Inconvenient voices. . .

My mother and her family were part of the Evangelical Covenant Church (then called the Mission Covenant Church).  It was and remains a very small denomination of now less then 130K members in well under 1K congregations.  The Evangelical Covenant Church was born out of Pietism and has its roots within Lutheranism.  Begun in 1885, it has generally remained conservative.  That is saying something for a denomination without a formal doctrinal statement.  They claim to be “non-confessional, non-creedal and non-doctrinaire,” value the Apostles’ Creed, promote the study of the Scripture, are Trinitarian, and teach salvation by grace through faith, apart from works. The ECC describes itself as “Evangelical, but not exclusive; Biblical, but not doctrinaire; Traditional, but not rigid; Congregational, but not independent.”  Clear as mud, right?

To my ancestors coming to America from Sweden in the earliest days of the 20th century, this sounded like home to them -- especially the Swedish language and culture which the Swedish Lutheran congregation in town had begun to outgrow.  Though they hold to two sacraments: baptism and the communion and traditionally practice infant baptism, they are not doctrinaire about who gets baptized or when or what it means.  The same for Holy Communion.  In 1996 they officially said at their Covenant Annual Meeting that "Resolution on Human Sexuality" represented the ongoing consensus position of the ECC. The resolution upholds all the traditional words "celibacy, the state of abstaining (outside of marriage) in singleness, and heterosexual relations as the Christian standard".  In Omaha in 2019, the Evangelical Covenant Church voted to expel the First Covenant Church, a prominent and historic Minneapolis congregation, for being "out of harmony on human sexuality."  While the ECC is traditional and conservative, they do wish that less attention was drawn to LGBTQ issues.

In May 2021, North Park University (an official school of the ECC) discontinued its Christian Studies Department (CSD) citing low enrollment and then dismissed four tenured faculty, including Dr. Bradley Nassif, an ethnic Lebanese Christian of the Orthodox Church.  When this was challenged, an investigation by a neutral outside organization demonstrated that the CSD was in fact in a strong financial position and so the university rehired three of the four professors they had dismissed.  That is all but Dr. Nassif, who was a prominent, reasoned, and orthodox voice on the issues of marriage and human sexuality. He was the only faculty member in CSD who went on record in support of the ECC’s views of marriage and sexuality, and who said this position should be reflected in the curriculum and classroom.  It seems that  certain members of the faculty and administration found this objectionable and responded to his perspective with hostility.

My point in this is that Dr. Hassif and all those who hold to orthodox Christian views on the volatile issues of sex, gender, and marriage are inconvenient voices for nearly every Christian (and, I might add, Lutheran) university.  These institutions have to deal with federal regulations on so many levels and donor support and student recruitment and faculty recruitment and happiness -- all more urgent than vocally holding to the positions of their sponsoring church bodies which may not be supported by any of these.  These inconvenient voices are threatening what has become a balancing act worthy of any circus performers.  How do you mollify the church body and its official doctrines and procedures while still looking reasonable and normal to those who certify your programs, pay the bills, and send their woke kids to school there?  Indeed!  That is the question.  If it is difficult for a very small church body like the Evangelical Covenant Church, it is nigh onto impossible for the LCMS with its larger and more numerous campuses to manage and direct.  It could be completely without the realm of possibility for colleges and universities affiliated with Rome.  While those of us on the outside of these institutions of higher education cheer on the inconvenient voices, the administrations and boards of regents and recruiters find themselves wincing every time these voices hit the news.

It appears to me that either we find a funding model to make it possible for those schools to turn up their noses at the government and to ignore the impossibility of competing against other schools dependent upon the federal dollar OR perhaps it has come time to simply let them go.  Private universities without a prominent pedigree and endowment will find it hard to compete in the educational marketplace of the future.  If it is hard now, how will they find their way around government paid college tuition at state and local universities?  I am sad in my conclusion that we may simply be prolonging an inevitable choice -- pay up so that the schools are released from the constraints of government and general university culture or else let them go to fare for themselves in the vast sea of American colleges and universities.  I wish there was another option.  I am pretty sure there is not.  Until we figure it out, there will be more inconvenient voices from among those schools who think that religious orthodoxy should be an ordinary expectation from the denominations that founded and fund them (if not directly then with legacy dollars from the folks in the pews).