“Bridge to the Church” ft. Lipscomb University’s Candice McQueen I Saturdays at Seven – Season Two, Episode Thirty-Six

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In the thirty-sixth episode of the second season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Candice McQueen, President of Lipscomb University. With extensive service in both K-12 and higher education settings, McQueen starts by discussing the educational benefits that emerge when greater integration between grade levels or years in school occurs. Teachers can more readily engage students in terms of content and content complexity. Students can more readily appreciate the connections between their educational pursuits which ideally come to be understood as a seamless whole. McQueen then speaks about her own discernment to serve as an educator, how it started in a fifth-grade classroom, transitioned to teaching future teachers, and eventually included administrative service as a school dean and commissioner of the state of Tennessee’s Department of Education. McQueen discusses the discernment process that led her to accept the appointment as Lipscomb’s president, her aspirations for the university, and the relationship the university shares with the Churches of Christ or Restoration Movement. McQueen closes by discussing how that relationship influences her understanding of the academic vocation, the formation of educators who serve at Lipscomb, and the ways Lipscomb and the Churches of Christ can grow in service to one another in the years to come.

Todd C. Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.

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Our guest is Candice McQueen, Professor of Education and President of Lipscomb University. Thank you for joining us.

Candice McQueen: Thank you.

Todd C. Ream: Ernest L. Boyer, the United States Commissioner of Education from 1977 to ’79, and President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching from 1979 to 1995, argued education across the lifespan should be a seamless web. Educators would interact vertically by grade level or year with their colleagues, as well as horizontally, and students would witness greater connectivity in their year over year experiences. Fortunately, your background afforded you with service as a teacher and an administrator in educational settings across the student lifespan.

To begin, what is your assessment of Boyer’s view of the relationship pre-K, K-12, and higher education should share?

Candice McQueen: Well, I, I think in many ways he’s spot on—this ability to have vertical alignment that has a spiraling from grade to grade and spiraling where you are revisiting primary concepts and then building on those and really looking at, whether you’re talking about Webb’s Depths of Knowledge or Bloom’s Taxonomy, you know, you’re moving up in terms of your analysis and your synthesis and your ability to connect dots. That is the ideal. 

I will say in my years of education, it’s very rare that you find across the education sort of ecosystem that that alignment is truly present. I’m in a unique situation and that I’m in a university setting that has a pre-K actually starting at ages three and four—two, three, and four, all the way up through a PhD. And so we are unique in that you can actually connect those dots and start seeing the connectivity. And even then it can be somewhat difficult. 

We as university professors we’ll go down to K-12 and we’ll talk to them about what we’re seeing in terms of communication skillset writing skillset in particular, and really try to figure out how can we move some of these skill sets lower into K-12, so they’re better prepared when they come into a freshman English course or move into some of their literature courses. 

So we do that well. But even then, you have to force those conversations in many ways to happen because you’re just in different worlds. College and upper school, you’re just in a completely different world. So I do think it’s the ideal. I think probably we come close to being able to see that in a true lifespan with 6,500 kids that range from two year olds to PhD. But I will say it’s difficult to do.

Todd C. Ream: Yeah. One of the things I’m eager to ask you about in addition to your experience as president there at Lipscomb, is also about Lipscomb Academy and how it fits more into, we’ll ask you to talk more about that here in a minute about how it fits into the educational profile of the university there. 

Where do you think as an educator then the breakdowns happen between the seamless web, especially when it comes to the vertical relationships that educators could or should share?

Candice McQueen: I think there’s probably two or three things at play. Um, I think one of them is we are very independent, typically as teachers or educators. We’re bringing our individual self, our individual knowledge and skills, our educational attainment to whatever content we’re teaching. And so we’re very independent minded. There’s this academic freedom that goes with teaching, even if you’re talking about down into elementary school. And so we teach what we believe is right in our eyes, based on our background and knowledge. And sometimes that doesn’t connect dots between curriculum or between standards, again, across a vertical, a set of curriculum or standards. And so I would say that’s one problem is that academic freedom truly does exist in educational environments. And teachers certainly bring that independence to how they approach their teaching. 

