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In the fifth episode of the fourth season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Mike Ahn, Dean of Spiritual Development at Biola University. Ahn opens by discussing the ways Biola’s location in Southern California serves as a vibrant home for learning, discerning, and living. One of the ways in which Ahn and his colleagues engage in that process is through the Winsome Conviction Academy for which he serves as an associate director. Ahn grew up in Southern California where his father served as the pastor of the region’s largest Korean American church. That experience led Ahn to think through his own calling in terms of its unique qualities as a Christian, a Korean, and an American, but also as one who shares in a love for the fabric of a region populated by 17 million people. Although Ahn left Southern California when he enrolled as an undergraduate at Haverford College, he returned and began the discernment process that led him to serve in campus ministry. In terms of flourishing in the vocation of a campus minister, Ahn emphasizes the need to listen to students and, in turn, discern what students are saying especially when the message being shared is not always readily obvious. Ahn then closes by reflecting on how the Church and the university can be of greater service to one another in the years to come. For example, Ahn notes the university is consistently engaged in thinking through how approaches to worship intersect with younger generations. In some ways, the university can serve as a worship laboratory for the Church. He also notes the university curates research that can be of great use to the Church. Ahn also contends the Church is attuned to the needs of particular communities. Learning from those insights can then help the university prepare students to meet those needs regardless of where their graduates eventually live and serve.
Todd 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 Mike Ahn, the Dean of Spiritual Development at Biola University. Thank you for joining us.
Some regions of the country garner more intrigue than others, with Southern California perhaps being one of those regions. The greater LA area including, say, LA, Orange County, Riverside County, San Bernardino, and Ventura Counties is home to almost 18 million people. Just as a point of comparison, the state of Indiana just has over seven million total.
For some, endless entertainment in the LA area comes to mind. For others, endless freeways with gridlocked cars come to mind. For some, approximately 280 days of sunshine come to mind. For others, devastating cycles of wildfires and mudslides come to mind.
To begin, how do you make sense out of living in California? And what qualities, if any, of the life shared by those 18 million people do you find inspiring perhaps?
Mike Ahn: Yeah, absolutely. Todd, thanks for having me on. I’m so grateful to be here, honored to be part of this podcast. I think Southern California is diverse. I mean, obviously it’s a diverse place. I think there’s uh, like you said, 18 million people trying to figure out their places around location and jobs and places.
But I think it’s also 18 million people who are trying to figure out and negotiate their identities and who they are. And I think the diversity that we have allows us to lean into and listen and learn and hear other people’s stories. And as we do all those things you know, Southern California is a, it’s a destination place for entertainment, for certain industries, for certain jobs.
But it’s also sort of a transient place for a lot of people, people who don’t get certain jobs, people who are coming to college like Biola. So it has lots of different kinds of people coming into the region. You know, for me Southern California is, it’s not just an observation for me. I’m a product of Southern California. I grew up in an immigrant Korean family. My dad is a pastor. He was a pastor of at the time, the largest Korean church in Los Angeles.
So I grew up, my weekends were in Koreatown, Los Angeles. My weekdays were in Pasadena or in Glendale. And so you know, my life was during the week figuring out how do I become American, if I could say it like that, you know? And then my weekends were, oh my gosh, these are people who are like me trying to figure out what it means to live in this diverse place.
You know, we are figuring out what it means to be a Korean American in all of who we are. So, you know, just for, for me too, I grew up when I was born, I was born with a Korean name, and my name is Mike. My name is Michael because my parents said, “What’s the most American name you can have?” And they said, “Michael is the most American name,” and so there you go, that’s why I was named Michael.
But again, on the weekends I really looked forward to meeting with my friends who were navigating similar situations as me. And again, as we talked about things, hearing about their stories, hearing about how they’re interacting, the Church became such an important place for me, such a place of community, a place of shared identity, a place of learning how to just navigate things with faith in mind.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. In what ways then do those qualities and needs afford the Church in Southern California with some unique opportunities? You mentioned your father was pastor, large Korean-serving church there in Los Angeles. You are now, you know, serve as a minister there to the Biola campus. In what ways, you know, do those qualities that circulate in California create, create opportunities for the Church?
