Community Engagement

The religious missions of evangelical Christian and Catholic institutions of higher learning lead them to serve those beyond the campus community and strive to produce graduates who will continue to engage thoughtfully in their communities post-graduation. Over the years, service and institutional initiatives supporting the common good have taken many forms, with community engagement serving as the most current vehicle for doing so. After providing a brief overview of Catholic and evangelical Christian approaches to community engagement and a description of the character and development of community engagement in American higher education, institutional exemplars will be highlighted from both evangelical Christian and Catholic institutional types.

Catholic and Evangelical Christian Approaches

Engagement means different things to different stakeholders. In the context of higher education, engagement is expressed in a variety of strategies and tactics that vary from institution to institution. However, for the sake of this chapter, I will adopt the Committee on Institutional Cooperation’s (2005) definition of engagement, which states that “engagement is scholarly and marries teaching, research, and service through mutually beneficial collaboration’’ (p. 4). With this definition in mind, community engagement in higher education is framed as mutually beneficial partnerships between institutions and communities, both local and global, that facilitate the sharing of knowledge and resources for the benefit of all stakeholders.

The Catholic and evangelical Christian traditions arc uniquely constituted and thus positioned to thoughtfully participate in community engaged work. Collins and Clanton (2018) argue that the “unique and distinctive function of Christian higher education appears to be this: When functioning properly, Christian higher education—unlike all other expressions of higher education—educates students in ways that are informed by the Christian faith” (p. 15). In this sense, Christian institutions engage in community outreach, service, advocacy initiatives, and academic pursuits that are informed by and committed to the common good. This Christian perspective of the common good has been referred to by Guthrie (2018) as deriving from biblical themes that relate to living faithfiilly to God’s word, and “showing up to serve at all of the addresses that comprise social life” (p. 21). In other words, working toward the common good in the Christian context responds to the Gospel call of loving God, loving oneself, and loving one’s neighbor (Guthrie, 2018). Community engagement, therefore, represents the mobilization of the cultural mandate present in the Christian commitment to the common good, serving as the tool to put mission into action across Christian colleges and universities.

It is no surprise, therefore, that Christian institutions’ outreach and impact reports indicate high levels of engagement arc occurring across the nation. Moreover, the CCCU’s National Impact Report (CCCU, 2017) states that, “in aggregate, CCCU students perform an estimated 5.4 million community service hours per year” (p. ix) and are more likely to engage in community service than their non-CCCU college peers. Additionally, 97% of CCCU institutions offer community service-learning opportunities, as well as a wide range of publicly accessible programs and employment opportunities for members of the local community (CCCU, 2017).

The ACCU’s published infographics present a similar narrative, listing over 550,000 hours of community service reported by five member institutions alone and highlighting success stories such as St. Francis University’s $46,000 fundraiser in support of the Dorothy Day Outreach Center and Ohio Dominican University’s food drive that collected over 740 pounds of food for a local food bank (ACCU, n.d.-b). Among the compelling statistics is a note that states, “77% of Catholic college and university students believe helping the poor and disadvantaged should be a life goal” (ACCU, n.d.-b). This sentiment, paired with the previously mentioned statistics, indicates how deeply the commitment to service is embedded in Christian higher education’s culture and practice.