With Faith in Mind
With Faith In Mind is intended for academically-minded, ecumenical Christians. Our goal is to engage listeners with a thoughtful and faith-informed perspective on important issues and big questions that our society faces. We do this by having real conversations with people who have great stories and expertise. In our first series, titled “Christian Education at the Crossroads," we’re interviewing top leaders and scholars in the Christian education space.
With Faith in Mind
Lay Theological Education: L'Abri, Regent College & Study Centers
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Charlie Cotherman, the pastor of Oil City Vineyard Church, joins Dan Hummel for an overview of non-traditional religious educational institutions.
Learn about Charlie Cotherman & Oil City Vineyard Church
Read Charlie's Book: To Think Christianly: A History of L'Abri, Regent College, and the Christian Study Center Movement
With Faith in Mind is produced at Upper House in Madison, Wisconsin and hosted by Director of University Engagement Dan Hummel and Executive Director John Terrill. Jesse Koopman is the Executive Producer. Upper House is an initiative of the Stephen & Laurel Brown Foundation.
Please reach out to us with comments or questions at podcast@slbrownfoundation.org. We'd love to hear from you.
Hello and welcome to With Faith in Mind. I'm Dan Hummel, today's host, and I'm also the director of University Engagement at Upper House. Today we're exploring the recent past and near future of lay Christian education, those educational settings outside, but often adjacent to the institutional structures of colleges and universities and churches and seminaries. It's part of our series on Christian education at the crossroads. And in this episode, we welcome Dr. Charlie Cotherman to the show. Hi, Charlie.
SPEAKER_03Hey, it's good to be with you. Glad to be here.
SPEAKER_00Excellent. I'm really excited to talk to you. I want to introduce you quickly before we jump into the conversation. Charlie is probably first and foremost the pastor at Oil City Vineyard, a church in Oil City, Pennsylvania. He got his PhD from the University of Virginia in Religious Studies. And he's the author of To Think Christianly: A History of Labree Regent College and the Christian Studies Center Movement, a book of particular interest to us here at Upper House since we're a Christian study center. And Charlie's also the program director at the Project on Rural Ministry, which is at Grove City College. Charlie, there's one other thing I wanted to uh mention with your biography, and it came out in looking up your uh pastor page at Oil City Vineyard. And it says that at some point in your life you had a horribly failed run at being a punk rock star. And as someone who's a fan of punk rock, I want to know uh is there a short version of that story or is that a very long and complicated story?
SPEAKER_03No, we we tried real hard. We had a band and we tried real hard, right? And uh and eventually we realized that especially when our lead singer found a girlfriend and decided he was done, that it was just time to do something else.
SPEAKER_00What what if I can ask what years was what year?
SPEAKER_03I was probably I'd say tell people I had a quarter life crisis when I was 25. And uh, you know, so hopefully I won't have a midlife one.
SPEAKER_00That's right. Okay. Well, thinking, I mean, I'm a I'm a connoisseur. I guess I was in high school in 2000 to 2004, so it was that was the high point of uh it was sort of a golden age of a certain type of punk rock at least. So um I think a lot of us of that age probably um I guess you're a little older, but it it was definitely in the water. Um sort of the the Fallout Boy Yeah, that pop punk kind of thing.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah, we did some Fallout Boy covers, yeah, for sure.
SPEAKER_00That's right. All right, awesome. Well, um hopefully uh I don't think that'll come up again in our conversation, but good to know uh anyway. Um okay, so uh Charlie, I'm we've uh we've known each other here for a couple years. A few years ago, we were able to, right at the beginning of COVID, actually, um, able to uh talk about your book, uh to think Christianly um here at Upper House and then also with a broader uh study center audience. And so uh I just grew to appreciate your perspective on the history of these sort of institutions that sit next to universities but aren't usually affiliated with them, though there are a few that become affiliated, and are really uh striving to offer educational, uh life of the mind type opportunities for students uh while also supporting those students in the work they're doing at these universities. And so as we're thinking about Christian education in this series, we're trying to think very broadly and trying to make sure we don't just go into the usual patterns of thinking of sort of institutions like uh colleges and seminaries, but also all of the types of other types of institutions that also offer Christian education. Um, so that'll be where we go. I did want to start with a slightly more uh personal question, asking where your passions came from for studying what you studied, uh Christian sort of this history of the study center movement. And then also you have a strong passion for rural ministry. And those might look at at sort of different sectors that don't overlap a lot on paper, but I wonder if you could just weave us a story for how those things uh connect to you.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. You know, I I think it's a lot of personal history. I I am a person who believes that like you know the sovereignty of God works its way out in our lives in all kinds of different ways. And so I I like to take into account just the kind of places he puts us. So I happen to have been born and lived most of my life in rural western Pennsylvania, and I I think maybe God had a reason for putting me here, and I'm trying to be faithful in this place and to this group of people that I call my you know, my own, that's mine from childhood, you know, I inherited. Um and then the study of evangelicalism and the study center movement, it really was kind of a multi-step thing, but it was still out of that personal kind of I was in seminary, I was thinking about going into a PhD program, and I was working with my advisor was Scott Sunquist, and we were kind of talking about evangelicalism, and I realized um that I spoke the language of evangelicalism as an insider. Like this was like I grew up listening to Adobson. I and so I started studying evangelicalism, but I also kind of had this persistent kind of um story in my life where that most of the evangelicalism I knew was pretty anti-intellectual. And so I was always um interested in evangelicals who were really trying to think well. And so, kind of through a series of twists and turns, you know, I ran into Francis Schaefer and I was interested in his later life, which was kind of political, but also his early career and really the whole of his career, which we did care about these questions. And then I happened to be at the University of Virginia, you can't avoid the study center there. And so I was like, this is so fascinating. Look at all these evangelicals trying to think well. Um, and so as I dug into that, I realized this other history I'm studying, and this history comes together. So it was kind of a perfect fit to just jump right in.
