Members of the New Saint Andrews College Class of 2005: Congratulations on completing your studies here at New Saint Andrews and for finishing well. You have done well.

I also want to congratulate and thank your parents here today. Parents, your children have been a delight to us. You have every right to be pleased and proud of your sons and daughters.They have honored your name and their Lord.

The College is very grateful to you parents for having entrusted your children’s higher education to us. Thank you for giving us the privilege both to teach them and to learn from them, for keeping us all in your daily prayers, and for your constant encouragement to the work and ministry of our College.

We are very proud of them, too, and we will miss them a great deal. For us, their departure today is not unlike what you probably faced that day they walked out of your home and headed off to their Moscow captivity. Their leaving the College leaves us with that same unsettling blend of pride and emptiness. You equipped them well to leave home and to make you proud, and it is our hope that we have done the same as they leave our academy.

Graduates, you have been a memorable class. Many of you have distinguished yourselves by your service to the college, the church and our community. You will be missed and long remembered.

At the same time, we are pleased to welcome you to your new status as alumni of the College. You are now numbered among our first 105 graduates. I hope your service to your Alma Mater will surpass the service you rendered while you were matriculating students here. Just as you probably told your own mom several times over the past few years, we now say to you:

“Stay in touch, write often, send money.”                

Now, before we send you off, I charge you, the New Saint Andrews Class of 2005, to shake the foundations of every institution in our culture in the strong name of the Lord and not to grow weary in building on foundation of God’s Word and what you have learned here.                                                             

A.    Shake the Foundations of Education

and help recover a vision for classical Christian education at all academic levels. Secular colleges and universities have convinced Christians that education is for training. But Christians should know better and you are uniquely qualified to help them understand the antithesis in education. Those like you who have been blessed with a classical Christian education now have the privilege of rebuilding a thoroughly Christian education that lasts more than one or two generations, starting in your homes, your churches, and the primary, secondary and post-secondary schools wherever you make your home.

B.   Shake the Foundations of Business

Because Christian education and Christian community is not sustainable as long as businesses themselves fail to raise up the next generations of faithful laborers. Today most businesses look to higher education to solve their research problems, personnel training needs, and more—all conveniently at taxpayer expense, of course. Until Christian businesses (including Christian schools) reform how they raise up the next generations of Christian workers (through business-sponsored apprenticeships, internships, and new employee training programs), they will suffer from their abdication of covenantal responsibility and secularists will dominate the field of business in principle. And businesses will continue to believe the lie that government-funded vocational training is spiritually neutral. Shake the foundations of business today and rebuild them with covenantal integrity.

C.   Shake the Foundations of Government

The most important living German philosopher Jurgen Habermas recently stunned the academic world with his new book, Time of Transitions (2004). Time of Transitions marks a significant, perhaps even radical, break from his previous positions regarding the foundations of good government, political discourse and civil society. Habermas abandons the intellectual and cultural poverty of postmodernism and has a reappraised his previous confidence in humanistic rationality and its capacity to facilitate ethical discourse and civility. Though he still describes himself as a “methodological atheist,” Habermas argues that Christianity—and Christianity alone—is the ultimate foundation for liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy. “To this day,” he writes, “we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.”

As graduates who can affirm Habermas’s conclusion, you must not shrink or cower when secularists, whose God is the State, protest loudly and try to further marginalize the Christian community.  Politics is not our god, and the state is not our hope, but we must recover the covenantal vision of biblical governance. Remember, you serve the King of the Universe.

D.  Shake the Foundations of the Church

You have been given a glimpse of a faithful church community here in Moscow . Cherish that, but do not try to turn the world upside down trying to make Moscows out of other church communities. That would be folly. But follow the examples you have seen of biblical faithfulness: a church unafraid to preach and live the Gospel in a way that has shaken up the surrounding community, and spooked Christ-haters. Too few churches have the courage to do that today. A church that fails to keep troth with her Lord by promoting and supporting Christian education, Christian business reform, and governmental reform cannot be surprised when subsequent generations exchange the nurture and admonition of the Lord for a mess of secularist vocationalism and post-Christian pottage. As leaders in your churches,  you must remember that all students must begin where they are, not where we should have been, and you will need to lead firmly, but  gently, preparing those around you for today’s spiritual warfare.

In sum, you must never forget the antithesis between belief and unbelief. Continue to study so you can recognize the difference. And whatever you do, wherever you go, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

As you leave New Saint Andrews today and travel the paths the Lord has prepared for you, may our Triune God bless you.

Go now with your Alma Mater’s blessing, her love and her prayers and shake the very foundations of this world with the sweet Psalms and thanksgiving of those who bear Christ’s name.