I am a proud Liberty University Alumni.
I loved my school in her success and I love her more now
when she has suffered a wound. This is my school. That’s my
mountain.
I know its God’s school. I know its Dr. Falwell’s school.
But a little piece of it is mine as well.
I’m from the generation who came to this mountain before
she had world class dorms, and world class food services, and world class
educational facilities. She had a football team that practiced out at Treasure
Island and played in Municipal Stadium. Williams Stadium was land we didn’t
even own yet when I arrived on campus.
My freshman English classes were held in a single wide
mobile office trailer out where the old guard shack used to be…roughly where
the bookstore is now.
We didn’t get financial aid back then, so I worked
thirty-five hours a week at Advance Auto Parts in Hills Plaza and repaired cars
in my spare time. We lived four to a room in rooms built for two. We rode buses
to Thomas Road Baptist Church on Sunday morning and Wednesday evening because
we weren’t allowed to go to any other church.
I played on the very first hockey team we ever had. We
skated on a frozen retention pond in the ravine, where the Vine Center would
one day stand. We played games in Roanoke.
Liberty was just a vision back then. Financially so shaky
that we’d go home at Christmas wondering if there’d be a school to come back to
in January. We did prayer walks. We wept with Doc. We believed that this place
would one day be all that he promised us it would. It would happen long after
we had left this sacred soil, but our kids, or our grandchildren, would attend
college here where we once did, only in the buildings he saw in his soul.
My grandmother lived on a fixed income of $6600 per year
for the last ten years of her life. But she was so proud of me for going to
Liberty and studying to be a pastor, that she sent $20 per month before I was
even out of high school to support this place. She thought that somehow it would
be credited to me one day and I had to explain to her “Mom-mom…that money goes
to the college. If you want to help me, send it directly to me.” And she did. A
card showed up every month or so…maybe six weeks, in my campus mailbox. Always
at exactly the right time. Her beautiful cursive handwriting adorning the
envelope…only a little less beautiful and worn by arthritis which made it
harder to hold the pen. There would be a note and a crisp Twenty-dollar bill.
The note full of scripture and assurances that she loved me, she was proud of
me, and she was praying for me.
My grandmother once scraped together enough money to buy
a memorial brick in the old religion hall. A couple of years ago, I was working for the university
when they tore the building down and I walked through there a few times trying
to find that brick. My grandmother’s “widow’s mites” were poured into this
school. My hopes and dreams were birthed here.
When I was in high school, the only college I wanted to
attend was Liberty. Dr. Falwell was my hero. He was a visionary. He was
exciting. He was a patriot. He preached an unswerving message of the cross and
didn’t pull punches or mince words. I loved him. We all did. All of us “Jerry’s
Kids.”
I learned life altering lessons here. I sat under solid,
old school preaching, and learned actual, tested and tried theology. I learned
to pray into the wee hours in the lobby of dorm five with my best friend Greg
St. Clair.
I preached sermons to empty chairs in the education hall
after classes were over. I dreamed of the same big God Dr. Falwell served and
got his vision from. I was changed here. I became a man here.
Emotionally and, especially…spiritually.
I was educated in theology and doctrine. I was taught to
test the spirits. To compare scripture with scripture. To not accept any old
teaching that came down the pike, simply because it sounded nice. I was taught
to rightly divide the word of truth. That God can use anybody, but especially
somebody who is prepared. Deeply, thoroughly, prepared.
And Liberty prepared me. We had a dress code I bristled against,
but it taught me to submit to authority and look sharp. We had early classes
with unforgiving professors who didn’t abide excuses. But they made me
appreciate the early morning and manage my time better. We lived in tight quarters,
but they made it impossible to be a loner and I met the best friends of my life
in those years.
It took me a long time to graduate. Life threw me some
curves and it took a while to reach home. But I did. And as I did, I was
solidified as a Christian. I knew the how and why of my Faith. I knew what it meant…
not just what it felt like.
My classmates went on to start churches and Christian
schools and be strong, stalwart, Champions for Christ. We didn’t bend to the
culture…we stood against its push.
Now?
My beloved Liberty has wandered so far from Dr. Falwell’s
original vision. Sure maybe we have the buildings and the facilities and the
sports teams and we’re flush with cash. But spiritually…we are not even close
anymore, to what he wanted for us on this mountain. We are no longer pushing
back against the culture. We are shaping the gospel to fit the culture. The
neo-evangelicalism that is pervasive at the Baylors of the world has it’s foot
in the door at LU and unless we act right now…we are heading for the same fate.
Christian on the sign on the highway, but pagan in our soul.
Not everything wrong with the spiritual atmosphere at LU
can be blamed directly on LU. The students coming to Liberty now aren’t the
same kids we were 40 years ago. They don’t come here to be pastors or Christian
schoolteachers. They come for a liberal arts education with some Jesus
sprinkled on top. They come here from far more theologically liberal homes
where emotion is doctrine and the difference between solid theology and heresy
is a blurred line. Liberty can only work with the raw materials sent to us.
