More than a century before the New Deal, Public Education, or the Civil Rights movements, the Second Great Awakening fostered a nation-wide “benevolent empire” of care for the poor, freedom for the oppressed and education for all.
That Asbury University’s chapel has become a “hot spot of sacramentality” {James K.A. Smith] would not surprise the founders of Christian higher education in America. The integration of revival and moral philosophy in the college chapel helped lead to what Mark. A. Noll calls “the great age of Christian higher education.”
While Asbury University’s current revival appears a modern anomaly, it is very much in keeping with the history of higher education in America.
Will twenty-first century Christian college leaders rise to the challenge of innovation as we have throughout history or will we merely get stuck in the past?