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192 - Standing for Something |
Standing for Something
IT has always been a mystery to me why questions of commitment to Christianity are an embarrassment in too many of our church-related colleges, why the campus chaplain is frequently a peripheral member of the community or merely an extension of the Dean of Students office to help with vocational and personal counseling.
I
The religious demography of many church-related colleges today looks something like this: a religious studies department whose faculty consciously obscure their own religious commitments in the name of objectivity; an office of campus ministries wedded to the triumph of the therapeutic or established as the beachhead for social and political concerns on campus; and, finally, a panoply of student groups and para-church organizations, organized as a retreat from rationality and in the pursuit of something approaching spirituality.
Church-related colleges and universities are not churches, but they retain in their relationship to the church a basic responsibility to present the Christian faith and the questions of religious meaning and purpose in ways that will elicit honest inquiry and commitment to a Christian vision of life and the preservation of humane values.
II
Virtually all church-related colleges and universities are relatively small institutions, and nearly every catalog celebrates the special attention given to individual student needs and development. In this lies a uniqueness that deserves preservation and celebration, for, in the increasingly dehumanized and dehumanizing society in which we live, the small, church-related college is a bastion of concern for the individual and the human spirit.
As I reflect on my own education at Hope College, Holland, Michigan, there are several characteristics that I find weak and defective; but judged in its totality, my education is one for which I will always be
John M. Mulder is President and Professor of Historical Theology, Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. A biographer of Woodrow Wilson, he has also served as Assistant Editor of THEOLOGY TODAY, and, with the Editor, as anthologist for the volume Conversions: The Christian Experience (1983), reviewed in this issue. This present article on church-related colleges is excerpted from The Presbyterian Outlook (April 23, 1984) and is reprinted with the permission of the publishers. The occasion for Dr. Mulder's comments was a meeting, Nov., 1983, in Memphis of the Association of Presbyterian Colleges and Universities.
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193 - Standing for Something |
grateful, and greater knowledge and time will not undermine that gratitude.
What made my experience so rich and stimulating was the nearly universal interest of the faculty in me as a person, in their desire to push me into new areas of thought, in their compulsion to broaden my horizons and expose me to new areas of human existence.
I have recently been on the campus of a church-related college, and what struck me forcibly in speaking with the faculty was their tendency to talk obsessively about their students, rather than their fields or their research. In this there are dangers, but there is also the refreshing and healthy commitment to an education for students, not of students.
The sources of this concern for the student as a person are various, but I do not think it is too much to claim that it springs from a fundamental Christian commitment to the sanctity of the individual and the enhancement of individual welfare. In my own life, one of the most profound comments about the nature of education came not from a philosopher, but from the Broadway stage-namely, the injunction in Rodgers' and Hammerstein's "The King and I": "When you become a teacher, by your students you'll be taught."
The intangible results of building communities on church-related college campuses, forging friendships between faculty and students, and seeking out and developing individual minds and personalities are not subject to quantification; they are also infrequently the objects of gratitude. But by striving for this kind of educational experience, church-related colleges and universities provide an essential ministry, especially when it is done for the least of God's children.
III
We live at a time when various factors have combined to undermine the confidence of educational leaders and erode trust in the value of a well-educated and liberally educated individual. It is the technician, the specialist, who reigns supreme in a technological society. In partial reaction to this hegemony, our populist instincts lash out to undercut leaders, be they in politics, education, or the church.
Today, we are inundated with indictments of education and a cacophony of calls for quality in our educational institutions. No one is quite sure what this quality should be, but we operate with the same assumption voiced by the judge in a case of pornography: "I know it when I see it."
The fact of the matter is that despite the persistent economic difficulties of church-related colleges and universities, not to speak of theological seminaries, the chief challenge confronting us is not economic, but a matter of quality. At the very same time that so many college students are turning away from education toward some other occupation, we are trying to replace faculties that were over-tenured during the halcyon days of the '50s and '60s.
In trying to rebuild these faculties during the '80s and '90s, we will be
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drawing upon a smaller pool of trained Ph.D.s than ever before. In 1981, only 0.2 percent of college students in the United States intended to enter graduate school and pursue careers in college teaching, compared with 3.4 percent in 1966.
Furthermore, from my perspective as a theological educator, the former pattern of church-related colleges as major centers for the production of future ministers of the church has virtually broken down. Today, our students are as apt to come from state colleges or universities, perhaps even more likely to come from these institutions, than they are from church-related colleges and universities. This is true of theological seminaries everywhere. Certainly attendance at a state institution is not an obstacle to training for ministry, but I believe that the decline in the number of students from church-related colleges and universities in our seminaries is a phenomenon that bodes ill for the future of the church.
Throughout the church, including its church-related colleges, we operate with a curious theology of ministry. In the Reformed tradition, the church has said that it was the church which called forth its ministers. And yet today we functionally operate with the assumption that the call to ministry is a private transaction between an individual and God, that the church and its educational institutions have no responsibility for initiating and selecting those to whom leadership is entrusted.
IV
As I have traveled about the church during the past two years, I have been struck by the number of pastors who told me that they entered the ministry because an important individual-a pastor, a layperson, a college professor-took them aside and urged them to enter the ministry. Most of them confessed that they had never done that for anyone during their own ministries.
Part of what it means to be a church-related college or university must surely be the assumption of responsibility for enlisting and training the future leadership of the academy and the church, as well as the society at large. To ignore that responsibility is to entrust the future of academic and ecclesiastical leadership to caprice and the whims of the marketplace.