There are challenges to American society that study centers are uniquely positioned to meet. After Allan Bloom wrote about The Closing of the American Mind, Ronald Nash responded with The Closing of the American Heart and Mark Noll wrote The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Numerous others have contributed to an evangelical assessment of our culture that unites in seeing the root of the current problem as being ultimately the loss of influence of a Christian worldview. Not only have we lost the dominance of Christian views of reality, epistemology, and values, but many in the Christian Church no longer have a conscious grasp of a Biblical perspective in these areas and are no longer consciously seeking to apply such a perspective to either their own lives or the culture around them. Because of this loss of the salt and light impact of Christians in our culture, the prevailing influences on society today are a strange amalgam of secular humanism (modernism), new age thought, and postmodernism.

Christian study centers can make a positive contribution in three specific ways:

1. They can contribute to a Christian assessment of the defects of current prevailing influences on culture.
2. They can help develop a fuller understanding of a Christian worldview as it answers the major general worldview questions concerning reality, epistemology, and values and as it responds to the specific forms in which these questions are asked and answered within the general culture and the attendant subcultures.
3. They can promote a Christian worldview to their particular target audiences.

The assessment of culture and the answers given to all its worldview questions must be theological in nature. Consequently, the promotion of a Christian worldview must foundationally take the form of theological education. Yet this is not to say that any of these tasks are best handled in terms of theological statements formulated in traditional loci arrangements. Rather, those traditional orthodox theological understandings must inform Scripture-oriented studies of these worldview issues shaped by the worldview questions being asked. This yields more directly practical answers and promotes a more apologetically relevant approach to theological education. Such an approach might then suggest, for example, instead of teaching courses in systematic theology as such, courses covering much of the same material might be taught as A Christian View of Reality, Apologetics and a Christian View of Truth, and Christian Ethics. Since all constructions of the loci of systematic theology are really synthetic (since Scripture gives us no such construction), this really amounts simply to a more practically focused arrangement of loci. Upon such theologically grounded conceptions of a Christian worldview, this worldview can be further applied to various disciplines.

Study centers of course provide opportunity for study, but Christian study centers offer tremendous opportunity for promoting a Christian worldview through offering both education and resources. In addition to targeting interested laymen, they can also profitably minister to students, internationals, and even ministers needing additional education in specific areas. Not only can they be useful in American settings, they offer many of the same opportunities on mission fields, especially those fields where interest in knowing more about Christianity is high.