To Think Christianly: A History of L’Abri, Regent College, and the Christian Study Center Movement
By Charles Cotherman
IVP Academic, 2020
320 pages (hardcover), $35.00
Evangelicals are familiar with well-branded campus ministries such as Cru (Campus Crusade for Christ), InterVarsity, Navigators, and Veritas Forum that have played significant roles in shaping evangelical youth during their college years. Evangelicals are also familiar with names such as Francis Schaeffer, Os Guinness, R. C. Sproul, or David Gill.
I suspect that fewer are aware of the Christian study center movement, what is now a network of over thirty-plus campus ministries scattered throughout North America at such notable universities as Yale, MIT, Cornell, Duke, University of Virginia, and more. However, the publicity is changing. Charles Cotherman’s book To Think Christianly helps put the movement on the map as he tells this story of this network—the figures, connections, visions, and happenings that gave rise to it. As he does, he provides another angle from which to examine evangelicalism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Cotherman unfolds the history in three parts: innovation, replication, and multiplication. During the 1960s as American evangelicals were heading off to college in droves (with other baby boomers), two innovative and foundational ministries for the movement emerged—L’Abri and Regent College—and the wider society shifted culturally. It was their innovations that contributed to the foundation of the later twentieth-century study center movement.
In Huemoz, Switzerland, Francis and Edith Schaeffer developed a ministry that uniquely met the counterculture of the 1960s with “a robust and holistic appreciation for the intellect, culture, and Christian spirituality not within the context of” a revival or seminary but “in a community built around home-based hospitality and rhythms of everyday life” (17). It was radical hospitality and community with an expansive, culturally engaged Christian thinking about all of life from a Reformed, Kuyperian stance.
In Vancouver, BC, as a group of Brethren businessmen watched their children head off to university, they began considering Christian ventures in higher education (49). They, with Oxford academic Jim Houston, established Regent College (50). Unlike L’Abri, however, Regent aimed to form a Christian educational institute that provided formal theological education for laypersons. Rather than the more isolated and monastic L’Abri model, Regent aimed to establish a reputable theological school attached to a university.
The innovations of Regent were theological education for laity (62–63), something of a Kuyperian theology (59) though less Reformed and more ecumenical (71, 81), more of a “mere Christianity” (87) following C. S. Lewis (60) that “avoided polemics” (82). Houston, like the Schaeffers, emphasized relationality and identity in Christ (61) contrary to the professionalism (as expression of secularization) of the university (62).
Both institutions formed significant networks (57–59); in fact, “L’Abri functioned as the unofficial hub of American evangelical influence throughout much of the 1970s” (45). And both inspired their guests and students to replicate their efforts. Houston saw Regent’s vision as a small, relational institution as one to be replicated and multiplied, not numerically expanded (93).
Throughout this second section of the book, Cotherman takes careful note of the roles played by Schaeffer and Houston in these replication efforts. He follows only four different efforts and their visionaries: The C. S. Lewis Institute (John Hiskey) near Washington, DC (chapter 3); the Ligonier Valley Study Center (R. C. Sproul) from Stahlstown, Pennsylvania, to Orlando, Florida (chapter 4); New College Berkeley (David Gill, chapter 5); and the Center for Christian Study (Drew Trotter) at University of Virginia (chapter 6). Both Houston and Schaeffer helped those interested in replication, though Houston was especially active in helping to build other likeminded institutions, such as the C. S. Lewis Institute or New College, often providing vision or organizational help.
Cotherman tracks these institutions with the various ups and downs of opportunity, funding, experiments, failures, vision, and connections. None had an easy route forward as they all attempted with varying degrees to implement or imitate components of L’Abri or Regent (sometimes both) amid a shifting American and evangelical cultural landscape. One important shift was the conservative swing of the late 1970s and ʼ80s, which unexpectedly and negatively impacted these fledgling centers that had emerged from the counterculture (182, 198). Each of the centers would in various ways draw on the vision, organization, and networks of L’Abri and Regent to launch.
Of the four, Ligonier began like L’Abri with a rural location, communal living, lay theological education, and Reformed theological vision (128–29, 135), but in the end pursued spreading the teaching through mass media, not place (142). In some ways, not unlike the fame and mass media into which Schaeffer himself tapped, Sproul and his team experienced the frustration of locale and technological reach, the tension between fame and relationality, between depth and consumer demand.
Of the four, it was the Christian study center at UVA under Drew Trotter in tandem with Trinity Presbyterian Church (PCA) that became the flagship model institution for the wider study center movement. Drawing on both L’Abri and Regent, it maintained cultural engagement, theological education for laity, and hospitality committed to a university and its community (224).
Throughout these chapters, Cotherman also gives attention to the role of gender. He notes that access to formal theological education via seminary was not easy for women in mid-twentieth-century evangelicalism (77–81). However, the study center movement not only provided access and training but also teaching opportunities not found in many evangelical institutions (132–35).
In the final section on multiplication, Cotherman pulls the whole narrative together. Here, he remains focused on UVA and Trotter, though as already noted, by that time there were many other centers. Yet, he is true to the subtitle and shows how the movement came together both in its ethos and in institutional form, the Consortium. Like L’Abri and Regent, they emphasized relationality and hospitality, as well as engagement with the goal of “thinking Christianly” in a way not disconnected from life. Study centers and their Consortium approached campus ministry “with an emphasis on constructive engagement with the community” that was marked more by “the theological concept of common grace” rather than “culture wars,” as they were “convinced that the path forward was more a matter of faithful presence through deeply rooted, engaged, and hospitable relationships and institutions than it was about the apologetics or cultural bluster” (252). This institutional connection to the university and avoidance of polemics especially reflects Houston and Regent, and the wide engagement with hospitality reflects Schaeffer and L’Abri. In the end, Cotherman sees the study center movement as a model of James Davison Hunter’s “faithful presence”: an approach that the study center movement explicitly embraces as it aims to walk the line between “syncretism and isolationism” (251), even while universities are not always ready to befriend historic Christianity (256–57).
Cotherman’s narrative is masterfully written by continually showing the thematic and institutional development and connections of a little-known slice of evangelicalism. While reading the book, those familiar with James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World and his idea of “faithful presence” may wonder how much this shaped Cotherman’s story and whether it might skew it a bit. In the conclusion, Cotherman speculates about the future of the study center movement, with high regard for its faithful presence strategy, and that it might be the wave of the future for evangelical campus ministry, for its positive engagement with higher education and especially in light of religious liberty controversies and “antibias regulations” coming from the university.
Overall, the portrait is well balanced, capturing both the forest and the trees. In many ways it’s groundbreaking, opening up a number of avenues for further exploration and raising a number of questions. The narrative is largely not one of ideas (or theology specifically), but more about visionary leaders, networks, and institution building. However, this book certainly calls forth an exploration of the relationship and tension in the study center movement, and in American evangelicalism more broadly, between Reformed theology and “mere Christianity.” The perennial questions “What is evangelicalism?” or “What unifies evangelicalism?” rises once again as Cotherman paints a picture with lots of texture, though he does not himself answer these questions. His book certainly fills a gap and opens up old questions with some new vistas.
Justin McGeary is assistant professor of Christian studies at John Witherspoon College in Rapid City, South Dakota.
