Many students are in shock, while alumni and donors are expressing both sadness and hope, after Lincoln Christian University’s Feb. 22 announcement that it will eliminate most bachelor’s degree programs and focus on graduate-level and undergraduate ministry degrees.
The decision of the board of trustees for the 78-year-old college in Lincoln will mean the elimination of all competitive sports after this academic year, the closing of residence halls and the layoff of more than one-third of the staff. Lincoln Christian students take part in both in-person and online courses based at the university, founded by Earl Hargrove in 1944.
Lincoln Christian’s attempt to ensure its long-term survival is rooted in financial struggles tied to declining enrollment over the past decade that worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, university President Silas McCormick told Illinois Times.
“It’s going to be an experiment,” he said, adding that university officials should know sometime in 2023 whether partnering independent Christian churches, students, faculty, staff and donors will support the new concept.
“We have to do it now,” McCormick said. “This is our last chance to do something. … If our employees and donors stick with us for a year, it can be sustainable.”
To avoid the financial pressures that closed MacMurray College in Jacksonville and contributed to the demise of several other small Bible colleges across the country, LCU officials outlined what they described in online documents as a “bold initiative to create a new model for Christian higher education that is responsive to a new era of Kingdom work.”
A few years ago, the university’s annual budget was about $9 million, with two-thirds coming from tuition, room and board that totals around $20,000 per student per year, and one-third from donations from churches and individuals.
The current academic year’s budget is about $8 million, with half from donations. The operating deficit is $1.4 million. Faculty and staff members haven’t had across-the-board raises in 10 years.
The downsizing and new model is expected to reduce the budget to about $4 million, with the majority of revenue coming from donations and other non-tuition sources, McCormick said. The faculty and staff of 80 would drop to about 30 after retirements and about 30 layoffs in late May, he said.
Graduates of LCU often go on to work as pastors or hold other ministry positions in independent Christian churches in Illinois and other Midwestern states. Many work for churches in Springfield, including at West Side Christian Church and South Side Christian Church.
Beginning with the fall 2022 semester, the university will narrow its educational programs to those directly tied to “vocational ministry,” including two undergraduate programs in “Bible and theology” and “Christian ministry, and seminary programs that award master’s degrees in Biblical studies, theology, Christian thought, counseling, ministry, leadership and divinity.
The new model includes an expansion of non-credit workshops, retreats, conferences and other educational opportunities led by faculty of the university.
Finally, the university plans to expand its work with churches to offer in-the-field training – with academic credit – to students who are on a path to become full-time ministers and counselors.
The university’s doctorate in ministry program, which doesn’t attract many students, will be eliminated.
Seminary students and undergrads will receive instruction from LCU instructors at their workplaces and have the chance to immediately put what they are learning into practice, McCormick said. Some learning will continue to take place in classes at the Lincoln campus or on virtual platforms.
The on-site training “adapts to the fact that more and more churches are developing their own leaders in their existing contexts,” Lincoln Christian officials told alumni in a document posted on its Facebook page.
It’s unclear whether the 130-acre campus, which will continue to operate on-campus apartments for undergrad and graduate students next year, will be sold in the long term.
Partner churches for training will include West Side Christian, Eastview Christian Church in Normal and Harvester Christian Church in St. Charles, Missouri.
Enrollment at the university has dropped more than 50% in 10 years, from 1,066 in 2012 – with undergraduates making up 678 students, or more than two-thirds of the total – to slightly more than 500 in fall 2021. Seminary students and undergrads as a group each make up about half of the current student body.
Enrollment doesn’t seem to have dropped in response to the university’s conservative theology and student conduct rules prohibiting alcohol use among undergrads, separate residence halls for men and women and prohibition of sex outside heterosexual marriage for students, faculty and staff, McCormick said.
Instead, the declines reflect the increasing challenges Bible colleges face in attracting students to education for ministry-related jobs, most of which don’t come with high salaries, he said.
In addition, LCU’s lack of funding for renovations over the past decade or more has made the campus less attractive for young students and their parents. As enrollment dwindled, LCU’s on-campus enrollment made the school smaller than many rural downstate high schools – another negative factor in recruiting students, McCormick said.
He also pointed to economic declines in Lincoln and Logan County as a whole, which he said have made it harder to attract faculty with spouses who would like to work close by.
Online comments from people connected with LCU have mostly reflected sadness but support for the trustees’ decision, though some Twitter comments criticized a section of the administration’s online memo about how changes in undergraduates threaten the sustainability of the status quo.
The memo said many current undergrad students seem “less committed to their faith,” “listless,” and lack emotional maturity during their “extended adolescence” and “emerging adulthood.”
Residential undergraduate students “often deal superficially with each other and their faculty, choosing to leave rather than deal with conflict constructively,” the memo said.
These students “often have an open distrust or even hostility to any perspective that pushes back against their own – even with members of our faculty, whose frustration with a lack of respect for their expertise has grown,” the memo said.
McCormick said today’s LCU undergrads often hold different political views than their instructors and are less willing than in the past to discuss those views.
Even though the school year began in September with a record start to its fundraising campaign and a freshman class of more than 100 – the largest in years – McCormick said there was a 60-student drop in undergrads between the fall and spring semesters.
He believes at least part of the drop was associated with the state of Illinois’ imposition of the statewide mask mandate and a requirement that students either be vaccinated against COVID-19 or undergo weekly COVID testing.
“A lot of students were not OK with that,” McCormick said. “There’s a sizable overlap between theologically conservative and politically conservative. A lot of our students are from central and southern Illinois, and the mask mandate was not popular with them, and it was not popular with their parents.”
Students are mourning the impending changes, student body president Olivia Foster said. The 20-year-old psychology major from Louisville, Kentucky, said she will be allowed, as a current student in her junior year, to complete her bachelor’s degree in psychology at LCU in May 2023.
Students have “mixed emotions” about the way administrators handled the announcement, she said, adding that some students wished they had been informed of the school’s financial problems earlier.
Some students disagreed with the memo’s statements about their maturity and faith, she said.
But when it comes to the overall change in direction, Foster said LCU officials are “handling it to the best of their ability.”
Second-year seminary student Jonah Steele, 24, received his bachelor’s in biblical studies from LCU and is pursuing a master’s while he preaches part-time at a small church in Marshall County.
Steele said he was surprised by LCU’s announcement.
“There’s a big part of me that’s very sad that other undergraduate students won’t have the same experience I had,” he said.
But based on the information the university has put out, he said the new model “seems like a really solid plan for moving forward. … I don’t know if it will work. It seems like it’s really dependent on how larger churches are going to respond.”
McCormick said he has been “inundated” by requests from churches that want to participate and support the new model.
LCU officials said the additional support from churches and other donors could allow the university to eventually not depend on government financial aid for its students. That change, McCormick said, would allow LCU to avoid future complaints such as a Title IX complaint pending against the university by a transgender student.
The student, Kalie Hargrove, an Air Force veteran attending LCU on the GI Bill, was assigned male at birth but withdrew from the seminary in 2021 when she was threatened with student discipline after she came out as transgender and began transitioning to female.
Board of Trustees Chairwoman Tamsen Murray, an LCU alum who lives in Oklahoma, was matter-of-fact when explaining how trustees considered the uncertainty of setting the programmatic changes in motion.
“It’s just the same mission, with a new model,” she said. “For us, we felt like the risk of doing this was more manageable than the risk of doing nothing. Sometimes when you’re at the bottom of a hole, you need to quit digging.”
Dean Olsen is a senior staff writer for Illinois Times. He can be reached at dolsen@illinoistimes.com or 217-679-7810.
This article appears in Overcoming the odds.
