The Unique Value of Christian Higher Education
Photo courtesy of Asbury University
During the last pre-pandemic graduation ceremony at Asbury University, the unique nature of Christian higher education became strikingly clear. After quoting Matthew 16:25 (“those who lose their life for my sake will find it”), the speaker, Pastor Steve Deneff, bluntly charged the graduating class to “seek out spaces of need, go there, and serve others.”
The address was reminiscent of an early 19th Century message at Mount Holyoke Seminary for women. The founder and President, Mary Lyon, implored students, “Do what nobody else wants to do [and] go where nobody else wants to go.” In his book The Road to Character, David Brooks details Mount Holyoke’s belief that a good life was bound up in struggle, not ease or pleasure. Heroism, it was taught, was found in the mundane, and students were compelled to a life of service. Unsurprisingly, the seminary regularly deployed students into dangerous and under-represented mission fields.
These messages are entirely distinct from, if not at odds with, other 21st-century addresses seeking to motivate graduates as they foray into the next chapter of life. The commencement message, says Merrill Fabry, is an “advice-filled genre”—much of which is cut from the cloth of self-actualization. In contrast, the counsel to “lose your life” or “go where others won’t” is a current flowing in another direction. Service for the sake of Jesus and the benefit of others is a different kind of guidance for students. And yet, the unique nature of Christian schools depends upon living into such a vision.
Like all colleges and universities, Christian higher education is staring down significant challenges such as changing demographics, increasing educational alternatives, and a growing skepticism as to the value of post-secondary education. Moreover, COVID-19 has not necessarily created new challenges to higher education so much as it has revealed and accelerated existing trajectories.
In such an environment, what is the role and contribution of Christian higher education? How should Christian schools think about the value they provide in the future?
The Future of Christian Higher Education
On one level, Christian colleges and universities offer the same rigorous, relevant education as their secular counterparts. They provide similar campus life experiences and are accredited and accountable to uniform academic standards.
However, there are elements unique to Christian higher education that, when fanned into flame, provide a unique value to students and society. While Christian colleges look like other campuses, our intellectual heritage holds a vestige of humility that is uncommon yet helpful to our present moment. Without humility, we can neither listen nor learn. It is an intellectual virtue indispensable to learning. Moreover, Christian education has a history of fostering a spirit of service. Students are not simply graduated, they are deployed—motivated to serve and add value in generative, loving ways. These elements constitute a thumbprint, a peculiar excellence, that can be both head-scratching and society-serving at once.
In today’s digital economy, information is ubiquitous—freely accessible and easily available. Among other things, this means that professors are no longer gatekeepers of knowledge. Schools will not be able to survive as mere purveyors of information. Formation, however, is a different matter, and there are key areas for our moment that should define the formative experience of Christian students.
What might this include?
First, a Christian school must strive to be a true university—literally, “unity out of diversity.” In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article, sociologist Christian Smith derided the modern university as a “fragment-versity”—a broad set of highly specialized academic silos incapable or unwilling to talk across disciplines to one another. Such a university, he says, has lost its capacity to grapple with larger questions of meaning, purpose, truth, and reality.
Here, Christian schools have an opportunity to stand apart. In his popular book Christ of the American Road, E. Stanley Jones writes, “As someone has said, ‘Education has given spokes to the wheel, but no hub.’ It has given nothing that binds life into central meaning and integration. At the end of a college course the real question is not what you know, but what you love.”
This has implications for college curriculum. It will not be enough for Christian higher education to provide a smattering of liberal arts and theology classes amidst a broad menu of majors and minors. Faith integration is important, but the vision of “unity out of diversity” for the Christian college demands what theologian Stanley Hauerwas calls “the wider sense” of theology, or “thinking about what you are learning in light of Christ.” Theology is not just an isolated discipline—it is a “meta” discipline that informs all other academic areas. Worldview sensitive subjects or ultimate questions do not arise in religion departments alone. Yet the interdisciplinary contribution theology offers to other fields is not unidirectional; theology should equally be informed by all academic areas.
A notable example of this comes from the Association of Christian Economists (ACE). Years ago, ACE committed an entire issue of their Faith and Economics journal to a mutually edifying dialogue between economists and theologians (“What Theologians Wish Economists Knew, and What Economists Wish Theologians Knew”). While interdisciplinary studies has been described as the “dominant educational paradigm” of the 21st century, Christian higher education can stand apart by having faculty who bring liberal-arts sensibilities and a theological imagination to fields otherwise bracketed off from these areas. This is not teaching a religion course only to pass a student down the disciplinary assembly line to the next academic field. Nor is it praying before class and then moving into a subject area foreign to faith inquiry. Rather, this is a vision of a different kind of faculty member with a different kind of training teaching in a different manner.
