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Friend Dana Gage sent me this link to an article about an important development vis the federal control of education. The article discusses accreditation and its role in the coming government takeover of Christian colleges.
Here is my take: the American churches have never figured out how to get along with each other and to work out their differences, so they have never figured out how to relate to the state or to develop their own people from within.
As a result, they have extra-ecclesiastical institutions like colleges, disconnected from the church, that they turn to for their intellectual leadership. It’s never been a stable or particularly successful approach, but our notions of what it means to be a church have led us to this pattern. It’s unravelling was inevitable. It may be that the inevitable is just around the corner.
I hope I don’t sound self-righteous when I say that American Christianity is not healthy or strong. Whether this is the crisis the linked article suggests, time will tell. But if it is, and it is like most religious crises, nobody will know anything changed after it is done.
