David Jang, Wycliffe and the WEA

Wycliffe, the venerable Bible translation organization, has gotten itself into hot water recently with some of its Bible translation practices. Various Evangelical groups, including Biblical Missiology, Horizons International, the Assemblies of God and the PCA, have criticized Wycliffe for its tendency to replace terms like “Son of God” with “Caliph of God”, or “Father” with simply “God”. The Assemblies of God has gone so far as to produce a position paper directly opposing these practices, and has threatened to break off relations with Wycliffe.

This would obviously be bad news for Wycliffe. As a result, they jumped at the opportunity to have the World Evangelical Alliance lead “an independent external audit” of their translation practices. Among other things, this independent review gave the Assemblies of God some aircover, and it appears they’ve decided to postpone any decision about Wycliffe until the WEA releases its report. And from my perspective, the WEA’s choice of Robert Cooley to lead the independent audit seems to be a positive first step.

Still, I find it a little troubling that Wycliffe specifically selected the World Evangelical Alliance to conduct this independent review. As I’ve mentioned previously, although the WEA has a long and distinguished history, since 2007 it seems to have come under the increasing control of David Jang and his associates. David Jang, of course, is the controversial leader of the Evangelical Assembly of Presbyterian Churches (not to be confused with the Evangelical Presbyterian  Church), Olivet University (not Olivet Nazarene University), Christian Today (not Christianity Today), Christian Post, and the International Business Times, among others. I’ve documented elsewhere the unsettling and sometimes unethical practices that his groups have been involved with. In general, David Jang seems to be very intent on making his organizations appear as large and mainstream as possible, with the oddly paradoxical result that they end up looking pretty shady.

Consequently, David Jang’s involvement with the WEA is a little worrisome. He was accepted onto the WEA’s “North American Council” in 2007, while the WEA was in some financial distress, and by all appearances has since become an integral part of its operations. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere:

• Jang paid for the WEA’s move to New York City in 2007. [Edit 7/11/2012: In 2007, the WEA opened a new office in Jang’s New York City offices. I am told that Jang’s community pays for Geoff Tunnicliffe’s NYC apartment, and that they contributed to the WEA’s formal move to their NYC offices in 2010.]
• All three of the WEA’s offices are colocated with organizations associated with David Jang.
• Jang hosts and runs the WEA website.
• One of Jang’s close associates, Chris Chou, is now the chief of staff of the WEA.
• All [Edit 7/11/2012: Apparently the vast majority of] WEA leadership courses are hosted at Olivet University, the school Jang founded.
• More recently, WEA and Olivet University joined in a bid to move onto the Green family’s campus in Northfield, Massachusetts.
• Etienne Uzac, one of the owners of IBTimes, is married to Marion Uzac, the former PR director for the WEA.
• The WEA gets a cut of every transaction handled by GivingWire.com (one of David Jang’s companies).
• David Jang’s media companies are promoting the WEA extensively.
• I was told by a source inside Olivet that David Jang has stated his intention to take over the WEA.
• Jang is closely associated enough with the WEA that ZoomInfo’s automated version of LinkedIn concluded (incorrectly) that he was actually the President of the WEA.

Maybe all this is just God’s way of providing for the WEA through some hard times. And maybe none of this has any impact on the WEA’s arbitration of the Wycliffe translation controversy. But it’s worth noting in this context that Jang’s reputation and orthodoxy is itself in dispute. He apparently taught at a Moonie seminary at least through 1992, and perhaps as late as 1998. He’s been the subject of several heresy investigations in China and Korea, at least one of which found solid evidence that his followers had acclaimed him to be the “Second Coming Christ”. I’ve also heard from two inside sources that his organizations engage in widespread unethical and perhaps illegal practices beyond what I’ve outlined previously.

In other words, there’s a certain irony here. The WEA has declared itself to be so orthodox that it may pronounce authoritatively on the orthodoxy of others; while at the same time, the man who seems to largely control it may have followers who think he’s the Second Coming Christ. If I were in Wycliffe’s shoes, and wanted a respected, neutral arbiter whose judgment and reputation were beyond question, I don’t think that I would have selected the WEA. I have no evidence that the WEA has a particular dog in this fight: but neither is it clear to me that its leadership is in a position to sit in judgment on anybody’s orthodoxy.

PostScript:

On my side, trying to weigh the limited evidence I have as best as I can, my initial take is that the instances I’ve seen of the WBT/SIL approach to translation certainly don’t rise to the level of heresy, nor are they a particular threat to Trinitarian orthodoxy, but they’re nevertheless at least a little troubling. Folks like Eugene Nida, who advocate a “dynamic equivalence” theory of translation, have a point, that all images of God are partial, and that translations which create incorrect impressions may not be helpful. That idea, of course, is not original with Nida, but goes back (at least) to the analogia entis of Thomas Aquinas. In other words, because I understand what Wycliffe is doing, even if I disagree with them and don't think it's terribly helpful, I'm having a hard time being as emotionally invested in the fight as the folks I've talked to from, say, the Biblical Missiology group.

Still, I think that the plain sense of Scripture, not to mention the history of Christian theology, makes it clear that certain images (not just certain texts) have canonical status, and that when there are translational or cultural difficulties, a good footnote or explanation is better than changing the canonical images altogether. This is especially true when engaging with Muslims who have already been told that the Bible has been subject to manipulation and corruption. I actually liked what the SIL folks did in the "Lives of the Prophets", by having the narrator engage in an explanatory dialogue with a member of the audience in the middle of the retelling of the nativity story.

Narrator (reading from Luke 1:26-27): God, the praised and exalted, sent the angel Gabriel, upon him be peace, to the village called Nazareth, in the region of Galilee in northern Palestine.   He sent him to a virgin girl who was engaged to a man named Joseph from the lineage of our master David, upon him be peace.  The girl’s name was Mary.

Audience Member (interrupting): Good leader, not to interrupt your talk, but we know that there are people who say of our master Isa [i.e. Jesus], that he is the Son of God.  I beg forgiveness from God for speaking like this!!!  I don’t understand why they say this thing! 

