by Matthew Pinson | Apr 14, 2014
I can remember attending a National Association seminar about twelve years ago. The discussion revolved around the large numbers of retiring missionaries over the next several years. This was compared with the dwindling numbers of students answering the call to cross-cultural missionary service. I would never have dreamed a decade ago that Welch College would have so many students interested in service as career missionaries, “tentmakers,” and short-term missionaries.
Welch College is abuzz with missions. Our student-led Global Missions Fellowship (GMF) stimulates interest in missions and awareness of people groups across the globe who are in need of the gospel. GMF accomplishes this through daily student-led prayer services for missions, fundraising for missions projects, and student missions trips. GMF also sponsors “Missions Moments,” once a week in chapel.
GMF is symbolic of the college’s seventy-one-year-long drive to play its role in the fulfillment of the Great Commission—and equip our students to do the same. We aim to make global missions not just a career but a lifestyle. We want Welch to produce graduates who are Great Commission Christians.
We believe that every one of our students can play a special role in this mandate. Some of our students are called to career missionary service and are being educated for that role at Welch. Our excellent B.A. degree program in Missions takes missions education seriously, for majors and non-majors alike.
Headed by veteran missionary-teacher Ron Callaway, missions majors combine heart, head, and hands to master cross-cultural ministry. The Missions Program sponsors missions trips, internships, missions conferences, retreats, and a host of other activities and events to make missions a central part of campus life.
Ron Callaway is in an excellent position to be able to train future missionaries. Not only is he a career missionary with four decades of cross-cultural missionary experience in places such as Spain, Panama, and Cuba. He also combines the heart of a missionary with the mind of a scholar. Chiefly, Ron Callaway is hailed by his students as a spiritual mentor who guides them in the way of Christ.
Welch College’s Great Commission emphasis impacts not just our missions majors and minors, but our entire student body. Our students who are called as local church ministers—pastors, youth and family ministers, music ministers, and others—have the opportunity to stimulate a vision for missions in the ministry of a local church. Our ministry majors explore the Great Commission mandate in the required course “Local Church and World Missions.”
We recently opened our international business degree program because of the increasing numbers of creative access countries that need the gospel. Many students called to missions are now majoring in international business so as to create a way to gain access to closed and restricted access countries.
Other students are majoring in business or teaching or counseling or some other “secular” field. Many of these will be career tentmakers in restricted access countries. Others will be called to surrender a time in their lives—a week, a month, a year—in short-term missionary service, using their vocational skills to help reach unbelievers in another culture. All of our graduates will be involved in praying, giving, and sending.
Welch College’s Missions Program works hand-in-hand with Free Will Baptist International Missions to educate Free Will Baptist missionaries who are thoroughly prepared for cross-cultural ministry. Leaders from Free Will Baptist International Missions and Home Missions have a presence on campus, and we are training our students to support our denominational missions efforts.
The college’s missions-as-lifestyle approach is probably the main reason that around 80 percent of all Free Will Baptist international missionaries have attended Welch College. We are boldly continuing our commitment to global missions—to being a Great Commission college for the glory of God in the twenty-first century.
Welch’s commission to world missions is the reason we support the annual World Missions Offering of the International Missions Board of the National Association of Free Will Baptists. It’s why I encourage every Free Will Baptist church and individual to give to the World Missions Offering on April 27, 2014. Please give sacrificially to the work of world missions through the WMO, to further the spread of the Gospel of the Kingdom!
by Matthew Pinson | Apr 11, 2014
I recently read a post from Rod Dreher at the American Conservative (americanconservative.com) that I found interesting, and I think most of my readers will find interesting. It consists of a letter he received from a Millennial who changed his mind on same-sex marriage (abbreviated below as SSM) and left the evangelical faith of his youth.
The words of the letter are chilling. The writer basically says the reason he or she left evangelicalism, embraced the same-sex marriage cause, etc., was the shallowness of his or her church, which did not provide any theological foundation on which to base a compelling counter-argument to same-sex marriage.
