A Christian family with college-bound members faces hard choices today. To attend a local public university or well-endowed private college may cost a modest amount of money, perhaps the price of a compact car. If the family chooses a Christian private college, however, the price may be more like that of a fine luxury car.
Christian colleges should be incubators of Christian thought and perspective in all areas of life. They should stimulate Christian service to the church and the secular community. They are hardly a luxury, if we are serious about the commands of Scripture to subdue the earth and to manage its physical and human resources to God’s glory.
But the idea of luxury persists and will continue to persist because, with rising costs, the average family that chooses Christian higher education for its children will probably have to forego big and second cars, a boat, long vacations, and other luxuries we have learned to consider necessities. In one sample of good Christian colleges, the average cost for an academic year—tuition, room, board, fees—rose from $3,000 in 1973 to $3,800 in 1977.
A Christian college education doesn’t cost more than a secular education. The difference is who pays the price—the taxpayer, or the student and his parent. How do colleges without governmental subsidies pay their bills and meet their ever-increasing obligations? A recent sampling of good Christian colleges revealed that students paid 71 to 95 per cent of the costs of running the college; the remaining 5 to 29 per cent had to be raised from other sources. Those other sources usually available to private colleges are gifts from alumni and other interested persons, support from churches, businesses and foundations, small endowments, and small amounts from governments.
The topic I was requested to write about was the financial crisis in Christian colleges. I chose not to, because I do not think that the crisis is financial. Rather, I think the crisis is one of inadequate communication. The Christian community does not understand what Christian colleges are and should be. The genius of Christian higher education, of Christian scholarship and teaching, of a Christian educating community, has not been adequately communicated, and as a result the priceless benefit of the truly Christian education has been misunderstood or even ignored by the Christian community.
In an article last spring in the Evangelical Newsletter, C. Stephen Board reviewed the vigor of campus ministries such as those of Campus Crusade, InterVarsity, and the Navigators and those of churches around large university campuses. As important as these ministries are, they cannot provide the academic nurture and stimulation that a Christian college community can provide if it is serious about developing a Christian world view.
In his article, Board pointed out some weaknesses of campus ministries: “Among the greatest weaknesses of evangelical activity at the secular campus are: (1) grad students—hardly any work anywhere, (2) urban centers—very little in the Jewish and Catholic urban centers, and (3) community colleges—no group has cracked them. Also Christian faculty at the most prestigious universities are sparse, and tend to be in engineering and science, rather than liberal arts. Finally, too rarely has a strong Christian critique of the university been forthcoming from any of these groups. Christianity rarely confronts humanism head-on. Consequently, evangelicals come across as mystics without much to say to the greater academic culture” (Evangelical Newsletter, Volume 4, Number 2, January 28, 1977, page 4).
A Christian college community should be energized to confront humanism head-on and to prepare students to think in a Christian manner so they will not be engulfed by secularism as they confront it daily for the rest of their lives. But Board concluded with these startling words: “At any rate, Christian parents still wonder where to send their kids. My advice is: Send them to the big universities—they will find lots of Christians there. Avoid the small secular or pseudo-religious colleges. The U. of Ill. has perhaps 2,500 evangelical Christians. That’s more than the student body at Moody and equal to the students at Wheaton.”
I endorse his advice to avoid the “pseudo-religious” college and add to that the lukewarm Christian college. But I disagree with his central point. The fact that a lot of Christians attend a particular immense university does not mean that one can there develop a Christian world view in his academic work. Some Christian fellowship and some Bible study is not an ideal substitute for an education that the Lord of Creation is invited to dominate.
The genius of Christian higher education is found in the fact that all the resources of the college community are committed to seeing all of life in the wholeness and richness made possible for believers in the Christ of the Scriptures. The foundation of a Christian education is a wide-ranging biblical view of the world, a philosophical awareness that all truth is God’s truth, a historical perspective that enables one to deal with the fact that God is working in and through his creation, and a realization that man in God’s image renewed by Christ is quite different from the humanistic conception of man as the “measure of all things.”