I think number two, we have not had great curriculum, particularly at the K-12 level that we can point to and say that curriculum does a great job of spiraling work and showing vertical alignment, showing depth in terms of the horizontal alignment that needs to be there. I think curriculum has gotten better in both math and reading over the last several years, but it has not historically been great. And so you’re as a teacher, constantly trying to connect those dots, and that takes a lot of time, energy, and effort to work across your middle school grades, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and make sure everything is aligned. If your curriculum already does that for you, then that’s the step that you don’t have to take. 

And then I’d say third, there’s probably the, a third reason is we’ve not invested that time, energy, and effort in this. So when we talk about professional development in education settings we’re thinking this is about my content and my content knowledge and my pedagogy. I don’t really spend a lot of time on, oh, we need to sit down and make sure the curriculum is aligned and it’s at the depth that it needs to be to prepare them for sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth grade. That is rare that schools take the time, energy, and effort to do that. So I think for all three of those reasons, this has not been on the front burner in terms of prioritization.

Todd C. Ream: Thank you. For those of us who are collegiate educators then, in what ways do you think we can be of greater service to our colleagues who are pre-K and K-12 educators?

Candice McQueen: I think there’s so much that college professors can provide in terms of feedback around readiness for college. I mean my best example, I was the dean of the College of Education and I had an opportunity to interact with all of our entering freshmen at Lipscomb. And I’ll never forget, I would end up talking to students who wanted to be teachers. So they’re coming in, they’re trying to be admitted to teacher education, and I have to tell them, you’re actually not ready. You’re gonna need to take a remedial course, whether that was math or English or whatnot. And I mean, I would have tears from people who want to be teacher and they realize they don’t have the readiness in their own content knowledge, and they would sit there and cry in my office. 

And I thought at one point what I would love to be able to do, and interestingly enough, I got the opportunity to serve as Commissioner of Education, so I would tell this story quite frequently is I wanted to tell our high school, middle school, and elementary school teachers, these kids aren’t ready for college coursework. They’re not ready for credit bearing coursework, and they’re not ready for two or three very specific things in math. They don’t know fractions well. They didn’t learn that very well back, back in fifth and sixth and seventh grade. They don’t really have a deep understanding of algebraic concepts and variables, and so they need more depth there.

I mean, as college professors, when you teach these subjects, you can tell where their gaps are, and so we’ve gotta do a better job of going down into our K-12 system and saying, here’s the shiny light that we wanna put on content that would better prepare your students. And we need to get in the same room and do that more often.

Todd C. Ream: Yeah. Thank you. In what ways do you think our campuses can be more welcoming to pre-K and K-12 educators and also be of greater point, a greater point of resource for them?

Candice McQueen: Well, I’ve always said that our university’s colleges of education and departments of education should be some of the most rigorous and sophisticated areas on campus. I’m a personal believer that when that happens, then you will end up with stronger teachers, stronger students who choose to go into the teaching profession and really professionalize the profession.

And I think sometimes in our colleges, we are advising students not to go in education. We’re advising them not to be teachers. Oh, you know, you have a great science knowledge. You should actually go into a different field. Or you’re a deep thinker in, you know, history and politics, definitely don’t go into teaching that this is a path for you. So I think we need to do a better job at colleges and university of uplifting the teaching profession or colleges of education, making sure that they’re rigorous and sophisticated and pointing people toward the teaching profession. 

I think that actually helps K-12 teachers more than anything because we’re producing then people who come back in the field who are ready for what they’re being asked to do. I think some of our challenge in K-12 that colleges sometimes actually reinforce is we don’t have the staffing. We don’t have the people prepared to do what they’re being asked to do, and sometimes we’re at fault. We’re not advising students to go into teaching and we’re not making sure the College of Education is a sophisticated, rigorous college on our own campus.

