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TIU is a member of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU). As such, we are committed to learning, growing, and deepening our understanding of how we can provide and strengthen support for all students on our campuses.
CCCU institutions ascribe to a number of biblical convictions that are considered counter-cultural, including a historic, biblical understanding of marriage as part of broader convictions around human sexuality and gender. They serve diverse student bodies, and work to care for all students, as the institutions seek for them to believe and feel that they are created in the image of God and therefore possess full dignity, value, and worth.
It is out of these convictions that TIU adopted the following board-approved Human Sexuality Statement in February 2016:
. . . we celebrate the good news that God loved the world so much that he sent his one and only son so that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life. We give thanks to God that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. As those who have received God’s grace and forgiveness, we desire to share God’s grace and to live faithfully in accord with the mission and core values of Trinity International University. We seek to live and relate to one another and to engage the culture in a Christ-honoring way, practicing convictional kindness and convictional civility. In that light we affirm the following statement.
This policy, drawn from Scripture as our ultimate authority, sets forth a Christian vision of human sexuality as a good gift of God. The divine design for sexual expression within the commitment of marriage between a man and a woman is fundamental to the well-ordering of human society and is integral to human flourishing. The divine design is fidelity within marriage and chastity for all outside of that bond. We desire to articulate this ethic as moral truth binding on us all while recognizing our need of God’s grace and forgiveness in the ways that we all fall short of this divine ideal. Cohabitation and same sex marriage fall short of the divine design.
We in the Trinity community regard marriage as a good creation of God, and marriage within the church as a rite and institution tied directly to our foundational belief of God as creator who made us male and female. We also regard marriage as a sacred institution which images the mysterious and wonderful bond between Christ and His Church. To us, then, marriage is much more than merely a contract between two persons (a secular notion). It is a covenant grounded in promises between a man and a woman, which finds its divinely intended expression in the “one flesh” union of husband and wife, and between the “one flesh” union of husband and wife and God (the divine design). We therefore will only authorize and recognize heterosexual marriages.
Recognizing the Trinity community as a family, we will seek ways to encourage deep spiritual friendships, with a special effort to include those who are single. We in the Trinity community will model the counter-cultural reality that intimate, loving relationships need not be erotic.
The Trinity community shall reflect these principles in all aspects of institutional and community life including, but not limited to, student admission and retention, faculty employment, administration and staff employment, and use of campus facilities.
In all these principles, we must never compromise the biblical standard for sexuality while at the same time we must treat everyone, including those who identify as LGBT, with gentleness, compassion, and love, while pointing them to the only hope any of us have, which is the gospel of Jesus Christ.