It is an uncertain time in the world of higher education.

The air remains tense in the wake of protests that erupted on campuses across America over the past year. The threat of violence directly impacting colleges and universities looms as large and palpable as ever with the assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University in September. Suits and counter-suits abound, and of the canceling and uncanceling of speakers, as it were, there is no end. We face the looming enrollment cliff, the effects of the One Big Beautiful Bill on higher education funding and operations, and the impact of artificial intelligence on our classrooms.

Amidst these headwinds, Christian colleges and universities should consider our calling. In such circumstances, what should our strategy be? What is our way forward?

An Example of Faithfulness

I have always been struck by the story of Daniel. Sent to Babylon in adolescence, he is a living embodiment of God’s command in Jeremiah 29:7 for his people to “seek the good of the city” in which they were exiled.

When Daniel first arrives in Babylon, he is placed in the king’s court, but he immediately encounters a problem: he and his friends cannot eat the food given to them in the court without defiling themselves in the eyes of God’s law.

Daniel tells his supervisor, who understands his dilemma but fears the consequences of defying the king: “Why should he see you looking worse than the other young men your age? The king would then have my head because of you.”

Daniel offers him a challenge:

“Test your servants for 10 days: Give us nothing but vegetables to eat and water to drink. Then compare our appearance with that of the young men who eat the royal food, and treat your servants in accordance with what you see.”

The test implicit here is obvious: do God’s ways of doing things actually work? Will they lead to human flourishing, or are they merely arbitrary rules? Do they really exist for our good? If we “seek first the kingdom of Heaven,” will “all things be added unto us”?

God, unsurprisingly, comes through in flying colors, vindicating the men’s faithfulness with unmistakable clarity: “At the end of 10 days, they looked healthier and better nourished than any of the young men who ate the royal food. So the guard took away the choice food and the wine they were to drink and gave them vegetables instead.”

And not only are Daniel and his friends physically healthy, but God gives them “knowledge and understanding of all kinds of literature and learning.” The passage goes on to say that “in every matter of wisdom and understanding about which the king questioned them, he found them 10 times better than all the magicians and enchanters in his whole kingdom.”

Faithfulness leads to flourishing.

The Daniel Option

Our situation at Christian colleges and universities is not dissimilar to Daniel’s.

Strangers and exiles upon the earth, we are outposts in a world that is our home and yet not our home. We are entrusted, like Daniel, with not only our own lives but with the lives of friends who follow after us. In our case, these are the some students who pass through CCCU institutions around the globe each year. Like Daniel and his fellow exiles, we hope to seek the good of the city—to contribute knowledge and research and, most importantly, graduates—that will contribute to greater human flourishing in the world.

And like Daniel, we are often confronted with choices.

Will we truly hold true to the missions our institutions were established to follow? Do we still believe in the idea of Christian education? Will we do what is right or what is expedient? Do we believe that God’s way of doing things will actually work?

For a time, it appeared that the answers to these questions—at least in the wider landscape of American higher education—were resoundingly negative. While nearly every major American college and university was founded with Christian missions in mind (and on paper), the march of post-Enlightenment secularism and the omission of Christianity in the academy seemed inevitable. For much of the late 20th century, religion was on the retreat in the academy as secular assumptions became standard in academic discourse.

But as G.K. Chesterton reminds us, “Christianity has died many times and risen again, for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”

The suspicion and even outright hostility toward religious belief once faced in the academy writ large is losing its voice. We are moving toward something like a postsecular order. Secular institutions are increasingly open to input from people of faith.

The failures of secularism as an educational paradigm become more evident with growing chaos and distrust across American university campuses, providing Christian institutions with an opportunity to demonstrate a more excellent way. Looking forward to the next decade of Christian higher education, it is my hope that we will follow Daniel’s example of faithfulness.

This is not the time to shy away from our institutional beliefs or apologize for our convictions. If there were ever a time to walk with renewed courage and clarity in our missions, that time is now.

It is high time that we see our missional distinctives as a distinct advantage.

Far from being at odds with academic excellence, our Christian commitments uniquely position us to cultivate the very intellectual virtues desired by our colleagues across the world of higher education.

Because we see all people as human beings created in the image of God, we strive to treat one another with dignity and respect—especially when we disagree.

Because we practice the radical hospitality of Jesus, we offer communities where all students can truly belong—and find belonging based on the eternal truth found in scripture.

