Imagine standing right next to a skyscraper. That close up, it’s not impressive. The most interesting part may be the used chewing gum that some unscrupulous pedestrian stuck to its side.

Now imagine taking a few steps back and looking up. The building looms over you with an almost threatening majesty, reorienting your sense of reality. You stagger at the literally towering significance of a superstructure whose only interest to you mere moments ago was the way in which someone abused it.

As a denomination, it’s time for us to take a few steps back, to look heavenward and to survey a staggering fact: The Lord God has given us a college. A college! Even the tepid description “institution of higher learning” ought to stir the collective soul of our denomination, which values education so highly and has historically worked so tirelessly to educate all kinds and classes of people. These emphases derive necessarily from our worship of the Savior of the world, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Unprofitable servants though we are, Messiah the Prince has entrusted us with the privilege of educating tens of thousands of college students for His glory and the good of our country. Whatever your present opinion of Geneva College, it is indisputably true that a college is a divine gift of towering significance in the advancement of Christ’s kingdom.

This article aims to demonstrate Geneva’s unique, kingdom-advancing potential in “such a time as this” and to call forth from across the RPCNA an intensified, prayerful, and personal interest in the college with which God has graced us.

Geneva, like many tuition-driven colleges, is cautiously navigating today’s tempestuous economic seas, blown about as they are by the consumerist spirit of our age that says that higher education is simply a means of securing a stable, state-approved career. With budgets to meet and bills to pay, it is tempting for Geneva to simply adjust institutional sails to catch prevailing market winds. We would be fools not to focus on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) and other course offerings currently in high demand.

But focus is not the same as tunnel vision. Geneva’s STEM courses are excellent, and an essential aspect of that excellence is their being taught alongside complementary courses in the liberal arts, led by a battery of Bible classes. Liberal arts courses, as classically advocated by civilization shapers such as Augustine, are essential to challenge today’s students—in every major—to understand, transcend, and transform a mechanistic culture that deifies the state and devalues human life.¹

Jim Gidley, chair of Geneva’s engineering department (and a ruling elder in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church) writes: “The Soviet education of the Stalinist era was designed to produce human automata that would fit as cogs into the machine of socialist planning directed from the top. Today’s nearly exclusive concern with employment as the only valid outcome of a college education has the potential to produce the same kind of education, if it is not already doing so. The only difference is that no force is required. The consumers of the education themselves demand to be narrowly ‘educated’ to fit into some niche in the current economy. The grim story of Soviet-style education is a chilling warning that we should not desire this for our children and grandchildren.”²

Elite universities, and the companies that employ their graduates, are recognizing the need for undergraduate curricula aimed at philosophical dexterity as well as profession-specific development.³ In response to a New York Times story lamenting the decline of humanities classes in higher education, a Harvard Medical School professor wrote: “I have turned down undergraduate students at our institution (some with near-perfect GPAs) based on the fact that they cannot recall the last humanities course that they took. While teaching a person how to do research, I cannot afford to also take the time to teach them how to write and think critically about ideas that are abstract as well as concrete.”⁴ Given the godlessness that some schools teach in their humanities/liberal arts courses, the need for rigorous, Christ-centered liberal arts education is all the more urgent.

The RPCNA’s history of helping the societally oppressed distinguishes Geneva among Christian liberal arts schools. While located in Northwood, Ohio, Geneva served as a stop along the Underground Railroad. The RPCNA was in those days an almost singular Christian force vying for the human rights and freedom of Africans enslaved in America.⁵ Such social conscience speaks powerfully to today’s young adults. Its grounding in the doctrines of grace, rather than the shifting sands of political correctness, can bring the advocacy of true justice for all true victims. These doctrines have also steadied the church in times of severe persecution. Geneva is thus uniquely equipped to fight injustice and to stabilize today’s young saints as Christ’s church feels the first few drops of rain before what may be a violent storm of political opposition.⁶ Christians need the kind of education Geneva offers, and Geneva needs more personal investment from its parent denomination in order to keep offering it.

