Editor’s Note: The following is a book excerpt from Faithful Faculty: Vocational Flourishing in Christian Higher Education (B&H Publishing) that was released today.
Serving as a faculty member at a mission-driven college or university is a calling from the Lord, but starting this journey can be daunting. Whether you are arriving at this new place from a research university where the research dollars flow in ample supply, a career in a “secular” profession, or even another mission driven institution, you are entering an academic community with its own unique vocabulary, history, culture, rhythms, challenges, and opportunities that blend together to create the environment in which you can employ your academic discipline to make a difference in the trajectories of your students’ lives that will extend into eternity.
This book will not make sense of every strange element of community life that you encounter. Some of them might never make sense to you. Our goal is simple. We want to help you navigate the first steps of your journey into this unknown land so you can be cultivated by it, begin to establish deep roots in it, flourish through the nourishment from it, produce fruit for it, and make it better ground for the growth of all (students, faculty, and staff) who plant their lives there too. Pursuing this goal with diligence will bring glory to God because the work he has created us to do is being brought into alignment with and motivated by our calling to love him and our neighbors in the classroom, in our office building, across the campus, and even in the administration as ourselves.[1]
Getting acclimated to this new community starts with listening to learn. Listen carefully so that you can begin to learn the dialect and the history of the place. Listen to the conversations of your colleagues, and do not hesitate to ask them questions when they begin to transition from standard English to local jargon. Confess your ignorance to your colleagues. Asking them to interpret the “unknown tongue”[2] of your institution will help you establish relationships with them and will also provide them the opportunity to love you as a neighbor and become your friend. Jargon can be frustrating. (Just ask your students.) The history of the place, including its denominational history or lack of one, its people, and how its people understand its history, has shaped its jargon. This is the first step toward joining the membership of your community rather than remaining on the periphery of the place, like one who is there to extract what it can provide in the short-term and not nurture it toward long-term health.[3] While Faithful Faculty will not provide a comprehensive lexicon for your specific place, we hope that it will be a concise travel dictionary that will help you flourish in this language immersion experience.
The chief operating officer for jargon at most mission-driven institutions is “Dr. Integration of Faith and Learning.” His name is referenced regularly, but who he is, what he does, and how he does it is often a mystery. Each of these words seems to have a straightforward definition when used individually, but their use in combination often creates confusion and debate. If your educational journey has been like my undergraduate experience in the College of Engineering at the University of Kentucky, where most of my professors thought that the Christian faith was an impediment to learning, and one, in particular, told me that I was “wasting my talent” when I shared that I was pursuing a call to ministry in seminary rather than graduate school in mechanical engineering, you might be wondering how the Christian faith can be integrated with your discipline because your teachers have formed you to think that “the faith” is an impediment to “real” learning.
This subtle, often imperceptible, forming by our disciplines can cause us to end up believing that integrating faith and learning can be boiled down to passing along our own personal faith in Jesus to our students in various ways, but then teaching our disciplines with the same myopic specialization used at the state university down the road. While your personal faith in Jesus is of eternal importance both to you and to your students, loving your students as neighbors demands more. Faithful Faculty will seek to provide a robust description of how this phrase should be defined and then applied, but that does not mean it is used in that specific way where you serve. This template will, however, assist you in forming your own questions about this terminology, discerning how the language is being used in your community, and developing a framework for defining and applying the phrase to your research and teaching in a way that aligns with the mission of your institution.
Thinking carefully about these matters in community with your colleagues will empower you to form your students holistically. This type of education will not only help them gain an excellent understanding of your discipline’s method and accumulated knowledge but also the judgment to understand how this knowledge can be leveraged for restoring the brokenness within God’s creation rather than perpetuating it. This merging of excellent skill and rightly ordered wisdom will provide your students and you the chance to catch a glimpse of the glory that will be revealed when the groaning of creation is replaced with the perfected praise of the Creator that will result when God makes all things new (Rom 8:18-25).
