Christian Colleges Are Changing to Survive. Is it Working?

….is a distinctively Christian value proposition here that the combination of a secular college plus Bible-believing church cannot meet. Given that campus ministries have come a long way in the past few decades, it’s getting harder to do better than a secular college plus a good, local Bible-believing church.

Plus, there is a very real benefit to having your faith and positions challenged at a secular school that is hard to match at a Christian college. So achieving “better than secular plus local church” is not as easy as one might think.

[Bert Perry]

….is a distinctively Christian value proposition here that the combination of a secular college plus Bible-believing church cannot meet. Given that campus ministries have come a long way in the past few decades, it’s getting harder to do better than a secular college plus a good, local Bible-believing church.

Plus, there is a very real benefit to having your faith and positions challenged at a secular school that is hard to match at a Christian college. So achieving “better than secular plus local church” is not as easy as one might think.

If it could replace/sharply abbreviate seminary.

That’s all that comes to mind. And obviously it wouldn’t much help the situation.

[Andrew K]

Bert Perry wrote:

….is a distinctively Christian value proposition here that the combination of a secular college plus Bible-believing church cannot meet. Given that campus ministries have come a long way in the past few decades, it’s getting harder to do better than a secular college plus a good, local Bible-believing church.

Plus, there is a very real benefit to having your faith and positions challenged at a secular school that is hard to match at a Christian college. So achieving “better than secular plus local church” is not as easy as one might think.

If it could replace/sharply abbreviate seminary.

That’s all that comes to mind. And obviously it wouldn’t much help the situation.

It strikes me that the best way to sharply truncate seminary is to do something of a 3-2 program along the lines of what liberal arts colleges do with students who want engineering degrees—first three years in liberal arts/ core classes, then the next two in the technical classes. Interestingly, it would look an awful lot like what Harvard did 250 years back—you could attend when you could read “Tully” (Cicero) fluently, and the college coursework would then proceed quickly into Greek and Hebrew, along with your basic (but seminary level) exegesis and hermeneutics courses. You might get a true MDIV quality education in 5-6 years instead of 7.