Todd C. Ream: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much. I want to transition now to asking you about some biographical details and about the development of your own vocation as an educator. You earned an undergraduate degree from Lipscomb, a master’s degree in school administration from Vanderbilt University’s Peabody School, and a PhD in curriculum studies from the University of Texas. At what point did you know education would prove fundamental to how you understood and exercised your calling?

Candice McQueen: I had an amazing mentor in my own mother. My mother was a very successful educator. When I say successful, she won the National Distinguished Principal Award was awarded by then President Bill Clinton and got to go to D.C. So she was a phenomenal teacher, educator, principal. She was a principal of two National Blue Ribbon schools, both on Fort Campbell Army base. She was always part of the Department of Defense Schools. And so I had this mentor who was deeply involved in education. 

I used to say she had three children, me, my brother, and her schools. Her schools were always her third child and maybe sometimes her first child in, in the way she prioritized it. But that was such a great example for me and how much she cared about educating everybody that she came in contact with and to do it at a level that was extraordinarily excellent. And so that was my mentor. So I probably always knew this is a person I wanna be like. Not just because she was my mother, I just saw the excellence in the way she really, really did lead. 

But I did run from it a little bit. I mean, I think all kids sometimes do that. They don’t wanna follow exactly what their parents told them might be a good profession for them. So I ran from it a little bit in college and then circled back to education. 

And I knew it was my calling when you don’t see it as a job. I think sometimes we are, we’re college professors. That’s very true. When, you know, you get so excited to go in and teach content and teach students and see that intersection between the content you love and the students you care so much about, it doesn’t feel like a job and you’re so excited to get up and, and do that every day. I never liked the grading, but I always loved the teaching. And so that’s when you know you’re an educator as well. 

I will say that over time I also had and learned that same passion for leadership. And I think there’s a real interconnection between teaching and leadership. There’s a lot of the same skillset in both. And so I began to also see that I had a passion and love for leadership just as much as teaching.

Todd C. Ream: Thank you. Along those lines then, will you take us back to your first classroom for which you were ever responsible after you finished as an undergraduate, and what lessons did you learn that year and in any way do those lessons still live with you today now as a university president?

Candice McQueen: Absolutely. In fact, a very interesting story. I had Lipscomb University’s president’s son in my class as a first year teacher, and so the president of Lipscomb University at the time, Steve Flatt’s son, was in my class. And so I remember thinking I have been empowered as a first year teacher to preach, you know, to teach the president’s son. So it’s funny to see how that circle has come about. 

But I remember what I learned was the importance of being prepared. I’m a person who feels like preparation can cover lots and lots of things. If you don’t have knowledge on something and you feel like, well, I have this gap in what I should know and what I do know, being really prepared always for me, helped fill that gap. So you’re first year teaching, you’re teaching everything for the first time. I mean, literally. 

And so I would always compensate by being extraordinarily prepared. I was probably prepared more than any other first year teacher because I took that very seriously. That helps me today. I mean, I probably have gone into many conversations that I didn’t have all the knowledge, but I prepared to know enough to be able to ask the right questions and to hold my own in those conversations.

I think the other is, I’ll never forget, I put a saying up on the wall in my fifth grade classroom and it was, think, and plan, then do. And I put that in every single one of my classrooms subsequently. I still think about that today when I’m talking to my leadership team. Think about it. Don’t start doing it until you go deeply. That means researching, considering talking to others, then start planning it out. You need a plan before you do it. 

And I had a lot of students who would flip it and they’d start doing before they had done the work, which is that preparation piece to get to the do. And I find that still a strength of mine today. And it was something I was teaching fifth graders back years and years and years ago.

Todd C. Ream: Yeah. Of course, I’d love to ask about how that first parent teacher conference went when the university president, who signed your diploma just the previous spring, walked in, but we’ll leave that and the confidentiality of that aside, and move on.

