Elevation College and the Shift in Christian Higher Ed

When Elevation Church — Steven Furtick's massive multisite operation based in Matthews, North Carolina — announced in November 2025 that it was launching its own hybrid college, a lot of people probably filed it under "megachurch does another big thing." And that's a reasonable first reaction. But I think that framing misses what's actually interesting here, which is that Elevation College is a symptom of something much larger than one church's ambitions.

What's happening in Christian higher education right now is genuinely worth paying attention to. And Elevation isn't the cause of it — they're just one of the more visible organizations responding to it.

What Elevation College Actually Is

According to reporting by Christianity Today, Elevation College is designed for traditional college-aged students who feel called to ministry and want to earn an accredited degree while receiving hands-on, onsite training at the church itself. It's a hybrid model — part classroom, part apprenticeship, built around the church's existing ministry infrastructure.

That combination is significant. It's not just a Bible school tacked onto a church's weekend programming. The intention, as far as I can tell from what's been made public, is to produce graduates who are both credentialed and operationally experienced — people who know how a large ministry actually runs, because they've been running inside one.

Whether that produces well-rounded ministry leaders or exceptionally well-trained Elevation culture carriers is, in my view, the real question underneath all of this.

The Enrollment Crisis That's Driving This

Here's context that the news cycle tends to skip past: Christian colleges have been in serious financial and enrollment trouble for the better part of a decade, and that trouble has accelerated sharply.

Between 2016 and 2023, the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) saw member institutions face declining enrollment at a rate outpacing the broader national trend. Nationally, overall undergraduate enrollment fell by roughly 15% between 2010 and 2022, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. For many smaller Christian institutions, the drops have been steeper — and several have closed entirely. Since 2016, more than a dozen Christian colleges have merged, closed, or significantly restructured their programs. Concordia University in Portland closed in 2020. Indiana Wesleyan and others have made deep cuts. The pattern is not random; it reflects a structural mismatch between what these schools offer, what they cost, and what a generation of students who are skeptical of both debt and institutional religion is willing to commit to.

At the same time, megachurches — particularly the high-production, culturally fluent ones like Elevation — have maintained or grown their reach. Elevation Church reportedly draws over 20,000 weekly attendees across its campuses, with millions more engaging online. The church has a content machine, a built-in audience, and an existing culture of formation that traditional colleges simply cannot replicate through enrollment fairs and campus visits.

So when a church with that kind of platform decides to launch an accredited college, it isn't entering a healthy market. It's entering a collapsing one — and positioning itself as an alternative architecture for something people still want but can no longer afford to get the old way.

Why the Hybrid Model Is the Interesting Part

The accreditation piece matters — it signals that Elevation College is trying to produce something portable, not just internally recognized — but the hybrid structure is where I think the real institutional logic lives.

Traditional residential colleges, including Christian ones, were built on a geographic and social premise: you leave your home, you join a community of learning, you are formed by the combination of curriculum, community, and time. That premise is expensive to maintain. It requires physical infrastructure, residential staff, athletics programs, dining services, and enough students to generate the social density that makes campus life feel worthwhile.

Hybrid models dissolve the campus as the primary container. Formation doesn't happen in a dorm — it happens in a ministry context, with real work, real relationships, and real feedback from practitioners. That's actually a pretty old idea. Apprenticeship predates the university model by centuries. What Elevation College is doing is not inventing something new; it's recovering something old and dressing it in a contemporary institutional form.

The comparison worth making here is to what law schools tried in the early 20th century — moving from apprenticeship-based training to academic credentialing — and now watching the legal profession quietly move back toward experiential learning as bar passage rates signal that the pure-classroom model produces graduates who can recite doctrine but can't practice. The parallel isn't perfect, but the structural tension is real.

The Megachurch-as-Institution Pattern

Elevation College is part of a broader pattern that I find genuinely worth naming: large megachurches are increasingly functioning as parallel institutions to the ones that are failing.

They run counseling centers that compete with private therapy practices. They run food banks and social services programs that rival nonprofit organizations. Some run schools. Now some are running colleges. Each of these moves responds to a real gap — and each one deepens the megachurch's role as a total-life institution rather than a weekly gathering place.

There is something worth admiring in that responsiveness. When traditional institutions leave gaps, and people still need what those institutions used to provide, someone will fill the gap. Megachurches with resources and audiences are structurally positioned to do exactly that.

But there is also something worth watching carefully. Institutions that form the people who will staff and lead them have a particular kind of power — the power to reproduce their own culture and call it education. The question I'd want anyone thinking about Elevation College to hold is: what does the curriculum teach that the church might have reasons to avoid? What perspectives are represented on the faculty that the church's platform doesn't already amplify?