Narrator: It is known that this is an extremely important thing to them.  You must know that this [kind of] talk is a title for the awaited Messiah.  [His] birth doesn’t mean a [natural] birth from a woman.  The purpose [of this] is that God, the praised and exalted, chose our master Isa to be the king over the Lord’s Kingdom [lit. the Lordly kingdom] which He promised in the time of the prophets.  He [i.e. Isa] is the agent/deputy who became God’s Caliph over the people.  Because of this we can say that he is God’s Caliph in place of “Son of God” because God put him over the Lord’s Kingdom.   Good!  When they call him God’s Caliph it is certain that he is someone important [lit. big] among the people.  Yes, Oh Mutlaq [name of the man the narrator is speaking to], may the audience not take offense [that I singled you out and did not mention every one by name] while we read the Honorable Injil [i.e. the New Testament].  Surely our master Isa was originally the word of God that became a human in the virgin Mary’s womb.  This is for the purpose of expressing the glorious nature of God.

The translation's mistake was not in providing an explanation, but in immediately afterwards abandoning the rich and complex imagery implicit in υιος του θεου and switching to a different image (“Caliph of God”) that came bundled with a completely different set of translational and cultural problems. I don't think you can become truly Christian in your thinking without a great deal of pondering on all the concepts inherent in the phrase “Son of God”. Translations which try to avoid any difficulties associated with that image may make it more difficult for their readers to truly grasp and be transformed by the Gospel message.

Another way to put it is to say that a C5 missional strategy and related translation philosophies have an unhelpful understanding of culture. The SIL translations in question seem to assume that a given society's culture is all-pervasive and all-consuming, that there is virtually no common human nature underlying the various cultural norms, and that it is practically impossible to learn or understand new concepts. This certainly doesn't seem to be the Biblical view, and in an increasingly globalized world, it’s directly contradicted by the facts on the ground. It's a mistake to make such an idol of culture, for one of the purposes of the Gospel is, in fact, to change each and every culture into which it comes in contact. This is at least as true for our own culture as for Muslim cultures, and the difficulties that make it difficult for Muslims to truly hear the Gospel have painful parallels right here in the US. There are always points of contact and points of critique whenever the Gospel enters a culture: new conceptual frameworks must be learned, existing concepts must be transformed, and some old concepts must be abandoned in their entirety. If our presentation of the Gospel neglects either the points of contact or the points of critique, we’ve done a disservice not just to the Gospel but also to those who hear it.

[Edit 26 July 2012 – I initially stated that the WEA had moved their offices to NYC in 2007. In an email, Geoff Tunnicliffe pointed out that the WEA had not moved their offices to NYC until 2010, and another source confirmed that date. It turns out that I had misinterpreted a press release. The press release stated that the WEA had opened an office in NYC (co-located with the EAPC) in 2007; I incorrectly took that to mean that that is when they moved their offices down from Canada. I was wrong, and I’ve corrected the date above.]

IBTimes is planning for growth

Ann Brocklehurst has posted an interesting email from Jonathan Davis, one of the heads of IBTimes. (And IBTimes, it should be remembered, is one of the organizations closely associated with David Jang, the shadowy founder and effective head of the kinda shady Olivet University, which tried to purchase my alma mater, Bethany University.)

A sample of the email:

Over the next days and weeks we will be morphing our singular operation of the IBTimes newspaper into the IBT Group, multiplying our brand portfolio with the addition of several specialty publications. These changes will allow us to segment our diverse readers to better serve their needs with more refined, focused content, products and services.

This model opens up opportunity to reach readers across a broader spectrum of tastes and interests, and penetrate markets previously inaccessible. More importantly, it will allow the IBTimes newspaper to focus on its core readership of influencers and professionals as our group’s flagship publication.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a media company trying to grow. But as I’ve continued to hear unsettling things about David Jang’s organization (I’ve now talked to three people involved with the group), and as the evidence has mounted that they operate with surprisingly lax ethical standards for a Christian organization, it’s worth paying attention to what they’re up to.

Olivet fails to close escrow on Bethany University

Well, this is big news. The Northern California-Nevada District of the Assemblies of God just sent out this press release:

Bethany University Chairman of the Board, Reverend James Braddy, has announced that the sale of the Bethany Campus in Scotts Valley to Olivet University failed to close escrow on April 17, 2012. Therefore the sales agreement is no longer in force and the campus is back on the market. Reverend Braddy stated that the original agreement called for escrow to close on November 30, 2011. Olivet University had requested three extensions. In each case, Olivet was unable to perform according to the mutually agreed upon contract. Negotiations for a fourth extension did not prove acceptable to either Olivet or Bethany. The last agreed upon extension ended at 5:00 p.m. April 17, 2012, with Olivet University unable to meet the mutually accepted terms of sale.

Bethany has offered to lease the campus to Olivet University until the close of the school year. Bethany will aggressively be marketing the campus with a hoped for sale by the end of summer. The Board of Trustees regrets the failure to successfully negotiate the sale to Olivet University as it hoped this would have kept a viable Christian College in Scotts Valley.

William Wagner made some comments to the Santa Cruz Sentinel yesterday that made it sound like the deal might still happen:

Dr. William Wagner, Olivet's president, also declined to elaborate, saying only that "the whole thing is still open because there are a lot of different things we're still negotiating," and that Olivet is "not leaving anytime soon."

But this press release makes it sound like the deal is finished, for all practical purposes. Given all the concerns that have been raised about Olivet University, I can’t say that I’m disappointed, though I know that this puts the NCN District in a pretty tough spot, and of course isn’t very good news for Bethany’s creditors either. I should be clear that I don’t care who the District sells the campus to – I’d be fine with the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh setting up a commune there if it got the District out of a tight spot. My objection was never to the purchase of the campus, but rather to a questionable organization assuming Bethany’s identity and heritage. I’m breathing somewhat easier now it appears that won’t happen.

Reluctant Confirmation

I was called tonight by someone associated with Olivet. I don’t want to pick on him too much, so I’ll leave him anonymous for now. Not surprisingly, they’re a little unhappy with some of the things I’ve been saying about them (both here, and on the Bethany Alumni Facebook forums), and he wanted to ask me to be as balanced and fair as I could. Of course, I hope I’m doing that already, but he had a specific request, which I was happy to oblige. (It had to do with posting a link to Hokuto Ide’s yamayamakotowatcher blog to the Bethany FB group, to even up an earlier link I’d posted to the pseudonymous Davidian Watcher blog. Background: DW is convinced David Jang is a dangerous heretic; Hokuto Ide is convinced that DW is a malicious nutcase; and so it goes.)