SPEAKER_00That's fascinating. Well, I think those things will come through uh as we talk about um particularly the history here. So I want to jump to the history. Um, I'm thinking of our listeners and trying to give a slightly broader. We've we've we've we actually talked to Doug Strong. He's uh I'm gonna be on another one of the episodes, and he's a uh a historian of the Sunday school movement that goes all the way back to the uh 19th century and even before he roots it in there. So we're gonna have a slightly shorter timeline here to talk about. But thinking about the last uh, you know, we we talk about the post-war period, the period after World War II, right, uh last 70 or so years. Um, you know, one of the things that struck me as I was uh thinking about uh uh the study center movement is that a lot of it, and you talk about this in your book, a lot of it does trace back to that post-war period. So we're talking like the 1940s, 1950s. Um, if we could go back to that period uh in our minds here, what would uh Christian education look like uh at that point? And I what I'm trying to get a sense of is what were the conditions for which a lot of these new types of experimental um institutions like study centers emerged out of? What was the sort of context and what was the need that they were rising to meet?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it's a great question because obviously nothing happens in a vacuum. And so when you think about that post-war period in Christian education, you have to almost like have as a context the kind of fundamentalist modernist controversy that happened before, and this kind of sense of you know, circling the wagons, creating our own institutions, the fundamentalists creating their own institutions, Bible study, I mean, Bible institute movement just growing by leaps and bounds. You know, in the 30s, the Bible institute movement grew so much, as did Christian undergrad colleges, um, places like even Grove City just had such increased enrollment during those years. So there is this push for Bible institutes and even Christian liberal arts schools heading into. Then obviously the GI Bill and stuff, every higher ed institution in the United States is gaining students, and Christian universities and colleges are there too. So you have this liberal arts kind of college thing happening that's being buoyed up by the GI Bill and and all that. But as far as theological education goes, you know, there's a s there's a group of neo-evangelicals led by people like Harold Achengay, and they start trying to kind of get regain this, what they sense is this lost status in society, this lost cultural voice. And so you know, you have the NAE formed in in 1942, but then shortly thereafter you have Fuller in 47. So you have this kind of like uh, you know, professional clergy training that they're trying to be like um you know, model themselves after Princeton, but be an evangelical Princeton. So on for clergy, you have this kind of renewed push, you know, and then you start thinking about Trinity coming along and Gordon Conwell in the late 60s, you know. So there's a push for you know evangelical, uh clerical training that's that's top-notch. But but the laity, there's not a lot for them until some of these movements come along.
SPEAKER_00That's interesting. So you're narrating sort of the the way that um if we go back to the fundamentalist movement, a lot of Christians who were more conservative theologically sort of pull out of um their denominations and pull out of the seminaries and the missions agencies that they've been a part of, and they build their own institutions that um, and I think this is where that your comment about uh some of the organizations you grew up in were anti-intellectual. That was part of that pulling out, was actually pulling out of the intellectual conversations that were happening in those spaces. And so by the time we get to the 50s, there's a new set of institutions. You mentioned sort of Fuller Seminary, um, and then later some other ones come along, um, that uh basically are in some ways starting over or trying to think about how this new um institutional context, where they're not connected to these older uh seminaries and colleges, um, how do they reconnect with some of those bigger conversations, uh, those bigger intellectual concerns, questions in theology, in biblical studies, but also in in uh other sectors. Does that sound about right?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and I think the the big distinction too is you know, if you think about places like Moody Bible Institute, like their goal was the evangelization of the world, right? So they're trying to train evangelists. They're not thinking about top-tier academics. Now, when Aachenay and Fuller and then eventually Billy Graham get involved in Fuller Seminary, I mean, Akenay is pretty clear at the beginning. He's trying to create like the Caltech of the theological education world. You know, so now they're setting their sights on something different where they're saying we want to think really, really well and be people of faith.
SPEAKER_00That's right. Yeah, that's that's very interesting. So we have that happening, um, and those Christian colleges, many lay people are going into those. Um uh I think of, you know, you have your classic ones too, like Wheaton College is growing at this time as well. Um, you start talking in in your research about these two particular strands that are really important. One of them is Labri, and the other one is Regent College. So let's start with LeBris. And you mentioned Francis Schaefer. He's this important sort of uh intellectual figure uh in starting in the 1950s. But give us the sense of labris, which is totally different than a Christian college, by the way. But uh give us a sense of what was going on there. What was LeBris' uh sort of origin story and what what what was it trying to do?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so Francis and Edith Schaefer, and it's hard to think of them apart from each other because they really both formed LeBris so much. Um Francis Schaefer was a pastor first and foremost, and really always was a pastor. He was never an actual academic in any sense. Um, but they they were really, really thoughtful, really capable. And so they have a lot of success in America and the pastorate. They go bigger, bigger churches, bigger, bigger cities, and eventually they become known as these people that work well with children. So actually, their denomination asked them to go in 1948 in the post-war Europe to go and work with children. And while they're over there, um he meets um people like uh the art historian Hans Ruchmacher, and and you know, he he he starts Europe does for Schaefer, it transforms him into this like person he's always had liked art, but in Europe he can go to all the museums, and so he starts thinking, well, Europe's ahead when it comes to existentialism and stuff like that. So he's in all these conversations, and and he really finds a home there after he kind of goes through his own crisis of faith. And then he comes out on the other side, and what they decide together is that they need to just make their house um basically their mission field, and and their sending agency uh doesn't like it. They actually cut off funds, and in 1955, as complete faith missionaries with just a prayer list uh for support, um, they start Libris, which means a shelter, and they decide it, they design as a place where anyone can come with their questions for coffee and a meal, and that's what it really is for decades.
