Questionable motives @ CU
My sister-in-law Michelle is currently a sophomore at Cornerstone University, so this article (on Scot McKnight’s blog) really caught my attention when it came across my RSS aggregator. Though the details aren’t exactly clear, it appears that Cornerstone fired a recent hire in their IT department on account of his Catholic faith. The man that was fired, Tony Graves, fully disclosed on his application that he attended a Catholic church. They hired him anyway. Shortly after his hire, they (re)discovered that he didn’t attend a “biblical, evangelical” church and informed him that he must change his church affiliation or be canned.
I could see this being a big deal if this person were to be a theology professor or whatnot. But an IT employee? Give me a break. Who gives CU the authority to judge the character and faith of this guy whose church’s services might look a bit different than the “typical” CU employees’? The summary of my feelings on this issue are expressed very succinclty by one of the commentors at the bottom of Scot’s blog entry:
The school expresses by this policy; if your worship doesn’t look the same, and your prayer doesn’t sound the same, and your experience of God is not the same, then it is not legitimate.
I am disgusted and saddened.
I guess that I should respect the fact that this is CU’s policy, but it sure seems like they could have shown a bit more grace in this matter.
I think this might be related to the left over judgments many ‘evangelicals’ have about Catholics not really being Christians (due to fears about mariology (worship of Mary), transubstantiation (if bread and wine really become flesh and blood). My Catholic friends are astounded by this pervasive judgment, and many people (from various church traditions) would agree that some Catholics are themselves ‘evangelical’ - so to me, CU’s decisions shows the artificial divisions that are sometimes continued in the name of ‘faith,’ that aren’t really very ‘faithful’ at all.
Huh. Looks like they require notice “well in advance” of any church membership/association changes so they can review it (Appendix A in their employee handbook). They list a two week maximum timeframe to do these reviews. Irregardless of the policy itself, it seems odd that if it’s that important to them it’d take until after an employee’s start date to come up. As for the policy, after skimming their agreements and core values areas, I’m surprised people actually want to work there based on other stuff too…
One of the commentors on Scot McKnight’s blog asked the question of whether any of the prominent Christian schools employ Catholic (or other non-protestant) employees. I was trying to think through the staff and faculty members I knew while at Bethel. The only non-protestant I could remember for certain was John Lawyer in the PoliSci department. I’m fairly certain I remember him saying in one of his lectures that he’s episcopalian. Anyway - I doubt that Bethel would do something like this, but I’d be really upset if I heard of them doing so.
There are several faculty members at Bethel who are Catholic. I don’t think any of them try or have felt the need to try to hide it. Part of the doctrine statements is that each individual “is responsible to God alone in all matters of faith.” IIRC the only direct limitation on church is something where seminary faculty are required to be members of a BGC church unless an exception is made (which makes sense), and non-seminary faculty are encouraged to consider BGC. That’s burried deep inside the faculty handbook (p43 here if anyone is interested and has an account).
Good - that’s what I thought, but didn’t have any solid facts. Thanks for the referral.