This letter provides us a cautionary tale about the sort of environment we provide for young people to be formed and to mature in the Christian faith. It dovetails with what Thom Rainer (see, e.g., Essential Church) and others have shown: 18-year-olds are leaving Christianity at alarming rates, and the church type is not a variable in their leaving.
They’re leaving contemporary and traditional churches, urban and rural churches, charismatic and formal churches, megachurches and tiny churches. And the reason they’re leaving is not that we haven’t made the faith appealing enough to their cultural sensibilities. It is that they have not received a deep grounding in the Christian faith. It is that they have not been tied in to the “adult world” of the larger congregation, being generationally segregated in their own “youth world.” It is that they have not been mentored, over time, by godly adults.
And as Thomas Bergler has shown us in The Juvenilization of American Chrisitanity, too often this exodus is because many evangelicals have created a spiritual environment for their young people that appeals to their juvenile, youth-culture sensibilities rather than to their deepest needs and their deeply ingrained, innate knowledge of God and the law of God which is written on their hearts.
As Dreher intimates in the article, the answer is not to pendulum swing away from this shallowness into a “hyper-rationalism” that simply delivers stale theological lectures. The answer is what Leroy Forlines calls “total personality Christianity”—forging rich, loving intergenerational communities of faith that aim to provide full-orbed spiritual formation for the whole person—what we think (the intellect), what we feel (the emotions), and the everyday moral choices we make (the will).
I have reposted the article below.
Confessions Of An Ex-Evangelical, Pro-SSM Millennial
Posted By Rod Dreher On February 27, 2014 @ 8:27 am In | 181 Comments
A terrific letter came in last night from a reader:
As a Millennial whose change-of-heart on gay rights/ssm played a significant role in my walking away from the faith of my childhood, I feel I can shed a little light on that dynamic, and specifically why Millennials aren’t moving on to more liberal churches. My leaving was much more about what the gay rights issues revealed about that faith than it was about the actual issue of gays and their right to marry.
Because there is nothing more obnoxious than a 24 year-old who’s going to tell everyone how the world works, all of this comes with the major caveat that it is simply my experience, and perhaps no one else’s.
I grew up in a Baptist church which practiced a kind of soft Evangelicalism. They would have never thrown out that term because doing that kind of taxonomy isn’t really in the Baptist mindset, but the influence of Evangelicalism was everywhere. Even for non-evangelical Millennials though, it’s important to remember just how much Evangelical culture infused the culture of youth groups from more traditional denominations during this period. I spent a fair amount of time in other churches, and even in those churches that were quite conventional with their adult ministries, their youth ministry was heavily influenced by Evangelicalism.
We were taught that our church not only had the absolute truth, but that there was no earthly history between the Bible and the doctrines being presented to us. I went to Evangelical churches fifty-two Sundays a year for the better part of 19 years, and I cannot for the life of me remember once when the name of a theologian was mentioned. There was one interpretation of scripture, and it was absolutely true. And, in fact, even the various doctrines that were taught were never mentioned by name, because the presence of the name might suggest that there were alternatives. One in three sermons at least name-checked Pre-tribulation rapture theology, but neither those terms nor pre-millennialism or John Nelson Darby was ever mentioned.
Instead of an intellectual tradition, it is a church built on emotion. Every sermon is a revival stump speech about the evils of the world and the need for salvation. Every sermon ends in a sentimental pop song/worship chorus to accompany an altar call in which the same handful of members weeps at the altar (these people are subsequently held up as the most exemplary Christians. I had a friend in junior high who could cry on cue; she cleaned up on attention in this system).
The problem these churches inevitably run into with their young members and same sex marriage is on the issue of doubt. When you have a feelings based salvation in a faith in which doubt is a sign of spiritual failure, the young members of these churches lack the space to wrestle with a tough issue like this.
You see SSM advocates as employing emotive arguments in order to win, but you have to realize that a lot of the Christians that are being argued against have traded in nothing but emotion for the last 30 years. Salvation is a weeping, sinners-prayer mumbling, emotional roller coaster, and the emoting never stops. In all the years I was a member, my evangelical church made exactly one argument about SSM. It’s the argument I like to call the Argument from Ickiness: Being gay is icky, and the people who are gay are the worst kind of sinner you can be. Period, done, amen, pass the casserole.