Candice McQueen: Well, I have to tell you, he was a fantastic parent and his wife was as well. But it was a little stressful when you’re a brand new teacher. But I will say it all worked out well in the end. And we’re great colleagues today, and I love his son. He was one of the best students, so it all worked out well in the end.

Todd C. Ream: Yeah, thank you. You joined the education faculty at Lipscomb in 2001, began chairing the undergraduate education department in 2004, and then began serving as dean of the College of Education in 2008. Could you describe the discernment process you exercised when deciding whether to accept these administrative appointments?

Candice McQueen: Well, I will say that I tend to try to figure out how to get to yes, if I really feel like I have the talents and skills to do what I’m being asked to. I’m trying to get to a yes, and that was something I was probably taught early on. And so when these opportunities presented themselves, none of them were the right timing. I mean, I could tell you about what was wrong timing about every single one of them, but I wanted to try to figure out how could I get to a yes. And in all those cases I did. 

I mean, when I was going into the undergraduate department chair role and was asked to take on that role, I had a new baby. I mean, I don’t even think she was one. It was my first child and I was a brand new PhD and had just finished my dissertation and I remember being asked to do that and I thought, this is the absolute worst timing. But I said yes. 

And then fast forward, there was a dean opportunity. I was leading the search team for the new dean because I had just had my second child. So I now have a three and a half year old and a baby. And we were buying a house. I just remember all the stress that goes along with that. And I got to a yes somehow. I was asked by the provost and the president, we’ve just done this search, but we actually want you to do this. And I said, yes. 

I mean, so looking back, again, never great timing, but they were all the right things to do, even looking back with, with all you have to work out to make that happen. So I will say an advice is try to get to a yes if you feel like you have the strengths and talents and skillset to do the work, even if the timing is not quite right. And it’s okay to say no if it’s really not the right time, but try to get there if you can.

Todd C. Ream: Yeah. In what ways did those growing administrative duties and responsibilities yield an intrinsic sense of vocational satisfaction for you?

Candice McQueen: One, that’s a great question because I think you, you have answered it by having opportunities to advance and to use your skill sets in new ways and advanced ways, it really is professionally satisfying. I think about that a lot. When your team gets those opportunities and they get to engage, they tend to stay. 

It’s not as much about salary, although that’s a little bit of it. It’s not necessarily about lots of things, but it is about your satisfaction with the work and being able to advance within that work and have progressively more interesting projects and decisions and meetings that you’re in can be very, very satisfying. 

So, I think your question is a great one, and that is the reason why I think I’ve continued to stay in education as long as I have. There have been opportunities to keep digging deeper and going further and using your leadership in new ways.

Todd C. Ream: Thank you. In 2013 then, you were also appointed the university’s senior vice president. Would you please describe the responsibilities that came with that additional appointment, because I believe you were still serving as dean of the School of Education?

Candice McQueen: Yes, I was, so, I was over the Lipscomb Academy, which you mentioned earlier, our pre-K through 12 school. So I had direct responsibility from the head of school, reported directly to me in that senior VP role. That was a great opportunity to have a larger sort of number of people that I was interacting with and setting strategy and developing skill sets around communication and work with, you know, parents. Parents in K-12 are different than parents in college, so I was getting to utilize different skill sets. 

And then I also worked directly with admissions, particularly graduate admissions. The college that I was with had grown dramatically in graduate education, both master’s degree work, and we were the very first doctorate on our campus. And so we moved into a different Carnegie classification. And so I was tasked with working with graduate education or graduate programs across our education environment to help them develop programs and to also improve their recruitment and admission work around that. 

So I got great opportunities to connect with people all over campus in that work—particularly folks who were trying to vision what an advanced graduate program could look like for themselves.

Todd C. Ream: Can you say a little bit more about the history now of Lipscomb Academy and the relationship that it does share with Lipscomb University?

