Lex Fellowship

Around these parts, we talk a lot about the state and future of Christian Higher Education, especially among our schools. This year, one of our smaller, lower-profile schools has made some news worthy of blockbuster headlines.

Twenty-three years ago, Faulkner University purchased the Jones School of Law from the University of Alabama system. Jones was a privately run, un-accredited night school in Montgomery for decades, training local lawyers. As with many small law schools that are not accredited by the American Bar Association, graduates from Jones could sit for the Alabama bar but not in any other state.

This year, however, the Jones School of Law has achieved a great goal. In recent years, the law school has converted into a full-time program with day and night tracks. Since 2003, the Law School has nearly doubled its faculty under the leadership of Dean Charles Nelson, formerly of Pepperdine Law School. In April, the Law School received a recommendation of accreditation from the ABA’s Accreditation Committee, and this weekend, the Council of the Section for Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar made the formal decision to extend provisional accreditation to the law school. Among our schools only Pepperdine and Faulkner have law schools, and now Faulkner will be poised in the Heart of Dixie to grow wildly in wisdom and stature.

This is an extraordinary development. When I graduated from Harding, I didn’t consider Pepperdine because it was too far away, and I didn’t consider Faulkner because it wasn’t accredited. I know that I’m not the only undergrad to make such an calculation, and I am certain that Faulkner now will be in a unique position to recruit, train and graduate students and lawyers to turn the world upside down beyond Alabama’s borders.

As I have written in this space, the law is a strange, potent ministry and a tool for peace. The place and calling for a law school with a Kingdom heart is immense and kinetic. A Christian law school can produce ministers who have the skills, training and capacity to change the world, to provide for widows and orphans, to defend the weak, to promote justice and mercy and to make peace.

Go Eagles.