During the course of our conversation, I asked the Olivet representative about one of the charges I leveled in my last blog post, namely, that the EAPCA had been engaging in dishonest and unethical promotional practices by hiring an offshore company to generate fake “Likes” for their Facebook page. It’s always possible that there’s a reasonable explanation for the evidence I’d found, and I was curious to see if I’d missed something. After all, I suppose it’s possible that the Romanian company ran the fake “Like” campaign without authorization, or maybe some overzealous SEO guy from Deographics (one of their web design firms) ordered it up and has since been smacked down. So I wanted to know if Olivet could offer some explanation beyond, “We’re slimy weasels.”

Our conversation went something like this (abbreviated somewhat, but pretty close):

Me: “Did you know about the fraudulent ‘Likes’ before you read about them in my blog?”
Him: “Fraudulent implies something criminal. That word is too strong for what you describe.”
Me: “Maybe you’re right. Did you know about the unethical and dishonest ‘Likes’ before you read about them?”
Him: “You’re talking about the EAPCA. I don’t work for them.”
Me: “You work right next to them, in the same office, for Pete’s sake. Did you know about those dishonest ‘Likes’?”
Him: “What’s wrong with working in the same office? You seem to think there’s something sinister about it.”
Me: “Nah, of course there’s nothing wrong with it. But did you know about those dishonest ‘Likes’? Yes or no.”
Him: “I can’t answer that.”

I learned two things from this exchange. The first is that obviously, yes, he must have known about them. Without belaboring the point, otherwise why all the evasion? Why not just answer the question with a straightforward denial? “No, I don’t know anything about it, but we’re looking into it, and I’ll let you know what we find.” That would have settled me down just fine (for the moment).

The second thing is that, to his credit, he didn’t want to lie outright, and was rightly embarrassed they got caught. I’ve worked with plenty of folks in my day who would have lied, and wouldn’t have been embarrassed. The fact that he insisted on telling the truth, if not precisely the whole truth, indicates that whatever I may think about David Jang’s organizations in general, my interlocutor was not just a slimy weasel. I was glad to see that. He still has a sense of shame; and that means there’s hope.

Still Wondering What’s Up With Olivet University

It’s coming up on a year now since Bethany University, my alma mater, finally ran out of money and was forced to close its doors. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the Bethany alumni were initially quite excited to hear that another Christian school, David Jang’s Olivet University, had agreed to buy the campus and continue our school’s mission. But then we started noticing weird things about how the transition was being managed, and started hearing even weirder things. In the first place, it was a little odd that Olivet wanted to purchase the Bethany name along with the campus. I loved Bethany, but it’s not as if a tiny denominational school that shares a Biblical name with half-a-dozen other Christian colleges had any particular value as a brand. We’re not talking Harvard here, or even Wheaton. So that had the alumni scratching our heads. But then, when Olivet first put up their new Bethany.edu website, they baldly mischaracterized their acquisition of the campus, stating inaccurately that they had been around for 90 some years, and that they were Bethany. Not to put too fine a point on it, that was a lie, and it made nearly everyone associated with Bethany pretty uncomfortable. Eventually, after it became clear that they weren’t going to be able to make this claim without being challenged, Olivet agreed to change the language on the Bethany website; and now if you read the site carefully, you can tell that it’s not actually the same school (though it still has things like “Since 1919” on the home page – which, I hasten to say, is not true).

OK, so that’s some of the background. But it’s worth noting that while I was doing my research into Olivet last September, I kept turning up all sorts of weird little facts that I had trouble putting into a coherent picture. For starters, one of the Bethany alumni noticed one day that the new Bethany website had a “policies and procedures” page with this text on it:

Non-Constructive Negative Statements about University of Phoenix Faculty or Administrators: Comments or forum posts that make libelous statements or aggressively attack faculty or administrators, in general or by name, are not permitted.

Commercial Posts and Solicitations: Posts containing commercial content or solicitations are not permitted. This extends to students seeking to drive traffic to their own, non-University of Phoenix -affiliated websites and/or commercial ventures.

Note the references to the “University of Phoenix”. In other words, this page was lifted straight from the corresponding page on the University of Phoenix website, and whoever brought it across forgot to do a search-and-replace.

This faux-pas got discussed at length in the Bethany Alumni Facebook forums, and apparently someone from Olivet was paying attention, because by late that afternoon, all references to the “University of Phoenix” had been replaced by “Bethany University”. (And by now, six months later, they seem to have been removed altogether.)

I’ve thought a lot since then about whether there was anything significant about this particular misstep. Some folks on the Bethany forums were indignant, saying that it seemed to violate Olivet’s own honor code. Maybe; but at the same time, I’m a big fan of not doing more work than you have to, and if I was putting together a set of policies for a university, I can’t imagine a better place to start than with a set of tried and tested policies from a similar institution. It’s not as if this was being submitted to an instructor for academic credit, or to a journal to be published. Furthermore, as I’ve acknowledged earlier, Olivet was under significant pressure to get this deal closed, and closed quickly. In the process, they did, in fact, manage to get a great deal accomplished in a brief period of time, and it would be surprising if they hadn’t made some mistakes along the way.

But there does seem to be a different sort of significance to the mistake. In most academic institutions, policies like this, even if they're initially borrowed from somewhere else, go through a long process of review, argument, debate, revision, and finally, approval. And only after that process would it get posted to the website. The fact that "University of Phoenix" was still in the text shows that the process for creating this particular policy was rather different. A reasonable assumption is that an Olivet manager told some poor web designer, "We need some text to throw up in this particular slot, and fast. Go find something."

So is there anything wrong with that? Well, I think there might be, but it lies less in the details of this particular mistake than in an overall pattern that I’ve noticed on the websites of Olivet and especially its sponsor, the Evangelical Assembly of Presbyterian Churches in America. I don’t so much mind the fact that Olivet copied its policies from somewhere else (I've done that for internal policies before), but it seems rather odd that their process for coming up with them was so clearly disconnected from the organic life of the institution. They didn't create a policy because the university needed a policy. It looks very much like they created (well, copied) a policy because they wanted people on the outside to think, "Oh, Olivet has a policy for this."

And I’ve found evidence of that approach in all sorts of different places. The EAPCA website is an interesting case study in this regard. It repeatedly portrays the EAPCA denomination as a dynamic, thriving institution, with a rich, vibrant life. It has resources for congregations. It talks about planting churches. It describes a thriving “I Love Jesus Youth Ministry”. It advertises speakers who can come visit your church. It talks about a wide range of publications available for folks to access.

