In the evolving landscape of Christian education, there is a need for teachers who can equip students to navigate a post-Christian society. Many parents and students turn to Christian schools and homeschooling programs, which offer both academic excellence and the enduring values rooted in the historic Christian faith. However, while many dedicated Christians answer the call to teach, few are trained to integrate faith and learning into the subject matter. In the past few years, Geneva College has received inquiries for resources to assist K-12 Christian educators in replicating the faith-life integration work taught at a collegiate level.
This is a request that Geneva College’s President Calvin Troup, PhD, has answered through his recent publication A Framework for Biblical Integration and Learning: A Practical Guide to Faithful Christian Learning in the Classroom, published by Geneva’s Center for Faith & Life in the spring of 2025.
At its core, the book is an invitation for Christian educators to join in the pursuit of integrating faith and learning within every subject. It is a shared starting point for Geneva’s faculty and extends to educators everywhere who seek to uphold the unity of biblical wisdom in all of life and learning. The framework provides foundations and practices such as the importance of biblical literacy, an understanding of creeds and confessions, a rich Christian intellectual tradition, and the union of practical wisdom and subject knowledge.
“The framework is not a rigid formula or method,” President Troup explains. “Rather, it represents an ordered set of relationships — what we call ‘coordinates’ — that help educators navigate teaching from a Christian foundation. There’s a priority, but not a strict hierarchy. The elements of biblical integration inform and strengthen each other to provide a practical guide in the classroom.”
This biblical integration framework developed from a need for training at the collegiate level. Geneva College has been a leading institution in developing a biblical view of life and the world for more than fifty years because of dedicated faculty. When President Troup stepped into his leadership role at Geneva in 2016, he was met with a sobering reality: 40% of the College’s faculty would reach or surpass retirement age within the next decade. As these longtime educators prepared to step away, they voiced a deep concern — without intentional training, the College’s commitment to the integration of faith and learning might wane.
President Troup and Provost Melinda Stephens, PhD, responded to this insight with the development of the two-year new faculty development program. The goal was to cultivate missional fidelity in a new generation of professors, founded on Geneva’s core value of living and teaching “with Christ as King and under Scripture.” In the face of a general academic movement that separates faith from scholarship, it was an imperative to reinforce biblical integration in academic instruction, rooted in the conviction that “all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Christ,” as Scripture teaches in Colossians 2:3.
At the time, Provost Stephens had more than a decade’s experience in new faculty development. President Troup had previously directed a PhD program in rhetoric and philosophy of communication at Duquesne University, where he led a rigorous Preparing Future Faculty program for fifteen years.
This training initiative ultimately led to the writing of A Framework for Biblical Integration and Learning. The book encapsulates the principles that emerged from Geneva’s faculty development program, providing educators of all grade levels with guiding coordinates to apply biblical faith in their work.
“We are on a common quest,” President Troup reflects. “We want to develop Christian hearts and minds — our own, our students’, our colleagues’. Through faith in Christ and a reliance on His word given to us, we are able to grow into this reality and encourage one another along the way.”
With A Framework for Biblical Integration and Learning, President Troup offers a vision for the future of Christian education — one where faith and knowledge are inseparable, and where educators are equipped to lead students in the lifelong pursuit of truth in Christ. The book is available for order now through the Center for Faith & Life at Geneva College, and will ship in April 2025. For more information, visit geneva.edu/cfl/book.
By Erika Kauffman '20
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