What is "Christian"?

I do not claim to know the mind of God. I think to do so is foolish because God's ways are outside of my realm of reality. However, I do think about what God might think about a situation sometimes, especially the decisions we make under the context that we go to a "Christian" school.What does that exactly mean?

Rob Bell hit the nail on the head when he said "Christian is a great noun and a poor adjective." Some people would believe that Christian School is just a compound noun. No, Christian is the adjective that we have placed in front of the noun school to describe Houghton. We hope that if we stress the word Christian enough that it will add validity to anything that we say or do. We can claim that we do the "Christian" thing by dictating who we want our students to be and what we want them to act like.

The other day in psych class we were talking about conformity and how some students never felt like they were being put inside of a box until they came to Houghton, who wants to make us into cookie cutter Christians. I partly agree with this statement, but I think it is up to us to define our own faiths. We cannot rely on our home Church, the faith of our parents, or who Houghton wants us to be. I really don't feel confined in my faith at Houghton, mostly because I'm a strong willed individual who has resolved to expressing what I believe, even if it upsets other people. This is the time in our lives, as college students, that we should be growing with one another and developing our own faiths. And if my own faith looks like a Post-modern who believes in anaialism and some weird cross breed of open and closed theism all of my own who wants to see the return of community like Acts 2 and sees the church growing through relational evangelism then so be it. It does not make me any less of the noun Christian.

I would argue that the reason that people feel like Houghton is trying to cookie cutter their faith is because that is what they WANT them to do as an institution. Argue with me as you wish, but if more people were willing to explore their own faith, read the Bible not as a text book but as the breathed words of God, and think on their own then no one would be fitting into the cookie cutter model. God did not make us to be like this. We are given a personality through which we know and worship God. We are a community of people (as the Church) who all believe that Christ has died for our sins, so we can know God, but we know God in personal ways. If we as students could spend more time defining our faith and less time gossiping then we would be a stronger body of believers who did not feel pressure from an institution to be the same. If we would be lifting up each other in prayer instead of maliciously attacking one another. If we would be engaging in intellectual conversations that challenge one another instead of checking facebook. If we could be serving one another instead of worrying what others think of us. If we could be more eager to learn at the feet of our teachers and with each other then stressing about grades If we could be be a community instead of a collection of self- centered individuals. Then we would break out of the cookie cutter and be everything that God wants us to be. Then Houghton would be a body of students, faculty, and staff who are on fire for Christ and this campus could really reach out to the breaking and hurting world around us, in both our own school community and around the world, and be vessels for the restoration of God.

I was talking with Shane yesterday at lunch about the indentity crisis that Houghton finds itself in - between wanting to be more of an academic community and being more like a state school. Okay, first off, whoever made this comment really needs to go to a state school. I attended the University of Pittsburgh for a year. I have friends that are at Penn State University. Both groups would be repulsed by that statement. My academics were more challenging at Pitt. It's the truth. I was forced to learn and think on my own. I had to break out of the idea that grades are what matter and come to the realization that I am being taught by some of the top people in their fields and an 'A' just isn't feasible. I read more. I was involved in more activities (church, community, and school) and I had more fun. I hate to break it to you, but making an 'A' be a 96% or higher does NOT make a school more academically challenging. All it does is perpetuate students to become so focused on grades that they lose sight of the more important things in life. No one is going to care what grade you got in any of your classes when you leave Houghton, but they are going to care if you learned anything. They are going to care if your work is a chore or a way to glorify God. They are going to care if you really had a liberal arts education and can connect different subjects. And here, my friends, we are failing. Miserably. We need to rethink what education really is before we go wondering what type of school we want to become. And we need to figure out what type of students we are attracting to our school and figure out how to help them make the transition from being self-focused on grades to community and world-focused in breadth of knowledge.

I would also contend that being "Christian" does not give us the authority to make some of the rules we do or to unfairly punish people when they break them. God is our loving father and just like a real father he has to punish us sometimes. I remember when I was little I had this huge biting problem. I just gnawed on other people and left marks and once I remember making someone bleed. One day my dad bit me back. Yes, it was punishment, but it was fair punishment, I never did that thing again. My dad didn't have to sit there and beat me to make a point. He just bit me, not even that hard, and it was over. Punishment from God is also never excessive. But we as humans force these excessive punishments on other people in order to make a point. We want to show not only that we don't approve of a persons actions, but we are better then them because its something we would never do. This is in fact a lie. I think unconsciously we are worried that the actions of another are something that we WOULD actually do. And if we punish the other person in a severe enough fashion then we are sending the message to ourselves not to engage in "sinful" behavior. There is one problem in all of this. We are saying that we are bringing the punishment of God for sinners, but we forget the huge factor of grace. God has shown grace to us, therefore, we should show grace to others. Where is the forgiveness in this "Christian" community? If the staff cannot show grace towards students how are students supposed to show it to one another? Do you want to know what my school's "Christian" community actually looks like from the inside? It is a place where students hold on to regrets for way to long and cannot share them with anyone out of fear of punishment and being judged. It is a place where when students do have the guts to admit they did something wrong, and show honesty and integrity, they are unfairly punished. It is a place where depression runs ramped - both diagnosed and undiagnosed. Here students can hang on to hate for their fellow student for so long that they cannot even remember why they are mad. Here we don't show love and compassion and care for each other because we would rather play the almighty judge and gossip behind the persons back. And if this is what a "Christian" school then I would rather not be connected to it. I would rather be at Pitt and in Clearfield, where as "heathen" as we are at least we are authentic.

I leave you with another thought from Rob Bell, "Something can be labeled "Christian" and not be good or true."