When I was a freshman in college who had only just begun attending events with the University of Nebraska chapter of Reformed University Fellowship I asked our campus pastor if I should be getting involved in some more formal way, such as being on the ministry team or volunteering in some other capacity. The answer he gave has lingered with me for nearly 20 years:
"No, I don't think so. Your job right now is to be a student. That's the calling God has given you. RUF is here to support you as you follow Jesus in that calling by connecting you to the church and discipling you during these years. But your calling right now is to be a student. So be an excellent student. Be committed to your studies. Go to class. If you're doing that faithfully and in a year or two you want to do ministry team, we'd love to have you. But you're a freshman. So just figure out how to be a good student first."
I'd never heard a Christian talk that way before. The posture of most campus ministries at the time, at least, was something like "wow, isn't it convenient that this thing called a university exists which rounds up all the young people that we want to proselytize to?" They were marked by the same spirit and sensibility so accurately described by Michael Spencer so many years ago. There was virtually no engagement with the university as such and, indeed, very little engagement with the church. There were simply standalone vaguely Christian campus ministries doing Bible studies for individuals while also trying to maximize the amount of time those students spent doing "ministry" things with that organization.
The divide that emerged, then, looked something like this: RUF stood for a faithful presence approach to the campus while the campus ministries tended to focus on being pure from the campus while recognizing that one's degree was something of a necessary evil if one was to make a living after graduating. The latter tended toward Dispensationalism and very soft forms of fundamentalist separatism, though often without any real ecclesial presence backstopping it, while the former was inherently Reformed, had a quite robust ecclesiology, but also a contextualized understanding of the church as existing amongst many other institutions and callings. The church equipped Christians, discipled them, and sent them out into the world—where they would work in a variety of other institutions, hopefully in a recognizably Christian way because of the ways they had been transformed and shaped by the Gospel as they received it through the church's ministry.
This latter approach owed much, often without necessarily realizing it, to the work of James Davison Hunter, though they came by it via his friend Tim Keller rather than from Hunter himself. The concept of "faithful presence" comes from Hunter's To Change the World, in which Hunter specifically applied the concept to elite institutions, which he saw as being the primary purveyors of culture. Though seeking "to change the world" was almost entirely a fool's errand in Hunter's eyes, the more narrow and careful way one might think about such a task was to pursue a strategy of being faithfully present within elite institutions. If such a strategy was adopted with patience and care, one might see some genuine gains made over time.
This divide mostly does not exist anymore. Dispensationalism is, happily, a largely spent force with very little institutional structure backing it these days and very few young leaders championing it. In this sense, the faithful presence approach triumphed. But there is a catch.
In the aftermath of the decade or so of fracturing and cultural transformation beginning around 2014, many Christians have also lost patience with faithful presence, dismissing it as a failed strategy that is not able to reckon with the realities of the new cultural order, one that is often far more explicitly hostile to Christian ideas and teaching than was common in much of the US in previous eras.
As a result, there is a new foil to faithful presence, but it is not quietist, or Dispensational, or broadly indifferent to public institutions, as the older opposition was.
Rather, it is a kind of right-wing revolutionary program, often one that grew out of the faithful presence movement and in reaction against it, that apes the rhetoric of the revolutionary left on many points. It, however, seeks to put the left's methods in service of right-wing goals.
A good friend ably summarized the two ideas at the core of this new model:
The Hunterian influence is important to understand here because you could read the dispute between these two school as basically being a dispute between varieties of Hunterians.
The older group, which still broadly holds to the vision articulated by my RUF pastor, is largely following in the footsteps of Keller. For Keller, a large part of good, careful cultural influence meant faithful presence in elite, pluralistic institutions. Christians would not always or often control these institutions, but they also had a seat at the table and were thus theoretically (and sometimes actually) able to steer them in better, healthier directions.
The other Hunterian tribe is not downstream of Keller, but downstream of Moscow ID pastor Douglas Wilson. Wilson agreed with Keller in as much as he felt that Hunter is correct in saying that culture is shaped in a disproportionate way by influential institutions. This is why Wilson's father, who also affirmed this view, originally moved the family to Moscow, in fact. Moscow ID is a small mountain town that is within ten miles of two large, state universities in the interior Pacific Northwest: the University of Idaho in Moscow and Washington State University in Pullman, which is just eight miles away from Moscow across the state line into Washington. The idea, as with Keller, was to establish a presence within these large, influential institutions and, through that presence, accomplish real change over time.
