Bryan Nance, a 22 year old Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE) college student laughs and shows a group of his peers a text message from his roommate that says, “Just so you know, I want to drink tonight.” Bryan is sitting next to his girlfriend, Hannah Smith, also a PPE major but with a concentration in education. They hold hands and kiss gently on the lips, but the purity band, a ring that young Christians wear to symbolize sexual purity, on Bryan’s left hand ring finger says that they don’t do much more. Bryan enjoys drinking, dancing, seeing any movie he wants and showing his girlfriend he loves her by hugging and kissing, all actions that are frowned upon by many evangelical churches. It’s Thursday night and he is planning on meeting his roommate and a bunch of other friends at the Brooklyn Brewery for some pints of the house brew.
Bryan doesn’t believe in the rules that his family and his old church imposed on him, but he does believe in the Christian religion and is currently learning how to combine his faith with his career in a way that will allow him to be a professional first and give him the ability to discuss his beliefs in an eloquent manner at The King’s College in New York City.
On any given day, among the thousands of people file that in and out of the Empire State Building are students with iPods pounding in their ears and a backpack full of homework and projects. The only difference between these students and most other college student’s is that one of the books in their backpack is the Bible and that they attend The King’s College, the only evangelical college in New York City.
The number of applications to most Christian colleges, like The King’s College, are rising exponentially. Since 1990 the applications to Christ-centered colleges have experienced a 70.6% growth, according to the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities and the applications for this year’s class is said to be the highest number ever received. On the other hand, the outlook for the amount of applications to fill the class of 2013 at most other non- Christian colleges is bleak and will most likely drop from the height of 3.3 million applicants in last year’s “echo boom,” according to this year’s edition of the US News College Report.
With the election of Obama over McCain, many political commentators are heralding in the death of the era of evangelical power. This is far from the truth at most Christian colleges, based on the number of young people who are applying to enter higher education institutions that have a Christian bent. The young people who are attending The King’s College say they are learning to combine their religion with their profession, the most popular one’s being business and political science, which around 60% of the students study. Students who do choose those paths go on to work at The White House, Goldman Sachs, and Fox News, to name only a few.
King’s College is an evangelical college, but unlike some other similar universities’, Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Virginia or Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, the students attending and the faculty teaching here are not so-called “legalists,” a term that refers to people who follow the rules set down by the mainstream evangelical Christian churches. At the school, this means that while they, as they often say, “believe in Jesus Christ as their lord and savior,” the school doesn’t have any rules to forbid students social actions or behaviors, as stated in the King’s Student Handbook.
“King’s has grown up past the rules of the Christian movement,” says Steven, a 20-year-old PPE student originally from Las Vegas, who likes to party, but not like the tourists that are known to visit his hometown, “Many of us grew up in legalist households, but here it is our choice to follow the rules we used to have or not. King’s says ‘You’re adults, now make your own decisions,’ but they also teach us in a biblical worldview so we look at the bible and make decisions that are in light of that and the honor code.”
The college representation concurs: “The honor code is the way that King’s College polices its student population and the ideal that its students strive to uphold,” said the director of residential life, Shawn Best. “The honor code is a proclamation that must be signed when every student first arrives at King’s,” located on the 15th floor and basement of the Empire State Building. “It says that as an enrolled student you promise to not lie, cheat, or steal or tolerate those who do.” Best added, “I often don’t even hear about issues going on in the dorms. Most of the time the students use the honor code to take care of problems by talking to each other and they solve it themselves.”
Being in the Empire State Building is not the only difference between King’s and most other Christian universities. King’s does not require students to sign a faith statement, although it does require that of the faculty. The Dean of Students, Eric Bennett, said that “King’s is a truly unique place because we resist the idea that spirituality can be regulated through laws. We are focused on big ideas and intend to have our students influence culture from outside the Christian bubble. We teach our students to be bilingual, to be a believer, but to speak to others without judgment.”
The King’s College currently has 258 enrolled students who come from all over the United States. Matt Fillingame, a 22-year-old married student and the current student body president, added that the academics of King’s were based on the model of the famous English institution, Oxford University. King’s offers only two degrees; one in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics and the other in Business Management. Both majors are built on a common core, which is a sequence of 20 courses that take place over four years. The degree has a strong theological component and is based on the idea that Christianity gives powerful insights into the questions of being a professional today and gives students the tools to prepare for debate in the working world. “Our ambition is to be Harvard but with a different worldview,” says Fillingame.
The college also based some of its social structures on that of the Ivies. Its house system comes from the system at Yale. When students enter The King’s College they are automatically entered into a house, which are named for famous Christian personalities like Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Regan, and C.S. Lewis. The students live either off campus in a personal apartment or in the college’s dorms, which are inside of two high rise apartment buildings, The Vogue or Herald Towers, located close to the Empire State Building.
Matt, a different married Business Management student, who is 22 years old and expecting a son with his wife of three months, believes that King’s will be the Christian Harvard and its alumni may even equal such schools, “Yale and Harvard were originally seminaries and they were taught with a biblical worldviews,” he said. “Without religion,” he adds, “things like Enron happened. Now colleges have begun to bring back a religious worldview through ethics classes.”
Zach Cochran, a 19-year-old student says the coursework at King’s is rigorous. He personally does about three hours of homework a day. He adds that normally each class at King’s requires students to read between one and six novels a semester. “This semester I have probably read eight books, though my friends and professors always encourage me to read more.”
