Our Colleges in Historical Perspective

By Gary Tiffin

Undergraduate colleges (and now universities) founded and supported by independent Christian churches have transformed significantly in recent decades.*

From Margin to Mainstream

Our colleges were small and relatively unknown as late as 1960. They struggled for students, stability, and recognition. Professional accreditation for Bible colleges (initiated in 1947) was considered unattainable, undesirable, or even unnecessary by some, although some of our colleges helped found that accrediting association, now the Association for Biblical Higher Education (ABHE).

Beginning with Hope International University in 1971, 13 of our institutions now share regional accreditation. Some no longer retain their ABHE accreditation, opting only for regional accreditation. Faculty and administrator roles have become professionalized with acknowledged degrees and academic preparation common to their counterparts in the rest of American higher education.

It is true that our colleges have chapel, biblical and ministerial courses, and conservative rules for student behavior. But beyond these distinctives, our colleges appear quite similar to most any nearby college. Latest computer technology, federal aid to students, and participation in widely attended recruiting conferences, student life seminars, and assessment workshops suggest an increasing commonality between Christian colleges and our secular counterparts. Once viewed as second-rate, parochial, and even anachronistic, we have arrived at an acknowledged parity with the general mainstream of American higher education, even with our obvious distinctives. We are no longer on the outskirts of collegiate education.

From Limited to Multifaceted Curricula

Our colleges began, often in reaction to other forms of education, primarily as agents to train a loyal ministry. Curriculum was applied, practical, and usually lacking in breadth in terms of the social sciences, humanities, sciences, and arts even as it focused upon ministerial education. Congregational career roles drove curricula, taught primarily by ministers, many as volunteers or part-time.

While Milligan College and Kentucky Christian University were offering an expanded range of courses beyond Bible and practical ministry in the 1920s, others did not until accreditation requirements after 1950 required such. Today, even the most traditional Bible colleges among us are required by AHBE accreditation to offer a general education core. Regional associations require even more curricular breadth. Students are recruited with the idea that the expanded coursework will lead to careers beyond professional ministry roles.

By the end of the 20th century, work roles became more specialized, and our colleges sought a larger share of their available constituent college student pool. Many Bible colleges added majors that were available at secular institutions. The emergence of women in the workplace, a new emphasis upon the priesthood of all believers, the addition of adult degree programs, and an increased emphasis upon specialization at the graduate level all contributed to the expansion of curricula.

Many of our institutions now offer majors in a variety of fields beyond career ministry, most often including teacher preparation, business, psychology and counseling, computer technology, and social work. These are offered as a means to attract more students, to implement the biblical doctrine of the priesthood of all believers as part of Christ”s mission, and to provide “tentmaking” careers for missionaries who are blocked from overt mission work in some parts of the world. In that light, prospective missionaries do not always choose an explicit missions major.

Oldest Equals Largest

Taking only the data reported in Christian Standard from 2002-2005, full-time enrollment (FTE) correlates highly with earliest founding dates. The 12 institutions founded before 1945 are the largest and strongest by most criteria. In order of founding, Milligan (1884), Johnson (1893), Northwest (1895), Kentucky (1913), Crossroads (1913), Cincinnati (1924), Manhattan (1927), Atlanta (1928), Hope (1928), Jessup (1939), Ozark (1942), and Lincoln (1944) are the largest institutions. In the 2005 data, only Manhattan falls under 300 in enrollment, and only Dallas (founded after 1945) enrolled more than 300. Ten of the 13 regionally accredited institutions are in the pre-1945 group and were the earliest to attain that status.

Longevity among our colleges means higher enrollment (more than 300), greatest resources, and regional accreditation. Reasons for this may seem obvious, but deserve further analysis and examination. Some might contend that this points to the “slippery slope” away from ministerial training and focus on Christian mission by any definition. Others contend that it demonstrates appropriate adaptation to the demographics of a changing world. They also claim that Christian mission is more fully and broadly realized for more students today than in the past.

Yet, larger does not necessarily equate to more effective than smaller. Each institution has unique and different opportunities based on region, constituency, institutional mission, and target audience. As will be noted later, other factors bear upon institutional effectiveness.

From Career to Every-Member Ministry

Save for Milligan College, education for career ministry, rather than every-member ministry, dominated curriculum into the 1970s. Students came to prepare to serve the church locally or on the mission field. Curriculum was primarily male-oriented, even though many women attended.

Today, except for the smaller colleges (under 300), ministry majors constitute a much smaller percentage of student bodies than earlier. On the other hand, many of the largest colleges and universities claim they are educating more career ministers than ever before, even though the percentage of ministry students is smaller than before.

Our largest colleges are actually preparing more career ministers than 50 years ago, even with expanded majors. At the same time they claim to be educating volunteer ministers in other fields, which could not have occurred before regional accreditation and added majors.

The popularity and addition of adult degree completion programs, featuring evening and weekend courses in a compact format, have added to this expanded influence. Some institutions that offer adult degree completion programs can count more units of Bible taught in a short time in such programs than over many years in a traditional curriculum for traditional age students.