Candice McQueen: So Lipscomb University started in 1891. We were a vision of David Lipscomb and James A. Harding. These two gentlemen wanted to have a school that would actually help advance people, not necessarily in preaching, although we have a religious heritage but to make sure folks in regular professions like teaching and, you know, medicine and law could figure out and utilize their faith within their profession. And so I love that vision because that’s who we are today. It’s about connecting and integrating and living your faith as part of your work not dissecting the two. 

And so the K-12 school came some years later. I want to say it was 20 or 25 years later, but it was under that same umbrella. So we were doing this for the 18 to 24-year-old. What about if we moved it down into, you know, lower ages? And so it was the same vision under the same board, same structure. And so we’re very unique in that we have the pre-K through PhD all under one board. Um, and all under one president. 

Now, certainly there’s a head of school and principals but we all report up through that one board. And so what was interesting is the vision really of teaching students at all ages how to live their faith and their profession just got a lower and lower and lower vision in terms of age groups, and that’s where the academy came from.

Todd C. Ream: Yeah. Thank you. In 2015 then, you left Lipscomb to serve as Tennessee’s Commissioner of Education. Would you please describe the discernment process that then led you to accept that appointment and leave the institution to which you’d committed so much of your life and service?

Candice McQueen: Yeah, it was a very, very tough decision. It was a discernment process. I absolutely loved my work at Lipscomb. I had been a dean, almost seven years. I’d been at Lipscomb about 13 years, and certainly was an undergraduate there. So I had a lot of my life at Lipscomb and had great opportunities, had been a senior VP for almost two years or so when this opportunity came.

I had been involved in a good number of, I’m going to call them policy meetings and opportunities where I spoke before the legislature on different topics, had gotten to know the governor through that process, and he started inviting me to lunch. And we would talk about education topics and I loved it and this was so much fun. And then eventually one of those lunches he said, would you consider in my second term, he was running for second term, would you consider being my education commissioner? And after a lot of prayer, much prayer I think you’ve probably heard the term wrestling in prayer. That is what I would call it because I really loved what I was doing and I was also trying to discern if this was something I would be satisfied in. 

It was a very different kind of job than working in a university that was a faith-based university. This was a state level job. It had a lot of political implications. It was appointed but you were working with the legislature heavily and it was a policymaking role. Totally different kind of influence and totally different kind of leadership that you would need to use. And so I was trying to discern, discern if my strengths would be a good fit for this role. And I wrestled in that. 

Ultimately decided yes, that was over a period of probably a week. I didn’t have a whole lot of time. I had to turn it around quickly because he had just been elected, reelected. And this was December and I would’ve started in January. So it was probably good I didn’t have a whole lot of time because I did say yes and turned that around pretty quickly.

Todd C. Ream: And Bill Haslam was the governor of Tennessee at the time.

Candice McQueen: That’s correct.

Todd C. Ream: So in addition to learning how to drive long distances to visit schools east and west.

Candice McQueen: Eight and a half hours in length, yes.

Todd C. Ream: Because it’s, it’s quite a, it’s quite a distance as you just noted there. What did you learn about your sense of leadership and your leadership style by serving in that role with the state?

Candice McQueen: What a deep question. I would say that the two things that I learned most about myself and its intersection with this work was how much I really did care about education at all levels. I certainly had been in higher ed for a good bit and that was my, my place and what I love. But I learned quickly how passionate I got about pre-K education and how important that is and what happens in our elementary school reading classes to make sure students are set up for success. And I loved thinking about high school redesign and how we do high school better to make sure kids are better prepared. 

So I learned about myself while I had been in college environment for some time, again over 13 years at that point, how much I really loved the K-12 setting too. And students are students regardless of their age. If you really are passionate about growing them, you can be happy in all of these different sort of age spans and settings. 