There was one crucial difference, however: For Keller the point was to exercise faithful presence within pluralistic institutions, willingly recognizing that Christians were unlikely to ever exercise full control over those institutions. Wilson rejected this part of the strategy. This is why they set up in Moscow and not New York: New York is too big to ever plausibly be more or less "taken over" by Christians. But Moscow, a small town of 25,000 today and around 15,000 50 years ago, was "plausible" for such a strategy.
This, then, is the key difference: Keller's brand of Hunterianism is accepting of pluralism in a way that Wilson's is not. For Wilson, there needed to be some plausible chance of Christians coming to exercise something near total control over the institutions they would participate in.
This, then, is the divide that now exists within politically engaged evangelical Christianity in America. One group is trying to create ecosystems of Christian presence within pluralistic contexts while the other is seeking to build bulwarks of owned space.
Both strategies can be fruitful, but both can also become corrupted. The fruitful version of the pluralist strategy is going to look much like what Stiven Peter described in his eulogy for Keller:
On Sundays, I go to a church whose senior pastor and elder board were mentored by Tim Keller. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I attend classes in a seminary brought to New York by Tim Keller. When I see a homeless person on the street, I refer them to the shelter supported by Tim Keller. When a friend wanted to plant a church, they were trained and supported by the organization Tim Keller started. When a friend wanted a better school for her child, I referred her to the classical Christian school started by a teacher who first attended Tim’s Church.
More:
The institutional aspects of Tim’s ministry aimed to complement Tim’s presentation. He wanted to make Christianity not just intellectually plausible but also experientially plausible. City to City exists to galvanize church planting in the city, promoting a gospel presence in cities across denominations. Hope For New York exists as the Church’s justice and mercy initiative to promote the Church’s commitment to cultural renewal and the common good. The Center for Faith and Work exists to integrate the faith of Christians with their work. Tim’s writings also indicate a desire for institutions that support family life, especially schools, and counseling services. He took his inspiration from Orthodox Jewish and Catholic populations, who set up their own ecosystem to resist the cultural pressures of city life. This holistic ecosystem would essentially form a Christian civilization within the City.
The corruption of such a model comes when people seeking to be faithfully present compromise their Christian commitments for the sake of maintaining their standing in their institutions. Inherent in the idea of faithful presence is the possibility that our presence in a community is relativized by the demands of fidelity. It presupposes that there could come a time where our presence there is no longer possible, at least if we want to remain faithful.
This, of course, is often rather complicated in practice. We should not confuse the simple act of existing within an unhealthy or hostile institution as itself being evidence of a lack of faithfulness. To take one example I have used before, a friend of mine worked for a company that in 2021 was rolling out some quite aggressive DEI protocols with employees, including a requirement to sign certain statements that could quite reasonably be interpreted as condemning the traditional Christian teachings about sexuality and gender.
When asked to sign this statement, my friend quietly asked the HR desk if he could abstain for reasons of conscience while also telling them what concessions he was willing to make that would not violate his conscience. (If memory serves, the compromise he offered was that he would not use the preferred pronouns of trans employees, but he would refer to them by their preferred name.) This was a courageous thing to do, as he was a young father who could easily have lost his job. But the HR employee he spoke with was willing to accept his compromise and waived his requirement to sign the document. It would be a deep injustice for any Christian brother or sister to condemn this man as compromised purely on the basis of his presence in that institution without any knowledge of the risks he had actually taken. And, of course, the other side of this coin is that if the organization had refused to accept his compromise, then it would not have been possible for this individual to be faithfully present in that particular institution. So the notion of "faithful presence" inherently means that we must be open to the possibility that it will not be possible to be faithfully present in certain environments or institutions.
It is certainly true that some in the pluralist faithful presence model have become so comfortable and enmeshed in certain cultural environments that they've lost the ability to speak a distinctly Christian word of rebuke to those cultures. This is clearly a failure of the model and there are a number of examples one might cite of such corruption in practice.
However, until Christ returns there is no strategy we might pursue that is free from trade-offs or risks. The owned space strategy has its own vulnerabilities to deep corruption, vulnerabilities which seem far more difficult to avoid to my eyes.
"Owned space" begins by stating that Christian faithfulness over time will require that Christians own the spaces they are active in, or have something like a controlling share in those spaces. As a result, these projects tend to foreground purity in a way that can marginalize or entirely ignore issues of character and maturity. The pluralist strategy by definition includes space for ambiguity, complexity, and prudential judgments (and disagreements) because there is no way to implement it without those things. Indeed, the pluralist strategy presupposes that some level of personal maturity, virtue, courage, and wisdom is required.
