The Denominational Ring

With several stacks of papers now behind me (Nate Hendershot if you're out there, it has comments on it and is waiting for you :-), let me finish the outermost ring of my Wesleyan integration circle: the denominational ring.

4. Denominational Integration
The final element to integrate--which frankly is more than a cognitive element given that it has various missional and personal elements as well (these are the terms I will use for heart and ethical integration in the final draft). In this case we speak of course of The Wesleyan Church, the owner of IWU and its sister institutions.

I've already mentioned that our boss, the denomination, has rules. These include that 50% of our overall faculty be Wesleyan in membership and that 66% of the religion division must be denominationally Wesleyan. Further, the chairs of religion divisions and upper level administration must be Wesleyan as well.

This requirement has caused us some effort at IWU, where we now have 12,000 students (when you include online and satellite campus) and we have passed Notre Dame as the largest private university in the State of Indiana. In short, it is just difficult to find doctorally trained Wesleyans in any number of areas and, even if we can find them, they are not always the most excellent candidate. Must we hire less competent professors simply to maintain certain quotas? One of the objections to a Wesleyan seminary sometimes raised by the experienced is, "Where will we find the required Wesleyan faculty to staff the thing?"

These are birth pains, of course. There is nothing to stop someone from becoming a member of the Wesleyan Church when they come of course, although at times this can be a large sacrifice for someone who has spent their whole life in a certain denomination. Some of us wonder whether attending a Wesleyan church might count in some cases (many of our religion department attend Wesleyan Churches even though they are Free Methodist, Nazarene, or United Methodist). And ultimately it seems far more important that a person be Wesleyan in theology than a member per se. I mention these things to open dialog for suggestions. These are denominational matters that our boss will need to figure out as growth continues.

At present, the "on the street" functioning of denominational integration is that a professor at IWU must agree to respect the beliefs and practices of The Wesleyan Church, not necessarily commit to it. I am not certain that this is the official requirement--perhaps they officially are actually supposed to assent to it. But that train seems so far out of the station that I shudder to think of the effort of pulling it back in--it may not even be possible to run a quality university this size and find such folk. I raise an issue for which I do not have perfect answers.

Certainly faculty here are expected to follow an ethical code that is related to that of the Wesleyan Church. You may find it ironic that IWU's behavioral code is actually stricter than that of the denomination. For example, there are more restrictions on dancing at IWU than there are in the Wesleyan Church at large.

The statement of beliefs at the university is of course the same of the denomination. I would say that the broader university must respect these beliefs, although it does not seem necessary to me that all commit to the denominational particulars. For example, I believe we have faculty who believe that all Christians could speak in tongues and ideally would (not in the religion division). But they do not push their beliefs--I only know their beliefs because of where I know they attend church. I have never heard them express such beliefs on campus.

Similarly, we have faculty who do not believe that women should be senior pastors (again, not in the religion division). But they do not express these beliefs on campus and would be rebuked if they did.

My parenthetical comments above push us toward the real nexus of denominational integration--the religion division. Must everyone in the religion division assent to the beliefs of the Wesleyan Church? This question is compounded by the fact that Wesleyan faculty themselves may have "lover's quarrels" with their own church (as Bud Bence often quotes Robert Frost). Further, the Wesleyan Church itself is not a completely static target. For example, if I have understood correctly, the Australian Wesleyan Church has recently been allowed prayerfully to draw its own conclusions about whether or not it is possible to drink moderately and glorify God in its cultural context.

And is there a difference between a non-ordained member of the religion division who, say, teaches a course in philosophy or religions of the world and someone who is directly involved in the teaching of Christian ministries courses? It seems to me there is. I should mention that all the faculty in the IWU religion division ascribe to Wesleyan theology, so please don't think I am referring to specific individuals here at IWU.

But in theory, it seems to me that the degree of concordance of any professor at a Wesleyan university with the teaching of the Wesleyan Church is related to the subject they teach. All faculty must respect and agree not to work against the teaching of the church. But it seems to me that actual embrace of Wesleyan belief is primarily a matter of how "integral" and pertinent those beliefs are to the subjects they teach.

I am working out these thoughts as I type, and there is much food for discussion here. I welcome any thoughts, insights, critique, or correction you might have...