of society – is now seldom that. Read the
critiques of higher education. It’s not just that Johnny can’t read as
much as it is that Johnny and Suzy can’t think. And it’s not so much that
they haven’t been able to pull together a coherent philosophy of life, it’s
that they are seldom trying. They don’t even see it as a goal.
Assembling a philosophy of life used to be one of the main purposes of a
university education. Mark Noll, a prominent historian, wrote the
following in his lengthy introduction to Ringenberg’s book, The Christian
College: A History of Protestant Higher Education in America:
The capstone of the college experience in those days (early 19th
century) was a year-long course, often taught by the college president
in ‘moral philosophy’ or ‘mental science.’ It was a course with vast
horizons, much as Witherspoon had set it out, including everything
having to do with human beings and their social relations (the
subjects to be studied under this rubric would later become the
separate disciplines of psychology, philosophy, religion, political
science, sociology, anthropology, economics, and jurisprudence). The
course almost always included an investigation of epistemology in
general and the epistemological foundations of Christianity in
particular. The purpose of the course was to provide final Christian
integration for the college career and final exhortations concerning
the kind of citizenship good Christians should practice.
The goal was to pull together all of the disconnected bits of information
into a comprehensive whole and to do so within a Christian framework. It
was attempting to integrate faith and learning. And while it wasn’t
perfect – and Noll offers his critique of the approach, saying it had much
to commend it but some deficiencies as well – at least it was tried.
Today it is seldom being attempted. And when I talk with students and
professors it is seldom held up as a goal. We have so sub-divided the
world that no one even hopes the master their little corner of it, let
alone hold onto the big picture. Instead they are taking classes, to get a
degree, to get a job, to make money.
Now, it’s not all that bad. Having just yelled that the sky is falling, or
maybe more to the point, that it already fell, let me try to put some
distance between myself and Chicken Little.
. There are good things happening. There is a resurgence of interest in
faith and in evangelical scholarship.
. There are a growing number of evangelical campus ministries that now
define themselves in ways the reach far beyond evangelism and
discipleship.
. There is a growing sense, even outside the church, that there is more
to life than the modern categories we’ve reduced it to.
But if you measure the effectiveness of college ministry by the number of
students who are showing up this month at a large group praise gathering,
you’ll feel one way about it. And if you measure the effectiveness of
college ministry by the state of the University – especially if you
contrast the state of today’s University against the stated goals of the
University when it was founded – you’ll feel altogether different. Both
measures have some validity, but by the second, which surely is the more
important, well….someone should apologize.
And that is why at the outset, in a talk calling you to college ministry, I
want you to understand that the call is to college ministry in the broadest
of senses. We have to stop narrowly defining our mission if we ever hope
to fulfill our task. In the recent past we – and by “we” I mean
evangelicals – have too often restricted ourselves to the field of
evangelism and discipleship and I am saying that the world has suffered
because of it.
Now, I am a fan of both evangelism and discipleship. A big fan. But, even
if we broadly define those terms and have them include large group meetings
and mission trips and retreats and leadership development and the like, it
is still too narrow. Malik says it best in his book, A Christian Critique
of the University.
The University is a clear-cut fulcrum with which to move the world.
The problem here is for the church to realize that no greater service
can it render both itself and the cause of the Gospel, with which it
is entrusted, than to try to recapture the universities for Christ on
whom they were all originally founded. One of the best ways of
treating the macrocosm is through the handle of the universities in
which millions of youths destined to positions of leadership spend, in
rigorous training, between four and ten years of the most formative
period of their life. More potently than by any other means, change
the University and you change the world. This means much more,
however, than converting a student here and changing a professor
there; such converting and changing, while necessary and while it must
continue, is peripheral and rather pathetic when it comes to the real
character and magnitude of the task; those who interpret the challenge
of the university only in these terms miss the whole point; they are
either not university graduates themselves, or, if they are, they
failed to grasp the meaning of the phrase “the state of the mind and
the spirit in the university as a whole”; the “wholeness” of
university existence has escaped them. It means, rather, responsible
concern for the contents of the curriculum, how the curriculum came to
be what it is, the kind of ideas, attitudes, fundamental
interpretation of history and society and man and morals and destiny
and being it imparts; it means thinking of the central university
policy, regardless of whether it came about by drift or by design,
thinking of the kind of spiritual climate and frame of mind it fosters
as an ongoing rooted institution both by the topics and practices it
includes and the topics and practices it excludes.”