Many RP families have invested. Some students have even traded sunny Western skies and easy access to an ocean in order to learn horizon-expanding truth beneath the oft-gray skies of Western Pennsylvania.⁷ We need more of these priceless investments, but not because greater RP support would by itself gain Geneva fiscal solvency—far from it. The fundamental reason the RPCNA must invest more fully is our kingdom vision and Geneva’s astounding potential to help it materialize.

The primary benefits RP students can offer Geneva are humble hearts, the triune God, and neighbor-loving participation in a spiritually diverse campus community. Not because RP youth have all the answers and none of the struggles which afflict other Christian youth, but because they can join similarly postured believers in being a spiritually pleasant presence on campus. Nowhere is this need more obvious than in Geneva’s weekly chapel service.

Chapel at Geneva is a microcosm of the college’s ailments and opportunities. Geneva serves a raw-nerved generation of students in an age of rising pathological biblical illiteracy. Some students are skeptical seekers, desiring deep biblical truth but wary of institutions that claim to have it (and which force them to attend school-run praise services). Others are militantly apathetic regarding spiritual matters. And given the long reach of relativism into the popular Christianity of our day, the atmosphere of chapel is in some ways more Mars Hill than synagogue. Geneva is a mission field.

Thankfully, speakers in chapel are not as alone as Paul was in Athens (Acts 17). As they preach, they lock eyes with many sincere, Christ-loving students from across the denominational spectrum. Chapel messages currently enjoy great student and staff support. What polarizes the crowd is chapel music—not so much the Psalms themselves, but the way psalms are musically arranged and sung. The vast majority of students are utterly unfamiliar with the tough tunes and inverted language of some selections.⁸

In a conversation just after my start as chaplain, one highly respected member of Synod told me, “If the college wants the church to really get behind it, you need to sing the Psalms a cappella in chapel!” Done! This had already been the predominant practice in chapel prior to my arrival, and, in keeping with the wishes of Geneva’s boards, it is now the exclusive practice. Though it was unpopular among students, this step was what many RPs wanted and what some demanded. The results are not as bad as some predicted, nor as good as others hoped. The denomination must take a few steps back to survey an ironic and instructive truth upon which the survival of our educational institutions depends: We RPs would not have public platforms of higher education from which to promote our distinctive principles were it not for the financial and fraternal support of Christians (and others) who disagree with those distinctives. This truth does not instruct us to compromise core principles, but to present them in a winsome way, warmly compelling in on-campus application if not (initially) in propositional content. To muster a credible effort in this direction, we need help!

It is incredibly disheartening to campus visitors to see the number of people who do not sing in chapel, and it is incredibly disheartening to non-RP students when we expect them to adapt quickly and happily to denominational practices. We need more voices already accustomed to RP singing to help fill Metheny Fieldhouse with sincere, vibrant praise. Such sound will cut through the awkward pockets of silence and encourage the timid to sing out. What an additional blessing if music-minded RPs would band together with other believers to explore more broadly engaging ways of arranging the Psalms. Such efforts could have staggering spiritual benefits, especially in a historical moment seemingly handcrafted for us by the Holy Spirit.

Among Christians worldwide there has been a stunning surge of interest in the Psalms. Because the Psalms express Jesus’ heart and the experiential nature of union to Him, this trend teems with potential to unite the good Shepherd’s often-fragmented flock. What a perfect time to be Reformed Presbyterian, and to own a college—a college!—a place vibrantly alive with the scholarly and practical skills to promote the songs of our Savior.⁹

This call for greater RP investment in Geneva in no way assumes that the college exists to promote Reformed Presbyterianism. Reformed Presbyterianism is a means to the end of glorifying the living Christ. We must never confuse this means for that end. At the same time, Reformed Presbyterianism is a means of ministry whose distinctive message can profoundly benefit Christ’s body in “such a time as this.”

Are there problems with the college, wads of gum in its walls, which prevent your deeper interest and investment? If so, let’s talk.¹⁰ I’m hoping for good discussions along these lines at Synod and am eager to engage in other venues of conversation as well. Above all, please pray.

I’ll be so bold as to ask each person reading this article to commit to weekly if not daily prayer for Geneva. Let’s not neglect this gift of staggering proportions and stunning kingdom potential.

Rev. Rut Etheridge is chaplain at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pa., and is a minister in the RPCNA.

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