Re: the IFB, and only if you dont mind answering questions cjk0301
-I was wondering if you can give some insight into how the church would view suicide...on a earlier post I mentioned that religious scholars seem to be divided on the notion of the sin and existential ramifications of it.
-Re: a pastoral career plan and marriage etc
What percentage of students in such a college are looking at a career in the church? Would there be other career options at the end of your studies? Is the marrying agenda unspoken? Im wondering about the pressures upon a student to follow a path...
Crown College only offers a handful of majors, and almost all of them are for geared toward training young people for full-time ministry. The undergraduate degree programs are in Pastoral Ministry, Youth Ministry, International Missions, (Church) Music, and Education (elementary and secondary). Since I was there, they have also added a "small business" degree and a trade school that focuses on auto mechanics, HVAC, and cosmetology. There is also an associate degree program for office administration, and a program for teaching English as a second language. Only men can do the Pastoral Ministry program, and only women can do the Office Administration program.
There are a few women in the Missions and Youth Ministry programs, but but it is also mostly men. Education is reversed: it is mostly women, but there are some men. I don't know about the business program and the trade school, but even that school exists for the aid of students who may need to be bi-vocational (men ministering in a small church, on a foreign mission field, or in a part-time ministry role) or for women who absolutely must work (as a teacher in a private Christian school or as a secretary in a church office).
The roles are very gendered in the IFB worldview, including at Crown. Generally, women are expected to be housewives and mothers. It's OK for women to work, but definitely not preferred. They definitely cannot be a pastor in a position of "authority" over a man. I would say that 95% or more of the students there plan to be in full-time Christian ministry, and probably 75-80% or more actually move in that direction after college. (In my case, I did not jump directly into a pastoral role because I was not yet married. I left fundamentalism not long after.)
The marrying agenda is unspoken, but it's extremely common. There are definitely kids that leave the school without a spouse or a future spouse, but I would peg the percentage at lower than 20%. In the past, career options outside of IFB ministry were low because the school was unaccredited until very recently. For that reason, the degrees were essentially useless, even in churches outside of the very rigid IFB camp. The school of education may still be unaccredited (they don't want their students teaching in public schools); I'm not really sure about that. The school has sought to address those issues in the past ten years through regional accreditation and the extra trade training.
As for suicide, I don't many Baptist fundamentalists that would consider it a mortal sin (God can forgive anything, so that's good), but I also don't know many fundamentalists who would address it head-on when it occurs. There is definitely an element of shame for the family when suicide occurs.
Mental health issues is generally viewed as more of a character flaw or a "sin" issue, and fundamentalists tend to scoff at psychology and other mental health fields as some sort of liberal/secular indoctrination. Psychological care is very underserved in IFB circles, and counseling practices are usually kept within the church and performed by untrained professionals. If you look up Bob Jones University, Jim Berg, and the GRACE report on Google, you can learn more. (Warning: sexual assault trigger if you go down that path.)
I have known several families who have dealt with suicide, and it is typically kept very quiet, even though a lot of folks basically know what happened. Typically, the family makes a really big deal of what a good Christian the victim was, and never really addresses how they were lost or why. That's a generalization, but a fairly accurate one. Even after a suicide occurs, I have often seen that it is unlikely to change folks' view of mental health as a serious component of a person's well-being. This is not always true, but I have seen it enough to call it a trend within the IFB world. If BS did take his own life, I would imagine we will only hear about it because LE lets us know. The family and college probably will not, if they are consistent with what I have seen. I hope to be wrong if that ends up being the case.