SPEAKER_00And that's um so that should sound really familiar to someone like me who's running a study center now. It's a open space where people have coffee, they um they do bring their um intellectual questions, but they also just bring sort of life questions into the space. Um, what's it like to be a 20-year-old uh in you know, in and dealing with those issues? So um obvious uh connection to um, of course, there's a lot of twists and turns to the story, but obvious inspiration for um the study centers which emerge uh much later. Right.
SPEAKER_03And many of the people, many of the people in the study center movement find their way to Switzerland, to uh Waymo Switzerland and to Labris at some point. So there is this kind of like network growing through especially the late 60s and early 70s.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's right. And I actually think of a couple people on our staff um who either went to LeBris, the original one, or LeBris now has, you know, camps all over the world um and has gone there. Can you talk just briefly about um I think of uh someone on our staff, Cam Anderson, who's our associate director, who cites Labris or cites Schaefer and LeBris as a major inspiration for why he became an artist he grew up in the 60s, 70s. Can you just talk uh briefly about Schaefer's vision for how um things that maybe that anti-intellectual tradition in evangelicalism pushed away, things like art and uh sort of literature and history, and how Schaefer saw those things uh connecting with the Bible and and with Christian faith.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so I I can't think about this without thinking of Abraham Kuyper, though Schaefer wasn't uh you know a huge Kuiperian, but in a sense, I mean, that sense that it's all Jesus's, right? Schaefer modeled that and he he was able to communicate that all of life matters to God. And if you talk to people and you listen to their stories or you read what they wrote from that period, that was one of the main things they got from LeBrie. They they they sensed love, they sensed answers to prayer, and they sensed that all of life mattered, including your mind, including culture, including art. And Schaefer was really one of the first prominent evangelicals, even you might say, prominent fundamentalists, to say art matters enough to talk about it. We're not just talking about evangelism, we're not just gonna be content with our you know same picture everyone has in their church of Jesus that looks like a Swedish model or something. Like we're going to dig into art. We're going to actually ask hard questions and look at art and appreciate that God uses it. And that was true for all of us. Whether you were a you know, wanted to be a pastor or an academic or a you know a writer or an artist, Schaefer really believed that it all mattered.
SPEAKER_00Right. And there's a whole generation of of those, what the professions you just listed, um, of Christians who would point to Schaefer as a major uh inspiration for them uh to go into those fields. Um okay, so that's one uh really interesting development in the post-war period is this Lebris house model, and you can see how the study centers today are a version of that, though uh there's not a direct line, but there's definitely an indirect line there. Um actually there is a direct line. You mentioned it. A lot of the study center leaders um found their calling uh through places like Labris. There's another strand you look at, and uh it's just as interesting, I think, which is Regent College, a college that is still very active and vibrant in Vancouver. Tell us about the founding of that and what the vision was behind Regent College.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so Regent starts with the vision of a Plymouth Brethren shoe merchant named Marshall Marshall Shepherd in Vancouver and a uh brethren community in Vancouver that was open. They were the open brethren, so they were willing to work with others because some Plymouth Brethren are very much sectarian. But in Vancouver, this community was pretty affluent. They were all they they were thoughtful, they were open to working with others, and so as they started talking, they started to realize that their children were part of this post-World War II, uh, were experiencing this growth in education, and they were going to probably want pastors who were also educated. The only problem was that Plymouth Brethren didn't ordain actual professional clergy. So they had to figure out how to help their clergy get more education while still emphasizing a lay clergy. And so what came out of that was this vision for Regent College, which, though it had from the beginning conversations about professional clergy tracts, really the main stream of conversation was toward a lay theological education, a graduate lay theological education. Um, that could come in a one-year diploma for people that were going into the workforce and just had a year, kind of gap year, or it could come in a three-year degree that many would compare to professional uh bachelor divinity, which was what it was back then or master divinity, but um it was for lay people.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and it it's um it's interesting. I we actually have a pastor at my church who went to Regent. So it's interesting how they've expanded, and many clergy are also uh, you know, regent uh graduates as well. But that that core vision, as an interesting vision, it's the one that the the lay vision is what inspires us here at Upper House too, which is that theological education isn't just for clergy. Um, it can actually be very useful for people who are engineers or or lawyers or uh uh business business uh owners or anything like that. Um one one thing that you highlight in uh both of these stories, Labris and Regent College, is how there was a little more space for women to obtain theological education. Could you just talk a little about um about that and why that was the case? Yeah.
