What Is a Christian Study Center?

That seems like an appropriate place to start our blog posts. Most people are unfamiliar with the Christian Study Center (CSC) movement. If you’d like a sense of what CSCs look like at other universities across the country, the Consortium of Christian Study Centers maintains a helpful website. You may be surprised to learn that there are already about 40 Christian Study Centers nationwide.

In Texas, however, there are only three—and two of the three, including Shiloh Society, are less than a year old (the other being at Rice University). Prior to 2025, Hill House at UT Austin was the only Christian Study Center in the entire state.

As soon as I discovered the existence of Christian Study Centers, I was genuinely shocked that we did not have one here in Aggieland. As a fifth-generation Aggie who graduated in 2013, and someone very familiar with the Christian culture at Texas A&M, it seemed like a glaring absence.

So, what is a Christian Study Center? I’ll answer as directly as possible by examining each word in the name “Christian Study Center” in turn.

Christian

Christian Study Centers are Christian in both a basic and technical sense. But what does that mean?

Nearly all CSCs limit their statements of faith to the core tenets of historic Christianity. Shiloh Society, for example, affirms the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed. This is about as uncontroversial and basic as doctrinal boundaries can be and is normative for CSCs nationwide. 

Functionally, this means CSCs aim to foster open and honest conversations across denominational lines about the Christian life, the Christian mind, and the Christian worldview—engaging the most important questions, ancient and modern alike. Our desire is to see the whole Church in the Texas A&M context meet together to encourage and edify one another, regardless of denomination, while remaining mutually submitted to the essentials of the Christian faith as articulated in the earliest creeds.

An example may help clarify any residual confusion. This past semester, both Catholic and Baptist students and ministry leaders participated in Shiloh Society. These traditions have real and significant doctrinal disagreements—Communion being one obvious example. Yet both are united in their submission to the Christian doctrine captured in the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds.

Catholics and Baptists wholeheartedly agree on the referent of Communion: the historical, sacrificial death of the co-eternal, only-begotten Son of God—the second person of the Trinity—incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified in fulfillment of the Scriptures. The sheer amount of shared doctrinal ground contained in that statement is staggering, yet it is often overlooked, leading Christians to treat one another as outsiders rather than family—as sources of strife rather than edification and encouragement.

To be clear, affirming these creedal boundaries does exclude some groups who claim the Christian label. But the purpose of defining boundaries is not to create outsiders; it is to rightly align those within the family of God for His glory and for participation in His redemptive work against the powers of darkness—powers that once held all of us captive before we were adopted into God’s family through Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, working through the Church as the body of Christ.

Study

The word study is used quite broadly. While the “Christian” aspect establishes clear doctrinal commitments, our aim is to create a space where the entire university community feels welcome—whether to relax and enjoy fellowship or to focus intently on academic work.

Studying does not need to be connected directly to Shiloh Society programming. We want this to be a great place to prepare for an engineering exam, collaborate with classmates, or spend meaningful time with members of a student organization. Shiloh Society events and programs will take place regularly throughout the week, but there will almost always be space available simply to study or be with others. The only exceptions would be during large events or outside normal operating hours.

Center

One way to describe our vision for Shiloh Society is this: a deeply hospitable, comfortable, coffee shop devoted to the cultivation of the Christian mind. Augustine meets Starbucks. That’s roughly what we’re aiming for. 

We are deeply convinced of the power of place and personal presence. That is why we are a center. These are essential to Christian hospitality and especially needed in our post-COVID, hyper-technological, isolating culture. While events and programming are important to us, an organization that exists only through scheduled events can feel unapproachable—particularly to those who are not Christians.

The sustained, physical presence of a Christian Study Center—open, available, and usable outside of formal programming—is itself an apologetic and an invitation to Christ in a way that events alone can never be. A genuinely hospitable space with no agenda offers something that programming, by definition, cannot: a welcome that is simply given.