Mike Ahn: Yeah, you know again, because there’s so many people and there’s so many kinds of people, I think the temptation might be that we could go into our own lanes, and sometimes California is that, to be straightforward. But there’s a huge opportunity for us to learn to receive and to listen, you know.
And if I could just bring in food obviously I love Korean food but there’s so many different kinds of food in Los Angeles. There’s Mexican food, Japanese food, I mean, just everything. And it’s not just the variety of food, but it’s the levels of food, right? You got street Korean food, but then you got, you know, Michelin star Korean food, and you got Mexican food and, you know, things like that.
But also, if I could say there’s, there’s fusion, right? Because we’re learning to listen to each other, right. So you got the Korean-Mexican tacos, which are almost cliché now, but it’s like these two cuisines really work well together, right?
And so because that’s just how it is in LA, we learn, and we grow together, and we receive, and we creatively figure things out. And I think that’s the way it is for the Church, too. I think there’s, there’s an opportunity for us in LA for, for the churches. I think we can learn and see where people are coming from, and people are coming with many experiences. You know, people are still immigrating to LA.
People are second, third, fourth, fifth generation Angelenos as well. But whatever they’re coming with, I think we can learn to listen and understand. And, you know, again, just as a Christian, I firmly believe God uses everything. God works in everything. And so I think there’s ways to understand and discern what it would look like for us to invite God into that process, to understand where God is moving in all of our lives.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. In what ways then do you see clergy persons in Southern California meeting the spiritual needs of the people that call the Los Angeles area home? In what ways do you see them collaborating together and working together and leaning, you know, into each other to meet those needs? And then what ways do they, you know, perhaps work in independence of one another?
Mike Ahn: One of the things about churches and clergy people, I think, in Los Angeles is everyone likes creating their own lanes, you know? I think churches feel like they need to almost become everything to everybody in some sense. And I think, there’s places for that, but I think, there’s ways that churches can learn from each other and grow together from each other.
I think, you know, if a certain church is really good at serving the needs of a certain community, I don’t think I need to replicate that in my community if I don’t have those needs in my community. And I think we can learn from each other, and I think we could serve with each other.
I think there needs to be a little bit more of a collaborative spirit. And I think there are ways to meet the needs of people and just invite people into the community, into a church setting or into a worshiping community together as well.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Along with Tim Muehlhoff and Rick Langer, you help lead Biola University’s Winsome Conviction Academy, an initiative that fosters conversations within the Church and the broader culture that deepen relationships and enrich lives rather than tearing people apart.
Can you offer just, before I get to a couple other questions in, you know, in relation to it in Southern California, you know, can you offer our guests an overview of the kinds of conversations the academy seeks to initiate?
Mike Ahn: Absolutely, yeah. So, Dr. Muehlhoff and Dr. Langer wrote a book called Winsome Conviction in 2020. It was recognized by “Christianity Today” as one of the books of merit that year. It dovetailed really well with what our president at Biola was doing. Dr. Barry Corey was leading you know, the way he talks about the firm center and soft edges.
And so what he wants to do is have conviction, but also kindness in that way, in the way that we’re living it out, the way we’re offering truth and grace to people. And so dovetailed really well. And then Tim and Rick started this, it was called a project at first Wisdom Conviction Project. And a few years ago, they invited me into it as well.
So what we try to do is just create civil conversations within our world that is increasingly more and more polarized. I know a lot of people call it an argument culture. It’s not even just a cancel culture anymore, but people, conversations with contempt more than a desire to listen.
And so we want to get back into a posture of listening and a posture of we can disagree on certain things, but let’s engage and even learn from where we might come together in certain parts. Let’s find commonality but also agree that we don’t agree on everything either. And that’s not a bad thing. And so civility is really the foundation of, of what we’re trying to do in the Wisdom Conviction now Academy.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Part of the efforts that you’ve led on behalf of the academy include conversations between students at Biola University and Pomona College, one of the Claremont Colleges not too far from you there in Southern California.
Can you highlight a couple of those conversations, how they’ve gone, things that students learned about each other through those efforts?