SPEAKER_03I think that's one of the really cool parts of this story um is how, you know, because Schaefer for the r entirety of his life didn't believe in ordaining women, but he would teach a whole generation of young women theology at Liberty. Um and what happened is because they weren't uh ordaining and and training ordained clergy, if it was lay education, it was open to anyone. And so, male or female, you had an equal chance at either of these institutions to learn. And and I think that was a beautiful thing at that time because within North American evangelicalism at that time, it was not easy to be a woman in seminary. It was extremely difficult. You would get called into the dean's office because of you know your outfit wasn't appropriate according to their policy. Uh, you know, it was just uh extremely difficult to even get in. You weren't allowed to take preaching classes. Here, it didn't matter. You were just a learner along with everyone else, but you were learning from some of the best.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, uh very interesting. So we have um an um openness, uh, and I would say the other um don't want to diminish how this created a huge opportunity for women to learn theology, but um, I think just returning to that idea that theology wasn't just for the clergy. It wasn't just for the people who were going to maybe uh explicitly use it in their line of work. Um uh it was for um the the rest of us as well. And um I just want to reiterate for the readers how interesting it is, and this is maybe the historian nerd coming out, but how interesting it is that this comes out of this uh Plymouth Brethren, which is a very small, uh obscure to most of us um sect of Protestantism, that for a variety of reasons, one of their views is they you just don't believe in professional clergy. Uh and so it made no sense for a seminary, right? Because that's the for the professional clergy. Um and and of course, most people who go to Regent are not Plymouth Brethren, nor would they really be sympathetic to a lot of the Plymouth Brethren uh theology. But it's from that sort of uh, what would you call it, an egalitarian, though that's not a word I'd usually use with the Plymouth Brethren, but this egalitarian view of who should be able to run a church or who should be able to teach in a church. Um I also think, and Charlie, this might have been in your book too, that a lot of the um original vision in Plymouth Brethren were like bivocational pastors. So it was people who weren't professional clergy in the sense that they got their money just from a church. They were um uh a clerk and then they were also a uh pastor uh on the side. And so it also didn't make sense to have this big professional degree when most of their you know days were spent uh doing something else, uh doing some other profession. Um okay, so uh Hopefully listeners can see as we're sort of weaving our way through some of these uh innovations through the post-war period, how uh different institutions are popping up to meet different needs and to offer different just visions of what it could mean to be educated uh as a Christian, to have a lively life of the mind. There's so many more examples, uh, Charlie, uh, in your book, uh, but I want to uh just give room here. Um, it are there any sort of models or forms of education that sort of come to front of the mind of this period beyond the Lebris model, the sort of house model, and the Regent College model. You know, what else is going on in the 70s, 80s, 90s that is is of interest?
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Well, there's a lot of experimentation, right? So the free university model, that's not a not something that Christians have a corner on, but you know, in San Francisco Bay Area, Berkeley, you know, there's a group of Christians that are right there at the high watermark of the counterculture, and they start thinking about free university in Berkeley, and they call it the crucible, you know, and out of that comes um, you know, a study center that becomes a great that basically tries to become like Regent and educate uh New College Berkeley, educate lay people with graduate degrees. But it starts as this free university, you know. The other innovative thing, and it happens at Regent, but it's not part of the story we've talked about, is when they start this summer school, um, and so they actually launch Regent with a summer school, a six-week summer school divided into three-week sections, and they do that two summers before they launch their fall term in 70. Um, this summer school is really innovative because it can, in your summer school, you can bring John Stott, you can bring FF Bruce. They don't have to say, I'll live in Vancouver and be on your staff, but they can come and interact with whoever can get there for a pretty low price. Um, and so a whole generation of lay evangelicals are are learning from the cream of the crop. And I think that does something to you know, even the evangelical landscape in North America. So the fact they had summer schools, and this gets picked up by a number of other places, the summer school model, but but Regent, because Houston, James Houston, the first principal, had such a uh a deep appreciation for models he had experienced at Oxford, he pulls this over from Oxford, England. Um, they did they've kind of pioneered this.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I think of um just some of the ways that that what uh Regent is doing there with the Summer Institute just has echoes of things that were way older than that. I think of like the Chautauqua circuit, uh and the way that you know major names would come through and everyone would get to learn uh from these names. And the the draw, this is obviously before any type of um uh video, uh online video or anything like that. So the draw of being able to see this person in person to to learn from them in the flesh um is so high. So um, and Vancouver's a pretty nice place, if I remember, in the in the summer, you know, early summer. So that's a great, great place to uh to to to study for a while.
SPEAKER_03And one thing, you know, if I could add one quick thing too, and along those lines is you know, just the beauty of Vancouver, the beauty of the Swiss Alps. I mean, this was such a holistic experience. It was the kind of experience that that you never forgot and that that you know, weeks that might change your life because you're at one of the most beautiful places you've ever been. You're being challenged to think broadly about how Christianity can impact every aspect of your life. You're with some of the most talented teachers the evangelical world has to offer. I mean, so and then you're you're getting even the meals are instructional. You know, when Eva Schaeffer presents a multi-course meal and the napkins are folded just right, and she has lists about how to butter the bread to the very edge. I mean, she cared. Like it's all instructional. It's all saying that life matters, embodied life, which I think is a huge point to make about this. It's not just heads and brains on sticks, but this is for all of who that these people are.
