The essay below is a lightly revised version of an address Dr. Bademan delivered at a gathering of friends of Anselm House on November 9, 2023, at the Graduate Hotel, Minneapolis, called “An Evening of Amazing Grace.”

For this issue, I’d like to talk about grace and the modern university, the University of Minnesota in particular, and pose the question: “How might God’s grace, through his people, be present to the modern university?” I will make the case for a community like Anselm House being a special kind of grace for a university like ours.

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Of course, the first thing to say is that universities are a product of grace. The university is one of the great achievements of God working in and through human life over the last millennium. It is a surprisingly durable institution—even our humble U of M is approaching its 175^th anniversary.

Universities are places where thousands of people come together, forming a community committed to the study of the world and the human place in it. It’s simply amazing that when we as human beings—Christians or not—apply our minds to the world around us, it yields fruitful knowledge. Together, we can learn good and useful things about growing resilient crops, or the English Civil War, or about how to lead a company that truly serves the common good. Here in Minnesota, we think of Earl Bakken’s invention of the portable pacemaker or Norman Bourlag’s life-saving wheat varieties, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize. The list could go on and on.

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Universities at their best contribute in countless ways to human flourishing. Their accomplishments are astounding, even as their missions are noble. Listen to the echoes of grace in our university’s mission statement: “The University of Minnesota, founded in the belief that all people are enriched by understanding, is dedicated to the advancement of learning and the search for truth; to the sharing of this knowledge through education for a diverse community; and to the application of this knowledge to benefit the people of the state, the nation, and the world.” This is a mission that Minnesotans who are followers of Jesus Christ can get behind and support!
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But I won’t be the first to tell you that all is not well with the modern university, and not just from a Christian perspective.

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The loss of committed religious knowing within academia has coincided and perhaps even contributed to a larger loss of meaning and purpose in the university as a whole.
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In the words of some prominent academic insiders, the university has “given up on the meaning of life,” gone “academically adrift,” and even “lost its soul.” However useful the university’s knowledge might be for penultimate ends, without an appreciation for how all things hold together in Jesus Christ, the pursuit of truth is at best an exercise in missing the main point.
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So what does the university need in these times? And how might Christians, who confess Christ as Lord as well as the divine Logos (or reason), engage and support the good work of universities? At Anselm House, we believe these questions are at least partly related. The university needs grace in the form of a Christian community deeply engaged in its work, exploring how Christ is the key the university relies on for its coherence, whether it recognizes it or not. As the apostle put it, he is the one “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” More than this, the university needs the Christian community to faithfully engage its work as a domain of discipleship, rightly comprehending and ordering the knowledge of the university toward the love of God and neighbor.
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But can this happen here? Is it possible? Is it even thinkable?
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Since the mid-twentieth century, there have been just two basic models for how Christians have brought their faith into contact with institutions of higher education. (Christian parents of college-bound students will know these alternatives well!)
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The first is the campus ministry, led by the campus minister. Campus ministries are a wonderful grace. They are highly decentralized institutionally, rarely requiring credentialing for their staff. They can emerge overnight with a willing soul and so in this way they are remarkably agile, but they also ebb and flow with frequent leadership transitions. They equip students for a fairly narrow purpose, and certainly an important one: campus evangelism and discipleship. In this way, they have the feel of a church community for college students (often with weekly worship meetings). Campus ministries mostly serve undergraduates, and they exist across the country almost everywhere there are college students.
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The one place in higher education where campus ministries seldom exist, for obvious reasons, is at our Christian colleges (which is our second model). Christian colleges are also an amazing grace. In some ways, they’re institutionally the opposite of campus ministries. They are resource-intensive, all-service institutions, requiring lots of credentialing and delivering a lot of robust Christian formation, including the formation of the mind. And of course, they need to charge lots of money for these services. They are institutionally durable, but also relatively inflexible. Perhaps their biggest difference with campus ministries is that Christian colleges educate broadly, not narrowly, and (importantly) they do bring faith into the work of this more comprehensive education.
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For all their differences, these two dominant models—campus ministries and Christian colleges—share one striking thing in common: they are both largely peripheral, if not irrelevant, to the life and work of the modern research university; you might say they leave the mainstream university alone. Christian colleges are often worlds away from major universities, both figuratively and literally, while campus ministries serve the personal faith lives of undergraduate students but rarely engage with graduate students, faculty, or the teaching and research of universities themselves.
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This situation has had tragic consequences for our society, as it has contributed to an ever widening divide between faith and knowledge in our universities, churches, culture, and lives.
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But what if there was another model of Christian engagement with mainstream university life—a third way? An institution established and resourced like a college, but working within modern research universities like a campus ministry? What if unlike either of these existing models, this new institution brought the light of the gospel to the work of the university itself? By God’s grace here at Anselm House, this third way has already begun.
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God’s grace always goes before us. This is no less true at the University of Minnesota. Through his providence and provision, there are hundreds of Christian faculty members currently serving the educational mission of the University of Minnesota, and there are thousands of Christian students (undergrad and grad) who have decided to come to the U or have become Christians while at the U. We don’t typically think this way, but the University of Minnesota has more Christian faculty and students than a typical Christian liberal arts college.
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One of the obvious differences is that most of these Christians at the U only know a handful of other Christians. I’ve had the privilege several times in my role at Anselm House of introducing Christians to each other who have taught in the same department for years!
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We at Anselm House have begun to think of our work as that of activating or catalyzing the “Christian college” that is already present within the university. So how might we accomplish this? Let me just mention four steps, briefly. We will first need to identify the Christians. We certainly could use your help in this. If you know Christians at the U, please encourage them to reach out to us, whether students, faculty, or staff. Second, we will need to support the growth of a Christian network, comprised of campus ministries, Christian student groups, campus churches, and more. We believe it’s critically important that the body of Christ can recognize itself on campus. Third, we are working to resource this Christian collegiate community—not just for evangelism and discipleship, as campus ministries have long done, but for faithful service in academic and public life. We will need to provide theologically robust Christian education and resources to help the students and faculty of the university order knowledge to the love of God and neighbor. Finally, having been resourced, we will commission students and faculty to teach, learn, research, study, grow, and lead in Christ.
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The University of Minnesota is already famous for its societal and economic impact on the state and the world. What if the U also became famous for advancing the Kingdom of God?

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