The following is from the “Report of Reformed University Ministries to the 37th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America”:

The intellectual landscape of current campus culture can be a disconcerting place. As journalist David Brooks recently wrote:

A few years ago, a faculty committee at Harvard produced a report on the purpose of education. “The aim of a liberal education,” the report declared, “is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves.” The report implied an entire way of living. Individuals should learn to think for themselves. They should be skeptical of pre-existing arrangements. They should break free from the way they were raised, examine life from the outside and discover their own values.

Today’s student, approaching this altar of post-modern thought, is not only a member of a student body, but an initiate into an institution which will perhaps influence his core principles more than any other during his lifetime. As Charles Malik, a political and economic scholar, says in A Christian Critique of the University, the University is “one of the greatest creations of the Western Civilization [and] dominates the world today more than any other institution; more than the church, more than the government, more than all other institutions.”

Given this backdrop–of academic worship and skepticism of tradition—it is easy to see why Professor James Davidson Hunter concludes that, “In every age, social life has been defined by some authority above, beyond, or outside of us. Now this is not the case. It is the autonomous self that is the arbiter of what constitutes truth and reality.”

Because students are often asked to look to their own minds as the ultimate authority on Truth and to cultivate doubt of pre-established standards, the university provides a tremendous opportunity. There, we can not only summon the courage to say that there is absolute Truth but also lovingly connect with those who disagree. Many testify in later life that their college years were the time when they seriously considered Christianity.

Reformed University Ministries engages the current academic culture by sending ordained PCA ministers to serve on the college campus, to preach the gospel of Christ, to build Christ’s Church and ultimately to equip students to live all of life under the Lordship of Christ. This is a concrete expression of our commitment to our covenant children and to our obedience to the Great Commission.