When you have membership with no theological or doctrinal depth that you have neglected to equip with the tools to wrestle with hard issues, the moment ickiness no longer rings true with young believers, their faith is destroyed. This is why other young ex-evangelicals I know point as their “turning point” on gay marriage to the moment they first really got to know someone who was gay. If your belief on SSM is based on a learned disgust at the thought of a gay person, the moment a gay person, any gay person, ceases to disgust you, you have nothing left. In short, the anti-SSM side, and really the Christian side of the culture war in general, is responsible for its own collapse. It failed to train up the young people on its own side preferring instead to harness their energy while providing them no doctrinal depth by keeping them in a bubble of emotion dependent on their never engaging with the outside world on anything but warlike terms. Perhaps someday my fellow ex-evangelical Millennials and I will join other churches, but it will be as essentially new Christians with no religious heritage from our childhoods to fall back on.
If you are a Christian — Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox — I want you to send a link to this post to every pastor in your church, and everyone involved with youth ministry. And if you are a parent, I want you to think hard about this letter. I know I am. It explains how same-sex marriage was the catalyst for rethinking this churchgoing young Evangelical’s entire belief system.
This dumbed-down emotivism is the way many, many churches — not just Evangelical churches — present the faith to its young people. It’s that “Jesus is my best friend” stuff that adults think will make the faith more palatable to young people, but which just sets them up for collapse when they step outside the bubble of church culture and find pushback. Specifically, as the writer points out, if emotions are the foundation on which you build your faith, what happens when your emotions don’t line up with the teachings of your church? We Orthodox, Catholics, and Reformed Christians can look down our noses all we like at charismatics and Evangelicals for not having a strong and systematic theology, but what good does our theological depth do us if we don’t teach our young people how to think as Christians, and how to discipline their feelings with reason? Catholics, for example, are even more pro-SSM than Evangelicals.
It cannot be said often enough: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is the de facto religion of American youth. [1] Who taught MTD to our kids? Who failed to give our kids something real and strong with which to resist MTD? Not long ago, I was talking to a young adult I know who has walked away from the church, and I told her that if I thought the entirety of Christianity was embodied by the kind of insipid, intellectually vacant church experiences she has had, I would have walked away too. The answer cannot be to pound kids over the head with dry theological lectures, because hyperrationalism is also a problem. But the opposite extreme — teaching young people that the faith is all about emotional experience and fideism — sets them up to be ex-Christians.
by Matthew Pinson | Apr 9, 2014
The following blog post from Ajith Fernando appeared on the Zondervan Academic blog, Koinoniablog.net. Even though Dr. Fernando uses different categories and labels than I do, we discovered much common ground when he spoke on the campus of Welch College, about which he speaks in this post. I thought some of my readers might find it interesting.
Ajith Fernando: Arminian? Calvinist? I Suppose We are to Draw Daggers
Today our friend Ajith Fernando, teacher and author of several books including the recent Reclaiming Love, shares a devotional that’s cut me to the quick.
Recently Fernando met people who are encouraged by the revival of Reformed theology, yet as committed Arminians. Like them he appreciates Calvinism, but is committed to Arminianism, and so he wonders: What is he and others like him to do?
In the authentic post below he reveals his conclusion about a split that often engenders dagger-drawing:
“Systematic theology is helpful and needed in the church, but sometimes, with the paradoxes of Scripture, it can foster unnecessary divisions among devout biblical Christians…when we approach some of the difficult areas—on which the church has been divided over the centuries—we must do so with caution and humility.”
As someone prone to dagger-drawing myself, I would encourage you to sit with Fernando’s words and let them linger with you through your day.
—Jeremy Bouma, Th.M. (@bouma)
_____________________
I, a Methodist, made a surprise discovery of theologically likeminded folk while ministering recently at Welch College (a college of the Freewill Baptists). I was especially enriched by conversations with its President Matthew Pinson who edited the Zondervan book Four Views on Eternal Security.
