51st PCA General Assembly Floor Report

This summer at the PCA General Assembly in Richmond, Virginia, our president, Dr. Brad Voyles, gave his first floor report on behalf of Covenant College. President Voyles’s address was incredibly well received, evidenced by multiple rounds of applause from those in the room. I wanted to pass this report on to you so that you can hear these encouraging statistics and inspiring vision for the college.

Your role in supporting our mission is crucial, and we are grateful for your commitment and partnership. Thank you for your unwavering dedication to Covenant College and for being a vital part of our community.

Marc Erickson
Vice President of Development
Executive Director of the Foundation

Good afternoon,

Brad Voyles, ruling elder from the Tennessee Valley Presbytery and president of Covenant College. It is my distinct privilege to represent the incredible faculty, staff, and students of Covenant College and, on their behalf, share how grateful we are to be the college of the PCA.

I want to start today and simply say thank you. Thank you for your prayers, your support, your generous gifts—thank you for talking to others about us—and most importantly, thank you for the students you entrust into our care each year. As I was preparing for my first floor report as president of Covenant, I went back and forth on how best to use this time. Over the years, I have sensed a difference between those in the PCA who are connected to and know Covenant and those who do not. So, my goal today is to spend a bit of time sharing some encouraging numbers that we are excited about, but mainly I want to simply introduce you, or perhaps reintroduce you, to Covenant College.

I was in Richmond in late April for an admissions event and met with students and families to talk about the distinctives of Covenant College. During that time, I shared with them the secret of higher education, and the secret is this: every professor at every college and university in this country wants their students to think like they think, love what they love, and ultimately worship what they worship. I told them, if that is important, then students and families should spend some time getting to know the professors and what they believe and love. After that talk, I had a group of parents come up and tell me that they had not even considered that. They realized that most of their campus tours had involved seeing the football stadium, the new library, the food court, and the student center, but they had not stepped foot into a classroom or met a single faculty member.

In contrast, I could not be more excited for prospective students and families to meet our faculty and staff. They are some of the very best people I know—experts in their fields with incisive minds joined to Christlike character and discipling hearts. You cannot walk through our dining hall without seeing faculty and staff meeting with students for discipleship. We recently did a feature in our alumni magazine that describes in detail what I hold to be the most strenuous hiring process for faculty in Christian colleges across this country. I hope it is an encouragement to you to read that our faculty have to attest annually to the inerrancy of Scripture and subscribe to the Westminster Confession of Faith and the college’s statement of community beliefs.

Read the VIEW article “Unwavering & Uncompromising”

I was talking a few months ago with a PCA family who are parents of a recent graduate. They shared about how grateful they were for their son’s experience at Covenant—particularly in light of the experience their two daughters had at other Christian colleges. While the professors at the other colleges were Christians, this father reported that his daughters didn’t know what to expect from class to class with regards to professors’ beliefs. In stark contrast, he used the word “coherent” to describe what his son experienced from professor to professor and class to class at Covenant—a shared throughline that connected and integrated his entire educational experience. The reality is that coherence at Covenant is not an accident—it is cultivated. It takes tremendous effort and tending. It starts with who we hire and how we hire and continues through our shared philosophy of education and our enduring commitment to biblical integration across all disciplines.

So we are much, much more than a christian college. We are a coherent, confessional, Christ-centered college, and this makes us increasingly distinctive in the marketplace as we fight to remain missionally faithful against stiff headwinds. It has called for us to focus our efforts in order to recapture some lost ground in the marketplace in recent years. My repeated encouragement to the campus during my first year as president has been that mission faithfulness has always been and will always be our number one priority. However, mission faithfulness does not have to mean method faithfulness. In this spirit, the entire campus was encouraged to pursue new ideas, programs, and tactics, as long as they aligned missionally.

In the interest of time, I will share just a few outcomes among many that are encouraging:

The board of trustees approved in October a $46.8 million comprehensive campaign made up of strategic investments in capital projects, operations, and endowment to drive our enrollment and improve the student experience. We started the campaign in January and are about to finish our first phase this summer. Praise the Lord.
With new leadership, new culture, and new tactics focusing on strategic groups and a renewed focus on relational recruiting, our admissions team has done a remarkable job this year. Alongside a campus-wide commitment to gospel hospitality, we’ve been welcoming prospective students and families in record numbers, and we are seeing the Lord bless these efforts with tremendous results that have us ahead of schedule.
Our new student numbers are currently 16% ahead of last year, and we have the most deposits to date that we have had in 10 years. Praise the Lord.
After graduating our small 2020 COVID class, our overall student body is projected to be up 10% as retention was, again, very strong last year—87% for freshmen and nearly 91% overall. Both numbers speak to tremendous student satisfaction with the Covenant experience and will give us our largest overall enrollment in five years.
We are working incredibly hard to make Covenant as affordable as possible for PCA families as we seek to serve the denomination. Our focus on PCA pastors is bearing fruit as we are up 33%—from 18 pastors’ kids last year to 27 this year with three more in the pipeline. We have had generous donors step up and create a close-the-gap fund for PCA pastors’ kids and another donor create a fund for students who are going into fields of ministry where debt would be difficult based on their expected salaries.