But when you dig just a little deeper, it all gets a mite strange. As I’ve been perusing the EAPCA website, I keep having the nagging feeling that a Stepford Wife is peering over my shoulder. The thing you realize pretty quickly is that nobody would ever actually use this site. For instance, there’s no place to actually order the periodicals that the site advertises. There are a couple of email addresses which you can supposedly use to order these magazines – but emails to at least some of those addresses bounce, and the rest go unanswered. The page that describes the speakers who can come to your church is very vague and general, and gives no way to actually request a speaker. The resources on the “I Love Jesus Youth Ministry” lead either to dead pages, or to sites that don’t have anything to do with the EAPC. And most astonishingly of all, there’s no phone number anywhere on the site, even on the “Contact Us” page.

And there are other weird things beyond that. For starters, every one of their position papers was explicitly lifted from other denominations (usually the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, but one from the Assemblies of God). The description of their “Presbyterian Heritage” is puzzlingly vague, and manages to avoid the obvious question, “In what sense is the EAPC actually connected to this heritage?” I haven’t been able to find any of the periodicals they describe referenced anywhere else.

Now, most small, new denominations that I’m familiar with got started organically, when a particular pastor has a particular vision or style or message, and over a decade or two, that vision spreads informally via the planting of new churches and the growth of existing ones. Eventually, the problems and possibilities inherent in any large, dynamic movement come to the fore, and the churches in question decide – often quite reluctantly – to organize themselves more formally. This was certainly what happened with the Assemblies of God, and more recently has been the case with groups like The Vineyard and Calvary Chapel. You can also see it in its incipient phases in the variety of churches that have sprung out from Mars Hill or Applegate Christian Fellowship. The life and growth come first; the denomination comes next; and the website, if any, comes last of all, in service to the pre-existing life of the denomination.

But that doesn’t appear to be what’s happened with the EAPCA. On the contrary, I get the overpowering impression from the EAPCA website that the ordo websitis was something like this: “We really ought to have a denomination. Denominations should have a website. Let’s get working on that website.”As a result, the website mostly seems to be a large and rather clumsy advertisement for a denomination that someone was hoping would spring magically into existence. That’s why the website seems to have very little connection to any actual denominational life: the website is more real than the denomination it describes.

But there’s more. So next, take a look at the EAPCA’s Facebook page, and more specifically, at the statistics page that summarizes its “Likes”. As of 4/10/12, this is what it looked like:

Notice how it has almost precisely 1500 likes each day, lasting for precisely seven days, and then stopping? And almost nobody talking about them? That particular pattern is a sure sign of what is sometimes called a “Like Farm”. In other words, by far the most likely explanation is that somebody at the EAPCA paid a company (presumably in Romania) to generate 1500 fake “Likes”, so that the EAPCA would look like it was bigger and more important than it was. (Probably only 1500 total "Likes" are listed, rather than, ~10,500, because Facebook caught them at it and trimmed all the rest from some of their stats, though not all.) For a good comparison, check out the stats page for my old denomination, the PCUSA, which is at least 100 times larger than the EAPC, maybe more. It has fewer clicks per day, but the pattern indicates that they’re clearly organic. (Edit 4/12/12 – I also found that another domain associated with David Jang, http://ibplace.com/, has an identical pattern of fake “likes” on Facebook: 1500 a day for one week, with Romania as their primary source.)

Now, this is disturbing, right? Granted, this technique is de rigeur for slimy companies trying to cheat Google and Facebook, but it’s pretty surprising to find a Christian denomination engaging in outright click fraud. Perhaps we should be grateful that they were so clumsy about it. But it confirms the impression I gathered from the EAPCA and Olivet websites, that they’re trying very hard to make themselves look bigger and more important than they really are. And apparently they’re willing to go so far as to engage in unethical methods to create that impression.

[Edit 4/14/12 – It looks like both the EAPCA and IBPlace Facebook pages have been taken down. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this was done out of embarrassment at having been caught cheating.]

OK, well, that’s interesting. But there’s more.

One of the things that you realize pretty quickly when you talk to folks at Olivet is that they’re very proud of the fact that they’ve been accepted for membership into the World Evangelical Alliance. And, indeed, that’s nothing to sneeze at. The WEA has been around in one form or another since the 1840’s, and can count among its past leaders such Evangelical luminaries as Harold J. Ockenga and John Stott. When the Assemblies of God leadership first presented the offer from Olivet to assume Bethany’s campus and brand, they trumpeted the fact that Olivet was a member of the WEA (presumably this had been pointed out to them). And Olivet prominently displays their membership in the WEA on their website. The Christian Post (one of the numerous media organizations associated with Olivet) has a big story on the initial acceptance of the Chancellor and former President of Olivet, David Jang, onto the WEA board back in 2007. And there’s lots more, but suffice to say, Olivet’s membership in the WEA has been a big deal for them.

But then the story gets just a little odd. It turns out that the WEA hasn’t just accepted the EAPCA as a member organization; it looks like it may have practically become an Olivet subsidiary. For instance, the WEA website shows that they have three different US offices. But it turns out that two of these offices actually share mailing addresses with one or more Olivet-affiliated institutions, and the third office is less than half a mile from the EAPCA headquarters.

WEA Office	Olivet/EAPCA Office	Map
74 Trinity Place Suite 1400 New York, NY 10006	EAPCA 6 Barclay Street 4th Floor New York, NY 10279
1605 US Route 11 Kirkwood, NY 13795	Olivet World Assembly 1605 US Route 11 Kirkwood, NY 13795
125 Bethany Drive Scotts Valley, CA 95066 (You can read about the opening of this last office here.)	Bethany University  800 Bethany Drive Scotts Valley, CA 95066

And if you check around, you can see that new Chief of Staff at the WEA is a man named Chris Chou; he also happens to be the ex-director of the Jubilee College of Music (another Olivet-associated institution) and a member of the leadership at Olivet University New York.  Less obvious, but still interesting: the CEO of IBTimes, a business connected to David Jang, is a man named Etienne Uzac; he is presumably connected in some way with the Marion Uzac who is (or was) the press secretary of the WEA.

On top of that, it appears as if the WEA website is now actually controlled and managed by the Olivet family. David Jang’s organization apparently has leased some rackspace at an XO communications hosting site in Fremont, CA, which is where all of their web servers are located. They’ve got hundreds of domains hosted there from their dozens of media companies; and it turns out that this same subnet is exactly where the worldea.org website is hosted as well.