Like me they have a sense of kinship with those active in the revival of Reformed theology that has taken place recently. I find myself agreeing with many of their concerns. However, the folks at Welch, like me, remain within the Arminian fold, though we seek to guard against the typical Arminian dangers of placing too much emphasis on human effort in salvation and not enough emphasis on the work of grace in enabling us to respond in faith to the call of God and in keeping us from falling away. I didn’t know that there were many others like this! It was a time of personal encouragement and rich fellowship for me.
Early in my ministry life, my first boss, Youth for Christ Central Asia Director Victor Manogarom, told me that the Australian Anglican Archbishop Marcus Loane had told him, “When you come across the ‘Arminian’ texts, preach them with the full force of application; and when you come across the ‘Calvinistic’ texts, preach them also with the full force of application.” This is what I have sought to do over the years.
When the great Anglican preacher Charles Simeon met with John Wesley, Simeon said,
“Sir, I understand that you are called an Arminian; and I have been sometimes called a Calvinist; and therefore I suppose we are to draw daggers. But before I consent to begin the combat, with your permission I will ask you a few questions, not for impertinent curiosity but for real instruction.”
Simeon asked Wesley whether he agreed with several affirmations which Simeon considered basic to the Reformed faith. Wesley found himself in agreement with all those affirmations. Simeon concluded:
“Then, Sir, with your leave, I will put up my dagger again for this is all my Calvinism; this is my election, my justification by faith, my final perseverance: it is in substance, all that I hold, and as I hold it; and therefore, if you please, instead of searching out terms and phrases to the ground of contention between us, we will cordially unite in those things wherein we agree.”
Systematic theology is helpful and needed in the church, but sometimes, with the paradoxes of Scripture, it can foster unnecessary divisions among devout biblical Christians. Systematic theology looks at the whole teaching of Scripture on a topic and communicates it in a way that is appropriate to the context in which we live. This is important for every age.
However, when we approach some of the difficult areas—on which the church has been divided over the centuries—we must do so with caution and humility. The infallible authority we claim is for the affirmations of Scripture, not for our theological formulations.
Actually, I prefer not to use the label Arminian for myself as I try to take both bodies of Scripture seriously. But my Calvinist friends would say that this last statement confirms me as an Arminian! My western friends would accuse me of copping out because I am holding two bodies of Scripture in unresolved tension.
I think I can live with that.
God’s wisdom is so great that we could never fully understand the depths of his truth. So sometimes we will humbly bow in resignation and accept that humble, devout students of the Word will look at some issues differently. Usually each view has its merits for it derives from a biblical emphasis. But each view can also be taken to an unhealthy extreme.
Note: The story about Charles Simeon is from a delightful booklet Charles Simeon of Cambridge: Silhouettes and Skeletons edited by Julia Cameron and published by Didasko Publishing and the Simeon Trust. It is available through http://www.amazon.co.uk/
Originally posted on the Zondervan Academic blog, http://www.koinoniablog.net/2014/04/ajith-fernando-arminian-calvinist-i-suppose-we-are-to-draw-daggers.html#sthash.RjgT2jBu.dpuf
by Matthew Pinson | Apr 2, 2014
In my last post, I discussed what we mean by the word Christian in the phrase “Christian community of faith and learning.” The next word is community. Listen to the primary definitions of this word: a social group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society in which it exists. Another definition is: a group of men and women leading a common life according to a rule. Some other definitions are “similar character,” “agreement,” “identity.”
These definitions capture what I believe should be our vision of a Christian community of faith and learning. We are a community. We are a social group that has gathered around common characteristics and common interests: a common faith, a common Lord, a common baptism, a common confession.
We also perceive ourselves as distinct, in some very important respects, from the larger society within which we exist. We are also a group of men and women leading a common life according to a rule. We have a similar character. We have agreement. We have identity.
The word community means not only that you have things in common, but also that you have unity. So we have things in common, and we come together around that common Lord, faith, baptism, and confession. We have unity. We are a family. And there is much that holds us together.
Diversity
Within this unity we have diversity in our family. One of the reasons for our community standards is that we have a diverse community. In the midst of our doctrinal agreement, some of the members of this community are from more-conservative homes and churches than others. Others are from backgrounds of more-progressive practice (within our context of conservative evangelicalism).
