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The unprecedented enrollment growth of faith-based higher education is a curiosity to some, and a complete mystery to others. Particularly among intentionally Christ-centered schools, the enrollment rate of Council for Christian Colleges and Universities member institutions has outpaced the rest of higher education by more than 42 percent during the decade of the 1990s.

Not surprisingly, the demand for faculty members at these and other faith-related colleges and universities has increased as well. (With few exceptions, most of these faculty members are coming from secular Ph.D. granting institutions.) But with faculty salaries that tend to be lower than national averages, heavier teaching loads, and greater expectations that faculty serve on numerous university committees, be actively engaged in mentoring of students, and much more, why opt for life as a faculty member at a Christian college? The answers to this question are not all that complex, but may come as a surprise to some.

Any knowledgeable student of the history of higher education in America understands that most colleges and universities were formed around an explicit and purposeful set of educational objectives (today, we would use the phrase ”desired outcomes”), which included the intellectual, aesthetic, moral and spiritual development of students. Read any history of the great Ivy League universities, and one finds that these objectives permeated the curriculum and the life of the institution at virtually all levels. And as we know, these institutions and many others no longer embrace a mission that would include in any specific sense a moral and spiritual formation of students, beyond a general assumption that it is a student's responsibility to figure these things out for themselves.

Many would applaud these developments in higher education. But for some, this “great divorce” between the spiritual and the intellectual has produced a cultural, moral and intellectual vacuum in the leadership in our businesses, nonprofit organizations and even in our religious institutions.

One answer to the question of “why teach at a Christian college” is that these institutions embrace a heritage and tradition of producing graduates who are truly “liberally educated.” That answer frequently surprises friends and colleagues teaching in public and non-sectarian private colleges. Immediately, one begins to hear the questions like: “How can a Christian college or university, which is bounded by certain religious beliefs and tenets be a place where students are liberally educated? Isn’t one of the tasks of higher education to free students, intellectually, to pursue truth? And certainly a faith-based institution by its very nature must set boundaries and limits to the pursuit of that truth, right?” Church doctrines and religious belief must by their very nature limit that pursuit of truth, or so comes the charge.

If it were only that simple and true, you could stop reading this article and get back to the rest of your e-mail. I contend that students and professors at a Christian college or university are in a real sense more free to pursue truth than their counterparts at public universities. How can this be? The working assumption for most faculty and administrators at Christian colleges and universities is that “all truth is God’s truth,” and therefore we are free to pursue that truth in ways that are both intellectually rigorous and at the same time, connected to a moral order greater than ourselves.

Let me illustrate this from my experience teaching political science (international relations and comparative politics) at two Christian colleges (Westmont College in California and Gordon College in Massachusetts) for nearly 15 years. Each semester in my Introduction to International Relations class, I would use a standard text in IR to ensure that my students were grappling with the basic questions of the discipline. My supplementary reading list was as current as any faculty member teaching at a major university. But respectfully, I think my students got more in my intro class than the students down the street at the state university.

When it came time to discuss issues of war, terrorism, poverty and injustices in the world, I had the opportunity and responsibility to help my students ask questions like What does a just war look like? Do states have moral duties and responsibilities or are they simply morally-neutral agents on the world stage? How do the religious commitments of leaders and a citizenry inform their public life? This added dimension in my teaching was not simply window-dressing. It was hard work to challenge my students to wrestle with current realities and theories of international relations, while also asking them to think deeply about how the Christian faith and worldview might inform an understanding of these realities.

In wrestling with these questions, I was permitted (and indeed expected) to challenge students to think about the worldview assumptions which each person brings to answering these questions -- persons of the Christian faith, Jewish and Islamic faiths, or of no particular faith at all. If I were teaching at a state university, these questions would rarely, if ever, be a part of the conversation in class. “We can’t bring religious faith into the classroom -- religion should never trump the pursuit of truth. Religious education is the responsibility of the church, not the academy.” These are the common objections I would regularly hear or read from colleagues who look in on faith-based education and assume that what happens is some sort of “faith indoctrination” that is divorced from the hard study of political science.

Yet I persist. I chose to teach at a Christian college not because I had all the answers to the problems of war, violence and injustice. Rather, I understood that the pursuit of knowledge is not an end in itself, but rather is a means to a deeper understanding of wisdom and truth. Christian faculty who take the pursuit of truth as their point of departure are in many ways more free to explore the difficult and perplexing questions of their disciplines. And our students are the beneficiaries when we do this well -- not because we are spoon-feeding simple answers to complex questions from our Holy Scriptures -- but because we invite them to join us in a lifelong pursuit of truth that is informed by a faith that requires intellectual humility and integrity.

Some Christian colleges and universities require faculty members to affirm the basic tenets of the Christian faith as expressed within the particular tradition in which the school is founded (Wesleyan, Reformed, Anabaptist, and so on). Many others ask only that a faculty member affirm their basic faith commitments as a Christian. In either case, professors understand that these commitments serve the primary purpose of defining the academic community as a Christian academic community, a “truth in advertising” to prospective students, faculty, and those who provide financial support to the institution.

Earlier this year, the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute released its study on college students' spiritual needs. As the project co-directors Alexander and Helen Astin noted in the study, “the relative amount of attention that colleges and universities devote to the ‘exterior’ and ’interior’ aspects of students lives has gotten out of balance ... we have increasingly come to neglect the student’s inner development -- the spheres of values and beliefs, emotional maturity, spirituality and self-understanding.”

In their study, the Astins quantified for American higher education something that faculty members teaching at Christian colleges have known and experienced all along -- students are looking for deeper meaning and purpose in their lives, and they are not finding much help on many of our nation’s campuses. Seventy-six percent of respondents (110,000 college and university first-year students) drawn from more than 230 campuses indicated that the search for meaning and purpose in life was important or very important to them. In similar numbers, they expressed a belief in God, a somewhat regular prayer life and frequent conversations with friends or family about matters of faith and/or spirituality. Sadly, on most college and university campuses today, few faculty are engaging students in this deeper work of meaning and purpose in life -- what we might call the larger vocational questions that students are asking.

At Christian colleges and universities, faculty members invite students to explore these deeper questions, and are themselves encouraged to, in the words of Parker Palmer, “Let their lives speak.” We invite students into a world of exploration and the search for meaning and truth.

So why teach at a Christian college or university? In some small way we hope to better learn and live out what St. Paul meant when he wrote, ”we see through the glass darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” Teaching and serving at a Christian college should not be a suffocating experience. On the contrary, the best Christian college faculty members and their institutions will not be afraid to acknowledge the limits of our own understanding, even while we challenge ourselves and our students to live as followers of God who has given us minds and hearts to pursue truth. And that is no small thing.