And I have one more detail to add. I was recently contacted by someone inside Olivet whom I’m going to try to keep confidential. This person told me that David Jang actually funded the WEA’s move from Canada to their conveniently close New York offices, and continues to provide a significant portion of the WEA’s operating budget. My source also tells me that David Jang has stated that he intends to take over the WEA and to merge it into his organization. Apparently, like Bethany, the WEA had been in financial difficulties for some time (you can get a sense of that here), before David Jang stepped in to rescue them, so it looks like he may have the leverage to accomplish this.

So as it turns out, then, the WEA isn’t really an independent organization which can independently vouch for David Jang and Olivet and the EAPCA. Rather, it looks to be yet another mainstream evangelical organization which David Jang is in the process of, well, taking over. He’s funding them. He’s put one of his lieutenants in charge of day-to-day operations. He now runs their website. He’s moved their offices right next to his. It’s maybe even a little creepy.

So what’s going on here?

Well, that’s hard to say. If I had to give my considered impression, it would be that these guys are trying very hard to do something, and they think that that something would be easier if they had the respectability that came from being a denomination. And from owning the oldest Pentecostal university in the United States. And from controlling the oldest Evangelical organization in the world. But it’s the something that all this is about which still eludes me. Perhaps they’re just trying very hard to carry out the Great Commission, and all this stuff which looks so strange from the outside is just their way of doing it. But I can’t quite shake the feeling that maybe there’s something more sinister going on. I’m still just asking questions, not making accusations, and my intuition might very well be wrong. But I have to say, all this continues to feel weird to me. These guys are trying too hard.

And that leads me to the topic of my next blog post. As I mentioned above, I was recently contacted by someone inside David Jang’s organization. What this individual had to say was pretty fascinating – among other things, our conversations confirmed that my take on the EAPCA website was spot-on – and if it’s true, it’s also pretty worrying. I’ll try to write up some of it over the next day or two.

P.S. A journalist by the name of Ann Brocklehurst has an interesting theory about what the folks at the IBTimes might be up to, namely, using early press access to “locked-up” government data to manipulate markets. I think she’s pretty clearly discounting the Christian angle too much – reporters in general don’t get religion – but her theory is interesting as far as it goes, though I should be clear that all she has so far are just suspicions.

A Welcome Update from Olivet

On the Bethany Alumni forums today, someone challenged my constant harping on how Olivet had been framing their connection with Bethany University by saying, in effect, “Well, what do you want them to say?”

That was a very fine question, and after some thought, this is what I came up with:

In 2011, Bethany University had to announce its closure and submitted its teach-out plan. However, Bethany made an appeal for Olivet University to continue the mission of training ministry-bound men and women in Santa Cruz. Olivet University fully affirms the mission and the heritage of Bethany, and feels privileged to continue in the tradition of ministerial-based education that Bethany pioneered. The Bethany that was founded in 1919 has closed its doors, but with the full blessing of the Assemblies of God, the mantle has been passed to a new generation and to a new university. We chose retain the name "Bethany University" precisely to honor that heritage.

After I posted it, and various folks had the opportunity to read and comment on it, I forwarded it to Nate Tran, Olivet’s Dean of Administration, and asked if he’d be willing to post something like that up on the website. I was quite pleased when he responded quickly, and said that they’d be willing to make the appropriate changes. A few minutes later, the website had been updated. This is very good news from my perspective, and I’d like to thank Olivet for working with the alumni on this.  We all wish Olivet the very best as they endeavor to serve our common Lord; and it’s my hope and prayer that their students experience the same divine blessings at 800 Bethany Drive that so many thousands of Bethany students before them did.

Follow-up on Olivet University

Tonight, Bethany University breathed its last. Bethany had already closed its doors earlier this summer, but just a few hours ago, they held the final memorial service in Craig Chapel. Folks from all over the country came to attend, and hundreds more watched via a live stream. There was much laughter, there were many tears, and I don’t think anybody who saw it was unmoved.

Towards the end of the service, the president of Olivet University, William Wagner, spoke memorably for a few minutes. I enjoyed his stories, and I appreciated and strongly affirm the vision he expressed, of reaching the world for Christ through the wide range of new technologies and media that have revolutionized society over the last two decades. Bethany was a lovely school in many ways, but nobody could have claimed (with a straight face) that it was on the cutting edge of technology or media. There’s no doubt that Olivet is much further down this road than Bethany was or could ever have gone. (And of course, it was very generous of Olivet to donate what is now their chapel for this final memorial service. Folks from Bethany who worked with the staff and students from Olivet in the run-up to the service said that they were invariably helpful, gracious and hard-working.)

Dr. Wagner’s was actually the second Olivet voice I’ve heard recently. A few hours after my last post, the Dean of Administration from Olivet, Nate Tran, gave me a call, to discuss my concerns. I appreciated his attempt to reach out to me, and we talked for nearly an hour. On the whole, the call was productive, though somewhere in the middle it reached a remarkable low point, when Mr. Tran said that his “superiors” had instructed him to warn me that if I didn’t remove or rewrite my post, they would be forced to consider legal action. As you can imagine, that didn’t do much to help the tone of the call, and my response was Christ-like only in the sense that it perhaps faintly resembled the Christ who cleansed the temple. I may have done some shouting. (Take note: if you’re ever responsible for reaching out to thoughtful critics of your organization, it’s very bad form to start by threatening to sue them. All it’s gonna do is make folks even more suspicious.)

That interlude aside, however, our conversation was cordial and helpful, and I found Mr. Tran to be a reasonable interlocutor. I didn’t take notes during the call, but in general, I think it would be fair to say that he expressed three primary concerns about my post.

(1) His first concern was that my post described Olivet as “unaccredited”. He contended that this wasn’t accurate, and indeed, depending on what you mean, he’s right. Accreditation is a reasonably complex topic, but I’ll summarize (inadequately) by saying that there are roughly four different levels of “academic accreditation” in the United States: (1) entirely unaccredited; (2) accredited by an organization that isn’t recognized by CHEA or the USDE; (3) accredited by any of a fairly large number of bodies that are recognized by the CHEA and USDE; and (4) accredited by one of a very small number of “regional accreditation organizations”. In my experience, when folks in academia talk about a school being “accredited”, they usually mean #4, i.e., regionally accredited. They often lump schools from categories 1-3 into roughly the same boat, and use the term “unaccredited” to describe them all (which is why I originally used that term). The reason for this blunt approach is fairly simple: regionally accredited schools will generally only recognize coursework or degrees from other regionally accredited schools. If you go to a school in category #3, you can get financial aid from the US government; but your degree or coursework will typically only transfer to other schools if they come from a school in category #4. There may be exceptions; but they will tend to be exceptions.

