The "Fearless Christian University" is Becoming a Real Book!

An excerpt from the preface

One week ago I completed the first full draft of my “Fearless Christian University” book project. The task over the next several weeks is revising. The Germano book above is a great guide (at least for the parts I’ve read so far). This week I’ve been doing the first clean-up review: consistency in capitalization and italicization, eliminating awkward and useless phrases, eliminating sections that got better coverage elsewhere in the book, leaving breadcrumbs for what’s ahead.

Then comes the harder part — tightening the argument itself at a level deeper than the surface edit. Germano suggests reading the project out loud, so next week I’ll lock myself away and give it a try. My submission deadline is February 1st and I feel very good about hitting that deadline.

Many of my subscribers have come aboard after I’d already been posting about the book. I thought it would might be helpful to have an overview.

What follows is excerpted from the preface of the book.

---

A great deal of what you will read has been percolating for over forty years. Late in my graduate school coursework I had a great deal of angst about my professional direction. On the one hand, I had role models who were committed Christians doing important work in the sociology of religion at state schools and that seemed attractive. On the other, I saw that Christian colleges in the early 1980s could deepen their commitments to academic excellence, especially in the field of sociology. Amid my professional struggles, a professor at my wife’s alma mater, Olivet Nazarene University, had resigned and I was asked to take the position. So, the decision was made for me.

While the initial seeds of this book can probably be traced to those conversations at Olivet Nazarene, experiences at all my institutions and roles have nurtured those seeds over the years. I was privileged to see students become university leaders themselves. I worked with administrators who weren’t academics. I learned about the concerns of trustees and of their tendency toward conflict-avoidance. I had faculty colleagues who could provide a robust defense of liberal arts institutions and others who didn’t see the point. I saw far too many conversations ended over concern about “what church people would think.”

This book, then, is an exercise in re-imagining. What if Christian universities embraced their identity as academic institutions, with all the riskiness that implies? What could those institutions accomplish if they weren’t so afraid?

The layout of the book is as follows. The first chapter addresses the problem of fear and the ways it unnecessarily limits Christian university thinking. The second chapter explores the question of university mission and suggests the ways those missions need to be rethought considering today’s students. The third chapter challenges the notion of teaching a Christian Worldview and suggests the kind of academic ethos that will benefit students long after they graduate.

The fourth chapter tackles the tendency of Christian universities to get caught up in contemporary Culture War fights and suggests ways of easing those tensions. Chapter five examines relationships between administrators, trustees, and faculty and suggests ways to eliminate tension and improve institutional alignment.

Chapter six addresses the challenge of enrollment given the impending “demographic cliff” and the decreasing percentage of contemporary students who identify as evangelicals. The seventh chapter calls for administrators and trustees to truly engage the needs of students as they are, not as we might wish they were. The final chapter attempts to reframe the relationship between the Christian university and the church by considering the university a Mission Outpost as opposed to an extension of the church.

---

I’m eager for the book to get through the editing and publication process so that it’s out in the world. It may not move the needle in Christian Higher Education overall, but I pray that it creates a permission structure for Fearless institutions to begin having some important conversations.