Cowards, Copycats, and Careerists
Written by P. Jesse Rine |
Monday, November 27, 2023
Although the careerist may value the institution’s unique mission, its faithful pursuit is ultimately incidental to his primary motivation: ascending to the next rung on the professional ladder. Maintaining the distinctive character of Christian higher education and ensuring its enduring efficacy will require intentional, robust, and principled leadership that both understands and resists the mechanisms of isomorphic homogenization. If Christian colleges and universities are to continue the vital Gospel work of changing hearts and renewing minds, their leaders must eschew the temptation to play the coward, copycat, or careerist.
The soul of Christian higher education is its distinctive institutional mission: to pursue the implications of the Lordship of Christ over every academic field and discipline. This mission defines the Christian college’s purpose, which distinguishes it from secular peers and provides an organizing framework for institutional action. Given its central nature, it is little wonder why so much thought has been devoted to understanding the role of institutional mission within Christian colleges and universities. Scholarly treatments have ranged from profiling specific ecclesial models for higher education, to constructing typologies that span various theological traditions, to examining the negative effects of denominational disengagement. Yet common to all is a recognition that these vital organs of the church will flourish only insofar as their unique missions are intentionally maintained.
It is therefore disheartening to witness instances of mission drift within Christian higher education, for we know where this path leads: further compromise and eventual secularization. Perhaps most insidious are the forms of drift that appeal to conditions or standards within the industry at large to justify a departure from the college’s historic character. Although the details may differ across cases, the formula remains constant: Campus leaders point to a particular aspect of the college’s historic character as a rationale for moving the institution into better alignment with recent trends. For example, one institution reaffirms its Christian commitment to caring for all students by approving an official student club for sexual minorities. Another institution demonstrates its devotion to institutional excellence by appointing a vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion to implement “best practices” for achieving racial justice on campus. A third institution expands the reach of its Christian witness by reducing its core requirements to attract greater numbers of prospective students. Whether compromising on sexual ethics, uncritically adopting secular approaches to race, or sacrificing curricular substance on the altar of the market, the institution has mutated even as its leaders declare its mission to be more vibrant than ever.
For those concerned with the continuance of authentically Christian higher education, it is imperative to understand the mechanisms that lead to this form of mission drift. To the outside observer, the above examples might appear to be separate, one-off occurrences of poor administrative decision-making. In actuality, these choices are united by a faulty view of leadership, as evidenced by the lack of integrity between the institution’s stated values and the behavior of its principal. This discontinuity betrays a troubling reality: The chief executive has conceptualized and operationalized leadership in ways that elevate deference to external entities above institutional self-determination.
The aforementioned approach is problematic because organizations operating within the same industry tend to become more alike over time as they respond to shared external pressures. This phenomenon is known as institutional isomorphism, and its effects can be seen within Christian higher education. Isomorphism is a natural and common occurrence across various industries, but it becomes corrosive when it pulls an organization away from its distinctive mission. College presidents who fall prey to the above character flaw—the tendency to subordinate the interests of their own institutions to the wishes of the wider academy—ultimately function as accelerants of mission drift because they go with the flow instead of resisting the homogenizing forces of isomorphism. Leaders who exhibit this trait regularly appear in one of three different small-souled forms, each corresponding to a particular mechanism of isomorphic change: Coward, Copycat, and Careerist.1
In their seminal work, “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields,” Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell describe institutional isomorphism as “a constraining process that forces one unit in a population to resemble other units that face the same set of environmental conditions.”2 This constraining process occurs through three mechanisms, and each pushes Christian colleges and universities to become more like the rest of American higher education. The first is coercive isomorphism, which DiMaggio and Powell describe as “formal and informal pressures exerted on organizations by other organizations upon which they are dependent, and by cultural expectations in the society within which organizations function.”3 These pressures can “be felt as force, as persuasion, or as invitations to join in collusion.”4
Two primary sources of coercive isomorphism within the field of higher education are government regulation and institutional accreditation. Both exert coercive force, though the former is more direct while the latter is more indirect. Numerous government regulations influence the behavior of postsecondary institutions, yet the most consequential relate to eligibility requirements for participation in the federal student loan program. Christian colleges are roughly 70% tuition dependent on average, which means they rely upon student tuition and fees to provide 7 out of every 10 dollars for their annual operating budgets. Moreover, most Christian college attendees depend upon the federal student loan program to finance their education. As a result, changes to eligibility requirements, such as compliance with Title IX regulations that define traditional approaches to human sexuality as discriminatory, have the power to induce coercive isomorphism within Christian higher education.