With that in mind: Bethany was accredited by WASC, a regional accreditation body, and hence fell into category #4; Olivet is accredited by the “Association for Biblical Higher Education”, and falls into category #3. In other words, technically, yes, Olivet is accredited. However, from a practical perspective, what this means is that Olivet provides some, but by no means all the benefits of what is usually meant by an “accredited” school. Hence, before you decide to go there, you need to think carefully about what you plan to do afterwards.

Because Mr. Tran had a good point on this one, I’ve updated my previous post.

(2) Mr. Tran’s second concern was that my post didn’t accurately characterize the nature of the changes to the Bethany website. His understanding, he said, was that these changes had been purely cosmetic (new colors and pictures, that sort of thing), and that the content hadn’t been touched: and that’s why it still presented the “1919” Bethany history. I expressed some doubts about this while we were still on the phone, and a bit of investigation afterwards showed that he was demonstrably wrong on this point. You can verify this yourself if you visit the last version of the Bethany website on the Wayback Machine, and compare it to the current version. Among numerous other differences, the new website lists a whole bunch of degrees  that Bethany never offered, but which are effectively the same degrees that Olivet offers. It describes a Center for Information Technology that never existed at Bethany, but is featured prominently on Olivet’s website. The "e-Library" it describes is quite clearly the Ralph D. Winter Library at Olivet, not the Wilson Library at Bethany. And so forth.  In other words, the institution it was describing was clearly Olivet – except when it came to Bethany’s history and heritage, which it attempted to appropriate as its own.

Since this was an easily verifiable inaccuracy, my assumption is that Mr. Tran was simply misinformed.

(3) Mr. Tran’s third concern was that my post didn’t do justice to the very fluid situation in which Bethany and Olivet now find themselves. As I’ve said previously, I’m effectively an outsider, and have no first-hand knowledge of the state of the purchase; moreover, I don’t want to reveal anything that Mr. Tran may have wished to remain confidential. Suffice to say, that although Olivet is in fact leasing the campus from the Bethany Corporation, and has made a fairly significant down payment, the transaction is by no means complete. Furthermore, because the Bethany campus is facing imminent foreclosure by the banks who hold its debt, Olivet has been forced to move very quickly. Anybody who is familiar with the traditional pace of academic institutions will know that in a traditional university, it would be impossible to perform the requisite due diligence, raise the necessary funds, close the transaction, move the entire school, and then start classes, in anything less than two or three years. Olivet has had something like three months. Given both the speed and the complexity of the situation, Mr. Tran said, Olivet’s communications have been intentionally sparse: they haven’t wanted to provide premature, incorrect or confusing information. And although he didn’t actually say this, I’ll add on his behalf that, given this situation, it would be quite surprising if some significant mistakes didn’t occur in the communication that was provided.

All this is true. One indication of just how true is that since my conversation with Mr. Tran, Olivet has updated the “About” page on the Bethany website. The previous version of the page that Olivet had created (you’ll have to take my word for this) made no reference to the acquisition by Olivet, or to the fact that Bethany had actually closed its doors in the summer of 2011. Without any caveats, it presented the Bethany advertised by the website as being the Bethany which had opened its doors in 1919.  And that was, to put it graciously, entirely inaccurate.

Currently, however, that page reads:

Bethany University was founded in 1919, originally called Glad Tiding Bible Institute, as a training center for an urban San Francisco ministry. The nearly 100-year-old school is deeply rooted in rich Christian tradition and its long history has set Bethany as a highly respected institution in carrying out Christian mission.

Throughout the years, Bethany has gone through several transitions. The school relocated to its new home in Scotts Valley in 1950 and changed its name to Bethany Bible College 5 years later. In 2005, the Bible College expanded into a university and was named Bethany University.

In 2011, Bethany University had to announce its closure and submitted its teach-out plan.

However, Bethany made an appeal for Olivet University to continue the mission of training ministry-bound men and women in Santa Cruz. Olivet University has since transformed Bethany into an online university to provide greater accessibility to educational resources for churches in the global mission field.

Bethany has re-emerged under the management of Olivet University. Both institutions continue to provide world-class theological education together.

There’s no doubt that this is more accurate. But it’s still not very accurate.

To start with a minor point, it’s laughable that either of two tiny denominational schools (of which one has never achieved regional accreditation, and the other was perpetually on the verge of losing it) could provide a “world-class theological education”. I loved Bethany, I loved my professors, and they gave me a fine theological education, but none of them would have claimed that it was world-class. Still, I’ll forgive that as standard marketing-speak (we all expect marketers to lie, don’t we?), though I do wish Christian institutions had more respect for reality.

But it’s worth highlighting the rest of the paragraph in which that claim is found:

Bethany has re-emerged under the management of Olivet University. Both institutions continue to provide world-class theological education together.

These sentences strongly imply that Bethany is still around, that it has merged in some sense with Olivet, and that under new management, basically the same institution is carrying on. But that is highly misleading, to say the least. I honestly don't know what legal ground Olivet is on: from everything I’ve heard, Olivet is merely purchasing some of Bethany’s assets, not the actual entity itself. Still, it’s possible that I’ve been misinformed, and that Olivet is actually buying the actual Bethany corporation. So legally, technically, it’s possible that they may have the right to say that the Bethany which started in 1919 is still around and under new management. But even so: I’ve been asking around, and I’m only aware of one former staff member from Bethany (the groundskeeper) who will be making the transition to Olivet. Bethany’s WASC accreditation no longer exists, and wouldn’t transfer in any event. None of Bethany’s degree programs are being offered. I’m not aware of any former students who are attending. To the best of my knowledge, none of the former faculty will be teaching at Olivet. To take just one example of just how closed Bethany is: if you’re a Bethany alumni and need a transcript, you’ll need to order it from a different AG school, Vanguard University, which is taking over Bethany’s records: because there isn’t anybody left from Bethany who can fulfill those requests. You won’t be ordering that transcript from Olivet, or from whatever this new institution that might be named Bethany is. As I said before, this new school will share with my alma mater nothing more than a name and a campus.

Given that the Bethany I graduated from has shut its doors, fired all its employees, sent its students to other schools, is no longer in operation, and has for all intents and purposes come to a grinding and painful halt, I don’t see how it's possible to say, "Bethany has re-emerged under the management of Olivet University. Both institutions continue to provide world-class theological education together."

