BJU to change its Sunday morning format: "BJU will eliminate its Sunday morning service on campus"

Jay, I don’t think we’re too far apart on this. However, I must take issue with this comment:

We shouldn’t want a bunch of 18-19 year olds who may be away from home for the first time and who have little to no theological grounding (because, let’s face it, people treat BJU like it’s a reform school and not a University) deciding that the “church of what’s happening now” is what’s best for them. We certainly don’t want people who are training for Pastoral Ministry (for example), attending a seeker oriented church with doctrinal issues and getting more unsound while they are being groomed to take church leadership.

1. When does the hand-holding stop? It has to stop sometime.

2. 18 yr olds join the military everyday and do just fine without hand-holding (after boot-camp, that is!). If they don’t, they get severely punished.

3. What makes you think they won’t go to a “seeker” church once they graduate?

4. The role of screening a Pastor falls to the Deacon board, not a Bible College. I’m obviously an independent Baptist … !

I don’t have a surefire solution, but treating adults like adults seems to be a good way to start.

Tyler,

You treat adults like adults in the military, but there are still plenty of rules to uphold. You may not have to regulate where one goes to church, but there are expectations for a great many things, beginning with personal grooming habits, even. I mean, if they’re adults, why can’t the guys choose whether or not to grow a beard?

It would seem like your military perspective would at least shed some light on the concept of uniformity (whether you agreed with the application in this setting or not).

[Larry]

….will they be allowed to attend the church of their choice or will there be an “approved” list?\

Out of curiosity Dan, does a place like Liberty (where I think you teach some) allow students to attend anywhere?

Larry, I’m not privy to the exact parameters, but I believe there are (or at least were when my children were there a few years ago) some general guidelines for where students may attend. In all honesty, I don’t see how they could possibly monitor that considering their sheer size. They used to offer Sunday morning services on campus for campus students in the Vines Center as Thomas Road Baptist Church could not hold all of them. I think that has been discontinued. I do know that MANY students are very deeply involved in local churches and some even serve in part-time staff capacities as do many faculty.

I remember when BJU had their very tight list of “approved” schools and my friend, Walt Hanford shifted his style a bit too much for their liking and it became a “banned” ministry and many faculty people who had attended there had to find new churches and students weren’t allowed to attend on Sunday night or mid-week. I remember my friends who were students at BJ talking about how the girls had to wear hats, etc… to the Sunday morning services and it sounded very odd to me, even 30+ years ago. I attended a “Vespers” Service as a guest there one time 25 years ago or so and found that to be an interesting experience. I don’t know whether or not they still have those or not.

Dan

@ Tyler - you really think 18 year olds in the military do just fine? That has rarely been my experience, and it runs counter to passages like Psalm 1 and 1 Corinthians 15:33.

@ Jay - it seems the campus pastor is moving in the opposite direction of scripture, not closer to conformity. It’s not a church, it’s just a better looking counterfeit.

It’s one of the major issues I have with colleges and seminaries assuming the responsibility of training pastors instead of being more directly under the authority of church leadership.

I think it results in too many people passing the buck- churches assume that the college/seminary did the necessary filtering, and colleges don’t take responsibility for those who graduate with ministry degrees and intentions toward vocational ministry. Biblically, where does this responsibility truly lie?

Personally, I think it would be very interesting to just let students be who they are and reveal themselves, instead of pressuring them to conform while in their hearts they nurture a completely different set of values.

A list of approved churches makes my knees twitch.

You are correct, but it is not at all on the same level.

In the military, you can go where you want, you can see what you want, you can do what you want, you can date whom you want, you can go to church where you want, you can read what you want, you can listen to music you want.

Control in the military is usually restricted to where you live, what you look like and good order and discipline. Bible College is far more restrictive.

I hear what you’re saying, but 18 yr olds in the military do the same as any 18 yr old anywhere. They do not have dictatorial restrictions on their activity once out of boot-camp, and they survive. Some, like me, actually have real life experiences when they get older, in contrast to a 22 yr-old who leaves college and is wondering if he’ll be struck dead for dating a girl who doesn’t go to an approved church.

Adults must be treated like adults sometime. 18 is the time to start.

At 19, I handled an emergency dispatch call where a 7-r old girl died a few days after Christmas. The mother cursed at me, insulted both my ancestry and my mother, and blamed her daughter’s death on me. If I had gone to college, I’d have been counting my demerits and aspiring to be a dorm leader. No thanks …

Tyler,

The other side of that coin is that the “sheltered” 22 year old has a few more tools and a little more wisdom and maturity to face those decisions with when they step out. I am not sure how we can argue it is better to turn an 18 year old loose to learn as they go than to say we are turning a 22 year old college graduate loose to learn as they go. Seems like the same step, just different times in life.

