“The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers.” Lev. 25:23
One of the popular topics and measures in higher education these days concerns belonging. My simple database search turned up over 600 academic journal articles on the subject over the past few decades. If you are an employee of an educational or ecclesiastical institution, you are taught that we all should want every person to feel a sense of belonging at our institutions.
Yet, mature Christians must recognize that God does not want his people to feel a sense of belonging during this time on earth. That was true for the Israelites in the Promised Land (as the Lev. 25:23 verse indicates), and it is also true in the New Testament. Peter addresses us as strangers, aliens, pilgrims, sojourners, or exiles (depending upon your translation of I Peter 1:1 and 2:11). Indeed, the heroes of the faith “were foreigners and strangers on earth” (Heb. 11:13). What are we to make of this tension?
Defining and Measuring Belonging
The major difference between the two approaches to belonging relates to feelings and reality. The popular higher education discussion about belonging, like many higher education discussions these days, is about feelings. For example, here is the item we use in our Baylor Faith and Character survey to measure belonging (which is drawn from one popular measure1):
Please rate the extent of your agreement with the following items, regarding how much you anticipate you will feel like you belong to the Baylor community. Strongly Disagree (1) Disagree (2) Slightly Disagree (3) Slightly Agree (4) Agree (5) Strongly Agree (6)
- I feel like I belong at Baylor University.
- I feel like I fit in well at Baylor University.
- I feel like an outsider at Baylor University.
- I feel comfortable at Baylor University.
We thus try to figure out what will produce these feelings in our students, so we can retain them. Granted, one 2018 study noted, “research on university belonging remains in its ‘infancy,’ with more work needing to be done to fully understand the construct.”2 Still, this approach gives one the general idea. Should Christians teach Christian college students to think differently?
A Theological Perspective on Belonging
The Bible never talks about this kind of belonging. When English translators use the word “belonging” it is always about a possession or family. It is certainly not something that is praised. In fact, the opposite is true. Abraham and his offspring are praised as a paragon of faith in Heb. 11:9 because “By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise.” Christians likely need to think more biblically about not belonging. I suggest that we begin with two important themes.
The first aspect, the one described in Lev. 25:23, harkens back to creation in Genesis 1 and the future eschaton. Humans are not entrusted as owners of God’s creations but as stewards. This theme is also reinforced in parables told by Jesus (Mt. 25:15-28; Luke 16:1-8). God did not make this present world to be our home. It prepares us as stewards. Instead, Jesus is preparing that permanent home for us with the new heaven and earth (John 14:1-3). I sometimes am concerned that certain theological discussions about the importance of “place” in Christian thought do not capture this point.
We do not belong to a place. We belong to the triune God (John 3:29; 8:47; 14:24; Rom. 1:6:14:28; 2 Cor. 10:7; Gal. 3:29) and God’s family (John 8:35; Rom. 12:5; Heb. 10:39). This point is consistent with how Jesus talked about belonging. He talked about belonging in relation to the Kingdom of heaven/God and not this world or its institutions. He taught that the Kingdom belonged to children (Mt. 19:14; Mark 10:14). John the Baptist also talked about Christ belonging to that kingdom (John 3:31). In contrast, the world rejects those who do not belong to the world (John 15:19). They belong to the devil (John 8:44; I John 3:12).
The second biblical perspective described in I Peter stems from the Fall. In a fallen world, we should not pursue belonging. We tried to teach our children this outlook. A decade and a half ago, when talking about the paperwork for renewing my Canadian wife’s resident alien card, our youngest son exclaimed, “Mommy, you can’t be an alien. If you’re an alien, you have to be from outer space.” I then chimed in that during my first Christmas in Canada (my wife’s country of citizenship), it actually felt as cold as outer space (-13F/-20C for five straight days to be exact), but I do not think that my son or wife thought that my comment was helpful.
My wife then patiently explained that being a resident alien means you are a citizen of another country. The Apostle Paul reminds Christians, “our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20). As a result, we must understand and practice what it means to be resident aliens in our daily lives. Since I had the good fortune of having the presence of a literal resident alien and two dual citizens in my family, it provided some insight into this experience.3
My life experience has also helped me in this area. I have never felt a strong sense of belonging in most institutions I have worked and most places I have lived. It may stem from the fact that I lived in four different states before I was twenty-five and went to six different public schools, two private secular universities, and one Christian university during that time. Today, I am a twenty-three-year faculty member, but I have never felt what I would call “a sense of belonging” at Baylor University or Texas. This sense was reinforced in a Sunday School I taught about identity. I shared that I am half Colorodian and half Texan. The whole class murmured in disapproval, and one man shouted, “You can’t be half Texan.”