The owned space strategy does not necessarily require these concerns. It can, in fact, become automated in some sense, such that judgment and prudence become unnecessary because the nature of the space simply dictates what one will believe or do. At its worst, prudential disagreements between members of the community are actually liabilities—indicative that someone is, as already mentioned, a fool or lacking in conviction. Over time what can easily happen is that one's belonging in the owned space community is almost entirely contingent on one's relationship to the owner, with little regard for one's character, virtue, or even talent.
Several things follow from this:
First, the quality of these communities will tend to degrade over time. The primary factor which determines membership is not necessarily fidelity to Christ, but is rather one's willingness to submit to the many specific stipulations and rules that define the community. These rules will inherently go beyond the teachings of Scripture because Scripture is not intended to provide an exhaustive source of rules for such communities. There is very little ability to accommodate difference, therefore, because when the fixation is "owned space" many differences that can be maintained and tolerated with the aid of wisdom, patience, and good judgment are not able to be endured due to how such "compromises" will dilute the purity of the owned space.
Second, the owned space paradigm tends toward self-isolation because the sort of identity one must have to exist in the owned space is so rigid. Such communities can powerfully attract certain people who are willing to accept those terms, but their ability to reach out beyond that is virtually non-existent.
Third, and closely related to this point is that such communities tend to mirror the dynamics of online networks in which bridge builders are marginalized and not trusted (and aren't necessarily needed). Instead one stands out through acts of extreme devotion, which others in the community will then seek to surpass. Over time this makes it difficult to maintain a large movement because network effects are inherently polarizing and when applied to actual local institutions are deeply destructive because, unlike the world of the internet, local places have a limited reserve of plausible members to draw from.
Finally, because one's standing in owned space communities is not necessarily correlated to one's character but rather toward one's public performance, such communities are highly vulnerable to predatory individuals, who are often quite good at adopting certain behavioral traits if it secures them access to would-be victims.
That campus pastor I spoke to during my freshman year oversaw one of the most fruitful and remarkable seasons of ministry I have ever witnessed. During a roughly five year window that overlapped between the end of his time and the beginning of his successor's ministry RUF Nebraska and the two PCA congregations in Lincoln sent nearly 20 people to seminary—this from a city that at the time had around 500 people attending PCA churches on Sunday. From that small ministry has grown multiple pastors, missionaries, ruling elders, and deacons, to say nothing of the people simply laboring faithfully in small, non-ordained ways in their local churches and communities.
Obviously none of that would have happened without the work of the Holy Spirit to awaken the slumbering and to embolden and equip pastors for faithful ministry. But also I think there is a reason the message we heard at RUF resonated with us so: Humans are made to know God, which is to say we are made for truth and for virtue. We're also embodied creatures who God made to work, to attempt great things, and to build.
That isn't accomplished by adopting a posture of indifference to the way we spent the overwhelming share of our time as students at that time or as workers in the future, which is what most of the campus ministries back then were able to offer us. What we got from RUF was a way to think with integrity, seriousness, and Christian truth about everything we did in life. There was no cordoned off space of "ministry" that really mattered while everything else was binned to the side to be regarded as a regrettable, necessary evil to be endured. We know truth, at least in part, through following God into the world and seeking to serve him in "every good endeavor" as the title of one of Keller's best books put it. The Hunterian vision that we learned, directly through RUF and indirectly via figures like Keller, gave us a vision big enough to hold a good life. The dispensationalist quietist model simply didn't pass that test—it left us with an atrophied understanding of vocation and of work, which one considers the sheer amount of time and energy one gives to one's calling over a lifetime is quite a catastrophic failure.
I do not think the owned space model passes the test either. It leaves us unable to navigate difference because it creates in-person communities that mirror the tendencies and characteristics of online networks. In such contexts, friendship in the good recedes and is replaced by friendships of utility. Yet it is difficult to pursue genuine human goods of virtue, genuine belonging, and mutual care in the absence of difference. It is also difficult to evangelize our neighbors when our understood model of Christian community tends to treat those neighbors as threats.
As I already noted, no model of Christian interaction with culture is perfect or immune to risks of corruption. But the risks of both the quietist Dispensational schema and the new owned space model are structurally built into the models in a way that the plausible corruptions of the pluralist faithful presence model are not. What is needed right now is less a revolution and more a fair bit of repentance for past failures wed to a commitment to stay the course with the hard work of patient obedience to Christ amidst the inextricably complex and ambiguous settings most of us find ourselves in.