March 01, 1990 by

Or, What if missionaries were to design a university?

The U.S. Center for World Mission is both a mission society ö a community of people committed to doing anything they can to forward the cause of missions to the final frontiers ö and also a project, a center for collaboration with so many different departments it takes almost two hours to make even a superficial tour.

But the U.S. Center community has not only attracted many projects and organizations (and founded a few which now have their own autonomy), it has spent more than ten years raising the necessary funds to purchase a campus which serves not only to house these many different entities but to act as the headquarters of a unique, international university.

Specifically, the Mission Truining Division of the Center seeks to monitor the availability of educational opportunities for missionaries and mission candidates all over the world. To make sure that nothing essential is missing, very early in the history of the USCWM, a university was founded (see page 2), designed to pilot educational programs of value to missionaries and national workers which existing schools might well adopt if an experimental program were to show the way.

Mission Executives: We are now in a position where we are looking for faculty attuned to the special circumstances of the mission industry, preferably people with field experience. And, we can accommodate a small number of students in several programs we already have underway ö see below.

Reuniting Our Young with the Adult World ö and Gaining Ten Years

We regard as one of the most fundamental problems in American education the prolonged isolation of young people from the adult world. See the previous two pages. Our response has led to the design of what we call a 6x6, 2/3x2/3 undergraduate experience. We believe, along with professor Hamilton (see previous article), that it is possible for high school graduates to shoulder far more adult responsibility than is usually accorded them in America; only the drug lords expect a lot. In the case of mission-minded young people specifically concerned about the global mission enterprise (whether eventually as missionaries or supporters), we believe it is possible for them to do all of the following in a redesigned undergraduate program:

1. Complete a solid B.A. degree in four to five years, with no debts.
2. Spend six months each year "overseas" in a short-term mission situation, working and studying.
3. Spend two-thirds of each year in a cooperative relationship with ministry and/or work, plus two thirds in academic study. (Obviously one-third is both ministry and study.)
4. Maintain throughout the whole period accountable relationships with a) parents, b) home church, c) mission agency, and d) school.
5. Reside in a different country, and work as student interns under a different mission agency during each year.
6. Continue on toward a Ph.D. degree, if that is advised, without taking years off to return to the States.

While this particular program has not yet been fully tested, we believe cooperative education (a common phrase for work/study combinations) is the best way out of the spiraling costs of higher education, and certainly the only pattern that can effectively be offered to mission-field communities of believers.

You can reflect on how this works by noting the 70-year story of Northeastern University in Boston, whose academic record is spectacular and whose 9,000 Cooperative-Ed students annually earn well over $100 million. This is a healthy pattern needed in the U.S., not just on the mission field!

But this pattern is needed in the U.S. especially because we cannot sell to people overseas what we ourselves do not believe in. At one time, in Mexico, the government was so intent on rivaling U.S. university standards that the law required all university students to be full-time students.

Reproducing Educational Leadership

The only degree which allows the holder to bring someone else up to his or her same level is the Ph.D.

One of the State examiners told us, "Your Ph.D. program is as strong as Stanfordâs." People in our Ph.D. pipeline live and work in a dozen countries. The unique value of a Ph.D. program is the fact that it is like planting seeds. The mission fields of the world are by now populated by enough Ph.D.s to support many a university program, without any "correspondence school" activity at all.

We are not really looking for people who want a Ph.D. so much as we are looking for those situations overseas where adequate Ph.D. major advisors and committee members are to be found. Those Ph.D. holders capable of working with us can gradually multiply themselves and seed still other areas with new Ph.D.s, who are able legitimately to be major advisors of still others.

We expect to find people with proper credentials right within the mission societies now at work in the far-flung corners of the earth, and to establish them as advisors and as Deans of Graduate Studies. We have overseas deans now in Latin America, and South-East Asia. Mission Executives: we are open to recommendations of other potential faculty and graduate deans. Only by working through such people can we consider potential degree candidates. Even then we ordinarily expect mission agencies and national churches to make recommendations to us, rather than the potential Ph.D. candidate to recommend himself or herself.

What is a Ph.D. anyhow? A lot of mystique surrounds this lofty degree. And what is a Ph.D. good for? Let's be very honest and recognize that many Ph.D. degrees are being given by schools which do not wish to yield to normal standards of excellence, and such degrees thus misrepresent the tradition. Still other Ph.D. degrees are so minutely focused that their holders are narrow specialists with little to offer outside of a highly specific area of knowledge.

