Crossing KCU

Fellowship and the Final Semester

  “What if Jesus came to this place? What would he see? What would he say about all the things we are doing under the name of Christian? Would we even recognize him, acknowledge him, or listen to what he had to say? Well maybe he is here, and maybe he is speaking to us. But maybe we’re just not listening.”

 It was my own voice speaking back to me. They were the opening words of a short documentary film that our group had been working on for a class. My friend Jason and I were the ones actually in the class, but everyone else wanted to help with the project. The short video was to be our final exam for a class called Christ and Culture, which was the final class in the school of Biblical Studies, and one that all seniors in their final semester had to take.

Jason and I were glad to have help. After all, the project afforded us the opportunity to finally communicate something meaningful to a large part of the campus population. So it seemed only fitting that those of us who had fought for the school so long and hard through prayer and service should gather together for this final collaboration. It was already December, and for Jason and I, this was our last semester on campus. For me, it had now been seven years since I first stepped foot on the campus of Kentucky Christian College, now Kentucky Christian University, and it was finally time for my swan song.

I was happy to be leaving for the most part. The only downside was that I would be leaving behind the few true brothers and sisters that I had grown to love. Among them were Jeffery from India, who I’ve already said a great deal about, and Kiel Nation from Versailles, Kentucky. What I didn’t realize at the time, was that of all the friends I had there at the school during that final semester, of all those with whom we would meet together and pray with, some who I had even known for years, and some who I considered to be my closest brothers and sisters—of all of them, Jeff and Kiel would be the only ones who outlasted my time at K.C.U., and the only ones who I could truly trust to watch my back. Brothers like that didn’t come easy on a campus like K.C.U.

I had another friend named Jonathan who helped us on the project. He had been a close friend of mine for a few years. I had met him just after returning to the campus after my time in exile. He was an incoming freshman that year, full of passion and eager to carve out his place in the world. Both of his parents were ministers; his dad one of many ministers at a large church and his mom a women’s minister at the same church. When I first met him, he already had a mature understanding of what it meant to be a follower of Christ, and he had a very humble willingness to listen to others and learn whatever he could from them. He left the college after a year and a half, and then after sitting out for a year, he decided to return. Throughout this time he had remained one of my closest brothers. He spent time at my house, and I spent time at his. He was one of the few, genuine friends I had in my life. There was nothing I wouldn’t do for this kid. At a time when I had very few real friends, I could clearly see that God had brought him into my life to encourage me, and to provide fellowship. I learned a great deal from Jonathan. Even so, this final semester would also end up being the last time I shared with him in close community.

_______

Well, these were just a few of the friends that I had during that final semester, as we set about putting together the aforementioned video. Production of the video began in much the same way that most school projects begin—in simple terms that is, with a syllabus, a deadline, and a great deal of procrastination. The professor for this course, Dr. Durst really liked to stress discussion and conversation as the core of his classroom instruction.

To help facilitate these classroom discussions in this course he chose a book called Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, by Randall Balmer, which was essentially an eyewitness documentation of the evangelical subculture that exists in America. Each chapter of Balmer’s book focuses on a different expression of the evangelical church in a different part of the country, and presents a first-hand account of the author’s own personal experience visiting and interacting with each one. In one chapter, Balmer describes his experience visiting and observing the conservative Dallas Theological Seminary, and in another he relays his visit with a group of Episcopal Native Americans at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota.

Alongside this book, we also were able to view and discuss several episodes of Balmer’s PBS documentary in class, which accompanies and complements the book. In this documentary series, Balmer finds himself at the Willow Creek mega-church in Chicago, at a small, charismatic, black church in the South, a rural camp meeting in the Appalachian foothills of West Virginia, and everywhere in between. The main them of the book and series was on understanding the necessity of self-criticism, and how it’s important that we, as the Church, embrace criticism, and that we even make focused efforts at self-criticism by asking ourselves difficult questions concerning why we do things the way we do, and where we need to improve as a community of believers, wherever we are.

With these things in mind, our class moved into the final weeks of the semester, and closer to the final exam. The specific nature of the project was open for interpretation, as it only asked us to present some form of artistic expression, which could be a painting, sculpture, short story, play, skit, musical composition, film, music video, or something else pre-approved by the professor.

Jason and I had already discussed the project with the rest of our fellowship. We had all agreed that this was an opportunity for us to share some things with the rest of the campus. Before we started work on the project we checked our idea with Dr. Durst, and given the okay, we moved forward with the idea of making a short film.

In seeking after ideas for what to do as our video project we spent time in prayer. Our intention in doing so was to submit our work to the Lord, so that it could be a product of his doing, and not merely something we did on our own. In the case of producing a video, we wanted God’s message to be the central theme of the project, so that it would contain some greater meaning beyond whatever message or theme we could have come up with on our own. So that’s what we did, and over the next few weeks, we waited and allowed the ideas for the project to materialize naturally out of what God had been teaching us through our own relationships with Him.