Mike Ahn: Absolutely. This is our fifth year doing the conversations with Pomona College. We just did it two weeks ago. And it’s such an amazing experience. Again, Pomona College is only 27 miles away from Biola University. But again, I think Pomona leans left politically, and Biola leans right politically.
And I think our students, we bring 15 students, they bring 15 students. We have these conversations. The first day is really about learning how to develop listening skills and learning to tell our story.
The second day is we’re going to start discussing anything you guys want to talk about. We’re going to talk about gender. We’re going to talk about sexuality. We’re going to talk about abortion. We’re going to talk about immigration. We’re going to talk about AI. Whatever you want to talk about, we can talk about.
But let’s do it in a way where we can honor each other and understand where each other is coming from. And again, I think one of the most interesting things about Pomona Biola dialogues is that we learn that the Pomona students find differences within each other sometimes more vehemently.
And same with Biola students. They find differences with each other rather than with the other counterpart from the other school. And it just shows you that whatever topic there is, we’re not a monolith, you know. Just because we’re Biola or just because they’re Pomona doesn’t mean we all think the same.
But everyone has their own process, their own story, the way that they’re approaching understanding their world and understanding how to engage in their world. So they, they’ve come to it, they just develop a little bit more of an intellectual curiosity and intellectual humility through this process, which we love. And we, we invite them to keep talking.
I just got an email actually over the weekend from one of the, one of our students who said that they’re going to meet with two of the students from Pomona over the weekend, and that they’re going to have coffee just to continue the conversations they started two weeks ago.
So I think it’s a great way to get our students, you know, in a Christian college sometimes the struggle is that we become so insular or, you know, we call it the Biola bubble. And one of the best ways to grow, I think, is to get us out of that bubble appropriately. And so to get our students out of this bubble has been such a fruitful experience.
And if I could highlight one other thing we do, we do another dialogue with BYU, Brigham Young University. They come down to Southern California. Well, this is our second year doing this. Tim has actually developed a class with a professor up there named Dr. Andy Reed, and they do a class together over Zoom, and then they come down here to Southern California, and our students engage with their students, and it’s just an amazing time to talk about where we’re similar but also where we’re different, because we’re not the same.
Todd Ream: Yeah, that’s great. Thank you. Stepping back then to where we started our conversation then, in what ways, you know, these efforts, does Southern California, you know, perhaps serve as a unique location for the academy to pursue its mission? It’s branched out now to include, say, BYU in Provo, Utah, but in what ways, you know, given the sheer diversity and the size of the population in Los Angeles, in what ways is it unique?
Mike Ahn: Yeah, you know, just like Biola and Pomona aren’t monolithic institutions, Los Angeles isn’t monolithic, right? You’re driving down the street, and the street signs and the billboards are in different languages. So no matter where you’re going, you’re always hit with the fact that there’s people around you that are different. And so again, I think the temptation might be I’m going to find people who are just like me, and we’re going to make our own community over here in the corner, and we’re going to live Los Angeles the way that we want to live it.
But the invitation, I think, is to find the people who are different and to, and to recognize, you know, my neighbor that I’ve been living with for 20 years, I might not actually know that person’s story, and I could just go and have dinner with that person and get to know where they’re coming from and understand not only their ethnic heritage but also just anything about their history.
And then, you know, again, I firmly believe that bridge-building, kindness and civility, these are parts of the endeavor of evangelism. This is part of the endeavor of witnessing. And it’s about establishing a communication that is more relational and more, not just, we’re just not talking about ideas, but we’re coming together from a story perspective, and I think there is a value in doing that. And again, we can do that. We could just drive on our freeways. We could go in our cars and do our own thing. But the opportunity is there for us to engage with people who are different than us.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. I want to talk to you now about your own calling to the ministry and your formation for that, because you grew up in, you know, Glendale, Pasadena area, but you’ve not always lived in Southern California because you came east to go to Haverford College and study history as an undergraduate.
Can you give us a short sort of overview as to the discernment process that led you east and then led you back west?