Now, perhaps that is more than you thought you signed up for. And, I will
admit that it is stated more strongly than I am comfortable stating it. I
can not bring myself to suggest that evangelism and discipleship are
“peripheral and rather pathetic.” But, this is my initial challenge to
you.
I am making the case that college ministry is worth your life. I want you
to understand what I mean by college ministry. When we allow the
University to relegate us to the periphery, when we do our work outside of
the central aspect of the University, when we become, in any sense, similar
to another club – an intramural team, the Young Republicans or the debate
squad – we have already failed. And my observation is that, though the
University occasionally tries to put us in a box, most of us are content to
go there quite willingly.
Now, lest I be misunderstood, I am not talking about being content to take
just a little bit of a student’s time. And I am not talking about
believing that we are no more important than the chess club or hall
council. No one in this room believes that. In fact, what I’m arguing is
almost the opposite. I mean, we don’t engage the university as a
university and we don’t engage university students as university students,
we operate independent of the university as a whole. We act as if they
don’t exist, just as they act as if we don’t exist. And that is not our
calling.
We are called to stand in the center of the University as prophets and
pastors, and to engage the students, faculty and staff in the broadest ways
possible. This includes evangelism and discipleship. And it also includes
issues of social justice, such as racial reconciliation. But it also
includes the world of ideas.
How we go about carrying out this task is a bit beyond the scope of this
talk. And it will be a real challenge. But it needs to happen. I firmly
believe that the University needs College Ministers more than ever before.
Someone needs to critique the thinking that is going on. Remind people
what ultimately matters. And to do so without being bashful.
Let us not forget, the grand order of things goes as follows: God first and
everything else later. The University doesn’t get this. No institution
that is so arrogant – that so misconstrues the cosmic order of things – can
survive, even if they have a 13 billion dollar endowment. But how we go
about fulfilling this calling is a bit beyond me.
For starters, the University is one of the most complex entities on the
planet. Huge enterprises with many stake holders: students, parents and
faculty and alumni to start, but also big business and the government. And
competition is fierce.
Again, no more history lessons, but as I’ve tried to make clear, the
University is struggling to determine what its mission is. What is it
trying to do? Who does it serve?
In, The Campus Ministry, a 1964 publication from Judson Press, George
Earnshaw opens by noting that the former general secretary of the National
Student Christian Federation, Herluf Jensen, has asked this “disturbing
university question.”
In light of our culture’s need for engineers, scientists and highly
trained technicians-especially in light of the rapid pace of change.
(And he wrote this almost 40 years ago). Can institutions of higher
learning in a democracy remain sufficiently free to be concerned about
arts and letters (“the humanities”) or whether they will gradually
succumb to becoming mere training schools for ‘robot-type’ men.”
And later in the book Milton Froyd, who back in the 1940s was connected
with Colgate Rochester Divinity School where he served as Dean among other
things, wrote that someone needs to help the University strip off the
layers of secondary issues to get to the fundamental problem of Christian
higher education:
Whether [the] institutions of higher learning are going to remain free
to serve their own distinctive functions as agents of God in the world
or whether they are to become, wittingly or unwittingly, agents of the
culture…”
He astutely analyzed the problem by concluding that the university is a:
“symbol of a new kind of lostness in the world. There was a time when
the lost soul was symbolized by the derelict on skid row, and
salvation was symbolized in the succor offered to man in his weakness,
helplessness and failure. But in our day…we are most likely to
encounter the lost soul not in his weakness but in his strength.”
Now things have changed. There is a different set of issues facing higher
education and the mission of the university is being carried out in a new
culture and climate. But, I submit, someone still needs to help the
University strip off the layers of secondary issues. Today’s institutions
are not producing whole people.
Secondly, you only have to spend a bit of time on campus to know that they
know that they are confused. Someone needs to stand alongside the faculty
and donors and coaches and students and view the University through the
eyes of faith. To listen, as Malik says, “to what the University is silent
about. And to figure out why.” To speak lovingly and prophetically to
the institution. To care for them and for the people in them. And I mean
this for both Christian and secular schools.
Now, this is a very high calling and I need to be careful how I go about
making this case. In the best of settings there are a lot of ways to get
it wrong. And, it almost goes without saying that the University is
unlikely to listen to anyone that is arrogant and self-righteous,
especially if they are only 25 years old.