Out of this time of preparation came some serious questions that we felt needed to be asked about the environment that we were living in then, and that specifically addressed the issues surrounding Christian education. During our time in the Christian college environment we had all felt a sense that our greatest times of spiritual growth occurred, not through classroom instruction, but through living in constant community with so many other brothers and sisters, and the fellowship that flowed naturally out of that environment. Likewise, we were now aware of the sharp contrast between the model of education exemplified by Christ in the gospels, and the educational model we had come to experience in the Christian university setting.

We saw Christ’s way of teaching as experiential discipleship, in which Christ’s disciples walked with him everyday, and the things they learned from him occurring as a result of their relationship with him. In simple terms, the essence of Christian education, from a New Testament perspective, is simply found in walking with Christ. In our experience, however, the predominant method of teaching was an impersonal instruction method, whereby most professors, instead of pointing the way to Christ, pointed students toward men, and the teachings found within books and commentaries written about the Bible rather than to the actual Bible.

At the same time, the living environment of the school which offered the most potential for real spiritual growth was constantly stifled by a power structure built on the rule of law and focused on the enforcement of regulations. The constant attempts by the administration of the college to control behavior, rarely encouraged real spiritual growth by addressing the problems and personal issues of the student body, and instead placed upon them the weight of legalism, non-biblical leadership examples, and general harassment for non spiritual issues. From our perspective this was an extremely serious situation, most especially because it involved students who were involved in ministry preparation, or already in ministries.

In light of all this, we came up with some questions to ask in our film that were meant to call attention to the spiritual state of the campus body, and to also examine the current understanding of what is known as Christian education; and furthermore, how these issues are related and tied together within the community of God’s people, both on the campus, and in the wider context of the Church as a whole. Our main idea on the matter, going into the project was a very simple idea; that we, as the Church, cannot separate Christian education from the rest of our spiritual lives as the community of believers; and that indeed these two things go hand in hand.

This was the central message and theme of the video we made, which came to be titled KCU Unplugged since it was presented in the context of Kentucky Christian University and because that is where we were living at the time. In other words, we didn’t feel that the university, as a part of the Church, could separate its methods of education from the spiritual environment it was generating. We felt that this was just a simple issue, and yet one that touched the heart of life at K.C.U., and which also cut across the whole range of thought within our churches concerning our accepted traditions of educating people in ministry.

We felt the best way to address the connection between education and environment was to narrow the discussion to a small number of questions, which could then serve as a spring-board for generating more discussion on the matter. Likewise, we felt that the answers to these questions should come, not from ourselves as the ones asking the questions, but from a wide range of people, with different viewpoints.

With all these things in mind, we set about the tedious task of compiling as many interviews as we could from professors, administrators, students, and alumni. Our first several interviews consisted of about twelve questions that we were asking, but by the time we conducted our last few interviews, and were sitting down to begin editing, we had narrowed the field of questions down to the following seven:

1) How do you define ministry?

2) Who is called to the ministry?

3) How should we be prepared for ministry?

4) What does our relationship with God have to do with ministry?

5) What place does discipleship have in ministry?

6) How well is KCU preparing students for ministry?

7) What’s really going on spiritually at KCU?

The seventh and final question we asked in the video was answered a little differently. The question by nature is a difficult one to ask, and even more difficult to answer, but we never the less felt that it was the most important question in the video. This was not a question that we asked in our interviews, and so we could not answer it with interview responses as we had done with the previous six questions.

At some point near the end of that semester a couple of students decided to conduct a 24 hour prayer marathon for two weeks straight. They took an empty room in one of the academic buildings (which happened to be right next door to the room where we met to pray each night) and transformed it into what came to be known as “the tabernacle.” It was an interesting room complete with candles, communion bread and juice, a CD player with several devotional and worship discs, a wall to write prayer requests on, and a stack of notebooks and journals for the students to write in. For two weeks students signed up to fill one hour time slots inside the prayer room.

One morning near the end of the two weeks I went into the tabernacle and was immediately drawn to the stack of journals sitting on the desk. As I flipped through them I was surprised to see that most of them had already been completely filled with anonymous entries from students. As I sat there reading through some of the entries I was literally brought to tears. Anyone who read those journals would have reacted the same way. I had forgotten that the fellowship I was experiencing on a daily basis was something that many of the students were missing. Most of them didn’t realize they were missing it, as the college did a good job of making students believe that they were spiritually healthy as long as they were following all the rules and regulations and didn’t cause any trouble.

