LANGLEY, BC—Trinity Western University (TWU) will need to assume “a larger disciple-making task” if it is to compensate for the growing number of Christian students on campus who have doubts about their faith, says outgoing president Neil Snider.

“We do have the product of postmodernism,” he says. “And therefore, young people who are born in such a time…their mind is shaped by all of those things.”

But Snider believes the moral choice facing these students is just as great a challenge, given the gulf that now exists between a Christ-centred life and a “really vulgar” culture.

“Are you going to choose to be distinctly Christian or are you not? It’s not so easy to ride the fence when the lines are drawn so much more clearly,” he says.

“That’s not to say frankly that it was ever easy,” adds Snider, who has decided to step down next July after 32 years as president of TWU.

Sense of gratitude

Despite some major challenges—including a long and costly dispute with the B.C. College of Teachers over accreditation that went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada—Snider says he is leaving with “a great sense of reward and gratitude.”

When he started at TWU in 1974, it was a two-year junior evangelical Christian college with 340 students. Today, it is a four-year, fully accredited liberals arts university with 3,500 students.

Along the way, it has birthed several schools, including business, teacher education, human kinetics and nursing, as well as a multi-denominational seminary, the Associated Canadian Theological Schools (ACTS), with more than 500 students.

Snider says TWU’s “miracle-studded history” is the realization of the vision God gave him for Christian higher education, a vision that he brought to the job.

“I was convinced,” he recalls, “that we really needed to take our place like Daniel in the midst of the culture and bring our Christian worldview to bear on the life we lead, even on what it means to be good stewards and good citizens of the country.”

Brian Stiller, president of Tyndale University College and Seminary in Toronto and former president of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, calls Snider a “trailblazer” and “pioneer.”

“He helped establish the idea that a Christian university is valuable not only for the strengthening of the Church, but it’s a powerful witness of the gospel to the wider community,” says Stiller. “And behind him, we now have nine other Christian universities in Canada.”

Snider, however, regrets there are not more universities like TWU across the country. “We have a long way to go, because our task is not a simple one,” he says.

“If they’re aspiring to be like Trinity Western, which some of them openly say, they need to realize…it’s taken us years to become a solid university.

“And when we don’t have a lot of government support for things like libraries, it’s going to take a deep commitment on the part of many, many people to make a higher education wing of evangelical Christianity robust.”

Search is on

The university’s board of directors has empowered a seven-member independent search committee to find Snider’s successor.

Committee chair Reg Petersen, a businessman in Cambridge, Ontario and a former board member, says interested parties have until the end of October to send in their applications. From these, he says, the committee hopes to find a candidate to recommend to the board by next spring.

“We’re casting the net as wide as possible—inside, outside [the university], north of the border, south of the border. Maybe even [someone] currently in business,” he says.

And when the next president is chosen, Snider will assume a new role as TWU’s first Chancellor, which he views as being the university’s full-time ambassador to the rest of the world.

“It’s more than ceremonial, or I wouldn’t stay,” he says. “I have no intention of retiring.”