Institutional accreditation, itself a requirement for participation in the Title IV federal student loan program, presents another, softer source of coercive isomorphism. While postsecondary accreditors are staffed by full-time officials who coordinate the activities of the association, the site visit teams that actually review institutional performance against the accreditor’s standards of quality are populated by administrators from its member colleges and universities. These administrators not only issue requirements to address areas of noncompliance, but they also share recommendations they believe would benefit the institution, and these recommendations often reflect the consensus of the wider field that includes but goes beyond Christian higher education.
On its own, coercive isomorphism has the potential to exert significant pressure on Christian colleges, and this potency can turn pernicious when faith-based organizations are led by cowards.
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The Ministry of the Pew
The pastor’s ministry does not replace mine; it refines mine. It makes our ministry better, more effective. Your pastor equips you for the work of ministry, for the building up the body of Christ into mature manhood (Ephesians 4:12–13). This ministry finds some expression on Sunday mornings as you serve, you prepare, and you exercise your own gifts and acts of love within your local body. Much of the best ministry in healthy churches happens by those who never hold a microphone.
The first step is to survive the coordinated attacks from the children. An ex-nihilo stain suddenly appears on my daughter’s dress. An episode from my son responding to his sister’s “help.” A well-placed plastic Lego planted strategically at the bottom of the steps. And of course, a soiled-through diaper just as we head for the door.
Safely in the car, we prepare to play our part of our church’s ministry for that Sunday’s gathering. I have no formal duties this week — I am not preaching or welcoming or giving the prayer of thanksgiving — but I ready myself and my family for ministry nonetheless.
A worship song plays. Swerving along the main road cratered as the moon, we arrive at the chosen traffic light signaling time to pray for the service. The music pauses, and a hush falls on the car.
Father, please be with us as we worship you in spirit and in truth. Bless the pastor to preach your word with power. Give us ears to hear and obey your word. Have mercy on your beloved people. Let us see Christ. If any do not truly know you, save them. And Lord, prepare us now to be a blessing to your people.
After we park, we turn our energies to greeting the saints and getting all of our kids into the pew.
As the service begins, we focus on the lyrics being sung, asking God to warm our hearts and the hearts of those around us. My two oldest, imitating their parents, throw up their hands. We praise him with our whole person. Lord, accept our songs in your Son. Forgive our coldness and distractions.
As worship continues, my wife and I see some new faces, some faces we have not seen in a while, some faces we have been praying for. We note people we want to make sure to talk to after the service.
The preacher soon mounts the pulpit. O Lord, give him love for your glory, love for your people, love for your word. Bless him to preach as one speaking your oracles. Speak to us through this man.
After the preaching, after the final song and benediction are given, we look around — a big part of our ministry begins. Who would you have us speak with, encourage, welcome to the church, pray for, confront? How do you plan to use us to bless those around us in the pews this week?
Does My Church Need Me?
Here is the main point, the truth that can revolutionize your walk with the Lord and your experience of the local church: If you know and love the Lord Jesus Christ, you have something to contribute to your local church every Sunday morning.
Do you believe that? Do you come not only to receive — which you should — but to also bless?
This has been hard for “normal” Christians to believe ever since the beginning. In the early church, members looked around the house churches in Corinth and saw different usefulness in the Lord, different giftings. Some seemed more essential, and others more dispensable.
Responding to such thinking, Paul writes, “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’ On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable. . .” (1 Corinthians 12:21–22).
Indispensable.
In too many churches today, the feet, hands, and ears say of themselves, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body” (1 Corinthians 12:16) — because we do not preach, teach, or host small group — we are not needed. Hands show up on Sundays, listless, merely to listen to the mouth speak. They rest in the audience, treating the local church as a theater that welcomes spectators to watch more prominent saints do actual ministry.
You are not leading worship. You are not formally greeting, nor praying in the service, nor giving communion. You aren’t ushering, or serving in the nursery, or leading a women’s ministry. What part do you really play?
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Boys Are Falling Farther and Farther Behind Their Sisters: Should We Care?
In Boys Adrift, I also presented evidence that schools bear some of the blame for the disengagement of boys from education. American schools, with a few exceptions, have become unfriendly to boys. Boys doing things that boys have always done—such as pointing fingers at each other saying “bang bang you’re dead”, or doodling a sketch of a sword—now often get into trouble at school. But reprimanding an elementary-school boy for chewing his pastry into the shape of a gun does not change that boy into a flower child who wants to talk about his feelings.