Living in community means people from both sides of our spectrum sacrificing things, giving things up for the sake of others. God has brought us into this place for some wonderful reasons. He has brought us into community with fellow Christians who are different from us, who have different backgrounds from us, who have different perspectives. We learn from each other in this community, in this family. But we do so only through sacrifice—by giving some things up to live in community.
A Disciplined Community
We must continue to have a disciplined community that enables our students to learn and discipline themselves. We must give them habits that will enrich their lives. Our community standards are not always only moral in nature but they help us live together, and love together, and learn together in the way we ought. This college must yet continue its dedication to moral goodness. In a relativistic age, we must continue to teach and model before our students holy living that is rooted in a profound, disciplined relationship with Jesus Christ.
But when we become impatient with each other, let us never forget that we are a flawed community. We are not perfect. We are fallen. Let us encourage each other to realize that these flaws arise from our fallenness and yet urge one another to become what God wants us to be in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.
A Tight-Knit Family
One of the things about being a family is that we are small. I do not aspire to be always as small as we are now, but we must not forget that there are benefits to being small. God often uses small things to show that people who will accomplish His mission are not the great and mighty and powerful but the small people whom the world thinks are the least apt to carry out that mission.
We must teach our students, by instruction and example, the value of living in community, and what it contributes to preparing them to be leaders in the intellectual, spiritual, cultural, and public lives of their own communities.
Unity
At Welch College we are working together to foster a sense of unity. It is amazing to see it as we develop our faculty and staff, with a new, young generation of faculty and staff joining our seasoned veterans committed to the same mission, vision, and strategic plan. We are all working toward the same goals. My aim is to lead in a way that sees unity—indeed community—as vitally necessary to accomplishing our academic and spiritual goals.
The road ahead poses many challenges for Christian higher education. It will not be easy, but we must join hands and boldly traverse it together. By embodying the unity of the Spirit in the bonds of peace, Welch College can accomplish the awesome task the Lord has set before us, thus bringing greater glory to Him and extending his rule over every area of life.
Faith and Learning
The last part of the phrase is, of course, “faith and learning.” This means that Holy Scripture is integrated with every subject, whether the natural sciences, psychology, literature, business, or history. No matter what the subject is, we aim to view it from a thoroughly Christian perspective.
Integration
That does not mean that we simply take a secular subject and sprinkle moralisms and Bible verses over it. Rather, we attempt to integrate the Christian worldview with everything we think and do, including our academic subjects. That is the task of our faculty: to integrate Christianity with the disciplines they teach.
We must teach our students that God created the world and said it was good, that He became incarnate in the world in the form of His son Jesus Christ, and that He aims to redeem this fallen world by the power of His Spirit through Christ’s work on the Cross.
Therefore, Christian students must be diligent students of the world that God has made. This will aid them in their calling to bring about transformation and redemption in this world.
Every Course Has a Purpose
We also need to continue to emphasize that every course has a purpose. Some students come wanting to study only their field, thinking that the arts and sciences are not necessary. We must not succumb to the contemporary notion that career preparation is the primary purpose of higher education. Every course in our curriculum has its purpose.
At Welch College we are more and more committed to our core curriculum, which will play a part in producing truly educated and well-rounded students who have a truly Christian mind. We must remain committed to educating our students in biblical studies and theology, which will enable them to forge for themselves a Christian worldview. But this theological orientation will not be limited to the Bible class; it will pervade all aspects of teaching and learning. That is why we place so much emphasis on our general education core curriculum at Welch College.
The New Welch College Core
Next year we will be rolling out the new Welch College Core—a core curriculum in the liberal arts that will enable us to further our vision of integrating faith and learning. (I plan to spend some time on this blog in the future discussing the new core.) Our goal is to produce graduates who understand God’s Word and how it relates to God’s world. The Welch College Core will help us to do that more consistently.
by Matthew Pinson | Mar 31, 2014
Students who are on our campus for very long grow accustomed to hearing the phrase “Christian Community of Faith and Learning.” That is our vision for Welch College: that it will be a Christian community of faith and learning, to use a phrase that has often been used by the Christian philosopher Arthur F. Holmes. That is what this college is. It is what it has always aspired to be, and it is what we want it to become, more and more, because we are on a progressive journey—a pilgrimage—to realize the will of God for ourselves individually and corporately.