Mike Ahn: Absolutely, yeah. So yeah, my parents are not the typical Asian parents. I think sometimes we have the stereotype of an Asian parent where you got to go to UCLA or you got to go to Berkeley. And, you know, I did get into those schools, but my parents as they consulted with some people that they trust, they told me they wanted me to go to a college that where the professors were there to teach students, not to research on their own.
And so that was one of the things that they did. They didn’t understand the Christian college world as well as they might now. And so that wasn’t really on the radar at that time. But they wanted me to go to a small liberal arts college.
And so I applied to two kicking and screaming, but I applied to two because, and one was Pomona College, actually, but the other one was Haverford because they were the closest two to a city off of some of these U.S. World & News Report college lists. And so Haverford was one of the colleges that I applied to. And I did go out east, and it was an eye-opening experience for me.
And again, I think coming from a California public school setting in California where I’m trying to negotiate my identity and finding a lot of home in the Korean immigrant church and then going out east, not being able to find some of those things out east, and then being pushed into an environment where I didn’t have a sister, but I’m living on a floor with females as well.
I’ve never met a gay person until that year and I met that person on my floor. I never had to shower in a stall next to another female. You know, just, again, these are some of the things that were eye-opening for me and made me realize, “Well, I’m not at home anymore.”
And again, it was helpful for me to like learn to, I mean, part of the reason I can do some things like the Winsome Conviction Academy or some of these things that on campus is because I was pushed to ask certain questions and develop a broader worldview than what I was afforded growing up, and allowed me to push my thinking a little bit and hear other people’s stories as well.
But part of me coming back was a similar story actually. My dad, again, he’s a pastor in Koreatown, Los Angeles, and my dad’s church at the time was splitting, unfortunately. And as the split was happening he asked me to come back and help him with his youth ministry. So I had a job doing consulting in Center City, Philadelphia, but I decided not to take the job, and I came back home to Southern California to help my dad with the youth ministry. And I found a job in a high school teaching setting.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. You eventually then earned an MDiv and a PhD from Biola University’s Talbot Theological Seminary. Before we talk about your calling to the ministry then and the discernment process that you went through, we probably need to talk about maybe one of the most important questions, if not the most important question we’re going to talk about today. And that involves In-N-Out and your propensity to order from the so-called secret menu.
Did that love play a role in, say, not only anchoring you in Southern California as a child, but also bringing you back maybe?
Mike Ahn: I mean, I think I could eat In-N-Out every day. I think that’s not what my cardiologist wants, but I think I could do something like that if I had to. But, the Double-Double, I get regular onions and whole grilled onions. And I get chopped chilies. The fries, you got to get a light well, so it’s a little bit crispy.
And so all of these things are just part of, again, it’s, it’s one of those things. There’s a regular menu, and then as a Californian, you just kind of know these are ways that you can tweak it for how you, who you are and how you’ve grown up.
Todd Ream: You can tell the insiders whether or not they’ve got animal fries on their tray or not.
Mike Ahn: That’s right.
Todd Ream: They go pick it up. So yeah, absolutely. Onto your calling to ministry, can you share with us the discernment process that then led you to that? You know, were embedded in the Church and its efforts, you know, growing up, and then part of the process of coming home was to help your dad too with youth ministry during that challenging time. But yeah, can you describe your call to the ministry?
Mike Ahn: Absolutely. So, just to rewind just a little bit, in college, and this is a really quick overview, but in college, my first year, because it rocked me so hard. And a lot of my professors were actually, it’s almost stereotypical, but I would walk in and the first class I was in for history was something called Bible and Literature.
And the professor would say, “Hey did you guys read the text for today?” And we’re like, “Yes,” and she’s like, “Hey, did you notice that this is contradictory? Genesis 1, Genesis 2, you know, Matthew 1 did you read these stories? These are all contradictory parts of the Bible,” and things like that. And it just kind of rocked my understanding of Christianity too.
And throughout my time at Haverford, it, you know, God, in His faithfulness and kindness, brought me back to Him. But I think when I came back home, I was walking with youth students who were asking not intellectual questions, but more heartfelt questions.