The most common misconception about Christian colleges is that they isolate students from reality and grow “hothouse” Christians who cannot stand strong when challenged intellectually. When choosing a college, I too would reject a college whose educational program does not help students understand the real world in which they will have to function as educated Christians. But isolation from reality is not a characteristic of the good Christian colleges. A reporter for the Wall Street Journal visited a leading Christian liberal arts college and wrote, “While many educators think evangelical liberal arts colleges … encourage narrow-minded thinking, such colleges appear intellectually broader than many Bible colleges.” He noted that “Bible institutions” are commonly believed to ignore whole areas of study and to view subjects other than religion as incidental. He found, however, that the colleges he visited taught and analyzed Marx, Freud, and Darwin, but definitely from a biblical perspective. That’s good Christian education!
Another common myth about Christian colleges is that they lack academic quality. But I have read many evaluation reports from accrediting teams (almost always composed of persons from secular colleges and universities) and they all have recognized the quality of faculty and academic programs at the good Christian colleges.
The faculty for a good Christian college will include a substantial number with doctorates from leading universities. Graduates of Christian colleges can be found in the best graduate and professional schools in the country. The quality of committed Christian colleges is recognized by the academic community.
Not infrequently the charge is made that Christian colleges are only for the rich. Statistics show, however, that the students at Christian colleges come mostly from the middle to lower-middle classes. Most financial-aid awards are made on the basis of need, and the person with the greatest need is most likely to get the help.
Some college-bound young people dismiss the Christian college as all right for the prospective minister or missionary but not for someone who wants a specialized major. This is basically wrong information. The range of programs available at Christian colleges (admittedly over a great geographic spread) is surprisingly great. Students who cannot find the program they want at a Christian liberal arts school are well advised to attend such a school for a year to two of Christianly taught history, literature, science, and so on before going on to specialized work at a secular university. There are more and more joint programs between Christian liberal arts colleges and more specialized schools that enable students to partake of the benefits of both.
The Christian church and community should consider the Christian college worthy of support because of its unique mind-shaping function. If the men and women who sit in the pew on Sunday are expected to operate as educated, thoughtful Christians during the following week, there should be a reservoir of Christianly educated men and women upon whom they can depend for support. Christian colleges can provide that needed reservoir of educated strength only if they are supported and encouraged by the body of believers. Christians should take another look at the serious Christian college and devise ways to support it—not as a poor cousin but as an absolutely essential component of the growing Christian community.
Is there a financial crisis in Christian higher education? During the past decade, many Christian colleges showed that they could manage what had appeared to be insurmountable financial problems. For most the challenge is still pressing, but they have every right to be optimistic—if Christian higher education begins to take its rightful role in the total Kingdom endeavor. Christian education is a “basic industry” necessary for the welfare of the Christian community.
Christian colleges that are looking to the government to solve their financial problems are headed for serious trouble, though the reallocation of tax revenue to institutions that are compatible with the taxpayers’ values can be defended constitutionally. The hope for the future for the college that wants to be academically and biblically sound will be found in a growing service relationship to the Christian community.
“You Lack One Thing”
St. Mark 10: 17–22
He’d gotten the message early that religion’s
good for health and business: keep the rules,
avoid loose girls, righteousness has happy
rewards, Moses is a good investment.
It hadn’t taken long to show a profit,
living proof that piety pays: his heart
was sound, the family farm blessed, two kids
in Little League, a wife who knew her place.
Confident of his claim on the heavenly
bonanza, he put it all on display for Jesus.
The dismissing phrase, “You lack one thing,”
was disappointing considering the source.
He’d have to find a better rabbi, one
who understood the finer things of life.
EUGENE H. PETERSON
Sarai
“Who would have said unto Abraham, that Sarah
should have given children suck? for I have borne
him a son in his old age.”
-Genesis 21:7
Chinese red paint blood
Begins to run in her favor
Along the brittle grapevines of her arms,
Salting the womb at last with life.
And in the moonless midnight of her mind
A million million points of light
Prick a new Jerusalem into sight,
Spreading a seashore of city before her.
The glossy wolf’s hair about her eyes,
The puckered chimpanzee’s flesh around her mouth,
The darting fish’s sly of her speckled hands—
All the natural evolution of her kind
Begins by her new life to die,
And she is born a new creature.
TROY DALE REEVES
D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.