Embracing these elements that uniquely define the calling to teach at a mission-driven institution will deepen your desire to be inducted into the membership of your community. Members are not commodities for the machine of higher education and are not motivated by a desire to take from the machine. They are driven by love. They seek to nurture and be nurtured by their fellow members. They serve for the good of their place because their flourishing cannot be divorced from it.
At the same time, this symbiotic relationship cannot exist apart from an administrative commitment to view faculty as neighbors and not as nuisances. The administrators who have contributed to Faithful Faculty are driven by a love for God, which motivates them to lead in a way that enables their faculty to flourish. Being an administrator does not demand that you give yourself over to the dark side of The Force. Even so, no mission-driven institution embodies this ideal fully. Just commit to playing your role in helping it embody this ideal more and more with each passing day and refuse to become cynical when it falls short of the ideal.
When the entire membership of an academic community is committed to pursue the shared mission of cultivating academic disciples prepared to lead for the good of the places where God plants them, the fragmented multiversity-where academic disciplines engage in protracted battles for turf due to some longstanding suspicions that no one can even remember-can be replaced with a true university where interdisciplinary innovation drives the pursuit of excellence and puts on display the fact chat all things were created and are being held together by King Jesus (Col 1:15-20).
Interdisciplinary mentoring relationships can flourish because your good is our good and not my loss. Faculty from different disciplines have the freedom to learn from their colleagues’ expertise in how to teach more Christianly, pursue scholarship when teaching loads are high, and use technology in ways that enhance pedagogy and stimulate critical thinking rather than stunt it. Students, who so often struggle to have in-person friendships with peers, can benefit from seeing faculty who don’t agree on numerous things enjoy one another’s company and care for one another in times of trouble. By God’s grace, wisdom multiplies in communities like this. Ultimately, students can be formed to display godly judgment in the successes and crises of life that neither they nor we could ever foresee.[4] As Wendell Berry explains, “A teacher’s major contribution may pop out anonymously in the life of some ex-student’s grandchild. A teacher, finally, has nothing to go on but faith, a student nothing to offer in return but testimony.”[5] Or as the apostle Paul said in 1 Cor 15:58, “Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the Lord’s work, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.” What’s not to love about this opportunity?
[1]Many of the ideas and images in this introduction have come through reflection on the fiction and nonfiction writings of Wendell Berry. I am sure there will be places where his influence will show itself in ways of which I am unaware. In those places where direct reference to his work is made, I will provide a specific citation. My debt of gratitude for how his writing has helped me to love the places and the people that have shaped me will not easily be repaid. Many of the themes in this introduction were also developed through conversations with a few contributors to Faithful Faculty that took place at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary through the generosity of the L. Russ Bush Center for Faith and Culture and over lunches in the Honors House at North Greenville University with dear friends and trusted colleagues. [2] Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter (Counterpoint, 2004), 132; Jack R. Baker and Jeffrey Bilbro, Wendell Berry and Higher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place (University Press of Kentucky, 2017), 10. In this passage, Berry draws upon the biblical description of speaking in tongues in 1 Corinthians 14 where the apostle Paul asserts that a person speaking in a tongue not understood by the congregation builds himself up and not the church (14:4) and then goes on to explain that speaking in this way makes the speaker a foreigner to his audience (14: 10-12) to show a change that has happened in Hannah Coulter’s son Caleb, whose academic agricultural research is written in a language that is unintelligible to actual farmers. This is but one example of Berry’s critique that academics obscure, sometimes intentionally, what they are saying in language that no one, not even those for whom they are supposedly doing research, can understand. The same thing often happens in the vocabulary of individual institutions where words are used in nonstandard ways, and acronyms abound, leaving the newly initiated confused and frustrated. [3] See Wendell Berry, “Higher Education and Home Defense” in Home Economics (Counterpoint, 1987), 49-53; Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (Counterpoint, 2015), 9-17; Baker and Bilbro, Wendell Berry and Higher Education, 6-10. [4]See Wendell Berry, “The Loss of the University” in Home Economics, 84–85. [5]Wendell Berry, “Wallace Stegner and the Great Community” in Berry, What are People For (Counterpoint, 1990), 54.