Like, “Hey, a month ago, my mom said I had to be best friends with this person, and now that person is on the other side of the split, and now they’re telling me I have to hate that person. What am I supposed to do?” You know, and so, like, there’s these pastoral questions that I was learning to wrestle with. And that actually pushed me as I started to discuss these things with the youth students, to consider seminary.
And as I did that, I found a mentor, his name is Ryan Kwan. He’s up in the Bay Area now, Fremont, California. And Ryan walked with me through a lot of my questions, a lot of my vocational thoughts. And we did a lot of life together, a lot of meals together. He poured into me. And he went to Talbot. And as this time came for me to make a decision, I decided I’m going to go to Talbot because my mentor, Ryan, went to Talbot.
And my dad was very confused. My dad was like, “Why aren’t you going to Fuller?” Because Fuller’s a great choice. And again, I lived 15 minutes from Fuller, whereas Talbot was probably about an hour drive. And so I told him why. He didn’t really understand at first, but he’s like, “It’s your decision.”
And for me, one of the first courses and one of the first things you have to do is, you have to go on a retreat as a first-year cohort. And as I went to this retreat there was a guy named Dr. John Coe who spoke about you know, why we sin so much if we know so much Bible, or, you know, what do we do when we don’t feel God’s presence, or just a lot of these questions that I was wrestling through at the time. And he was our director for the Institute for Spiritual Formation.
And that’s when it hit me, this is why I’m at Talbot. So I transferred into the Institute for Spiritual Formation at Talbot and got to finish the degree. And those are the kinds of questions and the kinds of things that I was working through. Like how do we develop a discipleship process that is a little bit more wholehearted and, and fully embodied?
Todd Ream: In terms of that calling to the ministry then and the desire to create those kinds of discipleship processes then, at what point in time did you discern that your calling was also to campus ministry?
Mike Ahn: Absolutely, yeah. I actually didn’t want to be at Biola at all. I mean, it wasn’t even on my radar, you know, to be straightforward with you.
Todd Ream: Dr. Corey doesn’t listen to this.
Mike Ahn: No, it’s okay. Yeah, I mean, it was, and again, this is how God works sometimes. But I graduated in 2009, and the Institute for Spiritual Formation, as I was explaining at that time, was on the outskirts of campus where the tennis courts are, which is, like, way on the side. And I would drive down. Again I’m a grad student, so I come down once, twice a week.
I’m not a residential student. And I would take my classes. I loved the community in my classes. I kind of understood the undergrad thing, but I didn’t really understand what was happening on the undergrad side of the university. And then, you know I was working in a Christian high school. I worked at a local church for about 10 years, and I really wanted to be full-time in a church setting.
I applied to a few churches in Hollywood, in Downtown LA, and I just thought I’d be a full-time pastor. I thought that’s what I, a local church pastor. During that time while I was looking for a job, we had a daughter. She was one year old, and we had a hard time finding childcare for her. So I was actually a stay-at-home dad for about a year as I was looking for this full-time position.
And then after about, you know, two or um, searches where I got pretty far in the process. I started to open my parameters a little bit more, and three jobs at Biola opened up at the time. Two of them were hired pretty quickly, and the third one, I was like, “Um, I guess I’ll, I’ll apply to this.” so I applied to it.
I did end up getting it, but I’ll let you know right now, like, the first person I called, because I was in a process of getting hired at another church, the first person I called was the pastor at that church. And I told him, “Hey, Biola’s offering me a job. Hey, what are they, you know, what should we do?” And he said, I mean, so I was basically saying, ” I’ll work at the church.”
But it just didn’t work out with the church, and I took the Biola position. You know, for the first year, I was driving down, commuting about an hour, and each way, and I, I started to realize this place is pretty amazing. You know? This, you know, there’s the academy here, where they’re doing cutting-edge research, and the ideas that are being thought through here are pretty cool, you know.
And my job aligned a lot of the things that I was very interested in. I have a teaching past, you know, I have a pastoral side, and my job at the time was to develop our worship leaders, and that’s what my job was at the church before. I was a worship pastor and a small groups pastor. And so a lot of my past experiences started to converge into this job.
