“Are Covenant College Students Actually Behaving Like Christians?” was written in the last issue of The Bagpipe and, to me, was a mixed bag of ideas and promptings. On one hand, I agreed with the author's charges at the end of the article that we as Christians should seek to love God more and more. That’s kind of the whole point right? God sacrificed himself in the form of Jesus to save us so we could be reconciled to him. We have great freedom in this! Our sins are forgiven (awesome), we always have someone with us (super comforting), and a means to understand the world (clarifying). We also have freedom though to figure out what being a Christian and a human being looks like.
I admittedly took some umbrage with the examples the author gave of “unchristian” behavior in his article. I doom scrolled today on Instagram for probably an hour—am I not a Christian? I experienced the so-called drug busting raids (the contraband found was a sword and some beer cans)—does that make me no longer a Christian? There were months when I didn’t go to church while at Covenant because I was tired and sad. Has God now rejected me? I do not think so. I’m not saying that going to church or reading the Bible isn’t important. It is important! But rather than looking for markers of “unchristian-ness” within the Covenant community, maybe we can cut each other some slack?
Some of my best experiences at Covenant that actually helped grow my faith were when students and faculty just listened to me and when they gave me space to question doctrines or forgave my breaking of rules (sorry, Covenant). I didn’t need them to tell me to buck up and get on the Christian grind-set. Honestly, college is the time to ask big questions and challenge what you think you know. We all leave the security of home with its parental oversight and inherited beliefs and start to figure out who we are on our own. Some things we keep, and others we discard. Covenant gives us the space to question our faith and beliefs as we simultaneously hopefully strengthen it. It shouldn’t be a surprise that some of us in the process let go of our faith while at school or after.
When we encounter “secular” behavior at Covenant, what if we took it as an opportunity to love someone instead of as a threat to our Christian bubble? After all, Covenant is a mostly white, mostly straight, small PCA liberal arts school on a mountain in the South. It’s somewhat of a monoculture, so when small delineations occur, they’re more noticeable. What I’ve seen called “secularism” at Covenant has sometimes just been people arguing over the minutiae of PCA doctrine: old earth vs. new, the levels of Calvin’s awesomeness, etc., or personal choices like listening to music with naughty words in it and celebrating art with nudity.
In conclusion, I think we should allow more space for what “behaving like Christians” looks like and allow more grace towards those who are living out their faith differently from us. Even if that means watching a movie instead of doing a devotional.
I’m not advocating for the abolishment of Covenant’s rules but rather the judgements of others’ actions that we don’t like. It’s great to encourage our friends to follow Jesus more diligently, but it’s also pretty great when we just sit with them where they are. If we have a friend who is seriously doubting Jesus’ love, maybe we can show it by sticking by them. It’s great to urge our college’s community to follow Jesus better, but, in the process, let’s not shame others when we find them lacking.