Photo by Pierre Bamin

Our board has been consistent – rock solid, in fact – with our spiritual practices. We begin our meetings on Friday night with a meal together and then often go on a prayer walk. We have scriptures posted around campus and people walk in pairs and pray. On Saturday mornings, we have breakfast, and we start the meeting with a devotional.

After I became president, we went through a lot – a financial crisis and then COVID – and so resource management has always been a major issue for the entire decade of my tenure. At times, I feel like I’ve done nothing besides trying to do things more efficiently. And so I found myself in this weird place. I’m a Baptist pastor and I was a church planter. I was an evangelist for years. Maybe people just don’t see that side of me. They just know Chief Executive Officer me.

At some point I thought I’d like to do the devotional so board members could hear me preach and to hear my passion and why I care about what we do. And while it’s not super common, they’ve seen me cry because I care about a difficult situation or just about the importance of the mission of theological education for our churches.

There have to be opportunities for the vitality of our Christian relationships and passion for the ministry to come forward. They don’t have to be formalized. They can be. Those formalized relationships, those formalized structures, like people doing devotions at board meetings, they can be just like having a service. But they’re probably more lane markers or the big steel guardrails on mountain roads. They express our commitments and keep us on the straight and narrow.

How do we express what we believe more? We have events, traditions, and structures that can express spiritual vitality. As a historian, I look to our past. There’s so much inspiration in that and in what the people who founded our school cared about. For leaders in times of stress, that can be another way to say: This is why we do what we do.

For us, our founding documents are clear in saying that we believe in the Bible. What does that really look like and what would – or should – that look like at a board meeting? Our board, for the first time ever, is memorizing Scripture.

With three meetings a year, we’re not going to get a lot of verses memorized. But still, it’s pretty cool. We’re living out what we believe.

Passion

“Our board, for the first time ever, is memorizing Scripture....we’re not going to get a lot of verses memorized. But still, it’s pretty cool.”