Chapter Nine: Ashland University — How Drift Becomes Doctrine
Ashland University and its graduate theological seminary are not just one institution among many in the Brethren Church. They are the hub — the place where the tradition’s theological identity has been shaped, taught, and, in recent decades, quietly redirected. If you want to understand how progressive theological ideas moved from academic books into actual Brethren congregations, Ashland is where you have to look.
Ashland Theological Seminary was founded in 1906. Since then it has graduated over 4,500 students who now serve in more than 70 denominations and parachurch ministry organizations around the world. That reach matters enormously. Whatever theological framework gets formed at Ashland doesn’t stay inside Brethren congregations. It spreads well beyond them.
Faculty in the Department of Christian Historical and Theological Studies at Ashland include specialists in Brethren history, Anabaptist thought, and — significantly — what academics call “political theology.” That phrase refers to a discipline that links religious identity directly to contemporary social and political causes. In an Anabaptist context, it works like this: the early Brethren were persecuted for their faith, and that history of suffering gets reframed as a model for solidarity with whoever is considered oppressed today. The persecutors of the past become templates for identifying oppressors in the present. And the faithful community gets defined by its alliance with those claiming marginalization — rather than by its loyalty to the body of teaching the apostles handed down. It’s a framework that feels deeply Christian while doing something quite different from historic Christianity.
Ashland is also home to the Brethren Journal Association, which oversees Brethren Life and Thought — the primary academic and pastoral journal for the Brethren tradition. That means Ashland’s theological direction doesn’t just shape the ministers it trains. Through that journal, it shapes the ongoing formation of working pastors and lay leaders across the entire denomination. The institution functions, in practice, as the unofficial but very powerful voice that defines what authentic Brethren Christianity looks like.
None of this means every professor at Ashland or every graduate of its programs has embraced the full progressive agenda. There are almost certainly faculty and alumni who remain deeply committed to historic Christian faith. The concern here isn’t individual variation. It’s institutional direction — the overall trajectory, and the effect of that trajectory on students who arrive looking not only for theological training but for a place where they belong.
Ashland Is Not Alone: The Same Pattern, Multiple Traditions
It would be inaccurate — and unfair — to suggest that Ashland is a unique case. The same dynamics documented here: the gradual replacement of biblical doctrinal standards through academic influence and the progressive redefinition of justice, are documented across many Christian denominations and their schools. Ashland is a case study in a recognizable pattern, not an isolated tragedy.
Within the Anabaptist family of traditions that shares the Brethren’s own theological roots, the evidence is particularly clear. Eastern Mennonite University and Seminary (Harrisonburg, Virginia) formally changed its faculty hiring policy in 2015 to permit people in same-sex marriages, following a two-year institutional “listening process.” EMU subsequently withdrew from the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities. Today the university maintains an official LGBTQ+ Student Support Policy, publishes an Inclusive Language Guide, and hosted its first Lavender Graduation in 2022 — the first among Mennonite colleges in North America. Goshen College (Goshen, Indiana), affiliated with the Mennonite Church USA, followed an identical path that same year, formally updating its non-discrimination policy to include sexual orientation and gender identity. Both schools withdrew from the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities rather than maintain its traditional standards.
Outside the Anabaptist world, Calvin University (Grand Rapids, Michigan) and its affiliated Calvin Theological Seminary provide a striking example from the Reformed evangelical tradition. After the Christian Reformed Church made its opposition to same-sex relationships a binding doctrinal position in 2022, nearly 150 Calvin University faculty signed a formal letter of disagreement. A group of faculty filed official gravamina — formal written challenges to the denomination’s doctrinal ruling, a process available under Reformed church polity. By 2024, the denomination’s governing assembly formally instructed Calvin’s board to address the level of faculty dissent. That scale of organized opposition inside a flagship Reformed evangelical institution shows how thoroughly progressive assumptions can take root even in schools whose official commitments remain traditionally stated on paper.
North Park Theological Seminary (Chicago, Illinois), affiliated with the Evangelical Covenant Church, is particularly relevant because the Covenant tradition shares a Pietist heritage directly parallel to the Brethren’s own roots. North Park’s own website describes the seminary as “an evangelical school with a heart for God’s justice” whose community “actively engages antiracism, supports gender equity, and appreciates ethnic and cultural identity” — language that reflects the same blending of evangelical identity with progressive social framework documented throughout this paper.
Beyond these institutions still navigating the transition, a separate category has completed it. Union Theological Seminary (New York), Chicago Theological Seminary, and Pacific School of Religion (Berkeley, California) now openly identify as progressive Christian institutions. Union describes itself as “a beacon for social justice and progressive change” and offers coursework in feminist, Black, and queer theologies. Chicago Theological Seminary offers a formal degree concentration in LGBTQ+ Studies. Pacific School of Religion founded a Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in 2000. None of these institutions began this way. Each has Protestant Christian roots. Their current identity is the destination to which the kind of institutional drift documented in this paper ultimately leads.