There is a growing gender gap in higher education. According to the latest figures from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center: as of spring 2021, women accounted for 59.5% of students attending colleges and universities nationwide. Among four-year private colleges, women now account for 61% of all students. Both figures represent new records. Douglas Shapiro, executive director of research at the National Student Clearinghouse, told The Wall Street Journal earlier this month that if current trends continue, within a few years there will be two women graduating from college for every one man.
Well, so what? In 1970, men accounted for 58% of students attending colleges and universities, and there was no great outcry back then about the gender imbalance. Why should we be concerned now that the pendulum has swung in the other direction?
I think there are good reasons for concern, which can be summed up in three words: “educational assortative mating.” Educational assortative mating means that if a woman has earned a four-year degree and she is looking for a husband, she will usually choose a man whose educational achievement is equal to or greater than her own. Fifty years ago, if a man earned a four-year degree and was looking for a woman to marry, he might have many qualifications in mind for his future wife; but educational attainment was not one of them. In that era, college-educated men were happy to marry women who had never attended college. In our era, college-educated women are hoping to marry college-educated men. And there are not enough college-educated men to go around.
This problem is not confined to the college educated. I am a family doctor. A young woman in my own practice, let’s call her Linda, has two small children. She has never been married. She has never attended college. I bumped into the father of her two children. He told me how much he loves Linda. He told me that he has proposed marriage, twice, and both times Linda turned him down. I asked Linda, as gently as I could, why she did not want to marry the father of her two children. She answered: “Dr. Sax, I already have two babies at home. I don’t need a third!”
At every level, not just among the college-educated, young women seeking a man to marry are looking for men who are at least as competent and hard-working as they are. But ever since the 1980s, boys’ academic achievement in high school has declined relative to girls, not primarily because girls are doing better but because boys are doing worse.
Marriage rates in the United States peaked at 16.4 per 1,000 per year in 1946. As recently as 1990, marriage rates were still 9.8 per 1,000. Right now, the marriage rate is 6.1 per 1,000: that’s the lowest on record, going back to the 1880s. Although many factors have contributed to the decline in marriage, scholars agree that one major factor driving the decline is the reality that many women want their husbands to earn more than they do. American women have always tended to prefer husbands who can earn more than they do, but the growing phenomenon of underachieving young men means that there are not enough successful men to go around.
Nevertheless, many women still want to have children.
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How to Get over Your Fear of Psalm 119
Psalm 119 takes on fresh beauty and life when we begin to read the Psalm, not just as a script of general devotion to God, but as a script of particular devotion to Christ. The way to do this is by inserting the name of Christ each time we read of testimonies, of laws, or of statutes. In others words, don’t let the law of God be the primary object in sight as the Psalm is read. Let each mention of the law lead you to the mediator of the new covenant, Jesus himself.
Psalm 119 is a bit like a Munro on the Isle of Skye. Any Christian can look from a distance and recognise the beauty and majesty of the Psalm. However, when we actually try to read the Psalm, or appropriate its sentiment, we often wear out quickly and end up giving up. If we actually make it all of the way through the Psalm, we feel fatigued at the end, having trodden one ridge after another without taking in much of what we have passed.
Yet, length and repetition are not the only difficulties that we encounter as we read the longest chapter in the Bible. There is also the challenge of knowing what to do with the Psalmist’s intense passion for laws, statutes, precepts, and commands. Very few of us relish the seasons of our Bible reading plans when we are led into the wilderness of Leviticus or Deuteronomy. We cannot sincerely say that “I have rejoiced in the way of Your testimonies as much as in all riches” (Ps. 119:14). Although we can appreciate the personal devotion of the Psalmist to God, this intimate love often appears tediously bundled with an appetite for laws and commands that – if we are honest – not many of us share.
What should we do with such struggles? How can we imbibe the spiritual passion of Psalm 119 without our joy feeling somewhat suffocated by the rigidity and formalism of a relationship defined by law?
The Power of Seeing Christ as Mediator
The shift between the old and new covenants is a shift of mediation. Whereas under the Old Covenant, the people of God had Sinai standing between God and them, under the New Covenant we now have Christ in the middle. No longer is our relationship with God depicted by tablets of law; rather, we now know God and relate to Him in and through the person of His Son. Jesus himself is our prophet, priest, and king. All of our devotion to God now has Christ in view. Every command, as it were, is now a command from the mouth of Jesus. To obey God is to obey Christ.
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