A Christian Community
Let us consider the words, “Christian community of faith and learning.” The first thing we want people to know about this place, and what has led most of us here is that it is a Christian community. Spirituality pervades every aspect of this community. This is a spiritual community, a community that is led by the Spirit, energized by the Spirit, permeated by the Holy Spirit.
But we must understand that in this place, spirituality is not something that is off to the side, something special up in mid-air. The evangelist Francis Schaeffer often spoke of knowledge and life as a two-story house. He spoke of a lower story and an upper story. In the upper story is faith and emotions and love and religious things—spirituality. In the lower story is the rest of life, reason, the everyday decisions we make, the films we watch, the places we go, the things we involve ourselves in, politics, math.
Schaeffer said that so often Christians tend radically to separate those two stories of the house—the upper story and the lower story. Their faith, the upper story, the spiritual dimension of their lives, is radically separated from the rest of life.
A Whole-Life Vision of Spirituality
The vision of spirituality to which this institution aspires is that all of life is spiritual. There is no radical separation of the upper story and the lower story, of faith and reason, of grace and nature. We can and must take every thought, even the secular ones, captive to the obedience of Christ.
This vision means that spirituality is not limited to the chapel period, or to the Christian service project, or the dormitory prayer meeting. Spirituality is also an academic issue. It is an issue of the discipleship of the mind. It is a social issue, a cultural issue. It touches our relationships, our stewardship of our bodies. It touches every aspect of this community, not just what we tend to think of as the “spiritual” parts. We must let spirituality pervade our lives here.
What Do We Mean by “Spirituality”?
When we talk about spirituality, we mean that Jesus Christ came into this world to redeem all things, to save us from sin and death and hell, to save us from our selves which were alienated from Him. We mean that this Good News of Christ is found in the Bible which is the lively Word of God, without error in all that it affirms; and in that very written Word of God, we find the living Word of God, Who alone can save us and set us free.
As Jesus said, you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. The reason we have our students study the Bible is that it alone is the truth that, through the power of the Spirit, guides us into all truth and teaches us the truth about ourselves and the world. And that truth will set us free.
If we are to fulfill our mission in this century, we must continue to emphasize that spirituality is about applying the truth of God’s Word to everyday life—to everything. We must emphasize that truly Christian higher education is not just about taking “spiritual” thoughts or religious thoughts captive to the obedience of Christ, but every thought in all of life.
Calling
Another aspect of our being a Christian community of faith and learning that we must stress is that we are all called, called according to God’s purpose. God loves us all and has a plan for us, and we are all called, not only according to God’s salvific purpose, but also according to His purpose for our life’s work.
One student may be called to be a shepherd of God’s flock. Another may be called to Nepal or France or Indonesia or Brazil to carry the message of the Gospel to the people of another culture. Another may be called to be a stay-at-home mother. Another may be called to go into the workforce as a businessperson or teacher and live out the gospel in the everyday warp and woof of life.
No matter what God calls our students to, we believe they will be engaged in Christian ministry, in the service of Christ’s church, both in the church and in the world. That is some of what we mean by Christian community.
by Matthew Pinson | Mar 30, 2014
I remember with fondness conversations I had with Dr. L. C. Johnson, the founding president of Welch College, before his death. He stressed to me the importance of educating all kinds of students, with all kinds of callings—those called into full-time ministry and those called to be salt and light in the other professions.
Ministry Education
Yet Dr. Johnson stressed to me that he believed that, at its center, the college was commissioned to provide education for ministers, missionaries, and other church leaders. Without a force of well-educated young people called to serve God in full-time church vocations, our churches would not survive. Thus the college had to provide these laborers.
This is still the case, and as our community of faith grows and we launch out into deeper and more difficult waters in this new cultural matrix, we need more vocational Christian ministers than ever before. We must dedicate ourselves anew to educating preachers of the Word who will take a firm stand for God and truth in an age when divine truth is hard to find, shepherds who will lovingly lead their flocks and feed them the good Word of God, evangelists who will speak words of reconciliation to those who are “without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world.”