In other words, I appreciate the fact that Olivet, after getting caught in a blatant misrepresentation, has attempted to correct that misrepresentation. I remain concerned, however, that even this correction is still badly misleading.

So what does all this mean?

Well, I’m honestly not sure. As I said previously, the hypothesis implied by the Davidian Watcher blog, that Olivet and its associated institutions are just a front for a dangerous cult, simply doesn’t hold water. You don’t get a life-long Southern Baptist missionary to be president of your school unless you’re reasonably orthodox. But that doesn’t mean Olivet might not have other significant cultural and institutional problems. Having precious little first-hand information about Olivet, I need to reiterate that I’m not qualified to offer anything more than questions. But what I’ve learned since my first post has left me with more of those, including:

1. Why was Olivet so fast to threaten legal action over such an innocuous post? Does it say something significant about their culture, or even about whether they have something to hide? (For what it’s worth, a lawsuit is one of the tactics that the Davidian Watcher blog says they used on him.)
   
2. Why was Mr. Tran misinformed about the nature of the changes to the Bethany website? Was it just normal and innocent communication SNAFU’s? Or was someone intentionally trying to mischaracterize those changes (and hadn’t realized it was possible to check them via the Wayback Machine)? Or somewhere in-between?
   
3. Why does the “corrected” version of the website still present a highly misleading picture of the relationship of Bethany to Olivet? It was already clear that people were paying attention, and cared about what was being communicated. If I’d been in their shoes, I would have gone out of my way to make sure that this page left no inaccurate impressions. They clearly don’t want folks throwing stones: why give critics another opportunity?
   
4. Most speculatively, does all of this imply that Olivet has a culture of disregarding the truth, of treating perception as more important than reality? I’ve worked with folks in the past who possessed a remarkable “reality distortion field” that was very effective in-person, and within the organizations they led – but who were, for precisely that reason, entirely unprepared and unable to deal constructively with critical perspectives from outside the organization. That’s what this reminds me of.

Like I said, no answers, just questions.

I should add one last note.  Last Friday, after my conversation with Mr. Tran, I sent him an email asking for his answers to a variety of questions. I haven’t yet heard back from him, but if I do, and if this is still interesting to anybody besides myself, I’ll try to post and respond to his reply.

[Note from 2011-09-13: Olivet has since updated the language on the Bethany “About” page to a version that I feel is much more accurate. See this post for more details.]

What’s Up With Olivet University?

For as long as I’ve known and followed Bethany University (I graduated from there in 1990), it’s had financial troubles. On the whole, Bethany was a warm, loving place, and I’m grateful for the spiritual and intellectual formation I received there. But its financial difficulties were of long standing (well before I matriculated there in 1986), and they finally came to a head this last summer, when Bethany announced that its search for a white knight who could relieve its $15MM debt burden had failed, and that it was closing its doors for good.

This was very sad, of course, and a number of alumni have expressed ongoing grief about the closure of the school that they’ve known and loved. But this was also problematic for the Northern California/Nevada District of the Assemblies of God for a very different reason. The NCN District had counter-signed for something like $8MM of Bethany’s debt, and when Bethany closed and defaulted on that debt, the assumption was that the district would likely have to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Among other things, this would have meant the closing and sale of many small churches, and it would have hampered the district’s mission for years to come.

Everyone involved, therefore, breathed a huge sigh of relief when Olivet University,  a small, unaccredited ABHE-accredited Christian school located in San Francisco, agreed to purchase the campus, very roughly by assuming Bethany’s existing $15MM debt. Among other things, this meant that the NCN District would not have to declare bankruptcy; and that the Bethany campus, beloved by so many, would continue to serve as a center for Christian formation and ministry. So far, it’s hard not to see the hand of God at work.

So it’s with some trepidation that I find myself asking, “What exactly is Olivet University?” In a very real sense, I have no business asking the question. My formal affiliation with Bethany ended some 21 years ago; and at any rate, that institution is now defunct. And I should be (and am) grateful for any resolution to the NCN District’s financial difficulties that doesn’t involve outright bankruptcy. But there’s been a twist. Apparently Olivet University has received permission from the NCN District to continue business under Bethany’s name. That’s not too weird (Il Giornale did the same thing when it bought Starbucks); but it means that Olivet is now very closely associated with the institution whose name is on my diploma. That piques my interest. And it gets a little stranger.

For one thing, several months after the deal became public, the Olivet University website still doesn’t mention anything about the purchase. Moreover, the folks from Olivet have now put a new Bethany University website up that (as of 9/9/11) doesn’t mention the transition either. And more than that, they’re explicitly claiming to be Bethany University. The degrees they discuss are the degrees offered by Olivet. The library they describe is Olivet’s library. The academic standards they outline are Olivet’s academic standards. But they also claim that they’ve been around since 1919 (when Bethany was founded).  They claim that they used to be Glad Tidings Bible Institute (Bethany’s original name). They claim that they relocated to Scotts Valley in 1950 (when Bethany moved from San Francisco). They claim to be an institution that’s almost 100 years old.

But none of that is true.

When Bethany closed its doors this summer, all the administration, staff and faculty were laid off: and to the best of my knowledge, none of them have been rehired by Olivet. All of Bethany’s students were forced to find other schools: and to the best of my knowledge, none of them will be attending Olivet. When Bethany closed, it immediately and understandably lost its WASC accreditation; and Olivet is not accredited has no regional accreditation. In other words, there are only two things that the original Bethany University and the new Bethany University have in common: the name, and the physical grounds. Consequently, it seems disingenuous at best, and outright false at worst, to claim, without any acknowledgment of the discontinuity, to be Bethany.

And what’s really strange about this is that they didn’t need to handle it this way. There’s no reason that Olivet shouldn’t acknowledge the transition – from my perspective, the fact that a new institution with the same mission has purchased the Bethany campus is worthy of celebration. It’s a great story. It shows how God is still at work. It’s Elijah passing the mantle to Elisha. It’s a wonderful thing.

So why hide it?

I’m not certain of the answer, but one of the disturbing possibilities that occurs to me is, “Because they’ve gotten into the habit of not speaking the absolute truth.” And another is, “Because they’re trying to whitewash something.”

I need to be up-front and say that I have no first-hand knowledge about any of these things. But as I’ve hunted around for more information about Olivet, what I’ve found hasn’t really allayed my suspicions. I certainly haven’t found any smoking gun. But I’ve found a lot of small things that, when put together, show a consistent pattern that’s just a little odd.