In addition to curriculum, “unity out of diversity” has implications for students. Christians believe that human existence has a purpose—a teleology. Naturally, then, Christian schools exist to elevate and advance that purpose. When we raise the intellectual bar for our students, pursue a life of inquiry, charitably explore ideas, interrogate our own biases, commit ourselves to love-shaping practices that rightly order our affections, and serve in sacrificial, missional, and even peculiar ways, we are acting in a manner coherent with our reason for existence. As the atheist Roy Hattersley famously argued, there is a reason that “rationalist societies, free thinkers’ clubs and atheists’ associations” are notably absent from charitable work or disaster relief. Actions follow beliefs, and beliefs are incubated in the narrative within which we find ourselves.
This unified vision of a Christian University will demand an agenda of educational preparation unlike the template of years past. The US higher education system in its present form has not been engineered to prepare people for 50 years of work across 10-15 different jobs and career sectors. The raison d’etre of the university over the last century has primarily evolved to prepare people for careers in singular fields or subfields. Few institutions of higher education have combined elements of the pre-professional undergraduate learning paradigm with the concept of transitioning students into a multi-faceted employment future.
Tomorrow’s marketplace will demand a far more ambitious educational paradigm. According to The Institute for the Future, eighty-five percent of the jobs graduates will perform in 2030 do not exist today. As we rapidly move out of a manufacturing-driven economy, value is increasingly created and transferred through new modalities of creativity and service.
This has advanced a new economic context governed by a different set of norms than previous decades. Therefore, in addition to the technical and professional training necessary to function in the future, perennial soft skills that outlast the dynamism of tomorrow’s marketplace such as critical thinking, problem solving, effective communication, collaboration, prudence, and character will be indispensable.
While this can be achieved in the classroom at some level, inculcating soft skills will also require colleges and universities to incorporate other educational experiences where students absorb learning and growth. For example, this may include mentorships, work experiences, immersive travel, and other service-learning opportunities.
This does not simply amount to coordinating our educational offerings to help graduates acquire a stable job out of college. While students will indeed be marketable to employers, this is also a necessary means to equip students to serve, add value, and “seek the welfare of the city” (Jeremiah 29:7). Unlike Mt. Holyoke’s mid-19th-century seminarians, tomorrow’s graduates may be less likely to be deployed to dress wounds in the war-torn Crimean Peninsula or feed the poor in Calcutta. And yet, the opportunities for sacrificial service will be infinite.
I know Christian bankers who earn as much money as they can so they can give it all away; Christian lawyers who endure years of grueling study so they can represent those who cannot afford legal representation; Christian creatives who do not simply eschew secular culture, but create alternative cultural movies, shows, and books consumed by the masses; Christian nurses who use their time and resources to embrace and serve immigrants in their community; Christian scientists who commit thousands of hours to create health breakthroughs to improve the lives of others.
These contributions share one compulsion and commonality: otherness. Moreover, such service is motivated through Christian doctrine and animated in its practice. In his influential book The Rise of Christianity, sociologist Rodney Stark speaks to the “ultimate factor” in explaining the meteoric growth of early Christianity. “Let me state my thesis,” says Stark. “Central doctrines of Christianity prompted and sustained attractive, liberating, and effective social relations and organizations.” The creeds and canons of early Christianity were undoubtedly unique. Yet it was the way this doctrine “took on flesh,” Stark suggests, that led to Christianity’s rise and appeal.
The challenges of Christian Higher Education are significant. In the days ahead, schools will have to think very carefully about affordability, alternative business models, unique programmatic offerings, and endowment expansion to create more financial independence. But to be clear, while we should aim to “make our case” by elevating the life of the mind, loving our neighbor through sacrificial service, and unifying all dimensions of the educational experience to be a true university, his is not simply a strategy; it is an expectation, a picture of what it means to be an institution defined by its commitment to Christian doctrine and identity.
From President Mary Lyon to Pastor Deneff, the commencement charge to serve the world in sacrificial ways is advice that has marked the ethos of Christian colleges and seminaries for decades. The world is changing, and our methods and modalities for how we educate should rise proportionate to those changes. And yet, if we desire to maintain the moniker “Christian,” the spirit of service, sacrifice, and a unified educational paradigm must be steady elements of the Christian college or university. That is, whatever else you get at a Christian school, you get that.
Colleges and universities promise graduates relevance to the job market. And they should. Christian colleges and universities are no exception and seek to produce labor-ready graduates prepared to be salt and light in today’s dynamic marketplace. But because of our Christian commitment—and not in spite of it—the unitive educational paradigm of Christian higher education should always equip students to think well, inspire them to serve well, and practice to live well.
Dr. Kevin Brown is President of Asbury University in Wilmore, Ky.