Research

A Mission Held in Trust: Stewarding the Church-Related University
(2025-2026)

College and university mission statements are often little more than arrangements of vapid platitudes to which any reasonable institution and constituents would commit. Amongst those arrangements, one may find adjectives such as excellence and global, verbs such as welcoming, creating, developing, and disseminating, and nouns such as scholars and leaders.

Variations in the arrangements of such terms may include reference to the geographic location of the institution (in the case of public universities) and/or reference to the organizational structure of the institution (in the case of community colleges, liberal arts colleges, and research universities). As a result, little is left to distinguish the mission statements of public research universities such as the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia from one another.

Unfortunately, the mission statements of Church-related colleges and universities often fail to fare better. Comparable arrangements of platitudes exist. Instead of a reference to service to a particular region or state, Church-related college and university missions often include reference to a particular Christian tradition.

At times, even references to such a tradition can prove vapid. The use of a word such as heritage often serves as an acknowledgment of a past relationship and/or an acknowledgement of a connection to a particular ecclesial body. For example, the last sentence in Southern Methodist University’s mission statement reads, “SMU affirms its historical commitment to academic freedom and open inquiry, to moral and ethical values, and to its United Methodist heritage.”

In contrast, the first sentence in Southwestern University’s mission statement reads, “Southwestern University, under the auspices of the United Methodist Church, is committed to undergraduate liberal education involving both the study of and participation in significant aspects of our cultural heritage, expressed primarily through the arts, the sciences, the institutions, and the professions of society.”

Whether acknowledged at the end or the beginning of mission statements, the problem with these references is that no connection is made between how such a relationship with the United Methodist Church animates the commitments. The true measure of that claim, of course, demands a visit to campus. However, the fact that no reference is made to that relationship on the homepages of those institutions reinforces the likelihood such references are little more than acknowledgments of a past relationship (in the case of SMU) or a bureaucratic connection to an ecclesiastical body (in the case of Southwestern).

To highlight the difference, Wheaton College’s mission statement reads, “Wheaton College serves Jesus Christ and advances His Kingdom through excellence in liberal arts and graduate programs that educate the whole person to build the church and benefit society worldwide.” Perhaps the most critical term in that sentence is the preposition “through.” Details of that connection are then highlighted on the homepage.

In addition, the first sentence in the mission of the University of Notre Dame reads, “The University of Notre Dame is a Catholic academic community of higher learning, animated from its origins by the Congregation of Holy Cross.” Perhaps the most critical term in that sentence is the verb “animates.” Details of that connection are then also highlighted on the homepage.

Even when the language in a mission statement is clear and the connection between how a particular faith tradition animates a Church-related university is compelling, at least two other challenges emerged in recent years with which trustees, administrators, and educators (referenced collectively from here forward as stakeholders) need to contend. One challenge has to do with the culture Church-related colleges and universities presently find themselves engaging. No sooner had stakeholders become familiar with and accustomed to the challenges posed by the secular age, they found themselves contenting with what a growing number of sociologists label the post-secular age.

In An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age, Jürgen Habermas was amongst the first to acknowledge this shift, along with the challenges and opportunities that may emerge. While the future initially looked bright for the Church and, in turn, Church-related colleges and universities, what followed, however, was a general indifference to religion and a rise in people claiming no religious faith.

In the Czech Republic, Tomáš Halík was amongst the first to witness this indifference, acknowledge its challenges, yet also contend that it may provide Christianity with an opportunity for the fullness of faith to find expression. Writing in The Afternoon of Christianity: The Courage to Change, Halík argues, “If it is humanly authentic, faith will retain legitimate scope for critical questions that will help it to grow and cooperate more fully with its divine aspect (faith as a gift of God’s grace).” As a result, in what ways do stakeholders need to reposition the missions of Church-related colleges and universities in order to advance their respective rationales for existence and engage with a post-secular culture?

Another challenge has to do with how stakeholders view their relationship to the missions they are called to steward. Quite often, stakeholders view the mission as something they possess even if only for a season while they are employed by a particular institution. Mission is thus pliable to meet their social, political, and even theological sensibilities. One needs to look no further for confirmation of this challenge than to review the social media accounts of stakeholders and measure some of their messages against the missions of the institutions where they serve.

Mission, in contrast, is an organizing rationale designed to be to be held in trust by members of a community, inherited from predecessors and stewarded with the intention of being passed along to successors. In Philosophical Foundations in Fiduciary Law, Paul B. Miller contends “A fiduciary relationship is one by which one party (the fiduciary) exercises discretionary power over the significant practical interests of another.” In the case of the mission of the Church-related college or university, that second party not only includes the ones to whom the mission will be passed but also the ones from whom the mission was inherited. As a result, how are stakeholders serving Church-related colleges and universities being formed for such service?

