On July 4, 2026, Dr. Robert B. Sloan, Jr., President of Houston Christian University, was called home to be with the Lord Christ after nearly two decades leading HCU.[1] His leadership was marked by faithfulness to Christian higher education and a vision for a university rigorous in pursuit yet no less faithful in commitment.
My own tenure as an HCU faculty member began under Dr. Sloan’s leadership, which shaped me profoundly as a Christian intellectual and scholar. Teaching from an explicitly Christian vantage point has been transformative, made possible by the culture his structures built. At the heart of Dr. Sloan’s impact on me as a Christian academic and teacher is a question I am continually prompted to answer: What is a university for? The answer stems directly from the vision Dr. Sloan held and passed on for what a Christian university is.
A Crisis of Purpose
That question sits near the reason public trust in American higher education has collapsed, for reasons deeper than tuition or politics.[2] For many, the university either looks like an overpriced vocational pathway leaving graduates underemployed, or an institution claiming to form citizens without. Meanwhile, trade programs place students in well-paying work far faster, and more families conclude college debt is not worth the benefits many universities espouse.[3]
Yet, enrollment is not declining everywhere. As Perry Glanzer has documented, Protestant universities where Christian commitment shapes operational identity have outperformed their secular peers. Mission fidelity is the standard explanation, but the fuller explanation, I contend, lies in what these institutions are committed to: forming student character, often named growth toward Christlikeness, integrated with the pursuit of truth.
This points to something the modern university has forgotten: its historic telos, the end toward which it orders everything else, was the pursuit of truth, requiring intellectual virtue in those who pursue it. When the mission collapses into workforce preparation or ideological alignment, the formative center drops out, taking with it any vision worth four years of a young life. Recovering that telos takes more than naming it because pursuit itself is not quite the right word for what truth asks of us.
That leaves the harder question: if “pursuit” isn’t quite right, what is? The goal is to arrive at truth, not merely pursue it; and truth is embodied character, not abstract knowledge. In the Christian vision, truth is not a proposition but a person: the eternal Son of God incarnate in Jesus Christ. And Christians are called not just to know truth but to be conformed to him who is the truth (Rom 8:29; Col 3:10). And the emphasis of discipleship is not the process of conformity but the culmination of it, which is being made complete in Christ Jesus (1 John 3:2; Phil 1:6). The true telos of the university, then, is not simply the “pursuit of truth” but ultimately the formation of truth-bearers, the proper telos for any institution claiming the banner ‘Christian University.’
The university has lost its way on character formation, focusing on technicalities rather than the virtue and wisdom that derive from Christ. Knowledge and skill can lead to partial virtue and wisdom, more so when pursued alongside them. But a misordering is taking place: the truth found only in Christ should lead first to Christlike character, which gives rise to the very knowledge and skill the university prizes, now rightly grounded in Christ.
This ordering is what Christ calls for: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt 5:48, NIV). The word rendered “perfect” is teleios, carrying less the sense of flawlessness than of wholeness—a thing brought to the end for which it was made. Completeness is not an accumulation of competencies, but the finished shape of a life conformed to Christ. Formation apart from him is not counterfeit, only incomplete, left short of an end it cannot reach without him. Secular institutions prove this point: they cultivate real honesty and patience, virtues no Christian should disparage, but their formation stays partial, ordered to no end that can finish it. Completion takes the proper end, and the means, and that means is finally the Spirit’s work through faith in Christ, not a curriculum; the university cannot complete a student, but it can order everything within its walls toward the One who does.
Convictions Built to Last
Now an institution may affirm all of the above and still not hold it. Mission statements survive their authors only when preserved and carried forward by the next generation. Views differ on how, but most stakeholders in Christian higher education agree there is a dire need to preserve the convictions a Christian institution has set forth as binding, even amid disagreement. Its mission survives only where those entrusted to preserve and teach it have themselves been shaped by it.