Every institution faces those questions. But institutions with a wider gap between their public brand and their internal accountability structures face them more acutely.

What This Means for Traditional Christian Colleges

If I were sitting on the board of a mid-size Christian college right now, I'd be watching Elevation College carefully — not because Elevation is going to steal all your students, but because it represents a proof-of-concept that will be replicated.

The institutions most at risk are the ones with moderate enrollment (under 2,000 students), high tuition relative to local cost of living, accreditation that doesn't carry significant brand value, and a ministry-focus that overlaps significantly with what a well-resourced church could offer directly. For those schools, the Elevation model is not a curiosity. It's a competitive pressure with a built-in audience and a national platform.

The institutions least at risk are flagship Christian universities with strong name recognition, professional programs (nursing, education, engineering) that churches cannot easily replicate, and robust alumni networks that make their credential genuinely valuable in secular hiring markets. These schools compete in a different lane.

That table is a rough approximation, not a forecast. But the pattern it describes is real.

The Accreditation Question

Elevation College's plan to offer accredited degrees is the detail that separates this from the long history of churches running informal Bible institutes. Accreditation matters because it determines whether credits transfer, whether degrees are recognized by employers, and whether students can access federal financial aid.

Which accreditor Elevation College is pursuing — and under what terms — will tell you a great deal about the institution's long-term ambitions. Regional accreditation (from bodies like SACSCOC, which covers the Southeast) carries the most weight for transfer and employer recognition. National accreditation, while legitimate, is more common among vocational and career-focused schools and is not universally accepted by regional institutions for transfer credit.

If Elevation College pursues and achieves regional accreditation, it will be making a much larger institutional claim — that it can play in the same academic sandbox as established universities. That's a hard thing to achieve, and it takes time. The American Bar Association, for instance, requires law schools to demonstrate compliance across dozens of standards before granting full approval. Accrediting bodies for colleges have comparably rigorous requirements.

I'd be cautious about assuming accreditation is a given. It's a stated goal, and the church clearly has the resources to pursue it seriously. But the credential's value will depend entirely on which body grants it and on what terms.

What I Think Is Actually Going On

Here is my honest read: Elevation College is a mission-driven move that also happens to serve the institution's interests very well, and those two things are not in conflict — they just both need to be acknowledged.

A church that trains its own ministry leaders produces people who are fluent in its culture, committed to its vision, and deeply invested in its success. That's a genuinely good outcome for the church. It's also a genuinely good outcome for students who want to serve in that particular ministry context. The question is whether it's a genuinely good outcome for students who might benefit from exposure to a wider range of theological perspectives, institutional models, and ministry philosophies before they commit their career trajectory to a single church's culture.

Traditional Christian colleges at their best offered that wider exposure — not perfectly, and not without their own institutional pressures, but with at least some structural commitment to breadth. A church-run college, by design, begins from a different premise: that formation within a particular tradition is the goal, not breadth across many. That's a coherent educational philosophy. It's just a different one.

I'm not arguing it's worse. I'm arguing that the difference matters, and that students, parents, and donors making decisions in this space should be clear-eyed about what they're choosing and why.

The Broader Pattern Worth Watching

Elevation isn't alone. Across the country, large evangelical churches — many of them affiliated with the Association of Related Churches (ARC) or similar church-planting networks — have been building out educational infrastructure for years. Some of these programs are informal residencies. Some are accredited. Some are degree-granting. The trend line points toward more of this, not less.

The Christianity Today piece frames this as a "shift" in Christian higher education, and I think that's accurate. But shifts don't announce themselves cleanly. They accumulate, and then one day you look up and the landscape has changed. The launch of Elevation College is one data point in a shift that's been building for years, driven by declining enrollment, rising costs, cultural skepticism toward traditional institutions, and the growing institutional capacity of America's largest churches.

Where it ends up is genuinely unclear to me. The optimistic version is a more diverse ecosystem of Christian formation — residential colleges doing what residential colleges do well, and church-based programs doing what they do well, with students able to choose between them based on their actual formation needs. The pessimistic version is a progressive narrowing of theological and intellectual diversity, as church-based institutions with strong brand loyalty crowd out the more academically independent schools that pushed the boundaries of Christian thought for generations.

I think the honest answer is that both versions are probably true, in different corners of the landscape, simultaneously.

Last updated: 2026-04-25

Jared Clark is the writer of Christian Counterpoint, where he examines institutional patterns in religious communities through the lens of critical analysis and honest inquiry. Read more at christiancounterpoint.com.