MISSION STATEMENT

The mission of Greenville College is to transform students for lives of character and service through a Christ-centered education in the liberating arts and sciences.

HISTORY

For more than a century Greenville College students have been receiving the benefits of an education within the framework of an emphasis on academic excellence and Christian character.

Accepting the challenge to provide higher education for women, Stephen Morse moved to Greenville, Illinois, from New Hampshire and founded Almira College in 1855. It was called Almira College in honor of his wife, Almira Blanchard Morse. Two years after its founding, the College was incorporated. For the next twenty-three years, the school educated young women under the leadership of John B. White a classmate of Morse at Brown University. When financial reverses came, the property was sold to James P. Slade who conducted a coeducational school.

In 1892, ministerial and lay leaders of the Central Illinois Conference of the Free Methodist Church purchased Almira College, which was at the time housed in a single building, to provide higher education for young men and women under distinctive Christian influences. The institution was reincorporated under the name of Greenville College and authorized to confer the usual degrees. Since that time the College has served its students with distinction and increased its physical facilities as evidenced by our campus map. (Appendix A)

PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION

All truth is God's truth. Our educational philosophy rests in our search for truth, upon the authority of Scripture, as well as upon tradition, reason, and experience. It is shaped by Biblical revelation and informed by our theological presuppositions, and therefore includes the following assumptions about reality, knowledge, humanness, and value.

Reality: We understand God to be personal--the creator and ruler of an orderly, dynamic universe. Through this universe God's eternal purposes, meaning, creativity, and loving care are expressed.

Knowledge: We learn about reality through observation, thought, and a scholarly and disciplined search for truth. We then perceive reality's ultimate meaning in and through God and through His creation. The fullest information about God's person and purposes appears in God's self-revelation in redemptive acts--in Hebrew history and in the Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ--as recorded and interpreted in the Bible. God's dealings are always primarily relational, first through God's choosing of a people and later through the establishment of the church. God continues to be at work in the world through His creation and through the instrument of the church in the power of the Holy Spirit, calling people individually and collectively into a saving experience. To learn, throughout our lives, we must do more than gain knowledge. We must also integrate our knowledge with the adaptive coping skills--skills that we develop through our life experiences and temper by spiritual discernment. As we watch our community's leaders and members integrating the outcomes of their moral choices, we learn from our own faith-based choices. From these people we can learn to serve by leading, and to lead by serving. Their habits of heart and mind serve as models for our own. As we create our unique spiritual, cognitive, and psychosocial synthesis, our Christian learning community encourages and supports us. In such a community, both the curricular and co-curricular experiences can help us develop into servant leaders.

Humanness: We humans are created in the image of God, and are therefore of inestimable value. We further understand that this image is found across cultures, ethnic and racial groups, and social class. But because we are bound by sin, we have become estranged from God and neighbor, and our lives are distorted. Yet God, out of infinite mercy, offers us salvation and reconciliation in the atoning work of Jesus Christ. As a result, all who that profess belief in Christ are called to seek the fullness of the Spirit and to live lives of wholeness and grace through the power of the Holy Spirit. As bearers of God's image, humans retain certain qualities and responsibilities. These qualities include complex rational capabilities, systematic and powerful skills of investigation, and the capacity for compelling ethical and aesthetic insights. And because we are social in both our nature and our circumstance, we bear a responsibility to live as a functional part of society in its diverse manifestations. This requires sensitivity to culture, ethnicity, race, gender, religious tradition and practice, and social class. In addition we should live redemptively, pointing others to Christ, to the church, and to the Christian worldview.

Value: We value righteousness, which we understand to be obedience to God and His revelation. The essence of this obedience is captured in the Christian ideals of character and calling. Regarding character, we prize:

• commitment to God through a saving relationship with Jesus Christ,
• respect for all of creation,
• respect for persons as they have been variously created by God,
• personal freedom and the acceptance of responsibility for the personal and social consequences which result from the exercise of this freedom, and
• obedience to the teachings of Christ and the apostolic tradition, and to the Spirit of God at work in the life of the individual and the church.

With respect to calling, we embrace:

• the responsibility of each believer to live a life of full service in and through the church--the Body of Christ;
• the wholeness of life and our dual obligations to affirm all that is True, Good, and Beautiful and to exercise stewardship over all of creation;
• the ethics of love and the responsibility for bringing good news and personal relief to all, with special care for the poor and downtrodden, and
• the necessity of the indwelling Spirit of God if we expect our lives of ministry and serv­ice to have either substance or effectiveness.

Based on our assumptions about reality, knowledge, humanness, and value, Greenville College pursues certain objectives. Our pursuit unifies both spiritual and academic aims, in an effort to minister to the whole person.

THEOLOGICAL ASSUMPTIONS

Adopted by the Faculty on December 13, 1995

Greenville College is a Christian College of the liberal arts and sciences founded by the Free Methodist Church and committed to the following description of our theological character.

As Christians, we believe that God exists and is presently and actively engaged in the lives of people. Though we employ terms such as wonderful, powerful, righteous, loving, all knowing, merciful, and holy to describe God, none of them alone, or even in total, can completely capture the identity of God. Because that identity must be both experienced and learned, we commit ourselves to a living and learning environment that nurtures the whole person. We affirm that, as God's creatures, persons are endowed with the ability to respond to, and ultimately to know and achieve intimacy with God. This intimacy with God results in life growing ever more harmonious with God's nature, which can be described in terms of goodness, beauty, truthfulness, freedom and love. Because these qualities transcend all cultural, historical, and ethnic boundaries, Greenville College seeks to do the same.

We have seen that humanity does not live in harmony with God, and we seek to understand why. We believe that God is helping us to gain this knowledge, both through revelation and by discovery in that which God has done in history and has made in creation. Refusal to embrace this revelation and to begin the journey of discovery is at the root of humanity's problem. This problem has traditionally been defined as sin and can be best understood in terms of its consequences: alienation in all relationships, captivity to sin, and a darkened heart and mind. Death is the ultimate experience of this alienation and darkness. We understand that the person of Jesus Christ is the revelation of God, and the work of Christ redeems all creation, dispels the darkness of ignorance, frees people from captivity to sin, and restores all relationships. All this is mediated through the ministry of the Holy Spirit, holding the hope of redemption and life for humankind.

These affirmations lead us to embrace a Christianity that is best defined as Orthodox. Orthodox Christianity, holding to what might be described as a central consensus among Christians of all times and cultures affirm that:

We believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord; who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary; suffered under Pontius Pilate: was crucified, dead and buried. He descended into hell; the third day he rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

We believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy catholic church, the communion of saints; the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the body; and life everlasting.

We are confident that affirming the Apostles' Creed is completely necessary and adequate for one to claim to be fully Christian.

In order to define how we at Greenville College have and are working out our faith in practice, it must be understood that we are the willing, and sometimes unwilling, inheritors of a number of religious impulses and traditions including Orthodox Christianity, the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the Puritan ethos, an Evangelical tradition, the Anglican/Methodist tradition, the Pentecostal/Holiness impulse, and American Revivalism. As such, let it be understood that we embrace the Bible as the authoritative rule for faith and life, the historic forms and rituals of the church, the evangelical missionary impulse which preaches the gospel of Jesus, the continuing search for truth in all arenas, the affirmation of the good, the preeminence of Jesus Christ, the active ministry of the Holy Spirit in the lives of all people, the beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty, the ministry of love through works of service and mercy as the goal of Christian practice, the struggle for freedom and justice in all parts of the earth, and the necessity of an individual encounter with and commitment to God in Christ.