Were the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship to agree to the College policy of non-discernment, it would forfeit the means of forming, holding, and making public the Christian beliefs it was trying to preserve. In a word, one cannot both affirm the non-discrimination policy of the College which rejects doctrinal statements, and then plead for the College to give the freedom to require leaders to affirm in behavior and belief the doctrinal statement so rejected.

For the past decade, my wife and I have been the volunteer advisors to the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship (BCF). As reported last week in the New York Times, that relationship will soon come to an end because of Bowdoin’s demand that the fellowship adopt a non-discrimination policy that makes impossible faithful Christian witness.

Bowdoin’s policy comes in the wake of an emerging body of law permitting private and state universities to enforce an all-comers policy on leadership in all student groups. This means that even a student who rejects Christian teaching—on anything from the Trinity, to the Bible, to sexual chastity—can be made a student leader. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Hastings Christian Fellowship v. Martinez, 2010, allows universities to shape student organizations according to the prevailing culture of these institutions, even when doing so would prevent student organizations from adhering to a different view of the world, including one shaped by the teachings and practices of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

We are ministers in a part of the Church that believes that there are doors of entry into the Kingdom of God with dimensions more narrow than those of prevailing culture. Jesus spoke about these doors in the seventh chapter of the first Gospel: “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”

With the law now favoring those who dislike narrow gates, campus ministers must get ready to take their eyes off the prize of campus rooms, campus vans, campus billboards, and campus funding opportunities for Christian activities. We have become far too enamored of these privileges at the cost of losing focus on the access that matters—to the Kingdom through a narrow door. Campus ministers like us will forfeit our passport, turn in our electronic keys, and travel the road to Jerusalem without special privileges. We will conduct campus ministry without a campus, and we can and must do so because of the nature of the Kingdom that we proclaim. It is the way that Jesus traveled.

As a lawyer, I understand the legal arguments which would push back against these trends. I believe in the First Amendment liberties of College students, the contract rights of students to have their student fees applied to religious associations of their own choice, and equal access for Christian students when other religious groups are favored with special privileges such as kosher kitchens. But such arguments can distract us from the real peril. Too much ground has been conceded over recent years in purchasing a “seat at the University table” at the expense of confusing the broad invitation of the Gospel to all comers (what I have described to my students as the wide end of the funnel) with the narrow demands of Christian discipleship for those who are called to enter (that is, the narrow end of the funnel).

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Read another commentary: Bowdoin College makes headlines for institutional arrogance: Remaining true to Christianity apparently is something that the super-tolerant can’t tolerate.