Why GFI?
Acute challenges confront the world’s secular research universities. Standing at the apex of knowledge production, they exert enormous influence on education and society, yet crises of mission, disenchantment and disillusionment permeate understandings of what they are for. In some regions, they are under-resourced; in others, they are feared. An influential Christian voice is muted or absent.
Too often, Christian scholars, who have heard a call to the academic vocation, are isolated or silenced within their universities and across their fields. They long for ways to bring their Christian faith into their scholarship and academic practices, but they cannot see how. Insecure careers and overwork compound the divide they experience between faith and academic thought. Students are unexposed to Christian wisdom, and society is deprived of faith-informed scholarship.
GFI offers a proven way forward—a way to integrate a scholar’s faith and work and to bring Christian thought into the heart of academic fields, practices, and institutions. These will radiate out across the university and into the church and society.
Who We Are
GFI’s 200+ members are scholars of all academic ranks in research universities and institutes.
We embrace all faculties usual in great universities—agriculture, architecture, business, education, engineering, humanities, fine and performing arts, law, medicine and public health, natural sciences, social sciences and theology.
We span all six continents - Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, Oceania, North America.
How We Proceed – GFI Faith and Scholarship Dialogues
By fostering dialogues on great themes of the Christian faith that comfortably fit into the discourse of secular universities, GFI brings theologians and disciplinary scholars into creative conversations that foster community, both on the global stage and in hub universities in the Global South and Global North.
GFI brings scholars into dialogues on core doctrines (e.g., creation, love, evil, reconciliation, hope), master themes (e.g., beauty, flourishing, justice, order), and virtues (e.g., charity, humility, prudence), which are integral to the Christian faith, yet can be readily discussed in any university.
GFI initiates Faith and Scholarship Dialogues on key themes of the historic Christian faith. The GFI Method:
- Identifies core doctrines (e.g., creation, evil, reconciliation, hope), master themes (e.g., beauty, flourishing, justice, order), and virtues (e.g., charity, humility, prudence), which are integral to the Christian faith, yet can be readily discussed in any university.
- Invites notable theologians to write compact Theology Briefs on topics in ways that are readily accessible to scholars, whatever their disciplinary training or level of theological understanding.
- Invites GFI members to write short Disciplinary Briefs that bridge the theology and their research. These Briefs open up wider conversations between theologians and disciplinary scholars and stimulate cross-disciplinary awareness on the common ground of faith.
What We Offer
GFI is growing a global community of scholars who seek to develop a Christian mind to engage their academic work and life. Academics are drawn into a worldwide conversation where together we bring fresh and new ways of infusing Christian thought into our own fields as we also find cross-disciplinary connections in other fields. This wide-ranging conversation generates original content that is quickly read and deeply significant.
What We Believe
GFI members comprise Christians of all branches of the faith who can affirm the historic creeds of the Christian faith.
What We Deliver – How GFI Makes It Practical
GFI has created a large archive of original content, published and creatively searchable online. The dynamic online GFI library continues to grow from the current 250 pieces of high-quality writing and 2,000+ headlines that offer points of entry into the living archive.
GFI draws together the writings on each Dialogue and publishes curated versions in the GFI books series, Cross-Disciplinary Encounters with Theology, published jointly by the Langham Global Library.
GFI’s compact writings serve busy academics, faculty and students, who can find little additional time or energy for the often-challenging work of integrating faith and scholarship.
GFI develops aids to enhance the value of GFI’s original content:
- Resources for self-study – online navigation and search tools that reach to great topics of our times, master themes of the fatih, scriptures, and places all connected to specific academic fields.
- Resources for group study – Study Guides for faculty and graduate students on Dialogues – ranging from three-part series for weekend retreats to six-part series for sessions throughout an academic term or year.
- Resources for conversation – Zoom events, including GFI Scholars’ Forums on Dialogues across regions (Latin America, Oceania and East Asia, South Asia, Africa) and disciplinary clusters.
- Resources for keeping current – follow GFI social media at LinkedIn, and subscribe to the regular GFI Friends newsletter.
Our Practices
We inspire and mentor faculty and graduate students at all career stages. We cultivate writing skills and spiritual formation both through remote exchanges across continents and through retreats, workshops, and study series in local universities.
Who We Reach
Our primary call is to academics and academics-in-formation, from those graduate and doctoral students through the span of academic careers. We call senior and retired faculty to re-invest their scholarly and Godly lives in new chapters of service to the church in the university.
We reach pastors, priests, church leaders by giving them resources they can use in their own continuing education, their sermons or adult education classes.
We reach wider publics—those thoughtful Christians and thoughtful persons from other faiths or no faith—who want to know what Christian thought has to say on the issues of our times.