It will require folks who are wise [35] and humble and probably folks with
a good sense of humor. It will also require people who stay in one place
long enough to build relationships. Will Willimon, whom I’m mentioning
cautiously, probably does this as well as anyone I know. (I say that I
mention him cautiously because all I really know for sure about Willimon is
that he is considerably smarter than I am. Sometimes I think he’s
brilliant – especially when he holds a mirror up to the University. And
though I don’t often initially like it, when he holds a mirror up to
evangelicals, I often come around to see his point and laugh or cry or do
whatever is appropriate. But sometimes he says things that I think are
flat out wrong and ought not to be said).
In any case, Willimon has said that when he took his job as Dean of the
Chapel and Minister to the University at Duke he was told by his
predecessor that his job was to be the conscience of the University.
Willimon rejected that. Said he wasn’t up for that job. And he moved in
the direction laid out by Leslie Newbigen towards the idea of being a
missionary to the university. In part because he believes that it requires
real cross-cultural skills. Whatever metaphor works, the point is, he is
as good of model as I know of right now. And it is not just the University
that needs us.
So, in summary, I simply return to my initial challenge: Good things are
happening in college ministry. There is growth. There is an alliance of
evangelism and social action. There is an interest in community and
worship. There are reasons to be encouraged. But, from where I sit,
things are not going as well as most everyone else seems to think. And my
biggest concern is that we – campus ministers – have stepped down from the
larger challenge before us. We have focused on evangelism and discipleship
in narrow ways. We understand ourselves – or define ourselves – in ways
that are not central to the University itself. We operate on its borders.
And in doing so everyone, students and faculty, Christians and non-
Christians, even the University and the world, are poorer for it.
———————————-
[1] The Annotated Mother Goose, William S. Baring-Gould and Ceil Baring-
Gould, Bramhall House, New York, 1962, p. 116f.
[2] Malik was President of the General Assembly, President of the Economic
and Social Council, President of the Security Council and Chairman of the
Human Rights Commission.
[3] Malik, page 24.
[4] Evan Hunter, World Christian, page. 34.
[5] For the record, the growth is projected to continue for the next two
decades, rising by almost 20%.The Campus Ministry Update, June 2000, page
2.
[6] These institutions had evolved from that and possessed a basically
Christian foundation at the time they launched the American institutions.
But their initial beginnings were Greek not Christian. Philosophical not
Biblical.. Charles Malik, A Christian Critique of the University, IVP,
p. 15.
[8] In the introduction to Ringenberg’s work he states that, “One could use
many themes in tracing the history of American higher education (e.g. the
increase in the number of colleges and the size of their enrollments as the
country expanded westward, the growing democratization of the student
bodies, the evolution of the curricula, the growth of the extracurricula,
and the increasing role of the state and federal governments).” But, he
goes on to say that, “The most significant theme, however, is the changing
influence of the Christian worldview in the intellectual life of the
colleges.” (Ringenberg, page vii).
[9] Massachusetts Bay was not the oldest colony in the New World but the
“unusually well-educated and spiritually earnest Puritans waited only six
years to found Harvard primarily because they feared that if they delayed
much longer they would risk leaving ‘an illiterate ministry to the churches
when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.’”
[10] After God had carried us safe to New England, and wee had builded our
houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, rear’d convenient places
for God’s worship, and settled a civil government: one of the next things
we longed for, and looked after was to advance learning, and to perpetuate
it to prosperity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the Churches,
when our present ministers shall lie in the dust. (New England’s First
Fruits, 1643, as founded in American Christianity: Historical
Interpretation with Representative Documents, ed. Hilarie S. Smith, et al.
New York: Scribner, 1960-1963, I, 125.
[11] The Search for Veritas at Harvard and Beyond: An Interview with Kelly
Monroe, The Ivy Jungle Report, Vol. 5, Fall, 1997.
[12] Arthur V. Chitty, The Episcopal Church in Education (Cincinatti,
n.d.), p. 10.
[13] During its early years so many of Harvard’s students went into the
ministry that many referred to the college as the “school of prophets” and
the students as the “sons of prophets.” But by the eighteenth century a
growing number of New Englanders felt that Harvard was wavering doctrinally
and that it was now a school where no true prophets taught and which real
prophets denounced. Among the leading denouncers was Increase Mather, who
served as Harvard’s president from 1685 – 1701. Initially Harvard moved
from Calvinism towards Arminianism and then towards Unitarianism which
became its most characteristic theological expression by the early
nineteenth century. (See Ringenburg, page 38, Hudson, “Founding Harvard,”
p. 50f; Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636 – 1936
(Cambridge, 1936). When Calvinists could not maintain Harvard they sought
to establish Yale. And when they felt that they were losing Yale to
Anglicanism they moved quickly. (In 1722 a rumor circulated that President
Timothy Cutler and tutor Daniel Brown were beginning to accept Anglicanism.
