Christian Colleges, Distinctive Community, and the Transformation of Students
MATT PINSON
The Coronavirus crisis has had me thinking a great deal about the centrality of the idea of community for the conception of the Christian college or university. The concept of the college as an ecclesial community of teachers and learners, mentors and mentees, has long been at the heart of Christian higher education. The present crisis bears out how important community continues to be for the sort of “value-added” education Christian colleges and universities provide. Kristen Ferguson has recently reminded us on this blog that this commitment, which is at the heart of our mission of spiritual formation, should pervade our approach to education regardless of modality.
Christian higher education at its best stands in stark contrast to a shocking statistic reported by Gallup just a few years ago. This poll indicated that only 14 percent of college graduates had even one professor “who cared about them as a person, made them excited about learning, and encouraged them to pursue their goals and dreams” [1]. The reason this shocked me was the fact that personal investment in the lives of our students is so essential to our vision of Christian higher education that we can’t conceive of a collegial educational mission without it.
President James Garfield once said that all you really need to have good education is “a log hut, with but one simple bench, Mark Hopkins on one end and I on the other.” (Hopkins was president of Williams College, Garfield’s Alma Mater) [2]. That is still really what is at the heart of the most effective methods of education, regardless of delivery system: People who think, feel, and make free choices communicating wisdom and knowledge to other people who think, feel, and make free choices.
Obviously when we frame education in this “total-personality” context—to use a phrase my own academic mentor Leroy Forlines used constantly—we see that it is in the context of authentic human relationships that effective teaching and learning most naturally occur. [3] That’s because we are created in the imago dei as persons—as thinking, feeling, acting beings—who, because we are personal beings created by a personal being, long for personal relationships. That is the way the personal God designed us.
I have a story I often share with students to illustrate the “community” aspect of what we at Welch College call our “Christian community of faith and learning” [4]. As a freshman who was having a particularly hard time “finding myself,” one day I was talking with a fellow student, Tim Caldwell, in Goen Hall, our men’s residence hall at Welch. In the course of the conversation, Tim said, “Matt, I know somebody who can help you with your problems.”
“Problems?” I shot back. “I have problems??” He chuckled wryly and said, “Yeah. You need to go see Leroy Forlines.”
“Leroy Forlines?” I replied. “How can a 65-year-old, gray haired theology professor who uses words like “epistemology” and “traducianism” help an eighteen-year-old kid with his ‘alleged’ problems?”
Tim, however, convinced me, and I’ll never forget the spring day when I went up to Professor Forlines’s office on the second floor of the Johnson Academic Building and sheepishly knocked on his door. He answered, “Come in,” in his eastern North Carolina accent and his iconic soft voice. I went in, and he said something to me that he has said one hundred times since: “Whatcha got on your mind?” Now, mind you, this was not just an ice-breaker. He really wanted to know what I had on my mind.
That day, in that office, he began a relationship with me that provided me with what 86% of college graduates say they never had: “a professor who cared about them as a person, made them excited about learning, and encouraged them to pursue their goals and dreams.” Yet he did this in the context of what he calls “the inescapable questions of life.” And he spurred me on to explore those questions from the vantage point of a distinctively Christian worldview. His investment of himself in my little world had a life-changing impact on me, and today, 93-year-old Leroy Forlines is one of the best friends I have in this world.
Every graduate of Welch has experiences like the one I just shared. This is seen across the world in Christian colleges and universities. That’s why that sector of higher education scores so high in nationally normed surveys of student satisfaction with the college experience: We pour our lives into our students. And the reason we do this is because we have discipleship in view, discipleship of the whole person—intellect, affections, and will. And we get this vision of discipleship from Jesus Christ as he is presented to us in Holy Scripture.
It’s a tragic fact of higher education reality in our late-modern context that only 14 percent of college graduates can say they had only one professor “who cared about them as a person, made them excited about learning, and encouraged them to pursue their goals and dreams.” Christian higher education is different, because it remains committed to its vision of providing truly Christian communities of faith and learning that have a transformative impact on the “total personalities” of students for the sake of the gospel of the kingdom. May we, in this hectic time of the COVID-19 crisis, recommit ourselves to these distinctives.
[1] Mark William Roche, Realizing the Distinctive University: Vision and Values, Strategy and Culture (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017, p. 53).
[2] Burke Aaron Hinsdale, President Garfield and Education (Boston: J. R. Osgood and Company, 1882), 43.
[3] F. Leroy Forlines, The Quest for Truth: Theology in a Postmodern World (Nashville: Randall House, 2001), xii–xvi.
[4] With a nod to Arthur F. Holmes, who uses the phrase “community of faith and learning” to describe his vision for Christian higher education in The Idea of a Christian College (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975). See esp. chapter 7, “College as Community.”
[5] Forlines, 1–2.
Matt Pinson serves as President and Professor of Theology at Welch College, Gallatin, Tennessee.