SPEAKER_00That's great. That's great. And that um that's one of the arguments we make here at Upper House for being a physical space where people um we're not just sort of distributing uh videos or or podcasts, but we're actually a space where people can come in, experience hospitality, get to actually know other people in the in the flesh. And there is definitely um much more that happens than just brain activity at that point. It's a full body, uh full spiritual experience. Um okay, so if listeners, if they've been listening closely, they might have detected that there is some theological similarity to some of these um uh efforts. So um you you mentioned Charlie Kuyper, who's this important figure in the Calvinistic sort of reformed tradition. That's where Schaefer came from uh as well. I just wanted to give you uh space to talk about the broader theological underpinning that's underlying a lot of this desire for Christian education. And my my suspicion is it's that there's a sort of reformed background to a lot of it. But if you could just talk a bit about where the where people are coming from theologically. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, there's there is a reformed background, but it's broadly reformed, you know. So I mean, yeah, there's a Dutch reform like Kuyper, you know, Rookmacher. Yeah, there's a Dutch Reform thread that's coming through this, and and this is a stream that really does have an appreciation for, you know, the gospel impacting all of life, an appreciation for like a pluralistic society where everything can compete equally, you know, and um, which is they would say would be good for everybody, Christianity included, and Christians on the free marketplace would probably do pretty well because their beliefs are true. Um but then you know, there's also this kind of broadly reformed, like even Luther, you know, this sense of table talk, you know, and that shows up at the Ligneer Valley Study Center. They call their first uh publication table talk, and and there's a sense in which Luther took the scripture to the masses in the vernacular and and thought, you know, that women should learn at the table too. And and and so there is this just broadly reformed um part of that's an appreciation for scripture. Most of these places value scripture very highly. Um, you know, so there's a broadly reformed element to it, though I wouldn't want to call it strictly Calvinist. I mean, you have Plymouth Brethren, right? But they have they're working with Anglicans and Presbyterians, you know.
SPEAKER_00Right. There is an interdenominational uh part of that uh as well. If we could just we're gonna move uh soon to the to the present moment, but um Charlie, as someone who spent a lot of time thinking about all these different manifestations um over the post-war period, and you know, many of them are still in existence or and are doing quite well. Um, but if you were to just sort of grade it, uh what would be some of the biggest strengths of these types of efforts, and if we're gonna bound them together in sort of the study center type um uh model, uh what are some of the biggest strengths of that, uh, of this movement, this effort? And then what are a few of the weaknesses or the challenges that um these types of efforts at Christian education face?
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Well, the strengths we've named some of them. I mean, just the way in which people from all walks of life um could take some time to think Christianly about their vocations and their profession. I mean, I think that was a strength that it wasn't just for clergy asking the same kind of questions, but it was for people asking a whole range of questions. They might not even believe in the Lord yet. You know, so that was especially at Lebris, I mean, there were all kinds of people that did not believe God even existed there, you know. Um so that was a strength. I think a strength was how quick on their feet so many of these places were, because they were small and they weren't huge institutions, you know, with you know pensions to pay. I think being able to be quick on your feet um was was a strength. Me, you know, needing to be ecumenical to some degree, you know. Uh this sense of Lewis's mere Christianity was something that, you know, maybe not as much at Libris, but definitely at Regent and some of these other places was was at the forefront. So there were a lot of strengths just uh around accessibility, and I think some of those strengths actually become or or become maybe not they don't become weaknesses, but they end up kind of decreasing uh in how much of a strength they actually are as the years go on, as things change. So now when I think about um when I think about accessibility, a lot of these study centers don't seem super accessible anymore to like the average uh American Christian. Unless you have time and money to spend time somewhere, you know, it's it's hard to get there, or unless you get into a fairly elite university, you know, it's hard to get to a study center. Um they're not everywhere. So I think as accessible as they initially were, they're actually not very accessible to a wide range of people anymore. And that's that's something that I does concern me, and we can get into that later, but it's something I think about. Um I think another weakness is you know, these strengths and weaknesses are so interconnected. So the strength is they can move quickly, they're independent, they can they can they're quick on their feet, but the weakness is that sometimes personalities just drive the whole thing, you know, and if the personality goes off the rails, the whole thing goes off the rails. Or if the personality um passes away, like is there someone to pick up the reins, you know? And that was Regent's strength, is they had an amazing team. Houston gets a lot of credit, and he deserves a lot of credit. Uh, he was the charismatic leader, but Regent did so well because they had an amazing, amazing and big team.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I I love thinking about um those challenges as sort of um different variations on the strengths. Um and I think we can move toward particularly that accessibility question. When I heard you say that, I was thinking about um the uh well, exactly what you said. The way that we there's about 30 study centers now. If we're just gonna talk about study centers, um, the 30, 35, most of them are um obviously on college campuses. That's sort of the model, is you you plant yourself next to a college campus and you serve the students and the faculty at that university or college. Um, but many study centers, and I'd say Upper House is in the mix there at the University of Wisconsin, want to be near elite uh universities, universities that have rankings and resources and some of the best faculty, some of the brightest students. Um, and uh, and of course, that's a very small segment of American society that ever goes uh through those things. Um, can you just talk about um well, I I want to hear uh if you have any more thoughts on that uh sort of development in the study center movement. I know there's other um models for that. I think of intervarsity Christian fellowship, which is really emphasized trying to create chapters at Christian uh community colleges. Uh that's some of their new efforts, which are obviously a different group of students. Um, but also as someone who works in the rural setting for a lot of your work, um uh yeah, how I guess how do you how do you see that um development of a lot of the effort for Christian education being focused on elite university um uh students and faculty?
