I was nearly a failure at my greatest dream. Since the age of five (not an exaggeration, and you can verify with my sister), I dreamed of becoming a teacher. I played school pretty much non-stop from as far back as I can remember, and the dream never changed. It was fed and encouraged by the great teachers I had throughout my high school and undergraduate years, and I could not believe my great fortune when I landed my first teaching job at Fort Zumwalt South Middle School. I experienced 15 wonderful years teaching in K-12 education, but God had planted a seed in my heart to return to my alma mater, Emmaus Bible College (now Emmaus University), and when I was offered the chance to start a secondary education program there, we packed up and moved north to pursue the next phase of my dream.
And that’s where it almost went south. I was the product of a strong Christian home, a graduate of Bible college with a BS in Biblical Studies, and 15 years of experience in middle and high school classrooms. On paper, I was a perfectly qualified candidate to teach at a Bible college. Of course, the transition from K-12 to higher education had a few expected challenges, but the one I did not expect was the first round of course evaluations that found their way into my inbox. One particular question asked students to what degree the coursework prompted them to think about the content from a biblical worldview. My students ratted me out. The response was a decisive and unanimous “no”, and they were right. My teaching degree was not from Emmaus, and while the university I attended to receive my teacher training was “Christian,” their idea of biblical integration was to pray at the beginning of class. I was simply teaching as I had been taught, so we prayed at the beginning of class and even did devotions sometimes. But I had no real idea how to do Biblical integration with things like Educational Psychology, Content Literacy, or Methods coursework. My students were right, and I felt like a failure.
I know now I’m not the only one to experience this. As a matter of fact, I think it’s far more common than most faculty realize. Mathew J. Hall wrote about this phenomenon recently in an article published by The Gospel Coalition. Encouraging students and parents to get to know the faculty and dig into the curriculum of prospective institutions, Hall says, ‘It’s one thing to hold to foundational convictions. It’s another to master the skill of integrating biblical truth into academic disciplines. For a comprehensively Christian university to be functionally Christian, the latter is essential.”1 According to Hall, the responsibility for ensuring biblical integration falls on the institution and begins with faculty professional development. Unfortunately, many small Bible colleges are under-resourced, and lack comprehensive centers for teaching and learning, much less robust budgets for professional development.
The Association for Biblical Higher Education (ABHE) takes steps in the right direction with updated standards published in 2024 that include requirements for “Curriculum designed to support development of a biblical worldview though Bible engagement and theological reflection” (Standard 7 Essential Element 2) and “Systems for evaluating and improving instructional effectiveness to support student learning (Standard 4 Essential Element 16). Taken together, these Institutional Accreditation Standards have the potential to help institutions “exhibit the institutional integrity needed to garner and retain the trust of parents and students alike.”2
But how does a faculty member, with good intentions, the right background, and a willingness to learn move the needle on Biblical integration? My own experience and research3 give me some insights about learning in community that align well with Hall’s assertion that this begins “with the professional development of new faculty members.”4
As I mentioned, I had a less-than-successful experience with Biblical integration in my early years teaching at a Bible college. What I did not lack was a supportive community in which to improve my skills. That began with a chief academic officer, Dr. Lisa Beatty, who took time to review course evals with me, not as a punitive measure, but as part of an annual review process that allowed me to identify my own opportunities for improvement for the upcoming year. In a larger institution, this may happen as a function of deans or department chairs engaging in faculty annual reviews, but on our small campus, I was grateful for two things. First, my own concern about my success (or lack thereof) and the impact on students’ learning was important enough not to be swept under the rug or dismissed as invalid, as student course evals often are. And second, I received helpful counsel about ways in which I could improve at this mission-critical skill from a wise CAO who was attentive to Biblical integration in the curriculum and its delivery in courses.
The supportive community was also available in my colleagues who in many cases had seminary training and much more experience at biblical integration than I did. I was able to learn from them by observing lessons and even auditing a few courses. They had open doors and were willing to review handouts and slide decks or listen to me think aloud to help identify places where thinking biblically could be better forefronted in my lessons or assignments. In one case, a colleague provided a revised version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, an often referred to framework in education courses that is decidedly not representative of a biblical worldview. The highest levels of Maslow’s framework are humanistic and focused on self-determination and fulfillment, rather than a biblical perspective that acknowledges “The chief end of man is to glorify God” (Ecclesiastes 12:13-14). This resource provided a better foundation for pre-service teachers in my program to think about theoretical frameworks from a biblical worldview. The wisdom of my colleagues helped close a gap in my skill set that I didn’t even know I had when I first became a faculty member in biblical higher ed.
Finally, I took what I learned and did what I could to help pre-empt this and other challenges for new faculty. At Emmaus University, I co-created a New Faculty Orientation Course (NFOC) with colleagues. Our goal was to move beyond typical employee orientation and engage new faculty instead in thinking of their new role as teacher as a skill that needed to be developed and nurtured, with focuses on Biblical integration in teaching as well as other skills we saw as vital to first year faculty. We relied heavily on Stephen D. Brookfield’s reflective teaching model5 and sought to create a Professional Learning Community (PLC) in the spirit of DuFour, DuFour, and Eaker’s work in K-12 schools.6 While these resources aren’t necessarily written by Chrisitan authors they do espouse important characteristics of the Christian teacher that we viewed as essential for the NFOC. I previously wrote about the Biblical foundations of reflective teaching, and how the examples of David and Paul could inspire educators to be humble and adaptive in their teaching. PLC’s are similarly reflective of a Biblical approach to professional development. The idea of learning and growing in community is evident places like Proverbs 27:17 where the teacher declares “As iron sharpens iron, so a person sharpens his friend” (NET Bible) and throughout the New Testament epistles where believers in the new church were called to encourage, exhort, and train one another. And it turns out that of the many hoped for impacts of this year-long orientation course, the participants most valued and benefitted from the learning community that developed.7
It should come as no surprise that we need community in our quest to improve as educators, whether it’s adopting more active teaching methods, revising assessments that are susceptible to AI, or most importantly, learning to teach our content from a biblical worldview. We don’t struggle with these things because there is a lack of resources available to help – I can think of dozens of books, podcasts, and YouTube playlists that could help instructors improve whatever challenge ails them. But resources do not create learning communities and therefore struggle to produce real professional development.
I count myself fortunate to have benefitted from a strong community that was paying attention to how our Christ-centered mission was being delivered in every program, course, and lesson. I believe my students were similarly blessed when my teaching improved, and yes, the course evals eventually reflected that students were learning to think about their future role as educators from an integrated biblical worldview.
Footnotes
- Mathew J. Hall, “Considering a Christian University? Investigate 2 Things,” The Gospel Coalition, April 26, 2025, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/considering-christian-university-investigate/
- Hall, “Considering a Christian University?
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Sheri Popp, “Impact of Faculty Development Program on Teacher Attitude and Approaches to Teaching” (PhD diss., [Missouri Baptist University], 2021), ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Hall, “Considering a Christian University?
- Stephen D. Brookfield, “Using the Lenses of Critically Reflective Teaching in the Community College Classroom,” New Directions for Community Colleges, no. 118 (2002): 31–38.
- Richard DuFour, Rebecca DuFour, and Robert Eaker, Revisiting Professional Learning Communities at Work: New Insights for Improving Schools (Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree, 2008).
- Popp, Impact of faculty development program