The point of naming these institutions isn’t to build a case against them specifically. The point is to help pastors and church leaders see that what has happened at Ashland isn’t a tragedy peculiar to one small denomination. It is a documented, repeatable pattern playing out across multiple theological traditions at the same time. The Brethren situation is a window into something much larger.
Chapter Ten: The Brethren Heritage — Real Gifts, Real Vulnerabilities
The Brethren Church traces its origins to 1708 in Schwarzenau, Germany, where Alexander Mack and a small group of religious dissenters founded a community shaped by two powerful movements: Anabaptism and Pietism.
From the Anabaptist stream, the Brethren inherited a deep commitment to believer’s baptism, the community of faith, peacemaking, and the radical demands of discipleship. From the Pietist stream, they inherited a strong emphasis on genuine personal conversion, warm experience of the Holy Spirit, and the renewal of the inner life.
These are genuine and valuable gifts. At its best, the Brethren tradition produced communities of remarkable hospitality, real care for the poor, courageous peacemaking, and sincere discipleship. Their willingness to take the Sermon on the Mount seriously — in all its demanding particularity — is a corrective to forms of Christianity that intellectualize faith while failing to live it. Their instincts about community, embodied practice, and the concrete life of the church are not wrong. They are part of the full picture of what Christian faithfulness looks like.
But every tradition’s strengths carry corresponding vulnerabilities. This one is no exception.
Two Very Different Meanings of the Word ‘Progressive’
Before going further, a significant clarification is needed — one that any serious Brethren historian will raise, and that this paper has to address honestly to avoid misrepresenting the tradition.
The word “progressive” appears in Brethren history long before the theological movement of that name. And the two uses are not the same thing.
In the early 1880s, a three-way split occurred among the German Baptist Brethren. The group that organized as the Brethren Church in 1883 was called the “Progressives” — but what they were progressive about was church methods, not doctrine. They wanted Sunday schools, revival meetings, higher education, salaried ministers, and foreign missions. They objected to the power of annual conferences to override local church initiative. Their entire concern was about reaching more people more effectively with the Gospel. They wanted to do more, not believe less.
Theologically, these 19th-century Progressives were thoroughly orthodox and evangelical. And when actual theological liberalism arrived in the Brethren Church in the early twentieth century — as it arrived in virtually every American Protestant denomination — they didn’t welcome it. They pushed back. In 1921, the National Ministerial Association of the Brethren Church adopted a formal statement of faith specifically because, in their own words, liberalism was “creeping into the Brethren Church as in every other evangelical denomination.” Their motto was simple and unambiguous: “The Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible.”
The 1921 Message of the Brethren Ministry is a document every pastor engaging with this tradition should know. It explicitly affirms the infallibility of Scripture, the full deity of Christ and his virgin birth, the bodily resurrection, justification by personal faith, and the call that “the Christian should be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind.” It stands in direct contrast to the direction the Brethren’s institutions have moved since.
The argument here is not that the Brethren were never “progressive.” They were — in a very specific, method-focused, evangelistically-driven sense. The argument is that the theological progressivism of today is a betrayal of the Brethren’s own stated convictions, not a development of them. The Brethren’s own 1921 statement is the witness against the current drift. And no one can answer that by pointing to the 1883 split — because those 1883 Progressives were the very people who, in 1921, drew a hard line against liberal theology.
Alexander Mack on the Counterfeit of Love
A second voice from within the tradition deserves prominence here. Alexander Mack, the Brethren’s founder, wrote words that address directly the error progressive Christianity embodies. In his Rights and Ordinances, he confronted the temptation to substitute comfortable mutual tolerance for the kind of love that is actually willing to name sin and call for change:
“Where sin and error is not rebuked, but where it is said, ‘leave me alone in my own self-will, opinion and doing, and I will leave thee alone likewise; we will love one another, and be brethren.’ Alas! We have but too long stood in such pernicious, hypocritical love…. But now we have learned such a love, and have yet to learn it, which hate and reproves evil and wickedness.” — Alexander Mack, Rights and Ordinances
Mack wasn’t describing something he had observed from the outside. He was describing a temptation he had seen up close — communities that called mutual non-confrontation “love” and called mutual tolerance “brotherhood.” He named it bluntly: “pernicious, hypocritical love.” Genuine love, in the tradition of Christ and the prophets and the apostles, is love that is willing to hate evil and confront what is wrong.
The founder of the Brethren movement was not an advocate of the therapeutic, endlessly affirming model of community that progressive Brethren institutions now promote. He understood that genuine love requires the courage to confront, that genuine community requires real accountability, and that a brotherhood built on the unspoken agreement not to challenge each other’s sin is not a Christian brotherhood at all. Any reading of Brethren history that ignores this thread in Mack’s own theology is doing selective history.
