Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 135:537 (Jan 1978)
Article: Christian Higher Education at the End of the Twentieth Century Part 1: Foundations for the Christian College: From Harvard to HEW
Author: Kenneth O. Gangel

---

BSac 135:537 (Jan 78) p. 3

Christian Higher Education at the End of the Twentieth Century
Part 1:
Foundations for the Christian College:
From Harvard to HEW

Kenneth O. Gangel

[Kenneth O. Gangel, President, Miami Christian College, Miami, Florida.]

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first in a series of four articles delivered by the author as the W. H. Griffith Thomas Memorial Lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, November 1–4, 1977.]

When Charles W. Eliot became president of Harvard University in 1869, there were only three other administrators: the steward of the dining hall, the regent of the dormitories, and a part-time registrar. That was over two hundred years after the founding of Harvard in 1636. The distinctive purpose of America’s first institution of higher learning is well known. Its earliest printed rules announced that the chief aim should be that “everyone shall consider the mayne End of his life & studyes, to know God & Jesus Christ, which is Eternall life.”1

The pattern of secularization set in quickly in the colonies, however, and was well on its way a hundred years after the founding of the nation’s first college. Brubacher and Rudy make these observations about the decline of college graduates going into the ministry:

The percentage of college graduates going into the ministry was 50 during the first half of the 18th century. By 1761, however, this had fallen to 37 per cent and by 1801 to 22 per cent. Revivalism brought the figure back to 30 per cent by 1836, but then a steady decline set in, and it was 20 per cent in 1861, 11 per cent in 1881, and 6.5 per cent in 1900.2

BSac 135:537 (Jan 78) p. 4

In the fall of 1976, 11,337,000 students flooded to the colleges and universities of the United States. By 1980 it is expected that fewer than 20 percent of those students will be in private institutions and only a miniscule proportion in schools which could be called “Christian” as Harvard was in 1636. Yet the member schools of the American Association of Bible Colleges enrolled 29,846 students last year and they represent less than half of the existing Bible colleges and institutes on the North American continent. Surely, more than double that number are in Christian liberal arts colleges and several thousand more are enrolled in evangelical seminaries.

Every aspect of Christian work is affected by Christian higher education. The Bible colleges and Bible institutes have virtually kept the twentieth-century missions movement in operation; and seminary graduates carry out educational responsibilities in local churches as pastors and ministers of ...

visitor : : uid: ()