Our New Work: What We Do as Christian Faculty

Determining who we are – those who find our identity in Christ and follow Him – will always provide the foundation for how we live out our distinctive Christian calling in the university and the world.

We are Christians---called by God---to be professors.

Over the next weeks, our Missional Moments will humbly address the subsequent question, “As Christ-following faculty, what shall we do?”

Traditional research universities delineate faculty responsibilities with the tritium of research, teaching, and service.

Since we desire to include faculty at teaching universities, and even community colleges, for the purposes of these Missional Moments, we will tweak the traditional 3-legged stool of faculty responsibilities to be: i) Academic pursuits (research/teaching in discipline), ii) Relationships (with students/colleagues), and iii) Service (in the university/world).

Taking a clue from Duane Liftin, we'll begin our series of faculty responsibilities with this consideration:

Christian scholars view their work as larger than themselves, larger than itself. They look not only at what they’re studying but also along it, so as to see its Christ-centered implications. This tethering of the temporal to the eternal provides meaning and significance and beauty to what they do and generates the highest motivation for excellence. Their study becomes virtually an act of worship. They work not merely to understand the created order, as worthwhile as that goal is within itself; they also study the created order to deepen their understanding and appreciation of, and ultimately their relationship with, the One who fashioned it and who occupies its center, its Creative Orderer, the Lord Jesus Christ.

At the end of the day, the fruit I bear as a professor arises first out of a new mindset of curiosity, humility, and worship as I ponder the wonders of a world created, and sustained, by none other than Jesus Christ!

--Rick Hove and Heather Holleman