The Trustees conducted an investigation which confirmed their worst fears
and so they dismissed both Cutler and Brown and determined that: 1) the
students would be taught Calvinist Theology and none other; 2) that every
officer of the college must publicly subscribe to the Westminster
Confession of Faith and the Saybrook Platform of the Congregational
churches in Connecticut before receiving an appointment. Yale also forbade
their students from attending Episcopal Church services in New Haven.
(Ringenburg, page 39).
[14] See Franklin’s treatise on ???
[15] It is likely that one of the reasons Pennsylvania had primarily
secular goals for its higher education is that the dominant denomination in
the State was the Quakers and they did not choose to educate their clergy.
(Ringenberg, p. 38).
[16] Columbia was founded in 1754, originally as King’s College, by the New
York Legislature. And the land was given by New York’s Trinity Church, with
the provision that the president of the school be a member of the church of
England.
[17] Brander Matthews, ed., A History of Columbia University (New York,
1904), p. 444.
[18] Higher Education in the Colonial Period was quite different from
today. 1) only a very small percentage of young men enrolled (indeed only
9,000 baccalaureate degrees were awarded in this country between 1642 and
1900); the professors had acquired little training beyond their own
undergraduate course of study and, with the exception of the President,
were really more like graduate teaching assistants than professors; the
curriculum placed primary emphasis upon the study of Latin, Greek and
mathematics; and the college were more, rather than less, religious than
was society in general. See Ringenberg, page 37 or Winthrop S. Hudson,
Religion in America (New York, 1973), pp. 129-130.
[19] During the Colonial period schools such as Harvard, William & Mary,
Yale et al were not private in the modern sense of the word because the
twentieth-century distinctions between public and private institutions did
not exist. Each of the three schools mentioned were considered very
important in the training of civic as well as clerical leaders and received
significant amounts of financial aid from the government. Furthermore,
most of these schools-and the others that followed-named public officials
as ex-officio members of their boards. (Rigenburg, 41f, Jurgen Herbst,
“From Religion to Politics: Debates and Confrontation Over American College
Governance in the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” Harvard Educational Review, Aug.
1976 and Willard W. Smith, “The Relation of College and State in Colonial
America,” Diss. Columbia University, 1949, pp. 158-163).
[20] It might be argued that tolerance-as a character trait-is the one
exception. However, as Alan Wolf-a self described “secular academic”
confessed, the secular orthodoxy of today’s campus demands that you are
tolerant of everything except those who appear to be intolerant of you.
Which means, you are intolerant of those with a strong faith in general and
evangelical Christians in particular. (Alan Wolfe, A Welcome Revival of
Religion in the Academy, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sept. 19,
1998).
[21] Noll suggests that the changes on this front took place in the post
Revolutionary period. Puritans grounded their thinking in special
revelation and had worked to turn special revelation into a framework for
all of learning. The educators of the new United States grounded their
thinking in the Enlightenment and worked to give special revelation a place
within that framework. “Or, to put matters another way, where Puritan
education had proceeded from a Christian perspective which sought to
dominate the shape, purposes, and structure of learning, leaders in
America’s Christian colleges after the Revolution allowed truths of the
didactic Enlightenment to lay out the shape, purposes, and structure of
knowledge, within which they were delighted to find a place for
Christianity.” (Ringenberg, p. 14).
[22] Additionally, there is a smaller point of disagreement over the
difference between the ideas of creation and discovery. “Creation implies
invention, novelty, the development of something new that in a deep sense
reflects the talents and insights of the creator. Discovery, in contrast,
implies paying close attention to the external world, grasping it as a
given reality, so that what is new is only a description of what has always
been there. Western religion has always distinguished the two by
attributing creation to a divine being who is the author or originator of
all reality, whereas discovery is more likely to be described as a human
activity, such as learning to understand better the nature of created
reality. At the dawn of the scientific revolution scientists described
their work as an act of discovery. They were “reading the text” of God’s
natural revelation. The present understanding of academic work has shifted
away from “discovery” towards claims of creation. The most highly valued
academic work is now “the creative process by which ideas, new theories, or
even ways of expressing ideas are invented.” (Robert Wunthrow, Pursuing the
Sacred in Academies Hallowed Halls, The Witness, Sept. 2000, page 1f.