And then my supervisors at the time started to recognize and said, “Hey, we, we’d love for you to be here long term.” And started to say, “Hey, let’s figure out ways for you to, um… we could get another promotion for you. We can get other things onto your plate, and you can start looking into certain things.” And so all of that kind of converged in that first year or two or three.
And then as that was happening, I started to realize, man, God always had what was better in mind. I firmly believe in the local church, and I think the church is amazing. It’s just my place wasn’t in the local church. My place was in an undergraduate setting to be with college students as they are in this transient, transitory part of their life, as they’re understanding their identity, as they’re coming from different places, or they’re coming from Southern California.
And starting to realize, you know, “How do I start to live out a life, not only in my head with God, or maybe not only just by serving God, but how do I live my whole life out with God?” And so I’ve been here 14 years now, and again, I, I’m so grateful, and there’s no other place I’d rather be.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. For individuals who are discerning whether they too may be called to campus ministry, what would you recommend to them? And perhaps in what spiritual practices would you encourage them to invest as they discern that calling?
Mike Ahn: Yeah, I think one of the most important things is, it really is like a mentor or community to speak into your life, to affirm what your strengths are, what you’re, what you need to grow in. I think I learned so much from my mentor. I learned so much from the community around me here at work, just to affirm different things.
And again people called out different things that I didn’t even see in myself. Like for example, my supervisor was just telling me that at that time, that first year, “Mike, you’re such a creative person.” And I was like, “I’m not creative. I don’t know how to write. I don’t make films. I do a little bit of worship music, but you know, worship music isn’t the most creative thing in the world.”
But they were like, “That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about, you’re really good at getting different seemingly disparate and bringing them together in a way that makes sense for a lot of populations.” And I was like, “Oh,” and again, I never saw that, but the community around me, the supervisor called that out of me, and I, I think that’s one of my strengths now.
I think that’s one of the things that I say I’m good at. And so a mentor, a community. But in terms of discipline, I think, man, there’s so much of, of Christian life where you know, sometimes we pray for something, and we want to be, instead of learning, there’s starting to pray where we are and where I’m actually at. And if it’s frustration or if it’s confusion.
And again, I think it’s just about the discipline of honest prayer. I think that’s such a foundational discipline for me. It’s such a foundational discipline for how I’ve approached just my journey. And I think just learning to pray from that honest place and then allowing God to kind of take care of the rest.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Talking now about campus ministry and how it operates there at Biola, could you offer a brief overview of the departments that comprise campus ministry and formation at Biola? What ways do they work together, and what ways do they meet individual needs and dependence of one another?
Mike Ahn: Absolutely, yeah. So at Biola, we call it spiritual development, spiritual life. I guess campus uh, Christian formation in other places. But in spiritual development, we’ve got we’ve got chapels, we’ve got worship teams, we’ve got student ministries, we’ve got pastoral care, which is what we offer if students want to meet with us. And we have a basic needs pantry. So these are the various areas of what we do to try to meet the needs of all of our students, not just the middle core evangelical crowd.
I think one of the interesting things about Biola is um, we’re attracting more and more Catholic students, and we’re attracting more and more charismatic students. And so, like, we’re just starting to realize you’re coming from a high church place or a low church place, and just that middle evangelical space is not necessarily always our core crowd anymore, where it’s, it’s everywhere.
And so we just want to make sure that we’re attuned to the various needs of our university. And, you know, we’ve got such an amazing team here. I think everyone does such an amazing job. Chad and Meghan, Noreen and Landon, they’re such capable people of leading their own areas and, you know, they lead the four main areas that were listed.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. In your capacity as the Dean of Spiritual Development then, would you describe the role you play in the life of Biola? What services do you lead there, and the contributions you strive to make as the area’s leader?
Mike Ahn: No, I, I know, in my role at certain universities people might be preaching once a week or even like in every chapel sometimes. But I try to, what I try to do is I try to bring as many of our speakers into the chapel as possible. We’ve got such an amazing Bible department where students take 30 units of Bible.
We’ve got such amazing local church pastors around here. We’ve got such committed Christians. We have people in the film industry, in science and technology industries. And so we try to bring in as many people into the chapel as possible. And so my job is, sort of like, to kind of keep everyone aligned in an arc, creating a chapel theme that allows all of us to speak from a similar type of place.
