THE ASSEMBLIES OF GOD
AND
THE SECULARIZATION OF THE ACADEMY

Introduction

• Grateful for your life and ministry, for the commitment you have made to AG higher education, and for being with us this week.
• I’ve been given a topic with a million dollar title! Makes me also want to finally start on my sermon to end all sermons: "The Existential Reality of An Eschatological Hermeneutic!"

I. The Secularization of the Academy

A brief historical perspective. The Christian college has passed through four phases in its development in America.

First Phase: Monopoly

Colonial colleges. Nine between 1636 and 1780. All of them associated more or less directly with religious denominations, either having been founded or dominated by a religious group. Not like Christian colleges today in that they were more deeply a product of the main stream culture — the marriage of society to Christian faith. In a sense, the colonial colleges were church-state schools.

• Harvard. Authorized in 1636 when "It pleased God to stir up the heart of one Mr. Harvard (a godly gentleman and a lover of learning, there living among us) to give the one half of his estate . . . toward the founding of a college," as reported by the author of New England’s First Fruits (1843). First Fruits introduced the reason for Harvard’s existence this way: "After God had carried us safe to New England and wee had builded our houses provided necessaries for our lively-hood reard convenient places for Gods worship and settled the Civill Government: One of the next things we longed for and looked after was to advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches when our present ministers shall lie in the Dust." The first code of student conduct at Harvard contained these requirements: "Everyone shall consider the main End of his life and studies, to know God and Jesus Christ, which is Eternal Life . . . Seeing the Lord giveth wisdom, everyone one shall seriously by prayer in secret, seek wisdom of Him . . . Everyone shall so exercise himself in reading the Scriptures twice a day . . . seeing the Entrance of the word giveth light."

• William and Mary. 1693. Episcopalian. Charter of the school: "To the end that the Church of Virginia may be furnished with a Seminary of Ministers of the Gospel, and that the Youth may be piously educated in good Letters and Manners, and that the Christian Faith may be propagated amongst the Western Indians, to the Glory of God."

• Yale. 1701 [67 years after Harvard’s founding]. When Puritan orthodoxy began to decline at Harvard and the college became more receptive to theological and philosophical diversity, Yale said it would be what Harvard had promised: an institution where the Faith was protected. Student regulations at Yale in 1745 required that "all Scholars shall live religious, Godly, and blameless lives . . ."

• Princeton. 1748. Began in a parsonage of a pastor, and started as a reaction to Harvard and Yale’s opposition to the Great Awakening. Originally founded to train ministers, with the prospect of adding other disciplines. Seal includes an open Bible in the upper part of the circle and over the Bible the words in Latin, "I restore the dead to life." In Latin, also in the shield, is the phrase, "Under God’s power she flourishes." This seal is embossed on diplomas and printed on other official documents. Compare those declarations and representations to Time Magazine’s first week of July, 2002, report that Princeton University’s Center for Human Values, Professor of Bioethics Peter Singer, the "godfather" of the animal rights movement, said that Christianity is a "problem" for the animal rights moment. In his book, Animal Liberation, Singer criticizes American Christianity for its fundamentalist strain that takes the Bible too "literally" and promotes the idea that being human "makes you superior to any other being that is not a member of that species."

• King’s College — Episcopalian/Presbyterian (Columbia). 1754; College of Philadelphia — Interdenominational–Anglican tinge (U. of Pa.), 1755; College of Rhode Island — Baptist (Brown), 1765; Queen’s College — Dutch Reformed (Rutgers), 1766; Dartmouth — Congregational, 1769 — founded to bring Christianity to the Indians.

Why were these Christian colleges?

• No other institution than the church had sufficient strength to found colleges. Most college graduates from old world were ministers.
• Model of education was integration of knowledge and piety.
• The church was conceived as the servant to society — what was needed was a learned clergy and a lettered people. In Yale’s 1^st 12 years, almost 3/4ths of its graduates entered the ministry. In Dartmouth’s first 10 years 46 of its 99 graduates entered the ministry. 10,000 of 40,000 graduates of American colleges up to 1855 had become ministers.

What brought about the decline of Christian dominance? Forces at work in society to pull society and religion apart.

• Control of the colleges passed from ecclesiastical authorities to civil authorities.
• Prohibition of the establishment of religion.
• Rise of scientific inquiry and rationalism.
• Increasing heterogeneity and pluralism of American life.

  In 1795, Lyman Beecher, a student at Yale, wrote: "The college was in a most ungodly state. The college church was almost extinct. Most of the students were skeptical and rowdies were plenty. Wine and liquors were kept in many rooms, intemperance, profanity, gambling, licentiousness were common."