To be honest, I find that helpful for my Christian life. There is something fallen about every institution I have inhabited, every school, and every city. None of them has been or is the Kingdom of God. There are moments when you taste the Kingdom of God: a retirement party where you celebrate someone’s contribution to the Kingdom; when A Ph.D. graduate who has struggled in many areas of life throughout the program gets a job and finds their passion for contributing to God’s kingdom in the world, when someone you taught returns and talks about what God has taught them through their difficult life journey. But those are merely moments.
Helping Our Students Think Christianly and Critically about Belonging
After our students have arrived, I think it would be helpful to remind them that feelings of alienation can be helpful reminders of several things. First, this earth is not your home. You will always feel alienation. That being said, we do want to embody the Kingdom of God here on earth as much as we can. I recently heard one of my pastors describe the Church as an embassy of heaven/the Kingdom of God. I would hope that would be true of our Christian universities as well.
Second, whenever you feel a lack of belonging, it may be because we as a community are not fulfilling our function of being Christ’s ambassadors with our embassies. Thus, you need to tell us about your alienation. We do not promise to fix it. But we do recognize it as a sign of this fallen world that we may need to confront in some way. After all, in the scriptures, there are only two types of kingdoms to which one ultimately belongs: the Devil/world and God’s Kingdom
Third, you may also need to take some responsibility for your feelings of alienation. It is your responsibility to seek community, friends, and mentors. Yes, all of these things are gifts from God, but God does not simply lay them in your lap. You must pursue them passionately, as you would other goods that God gifts us—not idolatrously but wholeheartedly.
Finally, you must realize that a particular university is not yours. You have merely inherited the stewardship of it. It is yours to steward during the years you are there. Even the regents are merely stewards who have a fiduciary responsibility to act in the best interests of the university.
Thus, I would propose that we need another measure—one that measures a biblical understanding of NOT belonging in the university:
- To what degree do you feel a lack of belonging in various spheres of life? (e.g., religious group, family, friends, volunteer groups, etc.)
- To what degree do you feel a lack of belonging at [e.g., Baylor] university?
- When you feel like you do not belong here, do you first talk to God about your alienation?
- What do you think is the source? Is your alienation from your own fallenness, the world’s fallenness, the fallenness of fellow students, or those who represent the institution (e.g., staff, faculty, and/or administrators)?
- If you conclude your alienation comes from the fallenness of students or those who represent the institution, will you tell someone the source/sources of your alienation?
- To what degree do you see yourself as a steward of [e.g., Baylor] University?
- How can [] university help you as a pilgrim or sojourner in this world who will never quite belong?
Overall, as inhabitants of a fallen world and inheritors of the Kingdom of God, we need to normalize not belonging.
Footnotes
- Walton, Gregory M Walton, and Geoffrey L Cohen. “A Question of Belonging: Race, Social Fit, and Achievement.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92, no. 1 (2007): 82–96. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.92.1.82.
- Christopher D. Slaten, Zachary M Elison, Eric D Deemer, Hayley A Hughes, and Daniel A Shemwell, “The Development and Validation of the University Belonging Questionnaire, ” The Journal of Experimental Education 86, no. 4 (2018): 633–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220973.2017.1339009.
- The above two paragraphs are taken from my book, Perry L. Glanzer, Identity in Action: Christian Excellence in All of Life (Abilene Christian University Press, 2021).
While your points are well taken, one must also consider the biblical concept of hospitality and welcoming that Christians are called to extend to the stranger. This is addressed in the Torah, most specifically in Lev 19:33-34. I believe that this is the foundation of Jesus’ parable in Luke 10, after the Pharisee attempted to justify himself regarding Lev 19:18.
Paul in Romans, the author of Hebrews, and Peter each use a term we translate as hospitality. It is philoxenia, meaning love for the stranger, the idea of welcoming the alien—offering a home away from home.
Jesus, in his instruction about the judgment of the nations, says “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”
I concede that we, as mature believers, are not settle for this world as home. We have an eternal home, and we are currently living in the shadowlands. Simultaneously, we must offer hospitality to the alien, in order that we demonstrate the love of Christ in practical ways, living out the Gospel-life even as we profess our faith in Christ.
Doug, I agree. Christians must combine the recognition that we are temporary stewards of things like our Christian universities and that as stewards we are still to offer hospitality to strangers. For example, I’m proud of the fact that Muslim and Hindu students at Baylor experience the same level of “belonging” (using the instrument I mentioned in the essay) at Baylor as Christian students. Hopefully that means those of at Baylor who are stewards of the institution are showing hospitality to the stranger. Of course, as I have mentioned in other posts, sometimes a misunderstanding of what it means to show hospitality to the stranger can actual fuel unfaithfulness and secularization (see https://christianscholars.com/the-major-threat-to-christ-animated-learning-confusion-about-hospitality-to-non-christians-at-christian-universities/)