Bob Osburn on whether to send students to a secular or Christian college:

[Dr. Osburn serves as executive director of the Wilberforce Academy, which trains students to be redemptive change agents in their home societies http://www.wilberforceacademy.org/. ]

Rick:    Why should a Christian student consider attending a secular college?

Bob:    Exposure to a wide range of views and voices.  This is essential if students are going to recognize how distinctive is the Christian voice in public affairs. 

Think of it this way: A Christian college (not a bad place at all; I had one son who graduated from a nearby Christian college!) can be like an echo chamber where all the voices sound the same.  There is nothing distinctive about them.

By contrast, the secular university is a cacophony, and pretty soon you begin to recognize how different and unique the Christian perspective is because it sounds so different from the others.  Speaking personally, my three most exciting years growing in Christ were my sophomore through senior years at the University of Michigan after I became a Christian during my freshman year. 

Rick:   Any reasons not to attend a secular college?

Bob:   There are plenty of reasons not to.  The multiplicity of voice and views can subtly relativize one’s worldview, and there are you: anchorless.  It happens to many. 

Perhaps a bigger risk is that a Christian student hangs out with friends who, rather than being intellectually engaging, are morally degrading.  The effect can be tragic, unless one is solidly anchored in Christ.  So the risks are both intellectual as well as social.

Tribalism and Your Church

Does the name Ludwig Wittgenstein mean anything to you?

It should. Wittgenstein was a mid-20th century philosopher who gave us “language games.” That is, the way communities use language is similar to a game, and every community gets to make up its own rules of the game.

Two other philosophers of note, John Dewey and Richard Rorty, added a pragmatic twist to language games: Every group should strive to do what works for them. There’s no need to conform your group’s “rules” to any external standard, such as objective truth.

After all, no such standard exists.

On college campuses, this whole landscape is often called tribalism. What it means for Christian students/faculty is that we’ve been relegated to being one tribe among many. One shaper/creator of reality among all the rest. One language game alongside dozens of others.

Tribalism has gone beyond the postmodern university and has settled into mainstream culture. Thus the church is one of the many tribes out there, like one of a thousand flocks of geese, nothing more.

What does this mean for outreach? For evangelism at your church and mine? Two possibilities:

• We could work to regain our rightful "Voice of Authority" in order to shape our culture from a position of strength. This choice seems a dead-end to me. On campus, for example, it rarely if ever works.

• Accept our cultural demotion, act like one of the tribes, and commend Christian faith to a needy world from a posture of humility. Talk across the table with neighboring tribes rather than down to them.

In my view the Christian tribe should be the most humble, the most truthful, the most respectful, the most daring, the most artistic, the most fun, the most intellectual, the most emotional, the most supernatural, the most caring, the most interracial--the most compelling. . . of any tribe on the planet.

These qualities would revolutionize our outreach. What do you think?

The Rule of Non-Imposition

One of the inviolable doctrines of the postmodern university is what I call the rule of non-imposition. It means that no group on campus can impose its understanding of the world on any other group.

Picture the university as a huge bowling alley, with every lane occupied by a different group. These groups, or “tribes” as they’re often called, could be ethnic, religious, political or departmental. The rule of non-imposition, which is bundled together with other concepts such as tolerance and respect, forbids tribes from critiquing each other.

“So what?” we may say. People with similar backgrounds/interests hang together in groups, and the groups are supposed to be nice to each other. Not too profound.

The profound part is where it all came from and what it means for the deep epistemology of the university—and the marketplace and church, ten years later.

What a second, the ten years is up, it’s here . . .

QUESTION:  Do you see tribalism in your town, job setting, campus? As a Christian, do you feel the pressure of the “rule of non-imposition”?

NEXT WEEK: the origins of tribalism and the RADICAL implications for campus ministry—and your church.

To Inculcate or Evangelize?

The danger in giving parental advice is manifold. First, it implies a direct cause-effect relationship between parenting techniques and children’s behavior. Second, it can leave parents feeling guilty over wayward children, often falsely so. Third, since Sharon and I got lucky with our own kids, it gives the impression we really knew what we were doing.

With those qualifiers, I feel only slightly safer saying this: Christian parents should think more about evangelizing their kids, less about inculcating them.

I’m thinking here of incremental, sensitive evangelism that listens carefully, loves fully, prays frequently and shares openly. Evangelism that is 100% individualized to the person—whether your little 5-year old explorer, 15-year old wing-spreader, or late-teen wild oats sower.

The crucial difference is this: choice.

Those who inculcate say in essence to their kids: “You don’t really have a choice in the matter. You’re growing up Christian, and that’s that.”

Those who evangelize say something a little different: “You DO have a choice in the matter, and we’re doing all we can to make the Christian pathway attractive and challenging to you.”

Of parental influence, Smith and Denton say this: “The best social predictor, although not a guarantee, of what the religious and spiritual lives of youth will look like is what the religious and spiritual lives of their parents do look like.” (Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, p261).

(Folks, is our own spiritual modeling drawing kids in, or pushing them away?)

• When the evangelized come to me at age 18, most are ready to roll in ministry.

• When the inculcated show up, often they have little ownership of their faith. Some need a crisis and re-conversion. Others. . . well, they never do show up.

I recognize the inherent risk in what I’m suggesting. But I believe “evangelism” pays off more often than “inculcation.”

Next blog topic: College Campus: what it’s really like out there.

On the Atheist’s Lap

My daughter Kelli was an inquisitive, expansive thinker right out of the chute. I remember one time she asked me why God wouldn’t show himself if he was actually in the room with us. And why Florida was so far from Minneapolis.

When atheist Benjamin Pierce came to dinner one evening sporting a long beard, Kelli hopped into his lap and stroked the face fuzz for a minute before putting it straight to Ben: “Why don’t you believe in God?”

Ben looked at me apologetically as if his response might forever destroy a virgin intellect. I merely shrugged. At the time I was in an active state of disobedience from the ideology of Christian parents sheltering their kids from worldly influences and alternative belief systems.

It started with my decision in Kelli’s infancy to listen carefully to the parenting advice proclaimed by conservative talk radio and fundamentalist literature—then do precisely the opposite.

So I sheltered her from the most powerful forces that seemed to be pushing my professional audience—college students—out of the house of God: forced church attendance, boring sermons, hoop-jumping through confirmation classes, stringent restrictions on music and clothes and friends, and coerced Bible reading.

My wife Sharon is more temperate than me. She thought I took this whole approach to parenting too far. She’s probably right, I went a bit overboard.

I taught Kelli a non-compartmentalized (integrated) spirituality—namely, that sports and music and dancing and decorating her room were not “neutral” events, spiritually speaking, but rather, fun activities created by God for our enjoyment. Also, that Jesus would be her faithful companion everywhere she went.

My belief was that if a little girl would simply learn to have fun with Jesus, and nothing else, she’d probably grow into a fuller understanding of God and his ways later in life—because she’d want to.

I sought to evangelize, not inculcate. I’ll write about what I think is the difference, next week.