Second phase: dominance

From the Revolution to the Civil War. By 1861, there were 182 permanent colleges in America — 133 of these founded in the 30 years before the Civil War due to Westward expansion. Only 21 of these were state or municipal colleges. Presbyterians — 49, Methodist — 34, Baptists —25, Congregationalists — 32, Catholics —14, Episcopalians — 11, Lutherans — 6, Disciples of Christ — 5, German Reformed — 4, etc. However, there was another group of failed colleges. In addition to the so-called permanent colleges, Donald Tewksbury’s 1965 work on The Founding of American Colleges and Universities showed that in 16 states another 516 colleges were founded before the civil war — only 104 were surviving by 1928. 81% mortality. In another 18 states Tewksbury studied the mortality rate was about the same. Reasons?

• Financial disaster.
• Denominational competition.
• Unfavorable location.
• Natural disasters.
• Internal dissensions. Faculty and trustees in conflict.

An apt summary of these colleges is found in Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commanger’s The Growth of the American Republic. It was the heyday of the small, rural college with six to a dozen professors and one to three hundred students; of six o’clock chapel, prescribed classical-mathematical course, with chemistry and physics the most popular subjects next to Greek, and a smattering of French and German; ‘philosophical apparatus,’ mineralogical cabinet and collection of stuffed birds; Freshmen metaphysics, Saturday recitations of Paley’s Evidences of Christianity followed by dismal Puritan Sabbath, relieved by periodical religious revivals and tremendous drinking bouts; literary and debating societies encouraged, and Greek-letter fraternities discouraged by the faculty; well selected libraries of ancient and modern classics (Voltaire locked up); botanizing and fossil-hunting excursions over the countryside, ingenious hazing and amusing pranks, but no organized sports . . . The average statesmen and professional man of the Northern states completed his formal education at a small college, whose curriculum in many instances was not equal to that of a first class secondary school today. Foreign visitors compared these institutions with Oxford, Cambridge, or Gottingen, and laughed and sneered. But for an integrated education, one that cultivates manliness or makes gentlemen as well as scholars, one that disciplines the social affections and trains young men to faith in God, consideration for his fellow man, and respect for learning, America has never had the equal of her little hill-top colleges."

The major differences between the denominational colleges and the colonial colleges were that the former was a free agent from the state, far more partisan in nature, and too often proliferated beyond its capacity to offer quality training. These denominational colleges, broadly but negatively speaking . . .

• Subordinated, to great a degree, learning to faith.
• Neglected the discovery-research aspect of education in favor of transmission and application.
• Conservatism in curriculum precluded consideration of new developments in science or opposing points of view in literature and philosophy.

Positively, these colleges contributed to diversity in American higher education and brought such education to most every geographical division of America, becoming the cultural and religious agent of the advancing civilization on the ever-moving frontier.

Phase Three: Competition

Competition with non-Christian private and state supported universities.

In 1862, Congress set in motion a radical change in American higher education through the passage of the Morrill Act. This legislation provided each state with 30,000 acres of public land for each senator and representative within every state if that state would establish a college where instruction could be obtained in mechanical arts, agriculture, and military science and tactics. The land was then to be sold and the money from the sale of the land was to be put in an endowment fund that would provide support for the colleges in each of the states. Eventually every state took advantage of this act and land grant colleges were established. This gave great impetus to public education and revision of the curriculum. These schools, along with the 21 state colleges founded before the Civil War, the private colleges loosed from their religious moorings — witnessed the replacement of Christian orthodoxy with the influences of the Enlightenment and its emphasis on rationalism, deism, naturalism, empiricism, and humanitarianism. Science became increasingly more important, challenging the deductive thinking of the old educational system that has been governed by an epistemology heavily indebted to revelation. Descarte, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Darwin were men to be reckoned with.

The new education did not strive for a synthesis of learning [university — really a misnomer — Clark Kerr the only thing that unifies the university is the plumbing system], education for education’s sake, production of better persons [rather than solely functional people]. No longer were a great many of the students entering the ministry. Even in the denominational schools, theological liberalism reversed the pattern of faith over learning, frequently eliminating faith altogether. Student standards were relaxed. In loco parentis was out the window. Revivals ceased.

Phase Four: Minority (from substantial to small minority).

Between the Civil War and 1900 conservative Protestant groups, nurtured in revivalism and Bible conferences, expressed alarm over the developments they saw taking place:

• The rise of science, and particularly Darwinism, signaled the rejection of Biblical cosmology. Distinctions between the natural and supernatural were minimized with the consequence being a view that God was immanent in the world, rather than transcendent.
• Higher criticism asserted an evolutionary development to the Bible and resulted in the Bible being viewed as a fallible college of human documents rather than a word from God.
• The authority of Scripture as an objective standard for human behavior was also undercut by an emphasis on a direct, intuitive experience of God. Christian particularism gave way to universalism.
• The social gospel movement located evil in the societal environment and not the individual and therefore directed its goals toward the salvation of society rather than the individual.

