Same-sex marriage threatens to tear apart Christian college association as some members promise exit

Nearly a year after taking the reins of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities – following the messy and expensive firing of its last chief – President Shirley Hoogstra is dealing with a potential revolt of its members.

Because CCCU took no action after two of its members recently changed their hiring policies to allow same-sex married couples as faculty and staff, the organization lost a high-profile member, Tennessee’s Union University.

For almost two years CCCU has known of the “trajectory” toward accepting same-sex couples for one of those members, Eastern Mennonite University, Union President Samuel Oliver wrote to Hoogstra and Chairman Charles Pollard in an Aug. 3 letter, Union said in a press release.

Yet the CCCU board was still “not ready to deal with this issue” when it happened, wrote Oliver, whose school is the oldest Southern Baptist-affiliated college in the country.

More members are reportedly on the way out: Oklahoma Wesleyan University President Everett Piper told WORLD, an evangelical magazine, that he and “a handful of [other college] presidents” are giving CCCU until the end of August to decide whether to kick out Eastern Mennonite and Goshen College for their policy changes.

The CCCU and Union did not immediately respond to queries from The College Fix.

The likely change on same-sex marriage among some CCCU members was not even an issue when The College Fix spoke to Hoogstra shortly after she assumed the presidency last fall.

She was dealing with the fallout from the firing of her predecessor, Edward Blews. His tumultuous 10-month presidency was marked by the exit of nearly half of CCCU’s Washington, D.C. administrative staff, as well as hesitancy to fight on culture-war issues like the Obamacare contraceptive mandate, WORLD reported then.

Hoogstra’s top goal for the year was to “look for institutional autonomy” for the council’s then-176 members, and continue its focus on government relations work, she told The Fix at the time.

A former dean at CCCU member Calvin College and lawyer, Hoogstra said she wanted to “ensure that our members have the best membership services possible” on issues such as “prioritization” of academic programs, institutional debt and online education.

When Hoogstra was chosen, the chair of the presidential search committee said she had been picked in part because of her “savvy when considering legal and political liabilities,” Christianity Today reported.

Before withdrawing from the CCCU, Union had asked the board to call a meeting to vote on the issue of hiring same-sex couples, WORLD reported last week. (Hoogstra told The Fix last year: “We want our member campuses to feel they have a resource if they reach out to us.”)

Hoogstra, however, spurned Union’s request. She sent a letter to member presidents asking them to respect Eastern Mennonite, one of the founding members of CCCU and a board member, by engaging in a deliberative process about its future, according to WORLD.

That wasn’t good enough for Union, a 24-year member of the CCCU, which turned Hoogstra’s legal experience against her in its press release.

“Since the government, court cases and legislation will likely threaten constitutional guarantees of religious liberty in the days ahead, [President] Oliver said it was important that institutions like Union maintain a consistency and unanimity with their faith family’s commitment on issues like same-sex marriage.”

Because its “faithfulness to the authority of Scripture takes precedence” and “marriage is at the heart of the Gospel,” Oliver wrote to the CCCU, “regrettably” Union can’t remain in the CCCU.

Though it’s leaving the organization, Union is “not trying to pull other schools away from the CCCU,” Oliver told WORLD.

The CCCU itself said last month that the “vast majority” of its members wanted the board to follow a “good and respectful process before making any decision.”

Hoogstra clarified to WORLD that the “good and respectful process” the CCCU is following “does not mean that we do not recognize the importance of this issue in our current climate,” and it continues to advocate “vigorously on behalf of schools that hold the orthodox view of marriage.”

A former CCCU president, Bob Andringa, told WORLD that the board had made the right call, particularly given the potential legal risks of refusing to hire applicants in same-sex marriages.

“If you put yourself in a position that you may not get student aid, you may lose your tax-exempt status, you may lose your property tax exemption—from a trustee standpoint those issues are so much bigger than what association we’re going to be a part of,” Andringa said.

Another college president told Inside Higher Ed that it’s giving the CCCU the benefit of the doubt until it makes a final decision about Eastern Mennonite and Goshen.

“The CCCU is at a crossroads and is doing the right thing by having private conversations with presidents of various institutions to determine the best way forward,” said Cedarville University President Thomas White. Regardless of the CCCU’s decision, Cedarville “will not compromise on the biblical view of marriage.”

Eastern Mennonite itself seems ready to accept a downgrade in its membership in the CCCU to nonvoting status – an ongoing discussion among some members – rather than spark a civil war, Inside Higher Ed reported. President Loren Swartzendruber told the publication that EMU is “open to considering recommendations from CCCU leadership in terms of our membership.”

It’s already too late for that, Oklahoma Wesleyan’s Piper told WORLD: “The CCCU’s bewildering desire for a drawn-out ‘conversation’ has led everyone to conclude they think the Church’s engagement in illicit sexual behavior is open for debate.”

