By Frank Weller
We need stronger Restoration Movement colleges, now more than ever. Here are three reasons this is true.
The Ministry Pipeline
First, Restoration Movement churches face a looming ministerial crisis, with one in four lead ministers expected to retire by 2030. There are not nearly enough students in the pipeline to fill the number of expected empty pulpits.
In 2022 Christian Standard reported that Restoration Movement colleges had experienced a decade of decline in the number of ministry graduates. According to the article, “The 482 graduates from the 2019-20 school year are the fewest they’ve produced in any of the past 20 years—down 41 percent from their high-water mark in 2006-07.”
The same magazine issue stated that 60 percent of the lead ministers in our churches are over the age of 50. The result? Three of every five churches will need to conduct a search for a new lead minister in the next 20 years.
Churches and parachurch organizations are taking this challenge seriously. Christ In Youth recently launched their Vocational Ministry Project. CIY has formed a coalition of Bible college presidents and church leaders to engage the 30,000 students expected to make commitments to be “kingdom workers” at their conferences over the next 10 years. They want to nurture those young people who are making commitments by partnering with Christian colleges to communicate options for studying vocational ministry.
“Calling and equipping the next generation of ministry professionals is one of the most pressing needs for the church in our time,” said Sean Martin, CIY’s senior development officer. “Addressing it will require intentionality, innovation, and collaboration among a diverse range of stakeholders.”
Great Lakes Christian College’s Equipping Kingdom Workers Now initiative is one example of that collaboration. Backed by funding from Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky, GLCC contacted the 550 students who made commitments to serve in ministry at CIY events last summer and offered them the opportunity to enroll in the college’s seven-week Introduction to Biblical Interpretation online class for less than one-third the normal cost.
According to Greg Stauffer, GLCC’s vice president of enrollment, “By connecting with students who make kingdom worker commitments soon after they make those pledges, we hope to solidify their decisions and get them into the ministry pipeline before they graduate high school.” Twenty high school students enrolled in the first course offered in this program.
Our Bible colleges were begun as ministry-training institutions. Partnerships like CIY’s Vocational Ministry Project and GLCC’s Equipping Kingdom Workers Now initiative reflect those roots and demonstrate a commitment to training the next generation of preachers, youth ministers, missionaries, and worship leaders.
The Educational Alternative to Growing Secularism
Second, we need strong Restoration Movement colleges because Christian students need institutions of higher education that will foster faith instead of destroying it.
The growing secularism our grandparents saw gathering on the horizon is now a cultural hurricane. Christians are mocked at public universities and even at many private institutions that were founded in faith.
Students who leave the nurture of home and church to attend university frequently find their faith under attack. Exploring difficult questions is expected of students who go on to higher education. These days, however, deconstruction of faith has been normalized. Students’ faith is torn down but rarely rebuilt, leading many young believers to feel hopeless and confused.
We need Christian institutions of higher education where students can ask difficult questions. We need Christ-centered colleges where students can express doubts without being mocked. We need colleges where students can experience community and be discipled by those who have deconstructed, and then reconstructed, a biblical and defensible faith.
We need colleges that are “awake,” but not “woke.” The contrast between “awake colleges” and “woke colleges” is sharp.
Woke universities reject objective truth in favor of subjective cultural norms. They whitewash sinful behavior in the name of inclusion.
Awake colleges, by contrast, understand and engage the culture without capitulating to it. Awake colleges celebrate diversity without fueling division. They focus on education instead of indoctrination. They train students how to think instead of telling them what to think.
Some church leaders mistake awake colleges for woke colleges. They grieve the loss of the world in which they grew up. They grieve the rejection of values and virtues that even many nonbelievers once shared with the church. In their grief, these church leaders sometimes criticize professors and institutions that encourage students to intentionally engage the post-Christian world. They become suspicious when higher education explores ideas that are contrary to Scripture, even when the purpose is to expose those lies to their students.
In some instances, that suspicion is well-founded. Mission drift is the Achilles’ heel of higher education. Some institutions have drifted from their biblical and missional roots. But merely engaging culture does not necessarily equal mission drift. We need strong Restoration Movement colleges that prepare students to be in the world but not of the world.
The Mission in the Marketplace
The third reason we need strong Christian colleges is to equip the church to take the message of Christ into the marketplace.
In 2021, Gallup released a study that showed, for the first time in 80 years, most Americans no longer attended church.
Question: How will the church reach those lost people? Answer: By going to them.
The college I serve, GLCC, has embraced this missional challenge by adding “marketplace ministry” programs to the vocational ministry programs that have been a staple since our founding nearly 75 years ago.
We’re not alone in doing so.
Many Restoration Movement colleges, to the dismay of some in our fellowship of churches, added so-called “secular majors.” Pundits cite such moves as evidence of mission creep. Ironically, some of the loudest complaints come from those who teach within our “priesthood of all believers”. . . from the same people who proclaim, “every member is a minister.”