I also learned from a leadership perspective how much, how important it is to make sure you’re working with people at the level they need, not at the level of information you have. So I’ll give you an example. I worked with legislators who had zero knowledge of education, but they had to vote on bills that were education-related. Some had a lot of knowledge of education. They were teachers and they had run for office, and now they were sitting as a legislator.

Regardless of who I was talking to, though, most of them did not have a PhD in education. Most of them had not run a college of education at a university. Most of them had not been classroom teachers. So I was always cognizant of what I would have, which was the curse of knowledge. You just have a lot of knowledge on a topic, but you’re talking to people you’re trying to influence and convince, and I always needed to give them information at the level they needed it. Not the level I knew it. And those are very different things. 

Sometimes I’m trying to convince somebody how important this is for your district and what you can accomplish. It has nothing to do with the research that says that is absolutely the right thing to do, and that’s what I wanna tell them. But that really wasn’t the information they needed to make a good decision. I need to do an appeal to them specifically. That is really good advice that I got from the governor and I utilized that when I was commissioner and I continue to today. Sometimes we know more than we actually need to share. We need to share information that helps the other person grow and get them what they need.

Todd C. Ream: Yeah. From 2019 to 2021 then, you served as the Chief Executive Officer for what is called the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching. Would you please describe the scope of that organization’s efforts then?

Candice McQueen: Yeah, what a great, great organization. This is a national nonprofit that works now across about 25 different states. The scope of the work is to help state departments of education colleges of education, and superintendents, and district personnel, and certainly principals and classroom teachers, so it’s all that whole spectrum, ensure that we have excellent talent, meaning teacher talent in the classroom with the deepest knowledge they can about what should teaching and learning look like. 

So an example is we built a really, quite frankly, a famous rubric now because many states have adopted it on how would you evaluate a teacher for teacher effectiveness. Tennessee has adopted the rubric. Louisiana has adopted the rubric. Texas has adopted a version of the rubric. But it defines what does excellence look like in a K-12 classroom, and how would you provide an evaluation on that and feedback on it.

And so my organization then built out all of the tools, training and supports to make sure excellent teaching was happening in every classroom, and has some phenomenal research on what really works in classrooms as opposed to what sometimes you hear might work but there’s no research on it.

Todd C. Ream: Thank you. This leads us now to 2021 when you were appointed president of Lipscomb University, the role that you hold to this day. One of the outgrowths of your leadership so far has been Impact 360, the strategic plan. In what ways has that plan already led to a change in conversations on campus and potentially an alignment or realignment of expectations?

Candice McQueen: Yeah. Lipscomb Impact 360 was the strategic plan that involved our entire campus very far reaching, very stakeholder driven. And it re-instituted and re-engaged alumni as well. So it was fairly far reaching. The intent of it was to create something that was unifying both in a vision and a mission and a core set of values that are new, but also a set of goals. We ended up with six and we’ve added a seventh. But this is what I would call our roadmap to our vision, a roadmap to living out our mission. 

We reengaged and became more intentional around our mission. Our mission is about being a Christ-centered university, a Christ-centered community that prepares learners for purposeful lives and does that through rigorous academics, sophisticated academics and transformative experiences. And so every one of those words has meaning. Our transformative experiences, we’ve reengaged student life and our mission orientation both domestically and internationally. We’ve really been thoughtful about the rigorous having national accreditations. For a school our size, we have 22 national accreditations. That’s amazing. We are doing what we would think of as your top level academics across the board, very, very, very strongly. 

Moving in directions in terms of purpose, we started a Center for Vocational Discovery. Now this center is in the president’s office, and it has tentacles all across campus where each of our students engage in 10 weeks and talking about their strengths and their purpose and how do they find meaning in their work. Asking the big questions like, who am I? What’s my identity? How am I gonna practice this vocation? Where am I gonna practice it, and where can my strengths be best utilized? 