Our concept, and what we accept as the most valid of the classical patterns, is that a Ph.D. holder

1. has a very broad and deep general foundation upon which his further work' can be built,
2. has a competent grasp of the current thinking and writing of other workers in his same area of specialization ö he or she knows those others and is known by them
3. has personally done significant primary research to make a valuable, formal contribution to general knowledge,
4. has labored closely and effectively as an associate of his own major advisor, and, finally,
5. has demonstrated his or her willingness and ability to supervise the research of others.

This classical model, on closer inspection, strikingly resembles the kind of discipleship we all approve of. It is a marvelous fact that in this light this highly regarded Ph.D. degree is inherently valid and worthwhile to the mission industry.

A Most-Appreciated Felt-Need

Probably the jewel in our crown is our program in Applied Linguistics and TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), representing the one skill most widely clamored for in all the earth ö out to virtually the tiniest village.

And, to our knowledge there is, categorically, no other such programas rigorous and thorough and as specifically tuned to the special demands and opportunities of the mission enterprise. We have encouraged and assisted Christian colleges to offer courses in TESOL. We are confident none are likely to develop the in-depth specialization in this kind of a mission context. Even our Certificate in TESOL takes an academic year. Our M.A. in TESOL, if you add the required thesis, is longer and more thorough than any other. Our people have had an unusual role in the state, national and international TESOL associations. At the most recent meeting in San Francisco, our students gave two papers while 1,200 others were turned down. Our M.A. graduates have distinguished themselves in many countries.

But TESOL is not just one among many specializations on the graduate level. The professional ability to teach English is as globally significant as is the English language used and valued around the world.

This program generates high quality M.A. theses with very practical applications. One of our people took his thesis with him to apply for a doctorate at a leading U.S. university. His interviewer was well impressed. "This thesis could have been a doctoral dissertation with us," he said.

The Glory of God

Last week the theme of our day of prayer was "Seeing His Glory, Sharing His Glory." I remember meditating of this single, magnificent word, glory.

It is cause for deep repentance among modem Evangelicals that although our generation knows more than any other generation in history, and even though we sing about the majesty of God, nevertheless our hymns and spiritual songs reveal (say to a foreign student) practically nothing about the heavens, which declare the glory of God, and the earth, which demonstrates His handiwork (a synonym for glory).

In the early years of this century missionaries going to China took the university with them...like Yale in China. They taught the Chinese all the science they knew. Missionary science texts in China were often more advanced and up-to-date than textbooks back in this country.

But our hymns do not extoll the Creator God for the 100 billion atoms in a single DNA molecule. Our faith does not digest such facts as the evidence of His Glory.

Deng Xiao Pingâs "Four Modernizations" in China-- technology, agriculture, industry, science ö were four of the great emphases of the mission movement to that country. Those missionaries put a university in every province of China, deliberately, to glorify God.

What went wrong? It didnât go wrong in China ö where that new, spectacular knowledge undermined the entire older order of Chinese civilization. No, our universities went wrong. We gave up the faith.

Meanwhile, the university idea caught on around the world like a sweeping fire. Jesus said, "You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free." But it is up to us whether such truth will be a sweeping fire that burns and injures or a sweeping fire that purifies and cleanses.

We need for a handful of key faculty heavyweights in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences to rewrite the entire curriculum, at least the introductory texts in history, chemistry, psychology, physics, etc. from a radically Biblical point of view.

Thousands upon thousands of the younger leaders in the mission lands are reading secularized mistreatments of Godâs glory. They are losing their way. Even the texts in the Christian colleges and high schools of this country, are falling short.

Our main concern, as missionaries, is not the U.S. but the "face" of the Gospel we are presenting around the world. If thousands of mission-related schools around the world are using or are generating textbooks which have not gone beyond the level of understanding of nature in the 13th century, if our theological texts overseas and our church hymnody around the world take no account of the true glory of God in the heavens and on earth, then we are planting churches with shallow roots.

Where can this ghastly divergence be redressed better than in a university owned and operated by missionaries?

A Non-competitive University

Virtually all our key staff have had mission experience. We have the crucial opportunity to do things on behalf of other schools ö not robbing them of students, not being one more nose in the trough of dwindling funds for Christian higher education. We do not intend to do anything that anyone else is doing, but we want to try to do everything the year-2000 countdown requires, employing the highest of standards, indeed, setting even higher standards. For the Glory of God.

This university can only best serve the mission community if it can draw upon that community for its key workers. Thousands of mission families are home due to medical factors or retirement. Mission executives: only you can best refer such people to us, "second" them to us. What you give you will get back. Otherwise we will have little to offer.

Please, anyone, write us, phone us if you know of missionaries who can join us in this effort to maximize the value of the university tradition to the countdown for the Year 2000!