Chip, I hear you. However, I think the 22-yr old has job skills but little life experience. I think he has been cut off from the real world. I think it is a bad way to go. We just come from different places on this one.

I think by adopting a Bible College = daycare mentality (prejorative term, I’ll admit, but I feel strongly about this) then we’re doing little but delaying normal maturity from 18 until 22.

We’re not as far apart as you think. I don’t want college age students cloistered. But I have not seen 18 year olds in the military mentored to godliness. I would like to see a step somewhere in between the typical IFB (BJU, NIU, MBBC, Faith) college experience and the totally free secular campus/military.

[TylerR]

You are correct, but it is not at all on the same level.

In the military, you can go where you want, you can see what you want, you can do what you want, you can date whom you want, you can go to church where you want, you can read what you want, you can listen to music you want.

Control in the military is usually restricted to where you live, what you look like and good order and discipline. Bible College is far more restrictive.

In some ways, yes. I’d say it’s a little easier to drop out of Bible College than un-enlisting from the military, though. :) A graduate of a place like BJU has a lot more freedom to choose where he goes and what he does after graduation than a service academy grad.

In today’s military, one can date whom one wants- including members of the same sex. In the military, you can pick up a copy of an “adult magazine” at the PX (or at least they were behind the counter at the convenient stores in Navy housing when I was a kid). I mean, how far do we go with this?

The military has a different objective than the college settings we’re discussing. It would be nice not to have to have a list of rules, sure. I chafe at rules as much as the next guy. But again, it seems to me that the church list is a measure of maintaining a sense of uniformity. If you want a Bible/Christian college experience where you can go to church anywhere you want, hey, those options are out there, too. Look at a place like Cornerstone in Grand Rapids, for example. It is my understanding that part of what makes BJU BJU and not Wheaton or Cornerstone or Cedarville or other examples we could name is not just their principles, but the lengths they go to to protect those principles.

Furthermore, as today’s news in other institutions would demonstrate, I would argue that if BJU would go so far as to drop those kinds of expectations and “just let adults be adults,” the constituency backlash would be significant. Whether that’s good or bad is beside the point- it would be a reality they’d have to face.

[Chip Van Emmerik]

We’re not as far apart as you think. I don’t want college age students cloistered. But I have not seen 18 year olds in the military mentored to godliness. I would like to see a step somewhere in between the typical IFB (BJU, NIU, MBBC, Faith) college experience and the totally free secular campus/military.

See, this is the rub - there are 18 year olds that can’t handle making themselves dinner. Then there are 18 year olds that would conceivably manage an aircraft carrier like the USS Eisenhower, if afforded the chance.

BJU has to manage both groups. It’s a harder thing to do than one can imagine, and I don’t envy them the job - especially since they can’t see what’s on a student’s heart and mind.

To Tyler R, et al…

those who are concerned(or merely curious about) about the possibility of BJU putting out an approved church list,it is actually not so much of a possibility as it is a reality. To clarify further, there is already an approved church list for BJU faculty, staff and students.

You can find it on the website here: http://www.bju.edu/about-bju/our-community/churches.php

I hope this clrifies some things for those who are not as familiar with BJU as others.

First, I get the point about BJU’s history in Methodism and that would account for solemnity, but probably less than 1% of students or faculty would say they have roots in Methodism these days. Why have a traditional service for a group of people for whom that tradition is not what they are? The reason was probably “we’ve always done it this way.” I do remember the days of hats and robes for preachers, and those have been done away with for a good while.

Second, having some kind of list of banned churches is a good thing I think. I might not like exactly where the lines are drawn, but I respect that lines have to be drawn. If parents were sending their kids to the school because it represented a point of view (nearly all), then to have them go to a church that directly contradicted that view would be working at cross purposes with many parents. There’s a financial sense in which this is bad customer service, not to mention there are literally churches that preach heterodoxy (have you heard of this concept!??!! haha).

This “list” that everyone keeps referring to. Where is it since everyone is referring to it? What churches are on and off it? Do you know? Really? Is it that completely clear cut? Are there exceptions made in certain cases? Are some churches banned because they’re too over the top in a rightward direction? I ask these questions because it’s not that clear cut. There are churches that are publicly recommended and some publicly banned, and then there is a middle.

[Shaynus]

First, I get the point about BJU’s history in Methodism and that would account for solemnity, but probably less than 1% of students or faculty would say they have roots in Methodism these days. Why have a traditional service for a group of people for whom that tradition is not what they are? The reason was probably “we’ve always done it this way.” I do remember the days of hats and robes for preachers, and those have been done away with for a good while.