In an effort to address the challenges facing Church-related colleges and universities and the missions they strive to advance, this project seeks to make a tripartite contribution by providing strategies for:

1) understanding how mission statements serve as organizing rationales for how Church-related colleges and universities exercise their identity;

2) understanding the larger cultural context in which Church-related colleges and universities find themselves operating and how their mission statements intersect with that context; and

3) understanding the theological, philosophical, and legal characteristics of fiduciary service and how stakeholders serving Church-related colleges and universities are formed for such service.

Habits of Hope: Educational Practices for a Weary World (2023-2024)

Perhaps unbeknownst to one another, the editors of The Hedgehog Review and Plough offered their audience members beleaguered by a mix of COVID-19 and political fragmentation theme issues in 2022 titled, respectively, “Hope Itself” and “Hope in Apocalypse.” When closing his editorial note for the fall issue, The Hedgehog Review’s Jay Tolson offered, “hope may be the most demanding virtue—and, in our time, the one in greatest need.”

As the title he selected suggests, Plough’s Peter Mommsen led his readers into a seemingly counter-instinctual space—one in which thoughts of the apocalypse and hope are not only related but even inextricable. When closing his editorial note for the summer issue, Mommsen contended:

The resurrected Jesus – a flesh-and-blood person who in the Gospels eats a meal, breaks bread, and roasts fish at a lakeside campfire – is proof and pioneer of what humankind will be. . . . In the interim of the ages, as the universe’s great Sabbath approaches, humankind has work to do. Plant the sapling; tend the earthworms; welcome the children given to you; hope. The times may be troubled but beyond them, there’s a future to eagerly await.

However difficult to comprehend, the significance of Mommsen’s words concerning how to understand hope and live accordingly should prove compelling to all of us. When it comes to the cultivation of the virtue of hope, our expectation of the end of time narrates how we live in the present.

While many possible observations that come from Mommsen’s words merit unpacking, two prove most noteworthy. First, hope is inextricably tied to our anticipation of the world to come—a world inaugurated by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In essence, the character hope presently summons falls short of what God intends when disconnected from an expectation of the world to come.

Second, the character hope summons is not passive but active in nature. “Humankind has work to do” and that work in the world at hand is given purpose and order when conducted in the light offered by the expectation of the world to come.

The purpose of this project is to extend that theological logic concerning hope to the work humans called to the academic vocation do. The disorientation plaguing individuals called to such a vocation was on the rise through the 2010s, with Covid-19 only exacerbating it. While the pandemic has gratefully eased, that sense of disorientation is one from which educators have yet to recover.

In an effort to address the challenge facing individuals called to the Christian academic vocation, this project seeks to make a tripartite contribution by:

1) building upon an understanding that an expectation of the world to come is the proper theological context in which to cultivate the virtue of hope in the world at hand;

2) establishing an understanding of the virtue of hope as being critical to how individuals understand their calling to the Christian academic vocation; and

3) detailing how specific educational practices (integration, conversation, experimentation, diversity, reading, writing, and teaching) are not only practices that continue to cultivate the virtue of hope within Christian educators but also within the myriad of internal and external constituents those educators are called to serve.

Mentoring Matters: Theological Explorations of Generational Transition and the Academic Vocation (2021-2022)

Nearly all colleges and universities informally highlight the value of mentoring, whether they claim to afford that experience to their students or to the newest members of their professional ranks. Admissions brochures tout the value of students spending time in conversation with faculty over coffee and working side-by-side on research. New educators are often recruited with the assurance of regular access to senior colleagues ready to share their wisdom.

While perceptions of the value of mentoring are ubiquitous, definitions of, and organizational commitments to good mentoring, are nearly non-existent. Perhaps for the very reason the value of mentoring is perceived to be self-evident, scholars, regardless of discipline, pay little attention to debating the goals of mentoring, what practices allow for the achievement of those goals, and what challenges may emerge when those goals are not rightfully defined and honored.

For example, the results of a poll conducted by Gallup and released on January 24, 2019, demonstrated the link between student well-being and support from faculty. However, the summary of the results of that poll suggested, “supportive relationships with professors and mentors are significantly more common in certain fields of study – including arts and humanities – than others.” One challenge lurking within the details is that the goal of mentoring went undefined and, as a result, the practices allowing that goal to be achieved went unnamed.

Ubiquitous perceptions of the value of mentoring are arguably even more pervasive on Christian college and university campuses than on the campuses of their so-called secular counterparts. The Christian commitment to extend hospitality, naming only one such commitment, creates environments where mentoring is an expected good. Its goals and attendant practices, however, are subjected to little to no critical reflection. As a result, the unquestioned nature of those assumptions raises the possibility that some mentoring practices may even be more harmful than beneficial. One needs to look no further for evidence of harmful mentoring relationships than the non-fraternization policies colleges and universities are being compelled to put into place.