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Well, I I see it a couple different ways. On the one level, on one hand, I I think it's excellent. I mean, it it makes a lot of sense, and I think it's should be happening, you know, because these are places that are shaping our culture. These are places where there are funds usually available to do this kind of work because it does take money. Um there's alumni pools that care about thinking well. So it does make sense, and I don't hold anything against it. In fact, it you know, it if there's 30 more elite universities, they should all have a study center, in my opinion. You know. Now, I will also say I think the consortium and the movement and those who are willing to invest in it should think carefully about trying to broaden their efforts to smaller uh schools, you know. Um because there is a uh the the there is a divide uh in kind of historically Orthodox Christianity in the United States between kind of uh those who who live in in urban and suburban centers near great institutions with great communities of thoughtful leaders and those who live in most of the rest of the country where you just don't always have even you don't even know that's out there, you know, and so my heart is for the smaller places to actually to see more of these pop up. And the thing about it is, and I tell people this about church planting too, is you could probably uh develop four or five study centers at smaller colleges for the cost of one, you know, at a at a major uh institution, you know, because just the cost of living and everything is so much lower. So I think there's a lot of need, but I think there's a lot of potential in smaller places.
SPEAKER_00Have you given thought to what would a uh, and maybe these exist, I I might be ignorant of it. What would a study center that's at a more rural, uh in a in a more rural community, maybe that's not even the right model. I'm not maybe we can think about that. What's the right way to think about it? But what what would be the defining marks of that? Like how how would you best serve a rural community and how would that look differently than serving a you know a dense university community?
SPEAKER_03Yeah. I think a lot of it would be scale. Um you know, it just wouldn't have to be as big, but I mean I think it'd have the same kind of things kitchen, library, you know, places for studying, um good books on offer, courses, maybe not as many, but a couple courses a semester on offer to think well about something. So a lot of it's actually pretty similar. You'd you would find some faculty who are well trained who are Christian and who would want to help. Um, you know, instead of having a 17,000-person university or a 40,000-person university, you might have a 6,000-person university, but still a lot of people in a part of rural, you know, wherever you're at. You know, so I think, and then some of these colleges are actually close enough where you might be able to have some overlap, you know, you might be able to be in one building, rented space for two days, and in another one at the other place for two days. You know, you could think creatively about it. Um, I think along the lines of how you might think about church planting. Um so I think I think it could be done. I mean, it does take a blend of skills, right? You need to be able to have people leading these who can think well and have credentials of some kind, though maybe they don't need terminal degrees at the to the same extent, but they need to be be the right kind of thoughtful people. But at the same time, they need to have their ear to the ground and be aware of the context. You know, there's gonna be ways and tones of conversation that might be different in different communities.
SPEAKER_00Right, right. Yeah, different, different uh interests bubbling up from the community itself. Um I I do want to just, as I was thinking um as you were talking, there are study centers that are at much smaller colleges. I I think of the C.S. Lewis Center at that's in Northfield, Massachusetts, um, which is a very historic site for uh that's where Dwight Moody uh had a lot of his revival uh ministry headquartered. But it's a pretty small town now. And um I I don't uh exactly I don't recall the university or college they serve, but it's a small one because it's a small town. But there are a few of those, but um I think the the ones that certainly gather the most resources are places like University of Minnesota, University of North Carolina, um University of Wisconsin, um, these these bigger schools. Um uh okay, I want to um ask a different sort of a question that's slightly different, but as someone who's a pastor, Charlie, I I wondered um if you had some thoughts on this, which was um, what is the proper uh role of Christian education for the church and for these other ministries? And I wonder, I've wondered this in my in just my own setting, not even thinking about uh working at Upper House, but in just in my own church, wondering, you know, sort of what should I be looking to from the church in terms of intellectual formation, um exposure to sort of ideas that are challenging to the faith or or sort of sophisticated theology that I can use to bolster my faith versus going to um you know a college or a seminary or even going to a study center or a campus ministry or something else. As a pastor, what how do you think about that? How do you think about sort of what's in your what do you want to shape and what do you want to sort of outsource to uh other ministries to shape? Right.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and it depends where you're at, right? Because the reality is as a pastor where I am, I can't outsource much at all. If I outsource it, it's to the radio or to cable television. Right. So so for me, there has to be a way when I think about it, I I have to think what do I really want to convey, and that has to be a part of what our church does. Um so you know, just for me it often comes down to just like theologically robust, thoughtful teaching, you know, from the pulpit primarily um or a course here and there, you know, um on a topic. But I do think, you know, if you have the luxury of having options available, which is a great thing to have, um it's probably more of a question. And then the thing as I was thinking about this even ahead of our conversation, I was thinking what what I really think needs to happen, and this is happening to some degree, though I think it there's always room for more, is a real partnership between local churches and institutions like study centers, you know, um, or seminaries or whatever you have in your vicinity, like that geographic proximity does matter. So a sense of partnership for the good of the gospel and the kingdom, and a sense that we don't have to do all the same things, we can like share the load. I think that is a really good, like if there's a sense of partnership and teamwork, because honestly, like some of the really thoughtful intellectual conversations, you really may not want to have those at the church because some of the people, half of the people may not be ready for it. Because we're hoping our churches are actually quite diverse on every level. You know, and so the church on some level has to be about the main and the plane. Um, the the just the gospel, the sacraments, um, the fellowship of believers. You know, and so some of this is actually is better suited for a study center or something like that. But if there's a partnership, that can be that can be really beautiful.