Scot McKnight takes on Chapter Two

Let's talk about the institutional mission of Christian Universities

As I wrote last week, I’m deeply appreciative of Scot McKnight taking the time to write about The Fearless Christian University chapter by chapter. Today he took on chapter two, titled “Reimagining the Christian University Mission”.

Even though there isn’t a direct parallel to life in the seminary world he has inhabited¹, I’m glad to have his reactions. I’ll share some of his thoughts and provide my thoughts.²

At one institution where I worked the board worked on the mission statement, sometimes with the professor or not, and then articulated that statement, put it on the website and catalog, and it was there for all to read. I never talked to a student at that institution who came to the institution because of the mission statement. Nor did the faculty ever have serious conversations about the mission statement when it considered curriculum, content, and professional activities.

I don’t disagree with this at all. Mission statements are often developed with the help of consultants working with the administration and trustees. There’s a certain amount of branding taking place³. Faculty may be given a chance for reaction, but are rarely full participants in the process⁴. Rarer still are the situations where the mission statement could arise from a reflection on what really happens within the university.

He wisely observes the tensions at work in the above. Academic priorities shape the institution along one path, while denominational affiliation, constraints, and commitments shape the institution along a different path. And I will add here, to repeat a theme that has already present in this Substack, that individual professors will be doing both the academic and the Christian dimensions in different ways.

What students know about the mission statement varies from student to student, and from institution to institution. In more than four decades of teaching, I cannot remember any student ever wanting to discuss the mission of the institution in a classroom, while I do think at times, even if very rarely, it came up in my office.

This isn’t fair to Scot, but I’m going to reference a section in chapter five. Doing a deep dive on faculty backgrounds at five different Christian universities, I found that nearly half were graduates of Christian colleges and a quarter were teaching at their alma mater. If this is generally true, then faculty may have an inchoate sense of how the mission works on the ground than is sharper than any administrator, trustee, or admissions rep.

It would no doubt be very hard and time consuming work, but I’d argue that it’s possible to build the mission statement inductively from actual practice. I advocated for something like this in the late 1990s but it didn’t take (with what has been devastating results for people and programs at the institution).

Here’s a story that I cut from the original manuscript. At my first institution, Olivet Nazarene, we had the slogan “Education With a Christian Purpose”. As it happened, we had a marketing professor from Wheaton presenting on branding. He held up a napkin with the slogan on it (which he said anywhere else would be called a cocktail napkin) and asked what that meant. As I remember it, the VPAA gave a pretty anodyne response and that we were all in agreement. I asked him after the meeting how he could say that because we never talked about it. He said if we were opposed we would have left for other schools. As a troublemaking assistant/associate professor, I tried to push back. Which words in what order? How was this different from “Christians With an Educational Purpose” or some other configuration? I envisioned healthy dialogue among the faculty to work out the meaning of the phrase.⁵

What needs to be developed according to Hawthorne in a Christian university that is fearless is a transformational model of a Christian university. A transactional model leads only to job prospects. An exploratory model without synthesis leads to confusion if not chaos. “The transformational model, however, takes the exploration of diverse information as its raw material and delivers job prospects as a by-product of the educational journey.”

Because of the changes for students at both the personal and social level, a transformational model will challenge typical mission statements and especially as presented by the president, administration, recruiters, admissions, and others.

This transformational commitment is the central conceit of the book. The Christian university’s central priority is what happens to their students while at the institution and for decades beyond. This doesn’t take on the trope of “the customer is always right” because we are really focused on how they will be whole people scholastically, socially, ethically, and spiritually as they impact the world as professionals in whatever role they take on.

I’m deeply grateful for Scot’s careful analysis of my argument and look forward to seeing his reactions to the critique of Christian Worldview language in chapter three!

1. I got to have lunch yesterday with Angie Ward of Denver Seminary to work out details of my talk to their faculty on the 26th.

2. I plan to this with each post he makes about the book.

3. Faculty will be required to put the mission statement on their syllabi. They are often asked to explain how a curricular proposal fits with mission; but since the mission statements are so nebulous, almost anyone can come up with a justification.

4. I’m following news of dissension at one Christian university. In response to a vote of no confidence, the trustees noted that “faculty were given input” in the school’s restructuring plan. That passive phrase is always a clue that faculty were out of the loop in the formative stages and were presented with a “take it or leave it” option.

5. Nobody listened to me, so I wrote a book!