Whether Pepperdine be a church
How an anti-institutionalist founded an institution
Pepperdine is a Christian university, but is it a church? Should it be a church? These days, it employs worship ministers and holds worship services. Does that make it a church? And if it’s not a church, what is it? Are there Christian institutions that aren’t churches?
These questions have major implications for how the university should be run, and they have been considered explicitly in these terms since before the institution was even founded. George Pepperdine’s view was unambiguous: the college was not a church. He said as much in a chapel address he delivered during the school’s first term:
We want this school to be outstanding in one point; that is, the spiritual life of its students and graduates. We want it to operate not as an adjunct to the church, but as an extension of the work of the Christian home in providing higher education under such influence as will strengthen and deepen the student’s faith in God.1
This wasn’t a one-off line for Mr. Pepperdine—it goes right to the heart of how he thought about the institution. Over a decade later, in a speech answering the question “what is a Christian college,” he reiterated:
Such a college is not a church or a seminary. It cannot be handled as a church. It is not under the control of the church, it is not an auxiliary of the church, or an extension of the church, but it is an extension of the work of the home.2
The founder’s framing of the new academic endeavor as an extension of the Christian home is the result of what we might call a particular hang-up stemming from the church of his youth. To answer why this point mattered so much to him, I’m afraid we’re going to need to review a doctrinal dispute from the nineteenth century. But first I’d like to say a few words about one common misunderstanding concerning Mr. Pepperdine’s intentions.
Throughout the university’s history, some have interpreted the founder’s vision of a school “not under the control of the church” as an indication that Mr. Pepperdine didn’t intend for the school to privilege its connection with the Churches of Christ. In 1957, for instance, a significant portion of the faculty (including many members of the Churches of Christ) revolted against the founder, asserting that his statement that the college would be “a private enterprise, not connected with any church” ruled out a privileged relationship with his particular faith heritage.3
But Mr. Pepperdine clearly intended the college to relate differently to the Churches of Christ than to the other denominations. The college’s bylaws in those days required the whole board of trustees to be members of the church, and the entire first faculty came from Churches of Christ too (with the exception of one Mennonite, whose pertinent doctrinal commitments must have been sufficiently aligned with those of Pepperdine himself).4
Mr. Pepperdine wanted the school to be independent of the church in at least two senses: (1) in the sense that it would be governed by an independent and self-perpetuating board rather than by the church, and (2) in the sense that it wouldn’t depend on a church or group of churches for funds, which he intended to provide on his own.5 This vision was compromised when his fortune evaporated in imprudent investments, leading to the dissolution of the George Pepperdine Foundation in 1951 and ultimately the depletion of the endowment he left for the college.
To understand why Mr. Pepperdine insisted on this arrangement for the governance and funding of his new college, you have to understand an ecclesiological debate that had been simmering among the Churches of Christ for decades. The debate involved the question of institutionalism, or what relation individual churches ought to bear to organizations such as orphanages and schools. The question was debated by so many people over so many years that it’s difficult to compress it without losing some nuance, but here’s the essence of the debate as I understand it.
One party argued that the New Testament provides no example of churches monetarily supporting such organizations, concluding that such arrangements were therefore unauthorized digressions from the biblical model.6 To be clear, the anti-institutionalists7 were not opposed either to education or to caring for orphans—only to a scheme in which churches subordinated their funds to an external board of trustees. They thought such good deeds were the proper work of the church and that outsourcing the work to other groups was a usurpation of the church’s role.
The opposing party thought it proper for churches to support organizations inasmuch as they were necessary for doing good works.
The anti-institutionalists were often smeared as “Sommerites,” after Daniel Sommer, a preacher and journal editor among Churches of Christ in Indiana who had opposed Christian colleges on similar grounds as early as the 1870s. In Sommer’s mind, the college issue was connected to the question of missionary societies, which he regarded as plainly unbiblical: “The church is God’s own, divinely arranged missionary society. […] There is no one who can believe that it is God’s will that beyond the church there should be organized a man-made missionary society with presidents, secretaries, boards of managers, […] and so forth.”8
Sommer’s stance against missionary societies gained broad consensus among the Churches of Christ (especially after the issue contributed to the schism with the churches now known as the Disciples of Christ).9 But the anti-institutionalists’ opposition to colleges put them in a small minority (smaller still on the orphanage question). As a result, the debate over college funding sometimes proceeded in this manner: those opposed to colleges compared them damningly to missionary societies while those in favor of colleges compared them approvingly to orphanages.
