Deal of the Century: A Free College Campus

Attention BGCO leaders and your little cadre of OBU fundamentalists, have I got a deal for you!

A religion wire service is reporting that the answer to all our prayers may be at hand.  You can get what you've always wanted, an exclusively conservative and avowedly fundamentalist college.  And we can get what we want: an OBU that prizes academic freedom and operates free from fundamentalist meddling as it continues to provide a uniquely balanced, moderate Christian liberal arts education as it has for decades.  From the article:

NORTHFIELD, Mass. -- Jerry Pattengale's cell phone won't stop ringing as he leads a secretive group of four wide-eyed college administrators around a majestic campus built in 1879 by legendary evangelist D.L. Moody. 

Calls and visitors are pouring in for one reason: the billionaire Oklahoma family that owns the 217-acre site and its 43 buildings aims to give it away to a Christian institution.  Free.  No charge.  Just take it.

The Gren family (of Hobby Lobby fame) is soliciting new proposals after last year's effort to establish "C.S. Lewis College" failed.  All the Greens require are "an orthodox Christian faith and the financial wherewithal to pull it off."

Now, hear me out.

You wouldn't have to pretend to care about academic freedom anymore.  You could write your own Faculty Handbook from scratch, and hire and fire at will based on adherence to your preferred doctrines.  There woud be no pesky moderates.  I'm sure Tree of Life would be happy to run your bookstore.  Your indoctrination operation would be so thorough that none of your eager young preacher boys would dare consider furthering their theological education at Baylor, Princeton, Duke, or Harvard as recent OBU grads have done.

You have a tremendous advantage over the other applicants: money!  Lots of it!  You announced just last week that you were able to increase your 2012 budget by more than $1 million because your revenues were higher than projected.  I'm sure we can get the lawyers to work out some kind of deal whereby OBU can elect its own trustees and you can elect all the trustees for the new college.  We get the Bison Hill campus and you can keep your $2.5 million annual subsidy for the rest of time.  Send that money up to Northfield, MA and get your new SBC Great Commission Baptist college up and running.

Aside from the distinction of being the first GCB college, you would also have the advantage of doing something else you like: going into apostate parts of the country and converting all those heathen damned.  Right now the focus is on Colorado with its dirty hippies.  But just think how many more lost and liberal people there are in New England.  Even Mr. Green acknowledges, "While the Northeast has become very secular, we feel like it needs to reconsider the roots that this country was founded upon and that D.L. Moody taught."

I can't speak for them, but I'd even be willing to be that once you got this thing started, the Greens would be around to make sure the coffers stayed full.  It's the best win-win I can think of.  We'll stay in Shawnee, doing what we've been doing for generations without the roadblocks you've set in our way in the past 18-24 months.  And you can go enact your vision somewhere else.  No one will try to stop you, or even complain.

We'll even throw in a couple or three administrators to sweeten the deal.