And I share that to say the vision and the mission and the words, and it all had strategies of how we are going to get there. And so our campus has become very, very intentional and motivated around the things that we know, get us closer to our vision and mission, and live out our eight core values.

Todd C. Ream: Yeah. Thank you. In terms of the theological commitments that then inform that mission and vision, I want to ask you a couple questions now. My understanding is that they’re derived from the relationship that the university shares with the Churches of Christ, also known as the Restoration Movement. Can you, for individuals who are not familiar with the Restoration Movement or the Churches of Christ, detail some of those commitments and how they then inform the curricular and co-curricular educational experiences that are offered on campus?

Candice McQueen: Yeah. I think there’s probably three commitments that I would point to. There’s probably more than that, but the first would be the centrality of the Bible within the Restoration Movement. From the very beginning of the movement in the early 19th century, Alexander Campbell sought to cut through this divisive parts of tradition and wanted to make Scripture very plain that anybody could pick it up and read it. And he thought this could provide basically a simple platform for Christian unity. And it would be a means of completing what he would call the Protestant Reformation. 

He insisted that people not simply just revere the Bible like a talisman, but actually open it, read it, immerse in it. And for this reason, he really reacted against the revivalism of the day where he feared that this overheated emotionalism would distract people and discredit the Bible from being sort of people of reason. So he called people to embrace simple Gospel facts obey the Gospel receive it in full assurance of God’s forgiveness. 

And interestingly enough, two generations later, David Lipscomb could say that the most important thing in the world is daily diligent prayerful study of the divine Word or the Bible. So the Bible was always very central to who we have been and who we are today. 

I’d say a second commitment is there is a very high view of the church as part of Churches of Christ or Restoration. We believe the Church is the, you know, household of God and it’s a central means by which God carries out his mission in the world. We have a high view of the ministry of a congregation, attendance and being faithful to that congregation. We believe that, you know, our theology should be centered closely with our connection to the Church. So when Lipscomb thinks about who we are, we wanna be closely connected to the Church. We’re not the Church. But we want to have that close bond. 

And third, I think there has been a strong commitment to probably three different things, baptism, very important, Lord’s supper and taking that on the first day of the week and then that Christian assembly. And so these commitments to the Church, a commitment to the centrality of the Bible, and a strong commitment to baptism and Lord’s Supper and assembling together, I think is, they’re really important commitments of the restoration movement in Churches of Christ.

Todd C. Ream: Yeah. Thank you. When you think about those commitments and then the community of educators that are called to serve at Lipscomb, how do you define maybe the characteristics or qualities of the academic vocation that they hold in common?

Candice McQueen: Yeah, I think within our Lipscomb curriculum, we do a good job of focusing on Scripture. I mean, interestingly enough, we are an institution that for years has not changed our daily Bible requirements, meaning we still have 18 hours of Bible required of each student. Nine hours of that would be considered Bible survey, like Story of Israel, Story of the Church, Story of Jesus. Nine hours are more upper level courses like Christian Ethics. It could be in an individual book of the Bible that’s being studied courses like Faith and Culture or um, Faith and Philosophy. These are all courses that might be part of our curricular offerings. And so I would say those are important.

And Lipscomb from its beginning has really embraced this commitment to the Bible, but doing it as part of a liberal arts curriculum. And so you, you see this 18 hours of Bible, but you also see that we stress languages like Greek and Hebrew and Latin and French and German. And we have humanities well represented. Rhetoric has become much more important at our university. Philosophy, English literature. 

Really as one of our founders, James A. Harding said that our goal is to form students for the greatest usefulness of life. We’re not trying to make professional preachers but we are trying to develop students in the Lord’s way. And David Lipscomb would say using the Lord’s book for the Lord’s service. And so I would say those are characteristics that you would see in our curriculum.

Todd C. Ream: Yeah, thank you. Before we close our conversation then today I want to ask you about the health of the academic vocation, and you mentioned the high view of the Church that Lipscomb University has. In what way is the health of the academic vocation then, in your estimation, related to the health of the relationship the university shares with the Church?