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I th I think of someone that we uh work with here pretty regularly. Uh his name's Christopher James. He's at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary. Um but he often he does a lot of work in Madison and he talks about sort of ecosystems as the way to think about sort of church or ecclesial eagle ecosystems. Um most uh uh institutions, whether they're churches or study centers, are often just thinking about their own work and and how we can do our work better. Um, but we all exist in these ecosystems where if we think in those terms, we can make partnerships and have a bigger vision um than just our our individual institutions that can offer. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, in my notes, uh I had prepared I had this uh line, monocultures and ecosystems written down ahead of our conversation, because I do think like that is an important thing to think about. Not not exactly on those lines, but but I think it his idea makes a ton of sense. But um, you know, this sense of like we if we only do one thing, sometimes so I'm thinking about like the way we try to communicate. So for instance, you know, video video teaching, right? Like Ligneer Valley Study Center. Like they went from an ecosystem um that took in their context, took in a lot of uh kind of holistic sense of their place and was connected to other ministries by virtue of necessity to a monoculture, and then that was that was also negative. So it can't be just like we do us and that we're fine. It has to be this integrated ecosystem idea.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah, and that that it's interesting to think about that geographically too, because I think I mean we're we're doing this on a podcast, right? So it's sort of it's one version of that where we're gonna beam this out and anyone from anywhere um can take it, and we hope more and more uh people do it. But there is something lost, and we talk about this with other stuff we do. There's something lost when you remove the embodied context of upper house. And that isn't to say that that what we're doing isn't worthwhile, but it is to say that it's a it's a different type than uh when we actually host groups here or when we have an event where we have people from the community coming in. And um, you know, it for a variety of reasons, including the ease of the internet and mass media and stuff, the things that can scale well tend to be the things that you mentioned um, you know, cable news and uh on you know, internet cult. I mean, those are the things that are accessible to everyone everywhere all the time. Um, but they're those monocultures, right? They're the things that um sort of offer the same message to everyone, and it's usually the you know, the harshest message or the clearest message. Um, and uh I guess I that's a question that's just coming to mind right now, uh Charlie, as you've um uh been pastoring for your for a few years now. How much of your Christian education work is um sort of trying to build up um the theological or other knowledge uh in your in the people either your students or uh parishioners and congregants um and how much of it is is fighting against these other formation uh uh sources um that um not that not that before cable news people weren't getting formed by other things but uh I think a lot of people think it's it's intensified um in recent years but is that something you think about sort of how much of are you trying to undo things versus trying to build uh build from a solid foundation yeah I mean I mean formation is something I think about a lot and the formation I mean formation as you guys know happens to us all the time whether we want it to or not we're always being formed and and so I think about it a lot and sometimes it is a catch 22.
SPEAKER_03I don't love that our church uses social media but it seems like we have to use social media but I wonder what that's forming in our people right um so there are these kind of like I don't know the best way forward on this um but I do try as much as I possibly can to to to just lean into the fact that when we gather it is formative time when we walk to the front every week and receive the Lord's Supper that is formation you know when we worship when we pray when we hear instruction from the Bible so formation's at the front of my mind because I know folks are being formed 24 or seven basically when they're not at church.
SPEAKER_00Yeah that's right um our my pastor talks about um and this the he would probably qualify this um even even as I'm saying it but that he you know has uh he has us for you know 90 minutes a week or something and then all these other media have us for however many hours uh they have us for a week and so um particularly uh this is one example um he would have is um you know the Bible talks a lot about justice um and and so you can speak you can say justice from the pulpit or you can be teaching it in the class and people are gonna read into that word a lot of different things based on whatever news they consume and whatever they're reading and they're gonna they're gonna assume you're talking about that uh when you're saying justice and you might even just be trying to be biblical about it. You might be framing it entirely in the biblical context. So um I think of those really tough issues that particularly pastors have but anyone teaching uh in any setting uh would have um with a lot of these these terms that are in our culture and also derived from the Bible.
SPEAKER_03Well it's crazy out there.
SPEAKER_00Yeah it's crazy out there. Yeah. Okay. I wanted to um uh just wrap up with a couple questions one of them is to just get your take as someone who is in a more rural setting and so you're um you're dealing uh with uh people day to day who um are obviously in that setting as well and there's some perennial sort of Christian education topics and I just want to get your take on um what they're like uh from your perspective. And I don't want to like exoticize your your location versus mine, but it's just I don't live in a rural setting. So when I think about the first one is going to be faith and work. When I think about faith and work I think of it so intensely in this university context that I live in.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00And the and particularly a student oriented faith and work conversation where we're trying to prepare students to enter into careers, usually ones that require college degrees that and we want them to be thinking about how their commitments to Christ and and um their grounding in the Bible will shape them in those in those contexts. I I want to recognize that that's not the context of faith and work that everywhere is and probably is in in your setting. So what when you think about faith and work in your context what are you thinking about and what are you trying to get across to to people?