The King’s college was founded in 1938 in Belmar, New Jersey and moved to Briarcliff Manor, New York in 1955. In 1990 King’s ran into financial difficulties and closed in 1994. J. Stanley Oakes led the effort to find capital to reopen the school. In 1999, the college gained the Northeastern Bible College in New Jersey and moved to open in the Empire State Building under the old name of The King’s College.
The college has many university clubs and organizations, such as BreadBreakers, a organization that puts groups of students together to hold potluck dinners, and The King’s Council, the governmental board of the students. The college also has opportunities for students to engage with the outside world through community service by working in the New York City area, professional societies in law and business, and a worship service called The Tent, which meets on Thursday evenings.
Not exactly like Harvard or Oxford, The Tent has on average about 70 people in attendance, which is quite a large number of the currently enrolled 258 students. The worship service is in the vein of a traditional evangelical service with music and lots of ‘God Talk’- using words like saved, Jesus, hell and heaven, but it is the students’ choice to do it that way. The service is led entirely by the students, with the main director being Bryan Nance from above, who also is a very experienced singer. Nance believes that the worship service is different from those of any other Christian universities because it is optional and it is every student’s choice to worship in their own way and to participate as much as they feel personally comfortable. He explains, “It’s not your usual worship service and its definitely not like how our parents used to worship.”
As the rock music is playing while the students’ stroll in, the difference in the way each student wishes to worship is evident. Some students close their eyes and sway to the music with their hands pointed upwards, while others sit in thoughtful prayer. One young man is folded over his own lap in intense personal conversation. The Dean of Students is standing in the back of the small basement location, which has been dressed up in white Christmas lights for mood lighting, and singing the hymns quietly to himself.
Kate McKinnis, a 21-year-old student, with bright red, curly hair that is reminiscence of the little orphan Annie, walks to the front of the room as the guest worship leader and heads up the next section of prayer. She seems very nervous and fidgets and stutters while she talks. She references a verse in the book of Matthew in which Jesus says, “All who are wary and tired, let me take your yoke upon me.” Then the entire room splits off into four small groups to do a prayer activity.
Kate leads one group in “laying down their burdens for God” or telling the rest of the small group what is personally bothering them. After which, the group will “love on that person and help connect them with god.” A female student of small stature with curly brown hair who wears a thick coat of make-up and blue eye shadow, also named Kate, tells the group not to worry about upsetting anyone else and encourages all to speak their minds without hesitation, “It’s King’s, be revolutionary.”
A tall, skinny boy decked out in complete hipster dress named Alexander goes first. “I have a terrible fear of letting others see my faults.”
Kate leaps across the circle that the group formed in a corner of the room and squats in front of Alex to stare him directly in the eyes. She states coldly, “God says you are well loved. Beloved lord make him a man of honor. Remember Alexander, those things don’t define you because you have been called a son in the eyes of the lord.”
The pattern of a student laying down their burden and Kate or anther student reassuring them that they are okay if they are with the lord continues until everyone has gone and almost everyone is in tears. The circle becomes 16 teenagers and twenty-somethings who are listening intently to each other’s problems and truly caring for one another by responding to the issues laid down by their fellow students, something that isn’t often as organized at other colleges and universities.
Bryan, a transfer student from Liberty University, says that King’s is training the next generation of Christian leaders, but with a different outlook. “Evangelicals have been around in some form for over 100 years. In that time the movement has gone from opposing to imposing. They used to want to get away from culture and then they wanted to change the culture by a kind of forced Christianity.”
He goes on, “King’s does look to change the institutions of the worlds, but through educating the future leaders. King’s is trying to prep us to support our ideas through a thoughtful conversation, to be eloquent in discussing our beliefs, and to have good beliefs. Along with great academics, of course.” In the end he adds, “The American Dream stops fulfilling quickly, but we have something else to fulfill us.”
The kids at The Tent quickly bounce back from their heavy prayer and talk about their plans for afterward. Fillingame says that “students, who are of age, usually go to The Playwrights Bar”, which is an old-time, wooden bar right near the Empire State Building.
Fillingame openly admits that when he was younger he “never liked Christians because they all just seemed disingenuous and fake. They were too concerned in being ‘evangelical’. But King’s isn’t a bible school, the people who come to King’s think the evangelical church has lost its way and they want to be the new kind of Christian that we think will lead the changes for tomorrow. The old idea of the world versus us shouldn’t be there anymore and King’s is looking to change that.”
King’s strives to be progressive in everything it does. Recently, the school hosted a debate that was open to community members who noticed signs in and around the Empire State Building between Christopher Hitchens, the famous atheist writer at Vanity Fair and Douglas Wilson, a Methodist pastor. Emma, a very outgoing student studying PPE, said, “We are constantly looking to hear others ideas and debate, because it only makes our faith stronger.” Most students said the debate ended up being very well attended and really caused those who could come to think about why they believe what they believe.
Fillingame hopes that public events like this will change people’s opinions about evangelicals and bring the serious academic qualities of King’s into the media. “We are not kids from Hicksville, USA. We are students who are studying politics or business and using our faith as a backdrop. We are striving to meet popular culture and to be able to discuss our ideals eloquently when we get there.”
