Re-Imagining Christian Higher Education: Hope for the Future

When the editorial board first selected the topic of this special theme issue of the journal, it was with a keen sense of the challenges facing Christian higher education, but also the many opportunities and possibilities for renewing and reimagining Christian higher education that could emerge amidst these challenges. Therefore, we approached each author with a mandate not only to highlight the challenges we are facing, but to provide specific suggestions for how to move forward. As you read the articles, you will find many creative steps that Christian postsecondary institutions can take to be better positioned for success in the future, as well as steps individuals can take in their own sphere of influence.

The distinctiveness of Christian higher education is highlighted throughout the articles in this issue. In the first article, “Steering the Ship Through Uncertain Waters: Empirical Analysis and the Future of Evangelical Higher Education,” P. Jesse Rine and David S. Guthrie note distinctions of Christian higher education that both compound our challenges and provide a way forward in overcoming them. They assert that the tuition-dependent nature and small endowments of Christian colleges and universities result in a financial vulnerability that raises questions as to how many of our institutions have a sustainable future, commenting that “Christian colleges can't save the world if they can't pay the rent” (p. 15). Yet hope for the future is also provided in the data they present as they compare Christian colleges to other private, non-doctoral institutions: Christian colleges remain among the most affordable options in the private sector for obtaining a four-year degree, we are diversifying our student bodies at a faster rate than our peers, and we have higher yield rates than this benchmark group (that is, a higher percentage of students who inquire actually enroll), indicating that there remains a strong attraction to what Christian colleges distinctively offer.

As the student body at Christian colleges and universities becomes more diverse—and even more predominantly female—the issue of women in leadership at these institutions becomes particularly salient. In Karen A. Longman and Patricia S. Anderson's article “Women in Leadership: The Future of Christian Higher Education,” the “significant underrepresentation of women in positional leadership” is highlighted as “one of the most persistent challenges facing the movement of Christian higher education as it seeks to create a relevant and sustainable future” (p. 24). They note that although some progress has been made in the past two decades to diversify senior leadership teams, women still hold only slightly over 20% of senior leadership roles. Their article analyzes some of the potential reasons for this underrepresentation and suggests specific strategies for increasing the number of women in senior-level leadership within Christian colleges and universities.

The increasing diversity of our student bodies presents challenges of inclusion and equity, as Allison N. Ash and I note in our article “Pathways to Success for Students of Color in Christian Colleges: The Role of Institutional Integrity and Sense of Community.” This article is based on research conducted with over 1,500 students of color on 12 Christian college campuses, in which the predictors of students' intent to graduate from the Christian college where they initially enrolled are outlined. The challenges of delivering on the promises of a Christian college education and creating a sense of community among diverse students on predominantly White campuses are clear in the findings, but we also provide hope for becoming campuses where students of color can thrive by highlighting specific actions that campus leaders can take.

When educators at Christian colleges and universities talk about “diversity,” they often choose to limit the conversation to race (and sometimes gender). Yet our students' increasing diversity is not only in race, ethnicity, and gender, but also in sexual orientation and gender identity. These topics are often difficult to engage on our campuses because they highlight theological differences, as well. In Alyssa N. Rockenbach and Rebecca E. Crandall's article, “Faith and LGBTQ Inclusion: Navigating the Complexities of the Campus Spiritual Climate in Christian Higher Education,” the focus is on the campus spiritual climate for LGBTQ students who have chosen to enroll in Christian colleges and how we support these students who have been entrusted to us. If our mission is to develop all our students spiritually, how do we do so with integrity and care?

Those on the front lines of student interaction are not only faculty, but also student affairs educators. In their article, “The Future of Residence Life and Student Affairs in Christian Higher Education,” Rishi Sriram and Melissa McLevain note that one of the major distinctives of a Christian college education is its residential nature and the potential for seamless learning to flow across the curriculum and co-curriculum. These authors offer hope for the future by outlining a Learning Model of residence life that capitalizes on the benefits of student-faculty interaction, such that “residential communities can be transformed into environments that offer an integrated, holistic education that is vital to the mission of Christian institutions” (p. 72).