• Olivet University is closely associated with a denomination known as the Evangelical Assembly of Presbyterian Churches. This is not the same thing as the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. The EPC is a reasonably small but otherwise well known conservative Presbyterian denomination that is well within the mainstream of evangelical Christianity. Their Wikipedia article has as much information about them as you’d ever want to know. Apart from their own website, however, I can find hardly any direct information about the EAPC. There’s no Wikipedia article. It has no history. I have no idea how many churches it has. In other words, it’s not just small: it’s tiny. There’s nothing wrong with that; but it does raise the question, “Where did they get the $15MM to buy the Bethany campus?”
  
• From its own website, the EAPC seems to be reasonably orthodox and evangelical. But when you read its position papers, say, on divorce and remarriage, or ordination, you’ll find that they were explicitly lifted straight from other denominations (the EPC and Assemblies of God, respectively, in this case). Again, that’s just a little odd. In other words, these position papers didn’t arise organically through the life of a denomination. It’s more like someone said, “We need some position papers to put up on our website. Bob, go find something.”
  
• As I said before, Olivet is very closely associated with the EAPC; so much so, that the two seem to almost be the same organization. For instance, the moderator of the EAPC is Dr. Tom Cowley. Apparently this isn’t a full-time job, as he’s also the Dean of the Olivet College of Business. Again, there’s nothing explicitly wrong with this – it just shows that they’re a very tiny and inbred denomination (if denomination is the right word for it).
  
• Olivet’s Library advertises that they have “150,00 physical and electronic items”. But if you poke around, you find that they’re including things like the (freely available) Christian Classics Ethereal Library in that number, which is disingenuous, to say the least.

Well, whatever. They’re small, they’re trying to appear bigger than they are, they’re getting big money from somewhere. No big deal. But there’s more; and here’s where things start to get a little strange.

• The current Chancellor at Olivet University, and former President, is a man named David Jang. As it turns out, David Jang is a fairly controversial fellow. There’s an entire website – a very strange website, I should add – which is dedicated to convicting him of claiming to be “Second Coming Christ”; and there’s an entirely different website – equally strange – dedicated to clearing him of those charges. Unfortunately, much of the debate seems to take place in various Asian languages, and I don’t trust Google Translate enough to draw any real conclusions from the automatically generated English versions.
  
• At least some websites allege that David Jang used to be a member of Sun Myung Moon’s “Unification Church” (i.e., a “Moonie”), and that in the 1980’s, he was (peripherally?) involved in the fraudulent takeover by the Unification Church of a Methodist seminary in Korea.
  
• Apparently David Jang is a fairly busy individual, because he’s also the founder of (or at least closely associated with) several youth mission organizations, including the Young Disciples of Jesus, and Apostolos Campus Ministry, along with some large for-profit websites, like ChristianPost, ChristianToday, Gospel Herald, and International Business Times. Those mission organizations have generated some controversy, as this extended discussion makes clear. (Basically, several people on the forum say, “I was a part of ACM, and yes, I was taught that David Jang was the Messiah”, while other folks say, “I was a part of ACM, and no, I wasn’t taught that David Jang was the Messiah.” And then it degenerates into the sort of extended but endlessly fascinating paranoid name-calling that should be familiar to any participant on Internet forums.) I should note that Olivet University is closely associated with all of those organizations, as their 2009 Student Handbook makes clear.  (Basically, it lists a whole bunch of David Jang’s ministries and/or companies, and encourages students to work and/or volunteer with them during their time at Olivet.)

And then there’s other stuff that’s not really weird, except maybe in the larger context.

• Olivet University is a Presbyterian school (sort of), but their current president, William Wagner, once presented himself as a candidate for the head of the Southern Baptist Convention. In this ecumenical age, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it certainly indicates that its leadership isn’t closely associated with any particular denomination.
  
• Olivet, the EAPC, and the various organizations associated with David Jang repeatedly go out of their way to stress their ties to mainstream evangelical organizations, such as their membership in the NAE and the World Evangelical Alliance. They call their library the “Ralph D. Winter” library, after the famous missiologist, and prominently advertise the fact that he was there at its opening. I get the impression that Olivet was another, pre-existing Bible college in the Bay Area, before the EAPC took it over in 2000 and stamped it with their own identity. The EAPC gave themselves a name that’s confusingly close to a very different denomination; and the same is true of the ChristianToday website. On top of all this, they’re clearly very eager to assume the mantle and even the identity of Bethany University.

On the whole, reading between the lines, the consistent impression I get of Olivet University and its associated institutions is that they’re eager: especially when it comes to giving folks the idea that they’re bigger and more reputable than they are. The various institutions are all clearly a little inbred, and seem to revolve around David Jang in a manner that’s hard to characterize, but feels a little unsettling. For instance, David Jang and his companies are the obvious source for the $15MM Olivet is spending on Bethany’s campus; but nobody seems to be acknowledging it.

Unlike poor D. W. and his now-abandoned website, I don’t think that Olivet and the EAPC are just a front for the Moonies or some other Korean cult. But they do seem to have a culture of slanting the truth, and sometimes stepping over the line into outright falsehoods (such as their claim to still be the Bethany University that was founded in 1919). Perhaps that’s just a cultural difference between Asian and American Christians: but regardless, it seems unhealthy, and not the sort of straightforward adherence to reality that you’d want in any educational institution, let alone a Christian university. Let’s just say that it’s a significant red flag for me. I hope that the folks assuming the name and identity of my alma mater are worthy of her mission and heritage.

[Edit 9/9/11 – After a conversation this evening with the Dean of Administration at Olivet, I adjusted the parts of my post where I said that Olivet was “unaccredited”. That wasn’t quite accurate: Olivet is indeed accredited by the Association for Biblical Higher Education, and the ABHE’s accreditations are recognized by the USDE and CHEA as legitimate for financial aid status. However, it’s worth noting again that Olivet is not accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, which is the only accreditation that really matters when trying to get your credits to transfer (see http://www.acswasc.org/faq.htm#11). In other words, if you spend two years at Olivet, and decide to transfer to UCSC, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll need to start from scratch.]

[Edit 9/12/11 – I’ve added a follow-up to this post which explores in some detail – perhaps excessive detail – Olivet’s response, and my ongoing concerns and questions.]

[Note 9/13/11 - Olivet has since updated the language on the Bethany “About” page to a version that I feel is much more accurate. See this post for more details.]

[Note 4/12/12 – Some time after I made this post, some of the websites I linked to changed their domain names. I’ve updated the links to point to the newer versions.]