In addition, sociologists point to a heightened need to raise such questions with millennials now defining the generation accepting academic appointments at institutions across the country. For example, David Kinnaman, President of the Barna Group, noted in relation to his study of millennials and the Church entitled You Lost Me, that “the next generation’s prodigious use of technology, entertainment, and media” is historically significant. In particular, such forms and rates of usage disconnect them from members of previous generations and, in turn, how well millennials inherit the professional roles from members of those generations. Kinnaman suggests mentoring practices focused on the cultivation of vocational awareness and wisdom as ways to address that challenge.

Drawing upon the riches of the Christian tradition, the Mentoring Matters project seeks to determine what lessons we can learn from the past concerning healthy mentoring relationships, what goals should define those relationships in the future, and what practices make the cultivation of those relationships possible.

Public Intellectuals and the Common Good (2019-2020)

In one of his last published essays, the late Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C. asked “Where Are College Presidents’ Voices on Important Public Issues?” As was widely accepted by that time, the University of Notre Dame’s president emeritus noted in the February 2, 2001, issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education that scholars and, in particular, college presidents, had abandoned questions plaguing the public.

Hesburgh argued that the pressure to raise funds drove college presidents to embrace politically safer ground versus wading into the uncertainty that often comes with public engagement. As a former member and chair of the Civil Rights Commission, he argued that the most pressing issues of the day were being decided in arenas void of individuals who were arguably best trained to provide needed insights.

Little has changed since Hesburgh made that argument. Books and articles concerning public intellectuals generally begin with the assumption that their contributions are valuable but relatively absent, at least in Western culture. As a result, some of the most recent additions to the literature draw insights from practices public intellectuals embrace within a global context.

While history notes the prominent role evangelical intellectuals once played in Western culture, recent history also records their relative absence. As Mark Noll chronicled in 1995, in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, part of the challenge was the relative lack of intellectual engagement evangelicals were practicing at that time. By nearly every known indicator, intellectual engagement has since increased. However, evangelicals are not immune to the lure of political safety as well as the perils of specialization. The scholarship they produce all too often fails to inform a particular public whether that public be the Church and/or the state.

The “Public Intellectuals and the Common Good” project seeks to assess the present array of challenges, identify valuable opportunities, and provide examples of relevant practices as they relate to helping evangelical scholars expand their vocational understanding to include that of the public intellectual. Far from where some self-appointed public intellectuals find themselves working today, this project will also help evangelical scholars cultivate a sense of need for their work in relation to the broader context of the common good.

The State of the Evangelical Mind (2016-2018)

American Evangelicalism, however one defines it, is at a crossroads. The last quarter of the twentieth-century was replete with signs of prosperity. Not only were many churches, universities, and seminaries growing at unprecedented rates, some argued the individuals populating those institutions were contributing to a relative intellectual renaissance. For example, in the October 2000 issue of The Atlantic, Alan Wolfe noted, “evangelical scholars are writing the books, publishing the journals, teaching the students, and sustaining the networks necessary to establish a presence in American academic life” (https://www.theatlantic.com/ magazine/archive/2000/10/the-opening-of-the-evangelical-mind/378388/).

However, a host of legal, financial, social, and ultimately theological questions now face evangelicals, threatening that renaissance. For example, many observers viewed the financial challenges that compelled Christianity Today to close Books and Culture after twenty-one years as a tangible expression of those challenges. Caught between fear and hope, many of those same observers proposed the evangelical mind is now on the threshold of another “scandal.” In contrast, others proposed the opportunities for faithful intellectual engagement and witness are greater now than in recent history.

The answers to those questions have ramifications for evangelicals as well as the nation in which many evangelicals find a home. In The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (Simon and Schuster, 2017), Frances FitzGerald argues evangelicals defined the nation in a host of ways. They comprise about 25% of the US population but, as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author notes, evangelicals are far from a homogenous group. As a result, she contends how evangelicals engage issues ranging from climate change to immigration will have an impact on the range of debates and possible courses of action taken in the United States.

This project seeks to reflect upon that past while also thinking critically about the prospects for the future of the evangelical mind. As argued, those prospects depend in many ways upon the influence evangelical churches, universities, and seminaries exert. For example, what role will each one of those institutions play? What kinds of relationships will they need to share with one another? What kinds of relationships will churches, universities, and seminaries need to forge with other institutions? The essays in this volume are designed to frame the resources needed for answering those questions while also suggesting how those institutions should chart both their respective and common courses for the future.