A Republic, If You Can Keep It
Plus, Christian higher ed data, thoughts on mechanized ministry, and more.
EDITOR’S NOTE: “Signs and Wonders” is a column that shares thoughts on news items that either do not rise to the level of a news story for MinistryWatch or are slightly (even significantly) outside of our normal charity and philanthropy “beat.” My goal is to be punchy, opinionated, and not to worry much about being slightly off brand. If that is not for you, no hard feelings. But if it is…read on.
Back to Our Republican Roots. Lots of people say we live in a democracy. That is not precisely true. We live in a constitutional republic. Benjamin Franklin famously said, when asked what the 1787 Constitutional Convention created, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Keeping it, as it turns out, is not that easy. Our narcissistic hearts want our way, and we rebel against any limits, no matter how good those limits are for us. Paul Miller, a contributing writer for The Dispatch, has written an excellent essay on the topic. You can find it here. I interviewed Miller in 2022 for my WORLD Magazine podcast “Listening In.” You can listen to that conversation here.
Dueling Data in Christian Higher Education. “Rumors of Christian higher education’s (CHE’s) demise have been greatly exaggerated,” says Perry Glanzer over at Christian Scholar’s Review. He cites new numbers saying enrollment at Christian colleges was up in 2024 (the latest year for which comprehensive data are available), and he says, “The negative reporting and scare-mongering about college closures is a case study in how not to do redemptive journalism.”
MinistryWatch has written extensively about the troubles facing Christian higher education, so I must presume he is talking about us, among others. I will have more to say about Glanzer’s study in a future article, but I will say here that Glanzer’s analysis reminds me of the fable of the blind men and the elephant. Seven blind men grab the elephant in different places — the tusk, the trunk, the leg, the torso, and the tail — and they come up with radically different descriptions of the elephant. What appears to be a rise in Christian college enrollment is almost wholly attributable to a dozen or so colleges that have seen dramatic growth. (Again, more about that in a future article.)
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Another contributing factor has been a short-lived rise in the number of young people in the 18-24 age cohort. This so-called “echo boom” is coming to an end. The number of 18–24 year olds is expected to decline significantly in the next 20 years.
The bottom line: I do not believe Christian higher education is dying, but it is in trouble. A “dead cat bounce” in the data should not distract us from the overall trends.
Mechanized Ministry. Joshua Torrey has written a helpful article about the limitations of artificial intelligence in ministry. He concludes: “Spiritless things will eventually leave us empty. But our Christian promise is different. We have been given pastors and teachers so that we may not be tossed to and fro (Eph. 4:11–14). We are being built up into the image of the invisible (Col. 1:15; Gal. 3:27). We need the ‘solid food’ (Heb. 5:14) that the Bible and human ministers provide. Those aims and needs cannot be satisfied by 24/7 access to a machine.”
I agree with Torrey completely, though I am also aware that sometimes chatbots are the only way to reach people. In my interview with Justin Murff about the “digital church” in closed countries in the Middle East and North Africa, he said something that stuck with me. “In-person ministry is preferable, but it is not always possible.”
In the pro-life arena, for example, we are discovering that abortion-minded women turn first to the internet for answers. They will order medical abortifacients online and will take those pills without ever talking with a human being. That is one of the reasons that in our post-Roe era, we have more abortions than ever before. Men and women who have experienced trauma, especially in war zones and conflict zones, often turn first to the internet for answers, sometimes telling a chatbot what they are not yet ready to tell a human being.
I still generally come down on Torrey’s side in this debate, but can we stipulate for the record that the issue is complicated, and that simple, one-size-fits-all answers will not only fail but will also damage the credibility of Christians as people who have real answers for real problems.
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