This principle animated Dr. Sloan’s work. At Baylor University, he attempted what most Christian universities never do: build these convictions into the university’s actual structures.[4] He sought a university “unapologetically committed to Jesus Christ” that took up its historic task “for the sake of shaping the hearts and minds of students… to be witnesses in the world to the truth of Christ.”[5] That vision required attending to whom the university hired, which pressed against the Baptist instinct of soul competency. The years that followed were contested, and he resigned the presidency in 2005.
At Houston Christian University (then Houston Baptist), he built what he could not at Baylor, leading the development of HCU’s vision document, “The Ten Pillars,” which reaches into hiring, curriculum, and public identity.[6] Faculty annually affirm these convictions, requiring not doctrinal assent alone but a transformed person shaped by that doctrine. Convictions outlast their leaders only when written into the mechanisms that form the next generation of teachers.
What those mechanisms secure reaches into particular disciplines. Psychology, the field I teach at HCU, inherits a dominant anthropology that is not neutral; it carries assumptions that either leave room for the image of God or replace it with man’s own envisioned image. Because HCU treats a distinctly Christian approach to psychology as scholarship, such a scholar is freer than most to ask what a person actually is before asking how to treat them. That freedom was structurally put in place under Dr. Sloan’s leadership, not merely sentimental.
Carrying the Work Forward
Robert Sloan worked his whole career for the vision of a truly Christian University. He has finished his race, but the work itself is not finished. As stakeholders in Christian higher education, we have a responsibility to continue it: preserving the vision Dr. Sloan worked so diligently toward, not the mere acquisition of knowledge, not the pursuit of truth alone, but the forming of the whole person in Christ, for God’s glory and humanity’s good. So ‘let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up’ (Gal 6:9, NIV).
So take up the charge; it belongs to every one of us. If you teach, think through your discipline Christianly, retreating from none of its hardest questions, and do not baptize its secular consensus and call the result integration. If you administer, know that every hiring line, every budget, every accreditation report either strengthens the structure or quietly loosens it. And all of us: refuse the drift toward worldly respectability.
Hold fast to the conviction that Dr. Sloan staked his presidency on: if Christ is Lord, he is Lord of the educator: not of her devotional life only, but of her scholarship, her syllabus, her judgment about what deserves sustained attention. And if he shapes the educator, he shapes the institution, for an institution is nothing more than the people who compose it and the habits they hand on.
HCU’s Ten Pillars are materially symbolized by ten granite pillars recovered from the Galveston County Courthouse, one of the few buildings to survive the storm of 1900, standing upon its foundation. They are a testimony that convictions endure only when built into something and maintained, not merely admired. Dr. Sloan built that foundation; what remains is ours to keep building, called, as he said, to ‘proclaim the truth about God’s world… faithful to our central canonical confession that Jesus Christ is Lord.’[7] Let us pray in the Psalmist’s words that “the favor of the Lord our God rest on us; establish the work of our hands for us” (Psalm 90:17, NIV).
Now ask the question once more: What is a university for? It is for this: the formation of truth-bearers, men and women brought toward completion in Christ and sent into the world as witnesses to him. That is the answer Dr. Sloan gave with his life, and the one he handed to those of us who now teach and work, not just at the institutions he presided over, but at every university that calls itself Christian.
[1] Statement from HCU Board Chairman Ramiro Peña on the Death of HCU President Robert B. Sloan, Jr. | Houston Christian University.
[2] Daniel A. Cox, “Confidence in College Has Collapsed,” The Survey Center on American Life, August 20, 2026.
[3] Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education, Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education (Yale University, 2026).
[4] Barry Hankins and Donald D. Schmeltekopf, The Baylor Project: Taking Christian Higher Education to the Next Level (St. Augustine’s Press, 2007).
[5] Hankins and Schmeltekopf, The Baylor Project, 306.
[6] Houston Christian University, “The Ten Pillars 2030,” September 21, 2022.
[7] Hankins and Schmeltekopf, The Baylor Project, 336.
