Home Christian News Calvin University Inaugurates New President Amid Growing LGBTQ Tensions

Calvin University Inaugurates New President Amid Growing LGBTQ Tensions

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Wiebe Boer is the new president of Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Photo courtesy of Calvin University

(RNS) — As the son of lifelong missionaries, Calvin University’s new president, whose inauguration is Wednesday (Oct. 26), continues a proud Christian Reformed Church tradition of Dutch Calvinism.

Wiebe Boer, who arrived on the Grand Rapids, Michigan, campus, the last week in June, is the university’s 12th president, succeeding Michael Le Roy, who stepped down after a 10-year term.

A Calvin graduate himself, Boer has lived 30 of his 48 years in Nigeria, where his parents — both born in the Netherlands — served as missionaries.

He will lead the 146-year-old liberal arts university at a difficult point. Over the past decade, the university’s faculty roster and undergraduate admissions have fallen sharply. Its total enrollment of 3,256 students is down from 4,008 in 2012. Last year it eliminated five majors and seven minors, including Chinese, Dutch and German.

In addition, evangelical colleges across the country have seen a widening rift on social and political issues; Calvin is no exception.

The university, which is solely owned by the Christian Reformed Church, is walking a tightrope on sexual orientation.

This summer the Christian Reformed Church in North America voted at its annual synod to codify its opposition to homosexual sex by elevating it to the status of confession, or declaration of faith. That put its faculty, who must sign a statement of faith saying their beliefs align with the church’s historic creeds and confessions, into a difficult spot.

Some faculty have since asked for a “gravamen,” which entitles them to formally declare they struggle with a confessional claim. It’s not yet clear whether the university will approve those individual disagreements with the church’s confession.

Calvin occupies a more center-left position among evangelical colleges. While it forbids premarital sex and defines marriage as between a man and a woman, it allows a support group for LGBTQ students on campus. In the 2020-21 academic year, the school allowed a bisexual student to be elected as student body president.

Still, earlier this year it severed ties to a campus-based research center after one of its employees married a same-sex partner.

RELATED: Christian Reformed Church codifies homosexual sex as sin in its declaration of faith

Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Photo by Andy Calvert, courtesy of Calvin University