[23] Wilfred Cantwell Smith in his book, The Meaning and End of Religion,
has over 130 pages of footnotes in which he tries to unpack the meaning of
the word. And Martin Marty, the distinguished University of Chicago
professor and the editor of the enormous five volume work, The Encyclopedia
of Religion, when pressed said, “Religion is the kind of stuff that you
write about in a book by this title.“Dr. Marty made these comments as part
of the Oppenheimer Lectures at Lake Forest College in a talk entitled,
“Public Religion in America,” March 2001.
[24] Jeremiah 9:24
[25] 2 Cor. 10:5
[26] Dr. Willie James Jennings at the Duke University Divinity School has
noted that the seminary is considering offering courses once considered
preparatory for admission to the seminary because so many undergraduate
schools have dropped religion classes, Greek language, philosophy and other
pre-ministry courses altogether. Dr. Marty disagrees in part, citing a
broader time frame. He notes that in 1950 there were only two “tax-
supported” religion departments and today there are, according to the
American Academy of Religion, some 900. He further notes that they tend to
“thrive and dive” in the company of all humanities, all of which are
suffering in these times of market obsession and vocational training.
(Martin Marty, Private correspondence, 3.23.01)
[27] And it should be noted that the degree of secularization in liberal
arts colleges has increased since 1900, so that by 1966 the authors of a
major study on the small private colleges in America concluded that even
“the intellectual presuppositions which actually guide the activities of
most church colleges are heavily weighted in the secular direction.”
(Ringenberg, page viii)
[28] Witherspoon (1723-1794) was the President of Princeton. Mark Noll
suggests that Witherspoon did more than any other person to bring Christian
higher education into line with the new cultural convictions of American
society at that time (post revolution). (Mark Noll, “Christian Colleges,
Christian Worldviews, and An Invitation to Research,” An Introduction to
William Ringenberg’s The Christian College, page. 12).
[29] Mark Noll, page 18 of The Christian College by Ringenberg.
[30] Mark Noll, “Christian Colleges, Christian Worldviews, and An
Invitation to Research.” The introduction to The Christian College by
Ringenberg, page 19.
[31] This is very much at the heart of the problem. Though there is a boom
in enrollment in college-and though this boom is expected to continue-the
competition among liberal arts colleges is fierce and the schools
themselves are becoming increasingly market driven. It can be said that
the university has two pedagogical functions. One is to connect students
with the world at large so that they can get the credentials that will help
them get a job so they can pay their bills. In this setting they learn the
language of business, commerce, science and public discourse. And in this
setting the university is much like a high-powered convention and training
center. You get nice accommodations, a good health club and plenty of take
home value. The second mission is to serve as a “transmitter and crucible
of culture and values.” By virtue of this mission students wrestle with
what has been thought and done in the past as they struggle to understand
humanity and themselves-all in their ceaseless quest for a better life. In
this setting Emory University President William Chace wrote, “Learning is
praised for its own sake and the curriculum is treated as…all that is
acknowledged to be worthy of understanding and embracing; it is precisely
because certain things do not have immediate application that they are
worth knowing.” The problem is, as is pointed out by J. Linn Allen in
“Quo vadis, Loyola,” (The Chicago Tribune, April 8, 2001, section 2 page 1)
in which he discusses Loyola University’s decision to drop their degree in
classical studies, what they students want today is what leads to a job.
[32] Malik, page 100f
[33] The Campus Ministry, edited by George Earnshaw, Judson Press, 1964,
page 9.
[34] The Campus Ministry, page 10.
[35] Malik, page 70.
[36] The challenge of critiquing the University is profound. It takes the
right person with the right voice. Those on the theological left have
remained more a part of the discussion than those on the right and have
consequently had a more frequent hearing. When they have retained their
theological convictions and prophetic voice they have been effective.
Those on the right have too often retreated from the University. This
means that, although they have retained their theological convictions and
their prophetic voice, their often open hostility to the University has
meant that they have not had an audience.
[37] Andrew McThenia, “In the Strange Land of the Modern University: An
Interview with Will Willimon,” The Witness, Sept. 2000, p. 4.
(www.thewitness.org)
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