The conservative movement took 2 directions: (1) maintained control over colleges loyal to evangelical doctrine — such as Wheaton; and (2) founded schools with the Bible as the central textbook — this being the more predominant response.

The Bible school movement began as an effort to equip lay people with an understanding of the English Bible and to train them for ministry in the local church program and personal evangelism. However, its predominant role has been the training of missionaries, pastors, evangelists, gospel musicians, and those undertaking specialized ministries: "a pietistic reaction to secularism, a theistic reaction to humanism and agnosticism, a resurgence of spiritual dynamic in Protestantism, a restoration of Biblical authority and direction in education, and a return to the central concern of Christian education — the implementation of Christ’s Great Commission — ‘Go ye into all the world.’"

The Bible schools emphasized faith, devotion, the Bible, missionary zeal, practical Christian service, and revivals. The liberal arts, sciences, and reason received minimal attention. All faculty were expected to exercise a pastoral care for students. Pastoral experience rather than solely graduate theological or university training was a more important qualification in the hiring of faculty.

The past 40 years have witnessed a significant shift in the evangelical world from Bible colleges to colleges. George Marsden, The Secularization of the Academy, estimates that of the 100 or so evangelical colleges — the total # of students would equal about 2 state universities. 100 years ago — students in church related colleges equaled half the student population.

In 200 plus years, we have witnessed a tremendous shift in American higher education with the secularization of the academy.

In his classic work, The Secular City, Harvey Cox noted that: "The forces of secularization have no serious interest in persecuting religion. Secularization simply bypasses and undercuts religion and goes on to other things. It has relativized religious world-views and thus rendered them innocuous. Religion has been privatized. It has been accepted as the peculiar prerogative and point of view of a particular person or group. Secularization has accomplished what fire and chain could not: It has convinced the believer that he could be wrong and persuaded the devotee that there are more important things than dying for the faith. The gods of traditional religions live on as private fetishes or the patrons of congenial groups, but they play no role whatever in the public life of the secular metropolis [or university!] . . . Pluralism and tolerance are the children of secularization. They represent a society’s unwillingness to enforce any particular world-view on its citizens . . . For some religion provides a hobby, for others a mark of national or ethnic identification, for still others an esthetic delight. For fewer and fewer does it provide an inclusive and commanding system of personal and cosmic values and explanations."

II. The Assemblies of God

Deeply rooted in the holiness and revival movement that spawned the Bible school reaction to secular colleges before and after the turn of the last century.

Right from the 4^th reason for our founding — "A general Bible Training School with a literary department for our people," the AG has been concerned with the education of its youth — but, for its first 40 years — really only concerned about education that would prepare young people for ministry. Bible schools and Bible colleges were the only type of higher education sponsored by the AG until 1954.

There was a strong anti-educational attitude in the early years:

• Low socio-economic condition of the constituency
• Strong expectation of the Lord’s return
• Fear that educational requirements would be imposed on clergy
• General hostility to education as being antagonistic to the Bible and faith
• Belief by some that the Holy Spirit alone should be the instructor and that formal education was "not only superfluous, but a negation of the Holy Spirit."

The first interest in establishing a college other than a Bible college was voiced at a 1929 General Council. A General Council Committee on Bible Schools reported that: "There is a growing need of academic schools of our faith in different parts of the country to provide education without contamination of worldly and anti-Christian influences. We believe that our fellowship should look with favor upon the establishment of such schools, and should look forward to the time . . . when we may have somewhere an institution of college grade, where the most complete and thorough education can be obtained under Pentecostal auspices."

The report was not acted upon.

In 1935 a resolution urging the establishment of a literary institution owned and operated by the AG was presented to the General Council. However, no plans for the operation of the school were presented and action on the resolution was deferred. The matter was not taken up again until the 1945 General Council indirectly rejected a proposed liberal arts college. In 1947 the Educational Committee proposed to the General Council the establishment "of a college in which our young people who are not destined for the ministry can get a thorough training in a Pentecostal environment and under our leadership and instruction. It is to be understood that this committee does not recommend this college as a training ground for prospective ministers, but rather for the others of our young people who desire and require advanced education to fit them for their chosen life work." The resolution was soundly defeated 641 to 326.

Carl Brumback gave the reasons for the opposition: money would be diverted from home and foreign missions, Bible institutions would be forced into the liberal arts category, and gradually an academic standard would be imposed upon the clergy and they "would be judged on the basis of . . . scholastic attainments, rather than . . . spiritual abilities."

Not until 1953 did the General Council authorize a college of arts and sciences. Of our major endorsed institutions of Christian higher education, only one still retains the name, "Bible College."

