Since the question is being asked, what does it mean to be a Christ-centered university, there must be something missing between what we say we are and the reality of what we are. I see the problem being this, we as individuals can accept Christ as our Savior and as we grow in Christ we become more Christ centered. The relationship is personal and life changing. Transposing an individual relationship with Christ to an institutional relationship with Christ is where the dilemma starts.
Huntington University is a name of a higher education institution which has no soul and therefore no personal relationship with Christ. If we are going to be a Christ centered university, the focus must be on the individuals that make up the university.
This starts with the board members, president, faculty, staff and students. All with the same goal of striving to become more like Christ. Here again is where things start to break down. Each person in the groups mentioned have their own idea of what it means to be Christ centered. Depending on their backgrounds growing up, what denominations they are associated with and their maturity in Christ, gives each person a different perspective of what Christian is and how this plays out in every day life.
I will leave it up to others on how to unify this diverse group of individuals, so that everybody under Christ has the same vision and purpose as affiliates with Huntington University.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Bob Myers // Mar 7, 2008 at 8:50 am
Wow, Steve, you put your finger on an issue that is pervasive throughout evangelicalism. The same question came to my mind when, in the faculty workshop, Duane Litfin was asking questions like, “what does it mean when I say that Christ is Lord of my life,” or “what does it mean if I say Christ is Lord of my classroom, my curriculum, or my scholarship?”
Those are all good questions but I was struck by their individualistic nature. As a worship leader and wannabe renewalist, I believe the individualism of our evangelical culture is a barrier to fulfilling our potential as the people of God. It’s no surprise. The bedrock of evangelical experience is a “personal relationship with Christ.” And we should embrace that understanding from our pietistic heritage. But perhaps we can learn, as Mark Noll inferred in the same faculty workshop, from our Catholic brethren who are much better at understanding and living out a corporate faith.
In answer to your question, I suggest the place to begin is with Huntington’s heritage. We study history to learn who we are. We need to view our existence as a corporate community today as connected to those who have come before us. Huntington’s story as an institution founded “by the Church of the United Brethren in Christ upon a vital evangelical Christian faith” seems to be a good place to start in addressing the question of how we can be a Christ-centered community. Of course, it’s not so simple. What comprises “a vital evangelical Christian faith?” Certainly, there are attitudes and ideas that have attached themselves to twentieth century evangelicalism like barnacles on a ship’s hull that should be scraped off. (Perhaps restrictions that emerged from the Temperance Movement are one example.) But at least we have a boat to float. Now is not the time to jump ship but rather make sure she is seaworthy for the voyage ahead.
2 Fr Francis Zanger // Sep 14, 2008 at 4:08 pm
As a non-member of the Huntington community (I’m a medically-retired chaplain, volunteering for the small Anglican church in Portugal, the Igreja Lusitana), I’m not sure that I have a place in the conversation,but I also suffer from a failure of shyness, so:
The question of Christian individiualism is, by Church standards, relatively new– the first 1500 years of Christianity (like the Jewish faith before it) rarely thought or spoke in terms of one’s “individual relationship” with God– faith was corporate, and we were members of the Body of Christ. It is only with the rise of Protestantism that the strong emphasis on the individual began to take hold in some parts of Christianity… and where it did, the Church suffered schism after schism until literally no one knows how many different ‘brands’ of Protestant there are world-wide. [In Abu Dhabi, there is but one legal non-Roman Catholic Church-- it's Anglican-- but it allows any other Christian 'denomination' that wishes to use their property. When I visited in 1996, there were some 60+ groups, many of them East Indian and with fewer than a dozen local members, and none of them worshipping together.]
Scripture rarely speaks of the individual Christian– the “you” is virtually ’second person plural’ (vice 1st person– the ‘thee/thou’ of the King James translation). As a single example, look at either Matthew 25:31-46 or 1 Peter 3:21-22, both of which speak specifically regarding salvation. In Matthew’s Gospel, Christ gathers us as nations, not as individuals, separating us as a shepherd would sheep from goats. Peter’s letter is all written to ‘plural’ Christians– to the Body which individuals became part of through baptism.
The evangelical emphasis on the individual is echoed in the secular world, but Christ’s teachings were hardly about “I’ve got mine– you’re on your own”.
[One of the least Christ-like Christian hymns I know is "In the garden", the one in which the singer says "He walks with me, and He talks with me, and He tells me I am His own... and the joy I feel no one else has ever known". No one else has ever known the joy of Christ? Not Mary or Peter or Paul? Not any other Christian for 2,000 years? And we teach this in our churches???]
Huntington’s great hope isn’t to produce individuals, on their own, who believe that they have a one-on-one relationship with God. Rather, it is to create a campus where Christians may live in community, together as the Body of Christ, by His help and to the very best of their abilities.
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