Christ-Centered Higher Education and Why It Matters

My address at the dedication of the William L. Armstrong Center at Colorado Christian University, October 4, 2024

Today is a day to celebrate miracles, of what God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ have done through the enabling power of the Holy Spirit at Colorado Christian University.

I was asked to make some brief comments today about Christ-centered higher education and why it matters.

This past week I was in South Korea representing Colorado Christian University at the Fourth Lausanne Congress in Seoul, South Korea. The Lausanne movement was started by Billy Graham and John Stott in the 1970s. It’s a gathering of evangelical leaders from the global church that takes place about every 15 years to try answer the question, ‘how do we reach our world for Christ now?’ How can we unite for the common task of fulfilling the Great Commission and world evangelization. It was an amazing gathering.

In one break-out session, I was meeting with evangelical college and university educators from around the world. The conversation turned to the topic of secularization and the immense pressure most of these Christian schools feel to secularize. One president said that our secular counterparts scoff at our being here in Seoul for a conference on mission and evangelism. They think Jesus and the university have nothing to do with each other, and that evangelism goes against the very essence of what the university is all about.

At that point I could not keep quiet and said, “And do you know what? They are dead wrong!”

I reminded my colleagues that the university was not born out of an eruption of secular thinking. Quite the contrary, it was born out of a Christian worldview.

What we forget is that in the early Christian centuries, wherever the gospel went, the academy usually followed—Christians founded schools. When the gospel was embraced and Christ was received and people learned that God had given us a book, they wanted that book. And they wanted to learn how to read it. In other words, there is an educational impulse at the very heart of the Christian faith.

We forget that in the Middle Ages, Christianity created the university. The great Western universities arose out of cathedral schools and monasteries. That those schools and monasteries were themselves part of a mission outreach (which included evangelism) to bring the Christan faith to a spiritually dark European continent.

We also forget that in the new world, in North America, at the beginning America’s colleges were all Chistian institutions. We forget that American higher education rests upon the foundation of Biblical Christianity. Early on America’s college taught the Bible, Christian moral teachings, a Biblical worldview and salvation through Jesus Christ.

It was Puritans who, in 1636, established Harvard College in Massachusetts Bay Colony, our nation’s first institution of higher learning. Harvard’s mission statement read, “Let every student be plainly instructed…..the main end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17:3) and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning.”

Almost all the ivy league institutions had similar beginnings. Yale was founded by Congregationalists. Princeton by Presbyterians, Brown by Rhode Island Baptists, Dartmouth by New Hampshire evangelicals, Duke by Methodist, Colgate and the University of Chicago by Baptists. In fact, many American colleges were founded as a result of the first and second Great Awakenings (which were evangelistic).

If Jesus Christ is the light of the world, as he claimed to be, then he has everything to do with education. We believe this at CCU. We believe he is the eternal Word of God in whom, as Paul writes to the Colossians, “are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” And please recall, that when Jesus gave his apostles the Great Commission, he said, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” The Great Commission itself incudes the imperative to teach!

The age we are living in is not only an age of forgetfulness, where we have forgotten all these things, it is an age of rapidly deepening educational chaos, and rapidly declining confidence in higher education. The recent Gallop polls tell us that confidence in higher education in America is dropping like a rock. Why?

Because too many schools have given up the beliefs that you need to have for a university to work. They no longer believe in the truthfulness of truth, let alone the unity of knowledge. They won’t teach character because they can’t agree on what it is. The belief that we have a common human nature is also fading. Wisdom is not talked about. Reason is suspect. Core curriculums are rare. The West, the United States, and Israel are bad. The Judeo-Christian heritage is considered oppressive. Merit, assessment and excellence are devalued. Biological sex is ignored. Debate is stifled. Reading long-form books is too difficult. Ideologies like critical theory reign. And Christophobia is pervasive.

Now this is what makes CCU different. At CCU, you get more, not less. We believe that the pursuit of truth matters, that moral formation is important, that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. We want to teach the best of our heritage. We encourage debate. We want students to be shaped by goodness, beauty, and truth, because we believe in goodness, beauty, and truth! We believe that texts—the written word—matters, and some are worthy of deep and careful study. We still believe in excellence. We don’t coddle our students. Rather, we want them to become courageous and resilient.

Bill Armstrong was spot on when he said that at CCU we are going to lean into and lift up the name of Jesus. He was defying the secularists!

Missiologists often speak of the 10/40 Window. The 10/40 Window is the geographic band on the globe encompassing between 10- and 40-degrees north latitude. It is the region where the majority of the world’s unreached people groups are, people who have never heard the name of Jesus. It is a place of spiritual darkness, but also a place of immense opportunity to bring the hope of the gospel.

Christian educators sometimes like to speak of the 18-22 window which highlights young men and women between the ages of 18-22. These are the traditional college years.  We know the amazing life formation that happens during these years.

We also know that the majority of people who come to Christ do so before age 22 (National Church Life Survey) and we know that what happens on our campuses today is played out in our major cultural institutions several decades later. For these reasons, the 18-22 window represents a season of immense formational opportunity.

But we also know that this age window can also represent a world of immense spiritual darkness. Unfortunately, too many schools contribute to this darkness. They have embraced a project of deconstruction, of dismantling beliefs. And so, sadly, too many students graduate hating our national past, deploring our present, despairing of our future, and are just plain dumbed down.

CCU has a radically different agenda because of Jesus Christ. Ours is a project of reconstruction.  Our students graduate appreciating the best of our past, embracing our present, not as victims but as world changers, and looking to the future with hope because of Christ. As I like to say, we are putting the “higher” back in “higher education.” This is what our committed faculty labor at.

And I believe that the world and our nation need more CCU graduates. And so it is our intent to send out class after class, wave after wave, year after year, in order to fulfill the Great Commission of the Lord Jesus Christ, and to fulfill our own university mission, which reads: “Christ-centered higher education, transforming students to impact the world with grace and truth.” Let me say it again: “Christ-centered higher education, transforming students to impact the world with grace and truth.” Say it with me: “Christ-centered higher education, transforming students to impact the world with grace and truth.” This is what together we are working for. Thank you for helping us to this great end.