Partner with NSA

If you can think back over the course of your own life, I suspect that those years from 18 to 22 were some of the most formative. This was when you left home and became responsible for your life. You made decisions about where you would live, what you would study, who you would marry (or maybe not marry), what kind of job you would get, and where you would go to church. And these decisions have had a disproportionate impact on the rest of your life. Those few years really mattered and made a huge difference.

This observation is why a college like New Saint Andrews is strategic. We meet students at the most pivotal moment in their life and, over the course of four years, through the means of a rigorous, Christian, liberal arts education, and a vibrant evangelical community, we mentor them into maturity, graduating leaders who will shape culture under the lordship of Jesus Christ. Because these years are so disproportionately formative in these students’ lives, our labors are strategically focused where we can have the greatest impact for the growth of God’s kingdom.

"We want to build the kind of college that, hundreds of years from now, has become known as the proving grounds for our nation’s evangelical leaders."

Our goal with NSA is to continue to grow in our ability to execute this mission with excellence. We want to build the kind of college that, hundreds of years from now, has become known as the proving grounds for our nation’s evangelical leaders. Scripture warns us about the dangers of bragging about what you think you are someday going to accomplish. I think of Ahab’s great warning to Ben-Hadad, “Let not the one who puts on his armor boast like the one who takes it off,” (1 Kings 20:11). It’s a good warning to save your bragging for after you have done your doing.

But we aren’t bragging. We are simply defining the task that is in front of us. We want to establish a premier Christian liberal arts college in Moscow Idaho, one that is both evangelically faithful and also intellectually rigorous. So far, we have seen God give us great success in building the foundation of this institution. But we have a long way to go as we build the buildings to house this work, hire the faculty to do this labor, and recruit the students that will receive this education.

Over the last several years, we have begun to experience significant growth. Our total enrollment has doubled from just a few short years ago. And I should point out that this growth has been happening at a time when many other Christian colleges are shrinking or failing altogether. God has been very good to us. But we have also been careful in our growth, taking care to not overextend ourselves with our finances.

One thing that I have been continually warned about is the dangers of scaling up too quickly. You can grow so fast that your growth gets you into trouble, leading you to make commitments that you aren’t ready to deliver on. For NSA, the place that we could easily overextend ourselves is in our ability to fund our scholarships. Because we don’t take federal money (no Pell Grants, no federally subsidized student loans), the financial aid that we give to students is funded by us and not the government.

As we scale up, funding these scholarships becomes more and more expensive. In the long run, we would like to have an endowment that would fund these scholarships. And to that end we have begun an endowment that we are looking to build. It is not a lot right now, approximately $150,000, just enough to cover our first endowment funded scholarship. However, as we seek to build this endowment, we are looking to build a pipeline of donors committed to helping fund our scholarships.

This is the idea behind the Reservoir Fund. We are looking for friends of NSA, be they alumni, parents, or just fans of what we are doing, who would be willing to make a small monthly commitment to the college – a small monthly gift of $5, $10, or $15, scheduled as an automatic payment on our giving page. I know that this doesn’t sound like much. But we know that there are people all over the world who are following what we are doing and who want to see this work succeed. And these small gifts add up quite a lot when a larger audience gets behind it. If we can channel this support for the college into a reservoir of scholarship funding, we will put NSA on a new level of fiscal security.

To be clear, this is not a desperate plea from me. We are actually doing fine financially. In fact, I would say that our financial picture is currently the best that I have seen it since becoming president. So this is not about digging us out of a hole. This is about looking down the road and understanding that if we are going to continue to become the college that we want to be, we need to establish a more sustainable way of funding our scholarships.

"And I know that it is a bold move to say that you are building the next college to have this kind of legacy, but I am convinced that faithfulness calls for nothing less than this kind of ambition."

As you look at history, there have been several key institutions that have had a disproportionate impact on history. I was blessed to have been able to study at Oxford University where I saw firsthand the kind of impact that an academic institution can have on a nation. It is crazy when you are in Oxford where you are encountering a historical moment seemingly at every turn. At Oxford, I can point to the mark left by everyone from King Alfred to CS Lewis, from John Owen to Albert Einstein, from Thomas Cranmer to John Donne. A college can be a place like this. And I know that it is a bold move to say that you are building the next college to have this kind of legacy, but I am convinced that faithfulness calls for nothing less than this kind of ambition.

So, would you consider supporting New Saint Andrews College, with a small monthly gift? We are committed to the mission of graduating leaders who shape culture under the lordship of Jesus Christ. If this is something that you would be willing to support, click on the link below and sign up for a small monthly gift. We are very grateful for your support and ask that you please commit our future faithfulness to your prayer.

Thanks for considering this.