Mr. Pepperdine himself was almost certainly a Sommerite—at least, the consensus of all the historians I’ve read on the question is that he grew up in a church (and a home) influenced by Sommer’s teachings and that this colored his thinking well into adulthood.10 Batsell Baxter, who served as Pepperdine’s first president, even said, “When I first met George Pepperdine, […] he was what we would call a ‘Sommerite.’ He thought that what we call Christian colleges were competitors of the church in religious instruction.”11
By the time Pepperdine was thinking about his college in the 1930s, one of the leading voices in the institutionalism debate was G. C. Brewer, who preached at the Central Church of Christ in Los Angeles, where his salary was paid by George Pepperdine.12 Brewer was in favor of churches making regular contributions to Christian colleges,13 but he never persuaded Mr. Pepperdine. He wrote in his autobiography that “Brother Pepperdine and some others who were helping to operate the school had not been thoroughly converted from ‘Sommerism.’”14
Given that we know Mr. Pepperdine did start a Christian college, you might think he must have been converted from Sommerism by 1937. That was certainly the view of Batsell Baxter, who wrote that Mr. Pepperdine eventually “learned that such colleges are not competitors of the church but that they continue the work begun in the Christian home.”15 As we have seen in the block quotations above, this is a fair representation of Mr. Pepperdine’s view.
But then, why did Brewer leave California thinking of Pepperdine as an unreformed Sommerite? The answer has to do with two different senses of the term. Brewer used Sommerism here to mean opposition to churches funding Christian colleges, while Baxter understood it to be opposition to Christian colleges altogether. Pepperdine’s opposition to Christian colleges was reversed by several factors including (1) his admiration for graduates of schools like Abilene Christian College—especially Hugh Tiner—and (2) the persuasion of friends and mentors like Baxter, Brewer, and his friend and minister T. W. Phillips II. But he didn’t abandon all his anti-institutional beliefs.
Mr. Pepperdine was persuaded to start a college, but residual anti-institutional commitments did influence the way he structured the college’s funding. Mr. Pepperdine insisted that the school not receive financial support from the churches (an arrangement he likely regarded as unbiblical), but it didn’t matter because he had plenty of money to cover all the expenses on his own—at least, he had enough before 1951. This scheme set the young George Pepperdine College apart from other colleges associated with the Churches of Christ such as David Lipscomb College in Nashville and Harding College in Arkansas.16
While its source of funding was different, George Pepperdine College did resemble its sister schools in the tactic used to answer the accusations of the anti-institutionalists. As we have seen, Mr. Pepperdine repeatedly echoed this claim from other educators among the Churches of Christ: that the colleges weren’t usurping the role of the church because they were in fact extensions of a different Christian institution altogether—the Christian home.
This “Christian home” argument did not put the college issue to rest, but it does appear to have disarmed some of the anti-institutionalists’ objections. Daniel Sommer himself, having heard this new explanation during visits to some of the church schools in 1933, was largely placated, writing, “The only change I specially noticed while visiting those schools was the disposition to speak of them as ‘adjuncts to the Home, rather than to the Church.’ When I heard this I generally said, ‘That is more reasonable.’ […] This means my sentence has changed in proportion as college advocates have changed.”17
When he was considering starting a school of his own, Mr. Pepperdine visited Lipscomb and Freed-Hardeman College in Tennessee just a few years after Sommer, and he must have encountered a similar “Christian home” explanation about the role of these colleges.18 And we know he was persuaded of the explanation’s soundness because he was soon using it to justify his own college.19
So is Pepperdine a church? It was important to the founder that the school be regarded not as a church but as an extension of the home. I won’t presume to suggest how this commitment should influence the operations of the institution, but I think it would be a mistake not to consider which functions belong to the church and which to the university.
George Pepperdine, “Our Responsibility,” transcript in “Complete Text of Founder’s Speech,” The Graphic, 8 Dec. 1937: 2.
George Pepperdine, “What Is a Christian College” in “The Church and Sound Doctrine,” Bulletin George Pepperdine College 13.4, May 1949: 45–47.
Quotation from George Pepperdine, “Founder’s Statement,” Bulletin George Pepperdine College 1.1, June 1937. For the faculty’s objection, see President’s Committee report, June 1957, Box 1, Folder 5, Donald V. Miller papers, Pepperdine University Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA). Cf. Howard A. White, “Crisis at Pepperdine College: A Decisive Change in Administration 1957–1958,” Box 63, “Introduction” folder, Howard A. White papers, SCUA: 27.
