In the seventh chapter of Ezra, the scribe and priest Ezra receives a commission from King Artaxerxes to return to Jerusalem and restore the worship and teaching of God’s law to a people who had lost their way. The text tells us three things about Ezra that define the pattern for any work of faithful cultural renewal: he had set his heart to study the Law of the LORD, and to do it, and to teach his statutes and rules in Israel (Ezra 7:10). Study. Practice. Teaching. Not one without the others. Not study that remains in the head, not practice divorced from understanding, not teaching that lacks the authority of a life lived in obedience. This is the biblical template for what Lantern House intends to build. Ezra’s work was made possible by a benefactor—a pagan king, no less—upon whose heart God had laid the importance of this restoration. The text is blunt about this: “The king granted him all that he asked,for the hand of the LORD his God was on him” (Ezra 7:6). Lantern House, too, has been made possible by generous benefactors upon whose hearts God has laid a vision for the renewal of Christian intellectual and cultural engagement in Lawrence, Kansas. A founding gift has been committed to launch an institution designed not for a season but for generations.
The contemporary church in America faces a crisis of engagement without recent precedent. In its concern for fidelity, a significant portion of American Christianity has turned inward—becoming so insular that it has ceded the cultural mandate altogether and struggles to communicate the gospel effectively in our post-modern secular world. It has become, in effect, an echo chamber. Another prominent response has been cultural warfare: loud, combative, politically entangled, and more interested in winning arguments than winning souls. This approach generates heat but remarkably little light. Both postures have alienated an entire generation of thoughtful young people, who find themselves either fearfully isolated from the culture to which they are called to be salt and light, or who rightly sense that shouting is not the same as persuading and political power is not the same as cultural authority.
On the other side, much of mainline and progressive Christianity has responded to the culture’s challenges by accommodating them—softening doctrine, minimizing the supernatural, and reducing the faith to a set of ethical preferences barely distinguishable from secular humanism. This approach wins approval from the academy, but at the cost of having nothing distinctive left to say.
Between these two failures—the alienated and the accommodating—lies a vast and largely unoccupied middle ground. It is the ground of the ambassador for Christ. It is the ground occupied historically by figures like Augustine, who spent decades in patient, brilliant dialogue with the intellectual culture of late antiquity. It is the ground of the Magisterial Reformers, who built universities and published and debated and catechized and persuaded. It is the ground of the early church, which conquered the Roman Empire not by seizing political power but by out-thinking, out-living, and out-dying its rivals. Lantern House is built on the conviction that this middle ground—the ground of patient yet confident engagement, initiating conversation, hospitality, intellectual seriousness, and genuine community—is the ground on which the church can faithfully and effectively engage our modern Western world and university. We will not shout. We will not retreat. We will pursue conversations, set a table, open the books, unashamedly reflect on revelation, pour the coffee, and say: Come, let us reason together.