Before withdrawing from the CCCU, Union had asked the board to call a meeting to vote on the issue of hiring same-sex couples, WORLD reported last week. (Hoogstra told The Fix last year: “We want our member campuses to feel they have a resource if they reach out to us.”)

That wasn’t good enough for Union, a 24-year member of the CCCU, which turned Hoogstra’s legal experience against her in its press release.

Yep. Glad my son goes to Union. Great school.

We had to leave the church we had been part of for over 30 years, because the pastor and staff departed from classical Christian thought. Colleges would need to separate from CCCU, because during the accreditation process teaching following basic theology instead of popular acceptance would endanger their standing. Christianity which is other than a gooey, sweet substance to layer upon a current understanding of goodness as found in Oprah or Rotary is becoming less and less acceptable. Here is an excerpt from a 3,300 plus essay I wrote to clarify my thinking upon our leaving.

“The institution of the Christian Church was designed to act as an outpost of heaven within the finite, fallen world. Christian travelers could secure an anchor in Jesus’ spiritual dimension with praise, prayer, and wisdom as they climbed with a fragile, broken soul through a perishing creation into eternity. Yet all Christian institutions are subject to failing as human pride naturally aligns with the heritage of fallen humanity.

Unfortunately, the Catholic Church became the first case study for the inevitable attack on spiritual identity facing all churches, and Christian institutions. By necessity in caring for Christians and by default in having the only viable institutions after Rome’s fall, it became the politically dominated and spiritually crippled Catholic Church. Its descent illustrates the malignant, destructive spiritual consequences of worldly immersion consistently repeated over time. The Catholic Church displayed the inherent propensity of the human condition for debasement in order to find popular acceptance within secular societies, and became the first human institution or denomination derived from the Christian faith.

In the case of the Roman Empire, the clergy accepted Constantine as the first representative of a Christian theocracy. Founded as a spiritual entity, but forced to care for temporal needs, it merged into a single divine institution with the Roman state.

In its new role, the Catholic Church leadership could contemplate the pride of serving as high priests of the entire known world. Christianity was confirmed as the official state religion by Theodosius in 392 A.D. The Catholic Church built and managed elaborate façades like Potemkin Villages for its new political role, while marginalizing its spiritual mission of serving people who were seeking relationship with Jesus Christ. This new church direction was variously coerced, accepted, imposed, avoided, rationalized, applauded, and managed.

The clergy who rationalized, applauded, and managed the new relationship dominated as Rome fell and Europe entered the Dark Ages.”

LOL! But I know whereof I speak. Your religion has not yet been subjected to female pastors as heads of congregations. As soon as the mainstream protestant denominations got that, the gay activism followed immediatly, and now those churches are full of gay and lesbian pastors, gay and lesbian pastors lying about being gay because it’s against the rules, gays and lesbians disrupting every national conference to the point of police having to be called into a religious meeting, gay and lesbian teachers in the Sunday School and youth groups, sermons about “acceptance”, “inclusion”, “tolerance”, “social justice” (Marxist style) and, for good measure, “the Bible was written a long time ago”. Many mainstream pastors who are not gay or lesbian are nevertheless big LGBT sympathizers using guilt trips instead of scripture to influence congregations. I even had a pastor try to set up a program so that the gay men of the congregation could take the children of divorced parents out for day trips. Finally I fled to a small, but orthodox apostolic church — that doesn’t allow female pastors.

History sure ain't what it used to be!

Excuse a tad of snarkiness, but what I mean to say is, that sure was a distorted overview of a couple thousand years' worth of the pilgrimage of Christ's Church on earth.

This paragraph encapsulates the difficulty as well as any:

"In the case of the Roman Empire, the clergy accepted Constantine as the first representative of a Christian theocracy. Founded as a spiritual entity, but forced to care for temporal needs, it merged into a single divine institution with the Roman state."

"The clergy" never accepted Constantine as anything of the sort. Constantine himself was not even a professed Christian until his deathbed, when he chose at last to be baptized, not by a bishop who held the Catholic Faith, but by an Arian bishop. And the Church certainly did not subsequently merge into a "single divine institution with the Roman state."

By the late 400's, the invading barbarians took over temporal power and there was no Roman state: which, if your account were correct, would have meant the end of the Catholic Church, but it was not so. The Church continued doing what she has always done by divine mandate: teaching, governing, sanctifying, making disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

The Eastern Church, so often totally neglected in our slapdash histories of the West, followed a somewhat different course, but even in the Byzantine symphonia of spiritual and temporal power, there was never this merger you describe.

I am not writing this to deny that there were periods when Catholic prelates thought, lived, and ruled like secular princes, nor that worldly leaders often turned their backs on a neglected flock. But we were never left orphans. The persistence of the Church over 2,000 years, holy, Christ-honoring, and growing past the sprawling remains of every other earthly institution, must certainly suggest the activity of Divine Providence to those who are paying attention.

