The Outrageous Idea of the Missional Professor. Paul M. Gould
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that they are and do to the glorious riches of the gospel.
Paul M. Gould
Fort Worth, Texas
August 15, 2014
Acknowledgments
This book would never have come to be without the example, as a young Christian and college student, of those older in the faith who loved, discipled, challenged, and called me to live for something greater than self. Thanks to Rick Jones, Mark Brown, Mike Erre, Roger Hershey, and Stan Wallace. I thank those students with whom I’ve had the privilege, in turn, to disciple as a campus minister—Andrew Chapin, Baron Luechauer, Greg Thompson, David Clady, and many more. I’m grateful for my years as a campus minister with CRU (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ) and specifically, for the ten years serving with Faculty Commons, the faculty ministry of CRU.
Many thanks to Cultural Encounters for permission to include portions of my essay “The Consequences of (Some) Ideas: A Review Essay of James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World” within chapter 7. Thanks also to Christian Higher Education, for permission to include a modified version of my “An Essay on Academic Disciplines, Faithfulness, and the Christian Scholar” as chapter 8.
Thanks to Rich McGee, Bill Hager, David Dehuff, Ceil Wilson, Steve Pogue, Corey Miller, and Brad Fulton who all read selected chapters and offered helpful feedback. I give a special thanks to Rick Wade who read and edited the entire manuscript fixing many grammatical and typographical errors. Finally, I thank my loving wife Ethel and our children—Austin, Madeleine, Travis, and Joshua. I write this with the hope that our family will be a missional family and that each of you children will live missional lives in whatever context the Lord calls you to in the future.
The Outrageous Idea
In 1997, George Marsden wrote an important book that documents how attempts to integrate one’s faith with one’s scholarship are perceived in the secular university (and by some Christian scholars as well) as outrageous.1 The idea is that it is ludicrous, inappropriate, and even absurd to blend the personal/private/subjective beliefs of a religious academic with the public / openly accessible / objective truths and knowledge of the scholarly enterprise. Marsden expertly argued that there is a place for distinctively Christian views within the secular academy. I concur. Today, the idea of Christian scholarship is not as outrageous as it was when Marsden wrote. Sure, there are those, such as Richard Dawkins and his ilk, who continue to characterize religion and religious folks as delusional, but, by and large, Christianity and Christian scholarship are at least considered somewhat respectable within some, even many, of the academic disciplines.
Today, the truly outrageous idea is that of a missional professor. I shall use the term “missional” to describe a specific posture or identity of the Christian professor: a missional professor is one who understands and lives her life in light of God’s story and God’s mission (the missio dei). As Christopher Wright states, “God himself has a mission . . . And as part of that divine mission, God has called into existence a people to participate with God in the accomplishment of that mission. All our mission flows from the prior mission of God.”2 The God of the Bible is a God on a mission to seek and save the lost, to redeem and restore all of creation. Motivated by love, the Father sent Jesus into the world as an atoning sacrifice for sin (1 John 4:9–10). Jesus is a sent-one. So too are Jesus’ followers: “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you” (John 20:21). As Christians, we are called to be witnesses for Christ (Acts 1:8), pointing others to Jesus as the only hope in this sin-shattered, shalom-violated world.
The central outrageous idea of this book, encapsulated in the phrase “missional professor,” is that God wants to use Christian professors as professors to reach others (colleagues, administrators, students), play a role in transforming the academy, and meet the needs of the world. I’ll flesh this idea out in more detail in the pages to follow, but first a word on the notion of being a faithful follower of Christ as a professor.
What does faithfulness to God look like in this day and age for a Christian professor? Is it regular church attendance? Tithing? Consistent Bible reading? All of these activities are good and ought to be part of the faithful Christian life of a professor, but they don’t get to the heart of the matter. This is why the idea of a faithful professor doesn’t sound as outrageous to my ears as does the idea of a missional professor. In my mind, they are the same concept. But in my experience working with university professors, these two concepts are often seen as distinct. Most Christian professors deeply desire to be faithful to Christ in their vocation. The problem isn’t a lack of desire. Rather, the problem is a lack of understanding and vision. Many Christian professors and graduate students working in the secular academy have not discovered how to locate their lives firmly within the context of God’s great story as articulated in the Bible. And those Christian professors and graduate students who are living missional lives within the academy undoubtedly could use encouragement and a fresh challenge to “excel still more” (1 Thess 4:10, NASB).
The problem isn’t entirely internal to the Christian scholar. Consider Stanley Fish. In his book Save the World on Your Own Time, he argues that the idea of a missional professor is ludicrous and inappropriate:
Remember always what a university is for—the transmission of knowledge and the conferring of analytical skills—and resist the temptation to inflate the importance of what goes on in its precincts . . . Of course one is free to prefer other purposes to the purposes appropriate to the academy, but one is not free to employ the academy’s machinery and resources in the service of those other purposes. If what you really want to do is preach, or organize political rallies, or work for world peace, or minister to the poor and homeless, or counsel troubled youths, you should either engage in those activities after hours and on weekends, or, if part-time is not enough time, you should resign from the academy.3
In Fish’s view, the only legitimate role for the professor within the secular university is one of teaching and research, devoid of any moral, religious, or political values or ideologies. But the illusion that a professor leaves her everyday life behind when entering the pristine halls of academia is wrong-headed. There is no such thing as “value neutral” scholarship. Everyone, whether they like it or not, approaches the academic enterprise with a host of presuppositions, values, and religious commitments that are applied—some consciously and explicitly, others unconsciously and implicitly—in the process of teaching and research.
In this book, however, I am not trying to convince the Fishes of the world. Instead, my intended audience is Christian professors (and future professors) working within the secular academy (some who may be inclined to agree with Fish). A secondary audience is those Christian professors working within Christian universities and colleges, all of whom interact with their broader academic discipline and find occasion to interact with their Christian and non-Christian colleagues within the secular university. I shall write with an eye toward my primary audience, but if you find yourself working within a Christian university or college setting, the necessary adjustments to the discussion should be easy enough to make, and I leave it to you, the reader, to do so.
To be a missional professor in the secular university, great courage is required. Such a professor is courageous in light of the subtle or not so subtle pressure within the academic community toward conformity in terms of norms, practices, foundational assumptions, and lifestyle. The call to be self-consciously “on mission” within the university requires a boldness to be different—to engage in the scholarly enterprise with one eye toward the gospel and the other toward a lost and needy world.
Moreover, the presence of a missional professor within the secular academy is startling. A missional professor draws people to herself, and through herself to Christ. The subtext of her life is not, “Look how great I am,” or, “Look how impressive my CV is.” Instead it is, “Look how great Christ is.” Such a life lived in the secular academy is truly startling and refreshing. The presence of one missional