The Church and Higher Education

It's taking me a bit longer than I expected to try and catch up here in Durham after my recent mission trip to Chincha, Peru. I think that's a result of the time of year, both with respect to church life and university life.

I'm going to write more about our time in Peru in the coming days, but until then, I wanted to let you know about a new feature piece in the United Methodist Reporter, in which my friend and colleague Eric Van Meter and I sound off on the issue of higher education and the United Methodist Church.

The feature - which is titled, "Dialogue on higher education and faith," - gave Eric and me a chance to share ideas and examine the relationship of church and academy. It's a topic I've thought a lot about over my adult life, since I've spent more than 12 of the past 15 years either attending or working for various colleges and universities. Interestingly enough, every one of those schools was founded by Methodists: Hendrix College, Vanderbilt University, Lambuth University, and Duke University. Of the four, all but Vandy continue to maintain some affiliation with the UMC.

But the church's understanding of its educational mission has changed significantly from the late 19th- to early 20th-century founding of most of its institutions of higher learning. Administrators at Methodist schools will be quick to tell you that they are not "church schools." The very term makes admissions officers shudder with sectarian horror. Instead, they are at best "church-related," a term that is vague enough that it can mean a great deal or nothing at all.

Sometimes the Enlightenment desire to appear blessedly free of religion - which is very strong in campus culture - leads the uninformed to overreach in their speech. I have personally walked behind tour groups led by undergraduate students on Duke's campus on a couple of occasions, when the guide pointed up to the statues of John Wesley and Francis Asbury on the facade of Duke Chapel. The university was founded by Methodists, the guide explained each time, but we here at Duke haven't been affiliated with any church for a long, long time. That isn't true, of course. But to prospective students and parents who might be offended by the idea that the Christian faith should have a robust place in the academy, a little white lie is one way to apologize for the beautiful-yet-unmistakeably-Christian presence of a big church in the middle of campus.

Generally speaking, I think there are about three ways to think about Methodism's historic mission in higher ed. One is as an avenue for the education of the poor and the children of preachers. Varieties of that rationale were behind Methodist establishments of everything from John Wesley's school at Kingswood to the post-Civil War foundations of most Methodist colleges in the U.S. But take a look at the price tag of United Methodist-related colleges and universities today. Many still give discounts to PK's, but "half-off" tuition still is pretty pricey when your tuition is northward of $25,000 per year. And the poor? You're much more likely to find them in junior colleges and state universities than in private church-related schools.

A second way to think about the educational mission is as a way to form pastors for ministry. Since the M.Div is now required for ordained elders, and some master's-level degree is (almost always) required for deacons, that means the mission of theological education is mostly with the 13 UM-related seminaries. In my opinion, this is a continuing area where the church really needs to be involved in an educational mission. Unfortunately, there is just about zero consensus as to what theological education should look like. I happen to think Duke Divinity School is the best theological school in the connection, but someone educated at Claremont School of Theology or Iliff School of Theology would probably think they had landed on another planet if they spent much time around here. Is it okay for a church's seminaries to have widely divergent understandings of the church's own educational mission for its future clergy? And if not, how does the church bring about a consensus in its seminaries? Those seem to me to be open questions.

And then a third way to think about the church's mission in higher education is simply to say that it is the way the church contributes to a healthier, more robust, better educated society. That, I would argue, is the de facto reason the UMC continues to support undergraduate education at all. Though most UM-related schools have an active campus ministry affiliated with the denomination in some way, that is a far cry from the idea that the church has a vision for how higher education itself should be done. It is instead the secular paradigm of higher ed in a liberal democratic society that has won the day; it took the thought of Enlightenment-era French and German intellectuals about 250 years, but they have now successfully displaced the confessionally-oriented, communally Christian model of Methodist college life. And so the church's continuing support of its offspring can really only be justified with the affirmation that "our" schools are making a better society overall. But for my money, here's the really interesting question: What happens when the society we've bettered no longer has a use for something as odd and illiberal as the church?

These points really go beyond what Eric and I are doing in the feature piece, but I've been mulling them over since we finished it. He and I both focus a lot on the way the church can have a formative role in the lives of college students. And whether we're doing that in old ways or new, we simply must not let 18-22 year old men and women continue to fall through the cracks. If you get time to read the dialogue, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.