But all anyone had to do to understand the true spiritual condition of the students on that campus was to read through those journals. It was a medium that the campus population was using to express the reality of what was going on in their spiritual lives, and because it was all anonymous, they were being completely open and honest. The content of the journals revealed the collective spiritual condition of the campus body as confusion, hurt, anger, frustration, doubt, anxiety, fear, and a number of other things that people were struggling with, such as homosexuality, drug use, sexual immorality, loneliness, witchcraft, abandonment, attempts at suicide, various eating disorders, rape and abuse. These things were not issues being expressed by small numbers of students, but were the predominant thoughts and expressions contained within the journals as a whole.

So—getting back to the video—what we decided to do in what we thought was our best shot at answering the seventh question, What’s Really Going On, was to film the inside of the 24 hour prayer tabernacle and provide a narrated explanation of what it was all about. We felt the content in the anonymous journals provided the best answer to the question asked in the video; an answer that could, in that form, come from a large portion of the student body. Our intention by presenting this as the final portion of the video, was to cut everything down to the core, and to take a look at what was really going on in the minds of students preparing for ministry at K.C.U.

What we ended up with on the day of the final exam, and what we showed to the other students in our Christ & Culture class, was a short film inspired by the content of our classroom instruction, and produced through prayer, with the sole intent to present to our class that which God had been presenting to us. The questions we asked in the video were questions we felt God was asking each of us as well. Dr. Durst certainly seemed to understand and appreciate our efforts, since he awarded us 100% credit on the project and made some positive comments about it after the showing.

At the end of that semester I went back home to Indiana to finish out my degree through correspondence work, and Jason moved to New York with his wife, to do the same. Neither of us expected to hear anything else about the video. And oh how wrong we were.

_______

KCU Unplugged actually ended up very nearly keeping me from being able to finally graduate in May of 2006. After all the years of struggle, perseverance, joy, sadness, confusion, suffering, depression, redemption, revolution, and triumph—after all that, the President of the university sent an e-mail telling me that I couldn’t graduate because of the video we had made for class.

The problem was that some copies had been made for those of us involved in the production, and one of the copies had subsequently found its way into the hands of one of the many disillusioned freshmen on the campus. But this was no ordinary disillusioned freshman. He was, in fact, the son of a preacher of a mega-church in Ohio, which happened to be one of the main recruitment states of the college. Moreover, this preacher had been a member of the board of trustees for the university. Basically, this freshman took the video back to his home church where he showed it to the elders and his youth minister—the youth minister was a recent graduate of the university. And somehow, within the depths of this mega-church, more copies were made and mailed out to churches all over the country that were affiliated with and supported the university either with direct monetary contributions, or by sending students. We found all this out from the university’s President several months after it had happened, as we were facing the very real possibility that we would not be able to graduate.

The damage had already been done. Apparently the President began getting phone calls from all over the place, asking him about the video and inquiring about the state of the campus. To make a long story short, our ability to graduate was decided over a week at the beginning of the following May, as Jason and I haggled back and forth over the wording of an official statement of apology—which had to be signed by both Jason and myself since we were the main producers of the video. This was the demand that the President had made to us. Our original apology hadn’t been good enough for him, and his rejection had dragged the issue out over an entire week. After faxing back and forth this absurd document, which reminded me of two countries ironing out a treaty after spending many years at war with each other, we were able to come to an agreement (this, only after my dad made a phone call to the President threatening a lawsuit). And that was basically the end of my official dealings with Kentucky Christian University.

Sometimes there are people who hear me talk about my experiences with Kentucky Christian University, and they get really mad at me. They see this video, or read something I’ve written, or hear something I say about the university, and they immediately get mad and say something like, “Just because you had a bad experience…” But the truth is, despite everything I’ve told you about my time at the school over the years, including my final struggle in graduating, I couldn’t be more satisfied with my experience. That may sound a little bizarre to some people, or it may even sound a little insane. The reality, however, is that my time at K.C.U. was simply the place that God chose for my spiritual training—learning who he is, what he is like, what he expects from us, what it means to follow him, what it really means to be called a Christian. These are lessons that I am blessed to have learned, and I wouldn’t trade the time I spent crossing paths with K.C.U. for anything else in the world.

Even so, my satisfaction with my experience in working my way to a Biblical Studies degree does not excuse me from telling the truth about how I got to the point I’m at now. It doesn’t excuse me from pointing out that I had to pass through a crucible of false religion and spiritual idolatry while getting from point A to point B. A lot of what I’ve said in this book has been difficult to say, but it has to be said. False religion and idolatry are epidemics in the American church, and they are definitely not unique to my experiences in this one little campus in the foothills of eastern Kentucky. And so, there is just a little more to say.

“I am writing these things to you about those who are trying to lead you astray. As for you, the anointing you received from him remains in you, and you do not need anyone to teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about all things and as that anointing is real, not counterfeit—just as it has taught you, remain in him.” –1st John 2:26-27