Alabama Baptists have an extraordinary record of establishing and keeping Christian higher education.
Undaunted by a failed effort to establish the Manual Labor School in Greensboro in 1834, Alabama Baptists in rapid succession founded the Judson Female Institute (now Judson College) in Marion in 1838 and Howard College in Marion (now Samford University in Birmingham) in 1841. They were among the first 300 colleges established in America. The 20th century brought the establishment of Mobile College (now the University of Mobile) through Alabama Baptists in 1961.
These institutions were called into existence in a culture that valued education and Christian faith.
In 2012, Baptist schools find themselves in a very different setting with more than 4,000 colleges and universities across America and a society that seems to have relegated religion to the sidelines and marginalized serious discussions about faith, especially the Christian faith.
But before drawing any conclusions, let’s take a quiz.
What do 14 of the first 40 Protestant missionaries to China in the 19th century have in common? What do the first and 100th Baptist missionaries to Japan have in common with the North American Mission Board’s first appointee, and what do they have in common with the woman who established the first shelter for battered women in Alabama? What do these missionaries have in common with the woman who holds the record for the highest score ever made on the obstetrical-gynecological written examination (and has delivered more than 4,000 babies) or the first woman to head the U.S. Air Force’s smart weapons lab or the woman who led the discovery of a new hemophilia drug that dramatically improves the life of children with the disorder or a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award-winning, best-selling author or a former Miss Ohio and internationally acclaimed opera star or the first woman to sit on the Alabama Supreme Court?
The answer to the aforementioned quiz is Judson College!
That’s right. A small Baptist women’s college in Alabama’s Black Belt has had an extraordinary impact at home and around the world. One could assert that Judson has had a disproportionate influence for the Kingdom in its almost 175 years of Christian higher education.
Without a doubt, graduates of Samford University and the University of Mobile share this remarkable heritage of bringing light to dark places!
Contemplating Christian higher education’s purpose, a colleague in the Council of Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU), V. James Mannoia Jr., wrote, “Christian institutions of higher education, and especially Christian liberal arts colleges, must assess their distinctive mission in the light of the call to follow Christ. … First does the Christian liberal arts college actually teach its graduates to become more like Christ? Second, insofar as Christ’s mission was to humble Himself and become a servant, does the Christian college … teach its graduates to humble themselves and serve others?”
We deeply believe, and the record supports, that Christian faith and learning are always greater than the sum of their respective parts.
In our learning, we choose to follow Christ, and He does not call us to mediocrity.
In the autobiographical section of his book “Harbingers of Hope,” William E. Hull stated his view that “at their best, education is good for religion and religion is good for education.”
Reflecting further on the Christian college, Hull spoke on Judson’s campus not long ago and suggested that our faith and learning are not so much about “integration” as “interrogation.” He suggested that in our learning across the academic disciplines, Christian higher education should challenge students to ask first the important questions of our faith. How should one study, live and work as he or she follows Christ, who “brings good news to the poor, liberation to the captive, sight to the blind, release to the oppressed and proclamation of the Kingdom?” What are the implications of decisions made in a profession or a home when those decisions are at first Kingdom questions?
Our friends at Samford University Press, in collaboration with Paul Corts, president of the CCCU and brother to the late Samford President Thomas E. Corts, do a great service for all who hold dear the ideals of Christian higher education.
The recently published book “Thinking Christianly: Christian Higher Education and a Vigorous Life of the Mind” collected essays in Tom Corts’ memory. The essayists are a remarkable collection of bright minds who speak plainly about the call of Christ to the stewardship of the mind. Gerald L. Bray, in Chapter 3, “The Challenge to the Mind in Christian Higher Education Today,” recounts the church’s extraordinary commitment to colleges and seminaries in earlier centuries. Today, for many people, the idea of a Christian university is an “oxymoron and an embarrassment.” He effectively reminds us that Christianity “is not a Western religion but an expression of universal truth” and that “all human knowledge is finite and relative.” Our secular society has created many myths, “even if it claims to be based on reason alone.” “Christian theology puts spiritual truth in the place of myth, bringing reason and order to the world beyond our sense perception and explaining how we are connected with it.” Christian higher education informs and transforms students by calling them to this universal truth.
Christian higher education strives intentionally and without apology to point students to Christ, “the Way, the Truth and the Life.” At Judson, weekly chapel, student-led worship on Monday nights, faith-based service learning, Bible courses and studies, faithful teachers, missions assignments locally and internationally and a deep commitment to the stewardship of the mind coalesce to penetrate today’s culture of secularism and the myths of relativism to provide a transformational experience.
Alabama Baptists have held the torch of “Lux et Veritas” (Light and Truth) in three consecutive centuries. Your Baptist universities and college and their respective graduates thank you. Because of today’s culture of disbelief, your schools are now more relevant to students than they were at their founding.
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