Chapter 1: Maintaining Mission in Multireligious Contexts of Christian Higher Education: A Relational Pluralistic Model

Much work has been done on the issue of optimal student development in higher education. There are marked differences between secular and faith-based universities or colleges and further differences between largely monoreligious and multireligious faith-based providers of higher education. These differences in contexts are reflected in different understandings of the goals of student development and processes of student formation. However, student formation models relevant to secular and monoreligious contexts respectively do not fit the context of multireligious yet faith-based universities or colleges. This chapter reviews the need for a different, pluralistic model, discusses appropriate goals and formative processes within a relational pluralistic model, and suggests some initial ways of applying this proposed model in a Christian college with a significant multicultural and multireligious student body. The model reflects responses of staff at Excelsia College to questions about student formation, with consideration of scholarly work on Christian higher education. Some of the interview data were reported previously in a paper analysing staff understandings of student formation (Gowan & Miner, 2021); this chapter uses other data from the same interviews to propose how the derived model could be applied.