No Longer Bishop

For many years Bible college presidents served the de facto function of regional bishops for our congregations, offering pulpit search advice and other advisory functions even amid our independence and autonomy. Our colleges have long served as centers of identity and loyalty for supporting congregations, which in turn allowed and sometimes required college presidents to direct pulpit applicants to particular congregations and vice versa. Conferences, rallies, and church-planting efforts provided college presidents opportunities for extended influence beyond the campus.

This informal system has been displaced by the development of other institutions that wield power and influence. These include evangelistic associations, financial organizations, and megachurches. The latter often offer larger and better facilities and more extensive music and mission programs than the local college. Megachurches often hire from within, bypassing the traditional preacher education track at the local college. As the local preacher has lost cultural influence in an age of secularization, so college presidents find themselves less influential among their constituencies.

From Isolation to Engagement

Except for Northwest, Johnson, Crossroads, and Kentucky who had served constituencies comprised of both Disciples and future independent Disciples congregations, our pre-1945 colleges were founded between 1924 and 1944 in an atmosphere of fear, reaction, sense of loss, and lack of resources. They were often located in rural and smalltown environments.

This has been eclipsed by consortiums, urban witness, worldwide missions involvement, and geographical relocation. Today”s colleges are engaged in our world more than ever before. Professionalism has provided new access to our culture, at a price some still question. Names of colleges have been changed to Crossroads, Hope, and Jessup to allow for initial face value acceptance, even as institutions remain determined to maintain distinctiveness.

In the last 25 years, almost all of our Bible colleges have retitled themselves from Bible college to Christian college, signaling a less parochial approach to education. Names communicate key signals as to scope, target audience, and purpose. It is of some interest that only our group of colleges carries the name Christian in the official name of the college. It is very difficult to find any other church-sponsored college in America with the word Christian in its official name. At the same time, university status has been pursued by some as a means to refocus purpose, expand scope, signal quality, and attempt to attract student families to a university environment.

The Waning of Denominational Loyalty

This development has been widely noted with regard to congregations, but has developed relatively unnoticed among our colleges. As colleges have grown larger, expanded curricula, and added adult programs, they have been able to compete with public institutions for students who otherwise likely would never have considered Christian higher education. That has brought “foreigners” onto campuses, which has been met with responses ranging from grave concern to rejoicing. In fact, our colleges are far less homogeneous than in earlier decades.

I conducted an informal survey of four of our West Coast college presidents in 1999, asking for the percentage of “heritage” students in their undergraduate student bodies. That number ranged from a low of 12 percent to a high of 50 percent. While percentages will surely vary from institution to institution across the country, they do indicate a growing multidenominational or transdenominational makeup of student bodies and sometimes even faculty.

Some view this increasing Christian pluralism with great concern, while others see it as a natural outcome of our heritage that stresses restoration of New Testament faith based upon the essentials of the gospel. Some colleges view themselves as practicing the “plea” via this pluralism. Besides, they point out, the fastest-growing congregations among us attract a high percentage of non-Restoration background members to their programs and worship services.

Financing and Facing the Future

It is widely acknowledged that the cost for providing higher education has outstripped the ability of parents, students, and congregations to finance. Funding is increasingly mainstreamed through loans, grants, and aid through government agencies. This was unthinkable and impossible before 1960.

Today our largest institutions (more than 300 students) struggle to maintain their original purpose even while reinventing themselves. Meanwhile many of the smaller (under 300) schools live on a precarious margin in terms of resources, student numbers, fiscal and physical resources, and status. It is increasingly difficult to claim collegiate status without collegiate resources.

Each institution must measure carefully the tradeoffs involved between sources of funding and support and institutional mission. The articulation and practice of a clear, distinctive, and niche-oriented sense of mission and purpose will likely determine the future of our institutions.

Future existence for both our larger-older and newer-smaller institutions is at stake for different reasons. The larger colleges/universities will struggle for identity, congregational linkage, and distinctiveness as they increasingly enter mainstream higher education. Our smaller colleges will struggle to survive with limited resources and supporters, which may offer them the opportunity to experiment and venture into new approaches to education.

Why do we all have to look alike? We ought to encourage new and unique forms of higher education even as we maintain and update traditional forms. We may learn from the many new ventures in ministerial education since 1990 in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and countries of the former Soviet Union. These demonstrate a variety of formal and informal approaches to ministerial education, often without much direct government supervision.

Accomplishing institutional mission and purpose with quality, purpose, and effectiveness ultimately is far more important than size, name, resources, or even accreditation. But the latter list is often very much related to the former.

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*Milligan College has always been identified as a liberal arts college, and therefore does not fit some of the generalizations about Bible colleges in this report.

 

 

Gary Tiffin retires this summer as administrator of Turner Retirement Homes in Oregon after a lifetime of work with Restoration Movement colleges, including service as chief academic officer at Hope International University and Northwest Christian College.