If you know people in your churches who are passionate about serving our pastors, our families, and students in these ways, please reach out to us. We would love to connect these individuals to these opportunities to serve the Church.

As an educational institution, I’m very proud of these outcomes. I’m proud of other outcomes I could share on graduate school placement and job placement. But, this next stat is what I want to share now to end. As president of a coherent, confessional, Christ-centered college, there is no outcome that I am more proud of than this: we conduct an alumni survey every five years, and in the summer of 2023 in response to the question, “Are you involved as a member or a regular attender of your local church,” 96% of PCA alumni said “yes” and 87% of all our alumni responded “yes.”

Ultimately, this is the way we serve the local church: we send our students. We are a sending agency; we receive students, train them, and send them out—biblically faithful, expertly trained, vocationally agile—with a bedrock confidence that scripture is the Word of God and a love for the local church. When you hear numbers like this, 96% and 87%—it begs the question: Why? What is happening at Covenant College? I’m glad you asked.

From the moment a student arrives on our campus, local church attendance is prioritized through new student orientation, chapel, hall life, and a culture of providing rides to church. Church is not an addendum—it is an essential part of the student’s Covenant experience.
There is a strong commitment to Sabbath observance that permeates our entire campus. Not only is the chapel closed on Sunday, but the library and gym are also closed. This day is set apart.
We have never played an athletic event on the Sabbath. In fact, a number of years ago, our tennis team made the conference championship, and it was to be played on a Sunday. We requested for the conference to move the match, and they declined. We requested yet again and said that we would pay the other team’s expenses to spend the night—all their food and housing, even extend their bus contract—if they would play the match on Monday. We were denied at every turn, so we forfeited the match due to our convictions. It was crushing to the team and disappointing to the coach, but we held to our convictions and the conference changed the policy the next year so that any championship involving Covenant would not be played on a Sunday.
When our students attend their local churches, and we have many wonderful churches near our campus, they worship alongside their faculty and staff and observe the many ways that Covenant employees serve in the local church as officers, teachers, worship leaders, and workers. Nearly 20% of Covenant staff and faculty—including emeritus and adjuncts—are ordained elders and deacons in PCA churches.
The churches themselves—so, thank you—do an incredible job of enfolding our students and cultivating in their hearts a love for the local church through discipling relationships and inviting them into homes and into church service and involvement. These are patterns and habits formed now that last long after college.
Covenant College faculty and staff do not provide a paper-thin Christianity, but instead model a deep, tested faith and trust in a Sovereign Lord through not shying away from the hard circumstances of life on this fallen earth. The faith of students is increased as they bear witness to older Christians who are willing to share how they have wrestled with hard things and with doubt and yet still believe. This has a multiplying and strengthening impact on our students as they depart Covenant and encounter doubts and challenges of their own.

“In All Things Christ Preeminent” is not merely a motto, but an enduring truth of our curriculum and co-curriculum. I want to share a quote from a student that illustrates this. R.J. Bascom, a rising senior, was asked what he was learning about God in biology, and this was his unscripted response:

“Our Creator created science, and we just get to discover all of these amazing pieces. [For example,] we’ve been talking about blood this week in my biology class, and the use of blood as an analogy in the Bible is very strong but also very strange. It’s something that we don’t really encounter anywhere else in society, this idea that blood cleanses. Blood is a staining agent, it’s kind of nauseating for some people, and a little bit dirty—we try to avoid blood and always wash it out of things. But, we’ve been looking at the immune system and how white blood cells are so necessary and… designed to cleanse a myriad of bacteria, infections, and viruses in all different kinds of injuries. It’s very much a cleansing and healing process. So, we take that and then we [consider] Jesus’ blood and sacrifice cleansing our sins. [I mean] they didn’t know about microbiology and white blood cells a couple thousand years ago, but that analogy was something God knew because God created white blood cells and God created our blood to be this healing agent. So that’s an example of the spiritual connection, and it’s not something that we figured out or thought ‘we can bring God into science’—God is integral to science; our Creator is integral to this subject. We just get to find the cool things and golden nuggets that He hid for us in these analogies.”

All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Christ Jesus. From class to class and across all majors, a student’s faith is actually deepened through our coursework that repeatedly emphasizes the preeminence of Jesus Christ. It is amazing how powerful education becomes when you study creation at the feet of the Author of creation and alongside professors committed to studying God’s world in submission to God’s Word. What we are doing at Covenant is not the mere transfer of information—it is formation. You cannot underestimate the power of a gospel-rooted, biblically faithful, consistently coherent educational experience.

I hope you are encouraged by our survey results and our ongoing commitment to mission faithfulness at Covenant College. We are grateful for the enrollment growth and excited about prospective students—it helps us to have a robust enrollment. But, more than that, we are encouraged that more students are going to be at a place that believes the Bible is true and that Jesus is who He says He is. We want more and more students to be shaped and sent out resting on these truths.

Thank you again for your prayers and for your support. This ends my report.