Candice McQueen: Yeah, great question. I’d say, you know, over the last decade Lipscomb has really embraced what we would call a confession of faith. It’s part of a, a centering core that we developed, and it helps us center our Christian beliefs and commitments while we’ve had a broader relationship with a broader number of churches. 

It was written and introduced by the board of trustees and it tried to help answer some questions like, what would a deeper and more intentional focus on Christian character of a university look like, building on strengths of the Churches of Christ, even though we’re not a church? It asks questions like, how can we be more intentional about what are our theological values and what’s our core that guides the university? We were trying to answer questions like, how can we be more intentionally Christian in the classroom and in our academic community? 

And so the centering core and this piece, that’s the confession of faith, was really important for us to define that we have this connection and here’s what it looks like in terms of core values, even though we’re not the Church. But it allows us to have a center so we can actually be of greater service to the Church because we’re putting out people who can serve their churches in a lot of ways, as leaders can serve as a member of that church and be a strong disciple. And so their values are going to be aligned and the critical nature and character of who they are will be aligned, even though they’re not necessarily going to be the minister or the pastor at that congregation. And so I would say that’s how we’ve tried to think about it. 

And we also really care about hiring. We’ve been more and more and more intentional about hiring over the last several years to make sure when you’re hired at Lipscomb, even though you may be on a spectrum of different Christian backgrounds that the centering core we can all agree on. This is something that keeps us all in a way connected even while we may worship in different churches across the community. And that has been a very, very helpful part of bringing in and bringing together people who may have lots of different backgrounds of churches.

Todd C. Ream: For our last question then today, I want to ask you about the ways you mentioned that resourcing and preparing students to be good citizens and good leaders of the Church is one way, but in what ways can the university be of greater service to the Church moving forward, in what ways can the Church be of greater service to the university, how can we draw that relationship even closer together?

Candice McQueen: I actually spoke on this not too long ago at a convention conference in Atlanta, and I was speaking on that exact topic. How do we have greater synergy? And what we are finding is that students that are 18 to 24-year-old that we are serving in a typical undergraduate school are less and less and less likely to go to church on a regular basis. They just aren’t attending in the same way. 

And so what we feel like we can do at a Christian university that’s very intentional and very specific about our faith, where we’re bold and saying who we can be a bridge when students feel like they still want to engage faithfully. They still want to understand sort of theological questions that they’re grappling with. They still wanna have that community where they feel like they are learning Christian values, that they’re not going to church. 

We can help them at a university, point them back to the church is part of being deep. It’s providing depth for you. It’s providing community, it’s providing long-term sustainability. And maybe while you’re in the Christian community like ours, you’re hearing that on a regular basis, we’re helping you find church communities. We partner with churches on mission work to help guide students into those churches to find a long lasting sort of membership and opportunity to connect.

And so we feel like we’re a bridge. I think Christian universities are a great bridge to the church because then many times they’ll engage in Christian universities and they’re not going to church, so we can either point them to it or help them still have faith, and have it in a deep way, even while they’re not at a place they’re fully committed to a church.

Now, how can churches help the university? I think they help us by making sure we’re theologically have alignment. I think the worst thing to do is to say we’re on different pages and we’re training students and we put it, we’re putting forth values that don’t align from a centering perspective that doesn’t help us support what the church is trying to do either, but we have to be open that sometimes the way we do things may be different at a Christian university than a church. And we shouldn’t make assumptions about worship style because it may be different because who you’re serving may look different than who you’re serving in a church.

And so providing a lot of grace between Christian universities and churches are also going to be helpful for sustainability and to both serve as a bridge for each other.

Todd C. Ream: Thank you. Thank you very much. Our guest has been Candice McQueen, Professor of Education and President of Lipscomb University. Thank you for sharing your insights and wisdom with us.

Candice McQueen: Thank you.

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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.