At our college, we believe in the priesthood of all believers and that every member is a minister. We prepare graduates to set up outposts of the kingdom of God where they work. Our marketplace ministry students earn a minimum of 24 credit hours in Bible and theology. They are discipled by our faculty. We tell these students, “Any college can teach you how to do business (or communicate, or counsel). We teach you why.” We want our graduates to be the people coworkers go to when they need prayer. We want our graduates to be their workplaces’ ethical and spiritual thermostats.
Adding Christ-centered programs for students who want to take their faith into the marketplace is not a repeat of past failings when colleges and universities became unmoored from their Christian roots. Rather, it is leaning into the mission to prepare students to be servant leaders in every context: in church, at work, and at home.
Reversing the Trend
According to data from the Higher Ed Dive website, 91 private colleges in the United States have closed or merged with another institution since 2016. The list includes Restoration Movement colleges like Crossroads College, Cincinnati Christian University, Nebraska Christian College, Ohio Valley University, and St. Louis Christian College. Johnson University’s Florida campus will close after this spring semester. So, too, will Lincoln Christian University. In our region of Michigan, four faith-based colleges unrelated to the Restoration Movement have announced their closure since January 2023.
With the number of high school graduates in America expected to plummet in 2025, colleges are facing formidable demographic challenges. While larger universities add amenities like coffee shops in dorms and pet-friendly residences, Restoration Movement colleges struggle to compete for students while keeping down the cost of educating them.
More Restoration Movement colleges will likely close.
Some people have suggested that that is as it should be.
But I disagree. Reaching lost people is too important. Preparing the next generation of servant leaders who devote their lives to vocational and marketplace ministry is too important.
Strengthening Restoration Movement colleges will happen only when churches and individuals financially resource our schools and encourage their students to prioritize attending Restoration Movement colleges and universities.
Dr. Frank Weller serves as president of Great Lakes Christian College, Lansing, Michigan.
After reading Dr. Weller’s article, I believe it is important to support our Restoration Movement schools! However, at the beginning of the article, he cited the “looming ministerial crisis” with the possibility of one-fourth of lead ministers retiring. Additionally, he mentioned how the prevailing cultural winds in the United States are against cultural Christianity. These issues are, of course, very troubling.
As an American missionary living in the Global South, I believe this also represents a great opportunity. Here in Brazil, a once predominantly Catholic country is projected to become predominantly evangelical Protestant by 2030, the same year our 1/4 of our Restoration Movement ministers will retire. While we should celebrate how God is moving in Brazil, there is very little theological training happening here. In fact, Rhema and other similar ministry training schools, which teach prosperity theology, are the largest theological training facilities in the country. They are capitalizing on the growing interest in reading the Bible and studying theology in Brazil.
Unfortunately, the Restoration Movement is not offering our resources and distinctives that could foster healthier forms of Christianity. I am definitely not a cultural expert, nor do I have many solutions. But the question looms in my head: with something significant happening in Brazil, why don’t we open a Restoration school here? Or a couple of schools? Brazil is the fifth most populous country on the planet! We could be building ministry pipelines in this country where I live. Especially, with the amount of demand there is for theology and how much good our biblical theology would do for this nation. This opportunity needs to be considered, in my opinion, if we are thinking about God’s global mission.
I am very grateful for Dr. Weller’s service at GLCC! Christian colleges are very important!
His article got me thinking! I also am very grateful for the Christian Standard!
We also need to address the economics of a career in ministry. Prospective preachers can survive being poor during college – what they cannot survive is the crushing debt that follows, coupled with lower salaries for young preachers. What we need are more opportunities for debt-free attendance. Johnson U is doing great work in this regard.
Bible Colleges matter.
And I would love to see Summit Christian College (https://www.summitcc.edu/) get a mention in an article.
All we really want is transparency. When we got magazines from Johnson they totally emphasize the sports. That doesn’t get us excited about the ministry of the school. We need to know how many students are actually training for ministry. Proof that they are graduating students stronger than when they came in. NEOBC trains people all over the world on a budget of just over 100K every year! I was strong Restoration going into Lincoln—and felt a number of professors had disdain toward the movement. I know they felt they were “correcting” errors. But it focused on women’s roles, anti-traditionalism, and being open to charismatic revelation, and theistic evolution. On the other side not a lot of pushback on denominational error. The closing of schools are a symptom of deeper issues that are hard to address. Johnson closed FCC and they get to take the value of the property from the churches of Florida that committed so much effort to building what was a great school through the 90’s and into the 2000’s.
Might I suggest the tanking of the NACC which damaged Bible Bowl reduced the “pipeline” more than anyone could have guessed. Bible Bowl is only now bouncing back but it is probably a 1/4 of what it used to be. Thank goodness Milligan and KCU support hosting the program. I agree that these schools need to be improved and preserved—but every single church should seek to turn out people for vocational ministry. Mt. Dew and Pizza parties alone cannot build evangelist, elders, and missionaries. We need to be pretty radical in our approach and demand more from our members.