And I try to make that work in the chapel setting. Another thing we do is our conferences here at Biola. We cancel classes for three days out of a semester, and we have a Bible conference in the fall and a missions conference in the spring to remind ourselves that we are about the Great Commandment in the fall and about the Great Commission in the spring.
And cultivating that space is something that we do here in our team as well. But again, as a dean, I think not only working with our team and developing the chapels, the worship the student ministries, and the pastoral care spaces where, again, we meet one-on-one with students, it’s really like collaborating with faculty, with the administration, with finding ways to work together in educating our students, again, on the co-curricular side that we’re at.
Sometimes the curricular side, it’s all about the classroom. But, you know, a lot of times we feel like students learn and grow the most, maybe in their dorm rooms or in the chapel or, you know, in a campus tradition. And so figuring out ways to create dialogue together. And then I think more and more, especially, in the last few years as things have become politically more polarized in America, it’s just to recognize and, and think through how we lead and how do we respond as a university to certain polarizing issues that might be coming at us?
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. You’ve been there for almost a decade and a half now in service to the community there at Biola. In what ways, if any, have the spiritual needs of students changed?
Mike Ahn: Yeah, absolutely. You know, Gen Z is definitely more anxious. I think it’s not just something that is said. The mental health needs are, are real. I think sometimes the things that they carry they feel it. It’s a pastoral reality. I think another thing is students, because they have access to so much information, they’re asking lots of questions, and they just don’t, they have a hard time understanding what truth is real, if that makes sense.
Social media just blurs truth and reality so much. They’re not sure what’s, what’s real. And so some of this deconstruction kind of things that might be happening, they’re asking lots of good questions. And I think we’re, we’re inviting them to deeper faith into, in, in Jesus.
And again, I think some of this political polarization is captivating even our students. I feel like students feel like they have to pick a side instead of thinking deeply through issues, and instead of like really grappling with what this means biblically. It’s more like, “This is the Christian way, so you got to believe this if you’re a Christian,” and, “This is not the Christian way.”
And so I think some of these, the ways that it’s presented in culture has been harder for them to actually develop deeper thoughts. So these kinds of things are, are things that students are, are walking through. And you know, and, and the loneliness. You know, post-COVID, I think the loneliness is real. You know, sometimes I feel like my job is to discern, like, if a student comes to me and says, “We need more programming in a dorm,” for whatever reason.
Sometimes I feel like the question I’m asking, or, you know, I’m getting to a place where I’m learning to discern like, “Is it really more programming you want? Because you don’t really go to the programming anyway, you know. Like are you trying to tell me that you’re lonely? Again, I think there’s like this sense of, like there’s these felt needs that students have, which are good, and they’re trying to, they’re trying to solve them with certain, you know, they’re asking us to solve it for them almost. But again, I think their real need deep down inside is something that we can discuss a little bit more deeply too.
Todd Ream: Along these very lines then here as generations, you know, change, their needs change, and you strive to meet them, in what ways do you all in campus ministry then adjust to meet those needs? But then also you’re stewarding 2,000 years of theological resources and riches that then also have proven over time to meet these needs. How do you balance that?
Mike Ahn: Yeah, that’s a great question. Yeah, I think I mean, we firmly believe in the preaching of God’s Word. We firmly believe in singing the song, singing songs in community and worshiping God together. We firmly believe in praying together. I mean, these are, like, non-negotiables. This is what the Church did in the early church. This is what the Church has done historically, and this is what we’re going to practice today.
At the same time, I think there’s ways to be creative and innovate. I think about 10 years ago, there was the big podcast boom and we created something called The Biola Hour connecting it to our heritage. Biola was known more for its radio show called The Biola Hour. It was the biggest Christian radio show west of the Mississippi for a long time.
And, we kind of repackaged that as a bit of a podcast to talk about, vocation and impacting culture and things like that. And again, it wasn’t to take away preaching, but it was to emphasize on how some of the things we learn from the Bible can be lived out in faith. And again, it’s just listening to students.