We must commit ourselves to producing cross-cultural missionaries who will take the Gospel of God into dangerous and exotic places like Afghanistan and the Ivory Coast, or into places closer to home like the Nashville jails or urban Chicago.
Adapting Ministry Education to New Contexts
This will mean adapting our ministry education to new contexts. It will mean, for example, providing online ministry education for mid-career adults who have responded to God’s call to ministry yet in this current economic environment cannot pull up stakes and move their families to Nashville to attend college. This is why we have started offering fully online associate’s and bachelor’s degrees in Christian Ministry.
It will also mean moving into the arena of graduate theological education, beginning with an M.A. in theology and ministry and eventually moving into the establishment of a full-fledged Free Will Baptist theological seminary.
We remain committed to a full-orbed education that brings together an emphasis on Christian ministry education with a commitment to providing education across the disciplines and career fields. In this way our students will be enabled to respond to God as stewards of the gifts and callings He has given them, and be the leaders in the church and the world He has called them to be.
Beauty and Excellence
One thing Dr. L. C. Johnson said to me that will always stay with me was that he founded the college with a vision of cultural excellence. Perhaps this was why everything he touched gleamed with beauty and excellence and refinement.
This commitment to excellence was evident not only in his demand for gracious and considerate behavior for others—what is commonly called etiquette—but also in his appreciation of the arts. Our mission at Welch College must continue to be imbued with this sense of beauty and excellence and high cultural ideals.
People cannot be most productive in their vocation unless they are surrounded by beauty. Thus, we must commit ourselves to fostering a climate for the creation of beauty—from our teaching in the classroom, to chapel, to an ongoing emphasis on the arts—musical, dramatic, and visual—to beauty and elegance in the way we do our jobs, to the professional and personal etiquette we teach and model before our students.
A Historical Tension
Among Free Will Baptists there has always been a tension between anti-intellectualism and a Christian concern for the life of the mind. This tension existed among us as early as the middle seventeenth century. Two examples among our English General Baptist forebears are instructive: The London preacher Edward Barber reacted to being kept out of the schools of the Church of England by denouncing all humane learning. Yet the Lincolnshire farmer and tailor Thomas Grantham became an accomplished linguist, theologian, preacher, and writer through a sustained study of the Bible in the original languages, classical literature, and the Christian Fathers.
When Benjamin Laker, Paul Palmer’s father-in-law, moved to this side of the Atlantic in the late 1600s, he greatly valued his books on theology and other subjects, including Christianismus Primitivus, Grantham’s theological magnum opus. This same concern for education exhibited itself with the small band of worshippers Laker left behind after his death, who appealed to their brothers and sisters in England for either a preacher or for books—and this despite the fact that they and their posterity were kept out of institutions of higher education until late in the eighteenth century.
Zeal with Knowledge
This is the kind of tradition that has been perpetuated by Welch College throughout its history, and we remain devoted to this vision of Christian education. As Dr. Johnson said in a sermon, “Education is not to tame zeal, but to channel it.” We must renew our commitment to opposing that kind of zeal that is “not according to knowledge.”
Our Orthodox Tradition
A major strength of Welch College is that we remain firmly rooted in the Great Tradition of Christian orthodoxy our forebears have bequeathed to us with an unblemished inheritance of Christian faith and practice. The mediator of this tradition has been our churches that make up the National Association of Free Will Baptists. They have insured that we remain on a steady course of Christian orthodoxy and the faith and practice that our fathers and mothers believed—and we believe—most closely reflect the witness of Holy Scripture. Welch College must be a wise steward of that heritage of Christian confession—ensuring by rigorous Christian scholarship and spiritual vigilance that our inheritance remains intact in a new context of religious relativism.
Because of the debt of gratitude we owe to our churches, we must commit ourselves to serving them. Our college must not only be interested in what the denomination can do for it. We must be concerned about what we can do for our denomination. We must strive to instill in our students loyalty to our denomination and our confession of faith.