But where Dr. Falwell would have said “You’re here and
we’re going to indoctrinate you against the culture of the day"…the current
iteration of Liberty says “You’re here and we’re going to shape our spiritual
life here on campus to the culture out there.” “We’re going to tickle your ears
and feed your emotions and we’re going to imply that actual doctrinal education
and theological discourse is somehow stuffy and old, and the only thing that
matters is the emotionalism that we see on the You Tube channel of the latest
flock star." The uber pastors with entourages who come here as forty somethings
dressed as twenty somethings trying to pull a fast one on the kids…because they
see them as kids. Easy marks. They preach platitudes not sermons. They couldn’t
do an actual exegete if their lives literally depended on it. The names read
like a most-wanted list for biblical heresy: Lentz, Stanley, Wilkerson,
McManus… Posers and preeners, who crack jokes, emote, tell warm stories, and
couldn’t find their way through an actual theological discussion without a
roadmap and a flashlight. Narcissistic showmen who spew out-of-context
scripture references like a Pez dispenser. And anyone with even a basic grasp
of systematic theology can blow holes in their teaching like tearing a tissue.
On top of these questionable (I’m being kind) teachers,
we’ve now been invaded by the Critical Race Theory, woke culture. A godless lie
that heaps burdens on innocent backs and itself breeds a more subtle racism in
the name of abolishing racism.
Two weeks ago, there was a “BLM-lite” march on campus.
They claimed not to be associated with the Marxist radical group BLM, but they
held up their signs and chanted the names of their heroes…including a sexual
predator named Jacob Blake.
And some of them knelt.
I assure you, if you knelt on this campus while Dr.
Falwell was alive, your bus ticket home would have been on your bed in your dorm
room before you got back there. And some
of our leadership stood with them.
The problem is large on Liberty Mountain. It’s a lack of
theological grounding. A lack of deep education and the absences of
peer-reviewed presentations. Somehow, someone made their own tape measure and
declared themselves ten feet tall. Bad teaching after bad teaching had
slithered its way into convo and the only thing worse than the fact that it
wasn’t recognized as bad teaching, is that it was invited to come here.
We are not training young champions for Christ anymore.
Not by the real meaning of that term. A champion was a knight who entered
battle to defend the honor of his King. He was sharp. He was ready. He was
fierce. We are not training warriors who defend their King. They no longer no
how to wield the sword, how to use the shield. And they don’t even know when
their King has been offended.
The world has come in and dictated Liberty’s spiritual
life and atmosphere. It sounds nice. It’s a nice optic to have bus loads of
students picking up trash in Miller Park with LU T-shirts on. But as one
anonymous staffer told me, those same kids couldn’t explain salvation to a
child. The know platitudes but they could not defend the faith. The believe in
hell as a concept but not as a reality. Evangelicalism they
know…evangelism…they’ve never heard of it or practiced it. Doing alms and
service days in the community are fine. But that’s not what Jesus meant when He
said “The harvest is plenty, but the workers are few. Pray that God sends
harvesters into the fields.” Not trash pickers. Not bottled water deliverers. Harvesters.
The alumni who have responded to my writing and my
program this week and last are upset. Our hearts are broken. We want change.
It’s not a person we want changed…it’s a process. We want the school Dr.
Falwell built. We want people making spiritual decisions who understand the
roots that alumni have here. The blood sweat and tears that we literally shed
on this mountain. We want solid theology, not the midway at the county fair.
I have literally recruited dozens of people to Liberty.
Adults who wanted to complete their degree online, and young adults going off
to college for the first time. Whenever a friend asked me about Liberty, and
should they send their kids there I always answered with a resounding “yes.”
Now, for the first time, I cannot endorse my school. My
daughter will finish here because we live here but she grew frustrated with the
spiritual atmosphere and accepts that LU will never be what I told her it was
for me. She seeks God but can’t hear Him over the circus clowns and
self-absorbed “flavor of the month” guest speaker at Convo.
Liberty doesn’t need our money. They are swimming in
cash. But they need our references. They need perpetual families coming here
generation after generation. Nothing is worse for a college, especially a
Christian college, than an alumni base that has lost faith in their alma mater
and can no longer recruit for her.
Liberty has come to that crossroads.
I have spoken to pastors who no longer recommend their
young people come here. And one alumnus who pastors a church and wants to get
his PhD. But as he told me, “I won’t give them any more of my money until they
fix the problems and get us back to Dr. Falwell’s Liberty.
Whoever has made the decisions about convo, and about the
Christian atmosphere at Liberty must take a good long look at the history of
this college. They must value that heritage instead of trying to rewrite it.
Take the woke liberalism and paper thin, shallow theology and toss it in the
trash. Get us back to what Liberty was. Otherwise, as Doctor Falwell said
himself on many occasions… “If we ever get away from who we were when we
started, I’d rather they burn it to the ground then let it live as something it
wasn’t supposed to be. Better a smoldering rubble than a campus that has lost its
way.”
We have lost our way.
Instead of resisting the culture like a seawall, and
growing mature, doctrinally well educated, theologically sounds adults, we have
shaped our spiritual programs (including the mandatory religious academic
training) to go with the cultural flow. Our campus spiritual life has become a
glorified campus outreach at a nearly secular college.
The alumni have spoken. They deserve to be heard. Because
this is our mountain too.