Students, they come to us, and they were telling us that chapels are great, but they want to understand, “What does that look like now for me to live that out as a business major? What does that look like for me now as a film major? How do I do that?” Because it’s great to exposit the Scripture, it’s great to preach the Scripture and God’s Word, but sometimes living it out looks a little bit different for, for the various kinds of students that we have.
So that’s part of the reason we started that chapel. And that’s not to say we don’t believe in preaching. We firmly do. We have more preaching chapels than an interview chapel. We have maybe, like, three or four interview chapels right now. So it’s not like that’s the main diet of how they are taking in chapel.
And, you know, last year, we started something called The Table. We started to realize students are analyzing the Bible. They’re evaluating the Bible. Some of them are learning to preach the Bible. We wanted to get them back to just learning and receiving and hearing and understanding the Bible in context.
And so at the table, we don’t do rows. We do circle tables on purpose. We do it over lunch and we try to, so again, we bring in the sense of taste back into a worship service, which has been lost a little bit in the evangelical world.
And we, over lunch, we listen to chunks of Scripture together, and process a little bit, ask a few observational questions, nothing too deep. But again, we’re learning to receive God’s Word and hear God’s Word again. And so again, this was our first year doing that. The anecdotal data has been very strong. And so, we’ll try it again next year.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. As we close our conversation then, I want to ask you about the virtues that those who are called to campus ministry need to cultivate. What virtues, you know, for example intellectual virtues, moral virtues, you know, should be cultivated? What theological virtues should campus ministers pray to receive as they seek to take on this calling and be salt and light to the students that they serve and the communities they serve?
Mike Ahn: Great question. We talked about discernment really quick. I think discernment is such an important virtue. I think, you know, the Bible is really important because it’s God’s Word, right. Now we got to figure out how do we bring God’s Word into everyday life, you know, what we’ll call wisdom, right.
Now, wisdom, I can apply it into my life, but now how do I discern what parts of wisdom should go into this person’s life or this person’s life or this person’s life? Or for me at 47, discernment and wisdom look a little bit different than when I was 27. You know, the way that I’m trying to love people might look a little bit different today than it was when I was 27, you know?
And so again, I think that discernment, that understanding of how to particularize God’s Word into the particular needs and context of my life, I think that’s such an important virtue.
I think another one is, I love Henri Nouwen just being that wounded healer. I think that, that virtue of like understanding your own woundedness learning how to bring it to God, bring it to other people learning how to walk with all of it, and then learning, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 12, that, you know, God’s grace is sufficient that His strength is made perfect in my weakness, and learning how to offer that healing to other people. I think such a huge virtue of, that’s just a core foundational thing I think we’re trying to do and model as well.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. For our last question then today, I want to ask you, in what ways do you believe that campus ministers can be of greater service to the Church and to their colleagues who serve, for example, in parish ministry in years to come? And then in what ways can those colleagues serving churches can they be of greater service to campus ministers who take on callings comparable to the ones you and your colleagues have?
Mike Ahn: Absolutely. I think some of this discussion about liturgy, I think as campus pastors in Christian colleges, sometimes we’re, we’re being flexible considering how generations change. And so I think there’s certain things that I think churches, local churches can, can learn from that. We’d love to speak and continue conversations about that kind of thing.
I think one of the biggest things is also learning from the academy. Just the research that they’re doing and learning to translate some of the deep thoughts and the things that they’re working through into a local church setting is so important.
And then I think, there’s a sense for, for campus pastors, we just, we need to be continually connecting to the local church. I think sometimes, again, we’re in our own bubble, you know? And churches are caring for the needs of that community, and they’re way more in tuned with, you know, what that community needs. And again, I think we can learn from how they’re trying to discern in their way how to serve the people around them.
And I think, we can learn that, and maybe we partner a little bit more collaboratively with them, even in service projects or in the ways that they’re doing basic pantries off campus or how they’re ministering to their people. I think college students want to help in a lot of ways, if they have time, as long as it’s planned out. I think there’s a lot of things that we can learn as well.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much. Our guest has been Mike Ahn, the Dean of Spiritual Development at Biola University. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
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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.