When I think of the principled theological behavior of men (as in, the guys) I often have to think of the wide cavalcade of OT history in which an entire, classically patriarchal society went off the rails over and over again under the influence of corrupt priests, false prophets, and apostate kings.

Then I have to think of the day of Christ's death and the ignominious behavior of His own hand-picked men: one betrayed Him, one denied Him three times, and the other nine headed out toward the tall grass. Only John proved himself loyal, and that was, incidentally, by sticking with Jesus' mother and the faithful women at the foot of the cross.

Or I recall how the entire national clergy of England collapsed into craven acceptance of that pervert King Henry VIII, who was willing to "redefine marriage," commit treason against the Church, and permanently split Christendom, so he could "marry" his repellent girlfriend and crown her queen of the realm. Every Catholic bishop in England went along with that, with the sole exception of St. John Fisher, who, with St. Thomas More, retained his integrity and was parted from his head as befits a saint.

I don't entirely ignore your story of the moral softness which has come along concurrent with the ordaining of female pastorship within Protesantism. But I think you may have cause-and-effect twisty-tailed around. What you think was the cause, may have been the result.

There is a lot of difference between Christianity as spiritual faith and as constructed into a religion where an acquiescent clergy will backwards engineer from the demands of an oligarchy through selected scriptures and homilies into a system of apologetics than can be used to dominate a people. Martin Luther saw that distortion achieved within his lifetime.

In my original post I said, “This new church direction was variously coerced, accepted, imposed, avoided, rationalized, applauded, and managed. The clergy who rationalized, applauded, and managed the new relationship dominated as Rome fell and Europe entered the Dark Ages.” Essentially it was a matter of who won and who lost in a worldly sense. St Patrick’s and other monasteries became the primary keepers of the faith.

I stand by the next statement of my essay. “The Catholic Church’s final rise to European political dominance began with the co-dependent relationship of Pope Stephen and Pepin king of the Franks in 750 A.D. In exchange for defeating Lombard incursions, Pope Stephen proclaimed Pepin’s sons, and their descendants, kings by “divine right”. When Pepin first met Pope Steven, he dismounted and led his horse like a groom. Pepin’s act of submission reflected the Catholic Church’s act of submission to worldly advancement when adopting those Machiavellian strategies allowing political prosperity in the midst of pervasive brutality and treachery. The Papal estates were transformed into the Papal States.

The Papacy became heir to the persistent vision of a Roman Empire, and formed a Teutonic-Latin alliance enabling shared political dominance for the next 600 years. The Catholic Church’s falsifying of divine, spiritual appointments served as the currency to purchase participation in every seat of power in Europe. The clergy abandoned its spiritual identity of professing eternal life in our Lord Jesus Christ, substituted human knowledge and cunning for survival, and then ascended in the temporal world. In response to European chaos, the Catholic Church became a notorious haven for clergy and kings seeking fulfillment of addictions to power and pride equivalent to addictions to drugs or pornography.”

The above is one example of a persistent direction churches take. Because of an article titled McChurch posted to Free Republic, I had an email exchange a few years ago with a Catholic priest. He lamented about Christianity “lite” in his denomination, and I saw the correlation with the Emerging Church, etal plaguing denominations besides Catholicism. Apart from government involvement such an approach enables personal advancement for church leaders coveting acceptance and acclaim within a larger social and academic secular community; a community holding values defined by popular media, academics, and progressive agendas. C. S. Lewis described these traps when he said in The Screwtape Letters, “Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels he is ‘finding his place in it, while really it is finding its place in him”.

A partial bibliography includes:

A History of Christianity by Ray C. Petry
A History of the Papacy by M. Crieghton
The History of the Church by Charles Jacobs
A History of the Expansion of Christianity by Kenneth Scott Lattourette
The Dark Ages 476-918 by Sir Charles Oman
The Middle Ages 395-1500 by Joseph R. Strayer and Dana Munro

"Essentially it was a matter of who won and who lost in a worldly sense. St Patrick’s and other monasteries became the primary keepers of the faith."

Which is to say, the Catholic Church.

The thing to keep in mind, here, is that the diocesan (Church) structure tended to assume responsibility for civil well-being as the secular diocesan (civic) order decayed. The monasteries did as well: they provided for order, stability, and the re-establishment of the rule of law in the aftermath of barbarian invasion and widespread disorder.

To separate "diocesan" and "monastic" can be misleading. True, the monasteries often were founded in separately from any local diocesan structure, but these were all Catholic institutions. They held Catholic and Apostolic convictions, they were Catholic in faith and morals, they maintained the Catholic Scriptures (Bible) and the Catholic liturgical and sacramental life, they were in communion with the Bishop of Rome and the rest of the Church.

Thus, through the vicissitudes of history, the Bride of Christ continued on her pilgrim way. From Pentecost to today.

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