This article is based on remarks by Dr. Calvin Troup, president of Geneva College, to the 2024 RPCNA Synod.

If we walked onto the Geneva campus not realizing that the school was a ministry of education belonging to the RPCNA, how would we know that Geneva is the Reformed Presbyterian college? That’s a question I try to answer every year in my report to the RP Synod. Geneva is deeply RP, so it’s impossible to provide a complete answer in that brief report. I highlight different aspects every year.

The basic indicators show up in the everyday life of the college. For example, chapel is required every Wednesday during the school year, and the chapel program reflects our RP commitments to exclusive psalmody and expository preaching by ordained men, whether teaching or ruling elders.

The college orders its affairs such that faculty, staff, and students are not required to work on the Lord’s Day. Of course, works of necessity (e.g., food service, security) and works of love and mercy are recognized as legitimate activity on the Lord’s Day at Geneva. However, classes, organized athletic competitions, programmed student activities, and the like are not scheduled. College offices, recreation facilities, and the library are closed.

The governance structure of the college also indicates that Geneva is an RP institution. The Geneva College charter and bylaws commit the whole institution to “the Bible as the written, infallible and inerrant Word of God, inspired by the Holy Spirit and profitable for teaching and learning.” Geneva works “within the context of a biblical view of life and the world as expressed in the Westminster Standards and the Testimony of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America.” The RPCNA Synod appoints the Geneva College Board of Corporators, RPs who control the charter and bylaws. The Corporators also elect the members of the Board of Trustees, the majority of whom are RP. The college president, the chair of the Board of Trustees, and the chairman of the Bible department must be RPs. Political science professors must “be committed to teach accurately and positively the doctrine of civil government contained in the Constitution of the RPCNA.”

One of the most important ways we know that Geneva College is RP today goes beyond the obvious indicators and governance structure to the heart of what it means to be biblical and to be committed to the Westminster Confession and RPCNA Testimony in practice.

Compared to the mainstream of higher education in the United States, Geneva College is countercultural. How so? We’re countercultural in how we approach and conduct collegiate education.

We begin “with Christ as King and under Scripture.” The preamble to Geneva’s core values purposely resembles the blue banner of the RPCNA, “For Christ’s Crown and Covenant.” We proclaim Christ as preeminent over all creation and all knowledge. The conventional wisdom of secularized higher education may assert relativism, fragmentation, and uncertainty, or may suggest that we can reasonably discover or construct new knowledge without regard for God. But we confess Jesus as Creator and Lord, the one in whom all things hold together, who upholds all things by the word of His power. Christ is the singular source of all wisdom and knowledge: the author of our coherent universe, all things visible and invisible.

We end with pro Christo et patria, “for Christ and Country.” The motto of Geneva College is our unequivocal commitment to Jesus Christ and to His sovereignty over all nations, including whichever nation we call our own. Because of Christ’s mediatorial sovereignty over all (pro Christo), we are called to make worship our first priority and to devote ourselves, second, to good works in service to the neighbors He has provided (et patria). The end of a Geneva education is stated in the vision of the college, “to prepare students for courageous engagement throughout their life’s work,” and the mission of the college, “to equip students for lives of service to God and neighbor.”

As a youth, I heard Dr. Francis Schaeffer speak at Geneva on several occasions. He emphasized that biblical Christians should understand that Christ calls us to live counterculturally in this world. Geneva, in helping students learn to answer that call, is not anti-cultural, but countercultural. We seek to live and work faithfully as an RP institution and mission station that is positively in the world, but decisively not of the world. Pro Christo et patria!