III. WHAT IS THE RESPONSE OF THE ASSEMBLIES OF GOD TO THE SECULARIZATION OF THE ACADEMY?

[No one person can speak for the Assemblies — but let me take a stab at analysis.]

1. The history of Christian higher education in America shows that the most predominant influence on the Christian college is that of its supporting constituency.

"There is no Biblical mandate for the church to operate schools. There is nothing apostolic about funding and financing colleges . . . [but] the church too has needs." The church related college fits the commandment of the LORD to Israel in Dt. 6:20-21, "When you son asks you in time to come, ‘What is the meaning of the testimonies and the statutes and the ordinances which the LORD our God has commanded you?’ then you shall say to your son . . ." The church college is the place where we say these things to our sons and daughters.

The single greatest danger to our schools is a changing in the core values of our churches and people

A drift away from core values in doctrine and experience will prove to be almost irresistible glaciers on the character and nature of our schools.

A healthy church is vital to a healthy college or university or seminary.

The Assemblies of God must devote the same kind of priority to its young people in America as it devotes to training young people all over the world.

The 2001 Annual Church Ministry Reports (ACMRs) indicate that the 12,100 churches in the Assemblies of God have 277,000 adherents between the ages of 13 and 17.

If you divide 277,000 by the 5 years represented in ages 13 through 17, then Assemblies of God churches have about 55,400 students in each grade level of junior and senior high school. In other words, over 55,000 young people identified with the Assemblies of God graduate from high school each year.

Our endorsed post secondary schools have about 15,000 students enrolled. 70% of these students are Assemblies of God — thus, 10,500 are from Assemblies of God churches. When these 10,500 are equally divided over 4 undergraduate years — the total matriculating into our schools every year from Assemblies of God churches equals just a little over 2,500 students.

Deduct the 2,500 from the pool of 55,000 high school graduates, and you discover that a miniscule 4.5% of our high school graduates enter an endorsed Assemblies of God postsecondary school. Over 52,000 choose other alternatives: secular colleges and universities, private colleges and universities, or no college at all.

Each year, we are failing to attract over 95% of our youth into our endorsed schools.

It would appear to me that this is the most significant crisis facing the church. We are loosing our opportunity to significantly impact the future of our mission by failing to provide for this vast army of young people.

Is it not time that we should be thinking about going way beyond the present incremental growth, and target leapfrogging ahead with a monumental expansion of our schools into large affordable and thoroughly Pentecostal institutions of higher education?

2. Each segment of the school must contribute to the success of its mission.

Conclusion

We are not the first believers to face secularism. Athens — the seat of philosophy — the best that human wisdom could do — was to come to no conclusion. The unknown God.

Athens lives on in our secular culture today and in American secular higher education. The search for truth has been all but abandoned in favor of everything is good so long as you don’t hurt anyone else.

Kafka has a story that illustrates for me the futility of education with God’s revelation. He tells the story of a man who picks his solitary way past rubble and scorched earth until he encounters a huge deserted apartment building. He enters a door, hesitates, then climbs a cement staircase high up in the building. And up there somewhere he begins to poke his way wonderingly. A chance premonition makes him turn off into a room, a little bathroom. And there, lo and behold, a fellow sitting on a sink, hunched over a pole, fishing in a bathtub filled with water. The visitor looks the situation over carefully and finally dares to say, "You’re not going to catch any fish in there." And the other fellow says back, "I know it," and continues his fishing.

Athens and today’s secular academy is fishing in all the wrong places. The academy knows about everything that is knowable, except the most important things: she does not know God, she does not know what to do with her sins, she does not know where to find a life of peace and joy and victory, she has no eternal hope, and she knows nothing of the life to come.

If there ever was an age we could confirm Paul’s words, "the world did not know God through wisdom," it is now. But, in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God made His wisdom known to us — and as Pentecostal educators we have the remarkable privilege of communicating the impact of God’s wisdom into the hearts and minds of the students we serve.

Given the fact that Christian higher education in America constitutes such a small minority, and given that in any particular year our schools only matriculate 5% of our high school seniors — it is absolutely critical that we infuse this vanguard of our AG youth with a passion for Christ, a love for His Church, a hunger for Spirit-filled living, an excellence in academic training, and a life-long commitment to serve Christ and His Kingdom.

We need not be discouraged over these small percentages of the total if we remember Scripture. There’s never been a great advance for God’s kingdom, as recorded in Scripture, that did not come against overwhelming odds.

• Moses in Pharoah’s court
• Gideon’s 300
• David and Goliath
• Nehemiah and formidable adversaries
• Jesus with 12
• 120 in the Upper Room
• 3 to begin the first missionary journey
• 12 at the start in Ephesus

A little leaven leavens the whole lump. Let’s do a great job in producing that potent leaven, and affecting this secular generation powerfully for Christ and His kingdom!