Because we are honest about our core convictions, we can create environments of robust, well-defined academic freedom—tethered to our institutional beliefs and defined by the good of our communities.

Because we know that all truth belongs to God, we are unafraid of scientific inquiry and robust intellectual discourse. We are neither lost in the endless, hopeless inquiry of relativism nor locked away in the fearful confines of the echo chamber. Instead, we set out, boldly, to search for truth, because we believe we can actually find it.

And we know that the truth—wherever it is found—will lead us back to its Source.

It is no coincidence that so many of the greatest minds across the history of the academy have been people of faith. As Daniel and his friends learned, the path of faithfulness is neither fruitless nor arbitrary. We have been given a blueprint for abundant life—both inside and outside the classroom. This is why the great scientist Johannes Kepler stated, upon discovering his laws of planetary motion, “I was merely thinking God’s thoughts after him.”

It is no coincidence that so many of the foundations of our society, from philosophy to science to ethics to law, are, in fact Christian foundations. As historian Tom Holland argues throughout Dominion, such influence is so pervasive that even when modern society attempts to critique the Christian worldview, it often does so on Christian grounds.

And finally, it is no coincidence to see so many graduates of CCCU institutions providing vital service, leadership, and moral fortitude in a world that desperately needs it. They have been shaped by an education that forms the whole person into a citizen of wisdom and virtue—given knowledge and understanding of all kinds of literature and learning. Their advantage in the king’s court is evident.

Like Daniel, we can walk boldly in our calling, knowing that faithfulness begets flourishing. Like his friends, we know that God’s deliverance can intercede even in the most dire of circumstances. And we know, too, that even if our efforts at times appear to be in vain on this side of heaven, they will not be in vain in eternity. Let us choose to walk boldly and obediently, entrusting the outcome to God: “If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to deliver us from it, and he will deliver us from Your Majesty’s hand. But even if he does not, we want you to know, Your Majesty, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.”

As we attempt to “read the winds” across the landscape of higher education, many things are uncertain. But one thing remains constant: faithfulness to God is non-negotiable. Our missions, should we choose to embrace them, provide us solid ground that does not change with the winds of culture. Technology evolves, political tides turn, and laws change, but such turbulence merely reveals what sort of foundation we have been built on.

May it reveal that we have been built on the rock.

The Time Given Us

I opened this article by asserting that we are in uncertain times in our field. The challenges we face in higher education today are qualitatively different than those our predecessors at Christian institutions faced over the last 50 years. As the old challenges have been overcome, new ones have grown to take their place. Artificial intelligence, funding, enrollment, protests, violence—these are serious matters that demand wise counsel.

But in another sense, the situation we face is not new at all. Uncertainty, difficulty, and potential failure have always been part and parcel of the Christian mission. As Chesterton muses:

“Faith is always at a disadvantage; it is a perpetually defeated thing which survives all its conquerors. The desperate modern talk about dark days and reeling altars, and the end of Gods and angels, is the oldest talk in the world: lamentations over the growth of agnosticism can be found in the monkish sermons of the dark ages; horror at youthful impiety can be found in the Iliad.”

Technological development and societal turbulence have always threatened to undermine the present work of the academic enterprise. C.S. Lewis reminded his students in his lecture “On Learning in War Time” that even as the bombs of World War II dropped within earshot, the vocation to learn and to teach remained unchanged: “If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun.”

There will never be a perfectly convenient time to follow our calling. Our mission will always face new obstacles.

Our situation is not new. It is the same situation faced by Daniel and his friends as they were exiled into a world of uncertainty and unknown, forced to wonder if remaining faithful to God would be as worthwhile in exile as it was back home. It is the same question faced by believers since time immemorial: will God be faithful to us now as he has been in the past? Will we trust and obey?

J.R.R. Tolkien asserts that, from a Christian perspective, all of history is a “long defeat … with only samples or glimpses of final victory.”

It is my hope and prayer that we may take up our calling with renewed commitment, whether these future years ostensibly hold victory or defeat—knowing, of course, that final victory is assured.

As Daniel and his friends realized, only God knows what kind of miraculous victories may occur when we allow faithfulness to be our guide regardless of the cost.

And as Tolkien reminds us, ours is not to decide the times in which we live, but rather, like Daniel, to decide “what to do with the time given us.”

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Jim Gash serves as the president of Pepperdine University.