The Cracks That Let the Drift In
With this historical background in place, we can name the specific weaknesses in the tradition that made progressive drift possible — not to condemn the tradition, but to understand it honestly.
First: the Brethren’s longstanding wariness of formal creeds — captured in the phrase “no creed but Christ” — while intended to guard against dead, mechanical religion, inadvertently left the tradition without sharp tools for defining and defending doctrinal boundaries. Alexander Mack and the early Brethren didn’t mean that doctrine was unimportant or that the content of “Christ” was open to infinite reinterpretation. They meant that the living Christ, as revealed in the New Testament, was a more adequate rule than any human-written formula. But as the tradition became distanced from its founding convictions, “no creed but Christ” became an open door through which revisionist theology could enter without triggering any institutional alarm. A community that hasn’t named what it believes with precision can’t defend what it believes with clarity.
Second: the Pietist emphasis on personal religious experience, while genuinely healthy in its proper place, gradually created a climate where how something feels spiritually began to matter more than whether it was doctrinally sound. When what matters most is an authentic sense of God’s presence, and when doctrinal precision gets viewed with suspicion as the enemy of genuine devotion, the tradition becomes highly vulnerable to any movement that presents itself in the language of spiritual sincerity — regardless of what it actually teaches.
Third: the Brethren peace witness — a genuine and costly theological commitment — contains within it a logic that, when extended beyond its proper domain, can slide into an avoidance of all confrontation, including doctrinal confrontation. Mack himself resisted this slide, as his writing shows. But later generations, formed more by the outward social expression of peacemaking than by its theological foundation, became communities where gentleness and acceptance were treated as reasons for doctrinal passivity. The very tradition that produced Mack’s fierce warning against hypocritical love eventually became a tradition in which calling out theological error was treated as a violation of the peace witness itself.
Chapter Eleven: How Belonging Becomes a Theological Trap
One of the most important and least-discussed drivers of theological drift is something you won’t find in any academic paper. It operates below the level of argument. It runs in the domain of belonging — in the deep human need to be accepted, seen, and given a place in a community that values you.
Here’s how it works. A person arrives at a progressive theological institution carrying a history of pain. They may have experienced real rejection in conservative or evangelical churches. They may have struggled to find genuine belonging in communities where cultural or theological conformity was the unspoken price of admission. They arrive uncertain, a little wounded, and quietly hoping this place might be different.
What they find is acceptance — rapid, warm, and comprehensive. The progressive community is explicitly organized around welcome. Its entire identity is built on being a haven for those who felt excluded elsewhere. For someone who has genuinely experienced rejection, that kind of welcome isn’t merely pleasant. It is powerfully, personally formative. It meets a deep human need. And in meeting that need, it creates profound loyalty.
The theological content comes bundled with the community. To stay fully accepted, you don’t merely need to attend — you gradually absorb the worldview: the shared historical narrative, the social concerns, the characteristic theological moves, and the designated opponents. In the Anabaptist-inflected progressive environment, this means inheriting a specific story: a faithful, persecuted minority, hated by the powerful for their commitment to peace and community. It’s a compelling narrative. For someone who has personally experienced rejection, it resonates at a gut level — because it gives a cosmic framework for their own personal pain. Their story and the tradition’s story become the same story.
The result is a form of historical identification that goes well beyond scholarship. The documented suffering of the sixteenth-century Anabaptists — real, costly, harrowing — becomes, in psychological terms, the individual’s own suffering. The evangelicals who push back on progressive theology become, in the narrative, the spiritual heirs of the persecutors.
This is not a minor pastoral footnote. When doctrinal error is insulated by a layer of personal identity and community belonging, the person who offers a correction isn’t just challenging an idea. They are experienced as attacking the community that finally accepted the person, the heritage that finally gave them significance, and the identity that finally made their personal pain make sense. The resistance to theological correction is directly proportional to how deeply the belonging need was met.
It also explains why progressive believers are so reluctant to accept labels like “liberal” or “conservative.” Those labels belong to a framework of theological comparison that the progressive community has collectively rejected. To use them is to accept a frame of reference that places the progressive position as one option among others, subject to the same scrutiny as other options. The progressive community insists, instead, that it has moved beyond these categories — that it is simply honest, and simply faithful.
For pastors walking alongside family members or congregation members caught in this — the theological arguments, however sound, will not be enough on their own. A person whose deepest investment is relational and identity-based, not primarily intellectual, needs more than a good argument. They need an alternative experience of belonging — one that doesn’t require adopting a particular ideological framework to maintain. The question is never only: what do you believe? It is always also: where do you belong, and what would it cost you to change your mind? Genuine pastoral care has to address both — with compassion, patience, and the kind of long-term relational presence that creates a different kind of home.