The Mennonite was Dederich Navall, who seems to have satisfied the doctrinal requirements for faculty listed in George Pepperdine to Batsell Baxter, 21 July 1937, reproduced in Minutes of the Board of Trustees, vol. 1, SCUA: 22–23. For a biographical sketch of Navall, see “Dr. Navall Speaks Nine Languages as Fluently as He Speaks His Native Dutch,” The Graphic, 16 Mar. 1938: 3.
Note that the very sentence in the Founder’s Statement (supra note 3) where he says “not connected with any church” also clarifies this financial interpretation: “This institution […] shall be a private enterprise, not connected with any church, and shall not solicit contributions from the churches.”
G. C. Brewer contested this point, identifying 2 Corinthians 8:19 as an example of early churches contributing funds to be administered by trustees for the glory of God. See G. C. Brewer, “About Organizations: Christian Colleges, Orphan Homes, and Missionary Societies, No. 6,” Contending for the Faith, Gospel Advocate Co., 1941: 219.
I follow Richard Hughes in referring to this set of beliefs as “anti-institutional” (Reviving the Ancient Faith, William B. Eerdmans, 1996: 230), though the group in question seems to have settled on “non-institutional” as their preferred descriptor. Modern members of this group generally disapprove of the labels “anti” and “Sommerite,” which I will use only in an attempt to clarify historical uses of these terms, especially with reference to George Pepperdine and his beliefs.
Daniel Sommer, “An Address,” Octographic Review, 5 Sept. 1889.
E.g., G. C. Brewer is at pains to distinguish orphanages and Christian colleges from missionary societies, the latter of which he says “we all oppose.” See “About Organizations: Christian Colleges, Orphan Homes, and Missionary Societies, No. 3,” Contending for the Faith, Gospel Advocate Co., 1941: 205.
Mr. Pepperdine himself wrote that the Kansas church of his youth “was somewhat under the influence of the teachings of Daniel Sommer on the College Question” (quoted in S. H. Hall, “Sixty-Five Years in the Pulpit: or, Compound Interest in Religion,” Gospel Advocate Co., 1959: 98). For the consensus of historians, see W. David Baird, Quest for Distinction, Pepp. Univ. Press, 2016: 18. Cf. Richard Hughes, “Faith and Learning at Pepperdine University,” Scholarship, Pepperdine University, and the Legacy of Churches of Christ, 2004: 22. Cf. William S. Banowsky, The Malibu Miracle: A Memoir, Pepp. Univ. Press, 2010: 21–22. See also, Audrey Gardner, “A Brief History of Pepperdine College,” master’s thesis (Pepperdine, Aug. 1968), Box 2, Folder 4, George Pepperdine College Records, SCUA: 1. Gardner writes that Mr. Pepperdine’s parents “were acquainted with the teachings of Daniel Sommer, an arch-conservative anti–Christian college advocate.”
Batsell Baxter, “The Work of Religious Education,” Abilene Christian College Bible Lectures 1944, Firm Foundation Publishing, 1945: 57.
Bill Youngs, Faith Was His Fortune: The Life Story of George Pepperdine, 1976: 183.
See G. C. Brewer, Congregations and Colleges, 1947, which collects his writings on the subject, most of which originally appeared in the Gospel Advocate. Many of the same essays are also available in Contending for the Faith, supra note 9: 199ff.
G. C. Brewer, A Story of Toil and Tears of Love and Laughter: Being the Autobiography of G. C. Brewer, DeHoff Publications, 1957: 88. Note, too, that Brewer delivered the invocation at the dedication ceremony for George Pepperdine College in 1937.
Baxter, supra note 11.
Cf. G. C. Brewer (Congregations and Colleges, supra note 13: 27), who notes that Pepperdine differed from other schools “in some radical respects. It was not built and is not supported by either churches or individual Christians. It was built, equipped and endowed by one individual.”
Daniel Sommer, Apostolic Review, LXXVII, 13–14 (28 March 1933): 12, quoted in Steve Wolfgang, “Sommerism,” Truth Magazine, XXIII, 27 (12 July 1979): 439–442.
See White, “Crisis,” supra note 3: 27.
Note, too, that the George Pepperdine Foundation also supported the Helen Louise Girls’ Home and the Pacific Boys Lodge, suggesting that Mr. Pepperdine regarded such orphans’ homes as worthy of support at least by individuals if not by churches.