SPEAKER_03Yeah I mean it is some partially by nature of my background I mean it is partially some of the same things on on one level I mean and we do have we have professionals we have teachers we have architects we have you know we have some of the same engineers we have these kind of people in our church but at the same time our community also has a lot of blue collar service work you know just like probably every community does they just might not be in a certain church right um but so when I think about faith and work I do I try to help people think I mean I'm pretty inspired by Schaefer's holistic take on it too so I think I try to get people to think about that there's no sacred secular divide that that all of life counts and and all of our jobs count and we're not just you know whittling away our time for no reason but like this is a chance to worship the Lord and actually invest in the kingdom. You know so so that doesn't it doesn't matter what kind of job you have for that. But the reality is and I'm I'm thinking back to a Christian day I think it was a cover story it might have been more than five years ago now called God of the Second Shift uh they had this story on kind of like the way in which most faith and work conversations assume a white collar listener. And I do think that is a problem. And there are lots of people that just even simply getting to church on a regular basis because of their shift work is hard, let alone coming to like a four-week class on faith and work. You know, so what does it look like to actually um help these folks think about it it's it it looks like something different right and innovative which I'm still thinking about what that looks like here. And it also sometimes just looks like validating that though that work matters because you don't read about it in most of the books you know coming out from IVP or something on vocation. Like these jobs don't show up the same unless it's like you might be a farmer but you're raising like grass fed beef and you're having this like restaurant local connection but you're not just like a dairy farmer and you're using hormones sometimes because you have to and in rural Western PA. You know what I mean? It's it's a different conversation.
SPEAKER_00Very interesting. The other one I wanted to ask you about uh sort of another perennial issue in Christian education is just the the sort of apologetics or or knowledge type of education. So that's often a a you know way that Christian education is delivered is there's certain defenses of the faith or there's certain you know issues um that are very hot in the culture that um and and I again I'm assuming this is why I wanted to ask you about it. I always come at it from a university context. So there are these issues that students are learning in the classroom yeah and you're wanting to make sure that they have a sort of Christian perspective on them. How do you think about those types of uh apologetics or uh or ideas oriented education um for a non-university context well I don't think a lot about apologetics and and I think it's kind of the nature of the way there's like been maybe a subtle shift from apologetics being at the front you know forefront of of thinking and I think I've inherited that a little bit.
SPEAKER_03But at the same time I do think a lot about again formation and part of formation is being able to think well about your time right and the the problems of your moment and the thing is because everyone in bigger small places has phones and has access to the same ideas though they might have trickled through like mass media um many of the same ideas though maybe a little less distilled are are out there in our churches. Right? And so it does actually matter that pastors are equipped and willing to tackle some of the ideas that are out there because everyone with the way tech is anymore, everyone is encountering them and they're trickling down to every sphere of life. So so that does matter um and that's why it does matter I mean I think the calling of of teachers and pastors in large and small places is just so important right now because there's so many ideas vying for our attention and for our hearts okay so that that takes us to the last question here and that's I just wanted an open-ended question of if you could uh sort of dictate where Christian education broadly construed um moves in the near future in the next five to ten years what are the the two or three things you'd really want to make sure are emphasized or are uh are uh top of the mind uh for the people you said pastors teachers professors uh those types yeah I think the first thing I would say um you know as I worked on my book uh I kind of came into contact for the first time with the work of Jacques Alul and this idea of a technological society and technique and it's captured my mind since then and then Alan Noble's recent book You're not your own uh you know really kind of riffs on that and does a great job and so I I am pretty convinced that we need to guard against efficiency being like the number one motivator for everything uh including education and we need to intentionally because it will not happen unless we're intentional push into more and more human forms of education the more it takes account of all parts of our humanity the better and the more it meets us in a relational space. That's one of the things is I was looking over some of the Regent chapter and stuff in preparation for the day I was just struck once again by Houston's emphasis on relationship. And it was like through 40 or 50 years of his career I'm I mean it's just amazing. Even when he would get pushback for being too relational not enough time in administration like but he knew this was so important. And so I think education that has to be relational it has to be life on life I mean there's a time and place for podcasts there's a time and place for for instruction uh from a great teacher but our tendency to just want the celebrity to give us a nice you know edited talk is dangerous to our souls and because there's something lost. I mean when you're thinking about Lebris and you're thinking about like you worked four hours together you know in the garden you learned something at that time and then you went in with dirty hands and learned theology. Like there's something good about that. And then you ate a meal together. So it's gonna look different in all kinds of places but it has to be contextual it has to be relational it has to be for this place in this moment for these people that God loves uniquely you know so that's that's probably like my biggest thing and that's gonna look like all kinds of different things um and then part of the a second part of that is that it cares about people in a lot of different places. You know and it's not just for the folks who are going to be at the front of the line for everything you know the best educated the people with the best connections but that that it tries as best it can the movement in general the study center movement but just like thoughtful Christians try to um make room at the table for people of different racial backgrounds, different socioeconomic backgrounds, geographic backgrounds, because it really does matter. I mean what does it look like for like the consortium to catch a vision and say we're gonna intentionally look at some underserved places and harness our resources to that I think that kind of stuff that sounds human to me. That sounds very kingdom to me.
SPEAKER_00Agreed agreed that sounds like a vision of um the kingdom from Revelation 7 9 or many other places in the New Testament of a very diverse multicultural multi-socioeconomic class of kingdom. So Charlie thanks for your time thanks for the work you've done and your ministry going forward is a pleasure talking to you.
SPEAKER_03Yeah it's great to be here.
SPEAKER_00Good luck to all you guys God bless and all you're doing appreciate Upper House thanks for joining us if you've enjoyed today's podcast be sure to subscribe and give us a rating on your favorite podcast app. Also be sure to check out our upcoming events on upperhouse.org and our other podcast, Upwards, where we dig deeper into the topics our in-house guests are passionate about. With Faith in mind is supported by the Stephen and Laurel Brown Foundation. It is produced at Upper House in Madison, Wisconsin hosted by Dan Hummel and John Terrell. Our executive producer and editor is Jesse Koopman please follow us on social media with the handle at UpperHouse UW