One of the key distinctives of members of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU) is a commitment to a liberal arts education. Cynthia A. Wells, in her article “A Distinctive Vision for the Liberal Arts: General Education and the Flourishing of Christian Higher Education,” encourages us to capitalize on that distinctive through the creation of a general education program that is “remarkably different” (p. 84) and that helps students “make sense of their education and their lives” (p. 89). She provides a sense of hope in her assertion that a general education curriculum rooted in the liberal arts will focus on the formal virtues, as well as students' meaning and calling, as “a way to ensure that human flourishing takes center stage in Christian higher education” (p. 90).

Moving from what Wells refers to as a “modest proposal” (p. 90) to a sweeping call for “deep, adaptive change” (p. 98), E. Eileen Hulme, David E. Groom, Jr., and Joseph M. Heltzel provide a blueprint for the Christian college of the future in their article, “Reimagining Christian Higher Education.” Based on their qualitative research on innovation and the change process on numerous campuses across the U.S., they invite readers to walk with them through the Christian campus of the future as a place that is “committed to faithful learning and to the intellectual, personal, and spiritual development of its students,” yet “engages in holistic, flexible, and real-world applicable modes of customized learning” (p. 100) that enables students to meet the needs of a globally connected world. The vision these authors cast encourages Christian higher education to move to an entirely new level, engendering hope through the many possibilities that are concretely described.

As a complement to calls for innovation, John Reynolds and Jon Wallace take a leadership perspective on envisioning the future of Christian higher education, a perspective grounded in their experiences as a university chancellor and president, respectively. In their article entitled “Envisioning the Future of Christian Higher Education: Leadership for Embracing, Engaging, and Executing in a Changing Landscape,” these authors encourage Christian college and university leaders to embrace their Christian identity as the foundation for their success, engage in new models of learning and doing business, and execute specific actions that make a Christian college education more accessible, affordable, and relevant to the types of students coming our way in the future. Their emphasis on leadership and governing boards provides hope for the future as they outline ways in which Christian universities can change the way they operate in the present.

The last article in this issue echoes Reynolds and Wallace's call for Christian colleges and universities to embrace their Christian identity, as President David S. Dockery reminds us of our roots and encourages us to reclaim and revitalize the breadth and depth of the Christian tradition in order to move forward. His article, “Toward a Future for Christian Higher Education: Learning from the Past, Looking to the Future,” goes beyond the past, however, by emphasizing that “we will need both confessional conviction and a fresh spirit of cooperation to build bridges toward collaborative and shared efforts” (p. 118). He reminds us that the future success of Christian higher education may well depend on our ability to “hold hands with brothers and sisters who disagree on less important matters” (p. 118) for the sake of the vital kingdom work that remains to be done. His words provide a fitting conclusion to this special issue of the Christian Higher Education journal as they remind us of our foundational purpose and call us toward a hopeful future embodying God's kingdom on earth.

Technology enables the challenges facing Christian higher education to become more readily apparent, more frequent, and to capture our attention with a greater sense of urgency. We need only open our email or connect to social media as we begin our day, and the challenges await us—many of them requiring a rapid response. In some ways, the ability to sort the important issues from the unimportant yet seemingly urgent issues represents our biggest challenge: discerning what Wayne Muller (2010) calls “the next right thing” (p. 27). It is tempting in this era of benchmarking to want to do it all, to craft Christian colleges and universities so that they offer everything our competitors offer, but the downside to this approach is that, as Jeff Selingo (2013) has noted, “the vast majority of schools that try to stand out end up looking like everyone else trying to do the same thing” (p. 17). It is in our distinctive approach to education that Christian colleges and universities have the most opportunity for success, and it is in our ability to discern “the next right thing” that we can move forward a step at a time.