Doubly Marginalized, Part 6: What the Church Can Do

Christians in the university very often feel like outsiders in both their churches and their institutions. In this series, I take a look at the different aspects of this situation of being doubly marginalized.

I'd like to close this series of posts with a few practical thoughts for Christians in the university and their churches. Last time, I focused on how Christians in the university can help each other. Here, I'd like to offer a few practical thoughts on how our local churches can support Christians in the university and encourage us even in everyday conversation and fellowship.

1. Understand that we never really stop working. When we come to church, we try to put the mental processes on hold so that we can fellowship with you, but sometimes inspiration just strikes and we may look like we’re in LaLa-Land. But that doesn’t mean we don’t want to talk to you and wouldn’t welcome your distraction from our distraction to bring us back to focusing on God.
2. Understand that we don’t have “normal jobs.”
3. But at the same time, don’t refer to non-academics as “people in the real world.”
4. Understand that we have to choose our words carefully, and that just because we may articulate our faith differently than you, it doesn’t mean we’re not committed to Scripture.
5. Understand that we see many terms like “pluralism” and “humanism” differently than you do (and very likely use the words differently than you do). I’ll expand on this another time…
6. Approach grad students with sympathy. If a grad student seems to drop off the face of the earth, don’t assume they’ve apostatized; they’re probably buried in dissertation figures. A warm meal is probably more helpful than a sermon about church attendance.
7. The same can be said about new faculty nearing tenure evaluation.
   
8. Don’t imply that theology is superior to other fields of study. I’ll expand on this another time…
9. If you really want to make our day (especially a grad student’s day), ask us what we’re learning in our research. (NOTE: Do not ask, “How is your research going?” or, “How much longer do you have til you finish your dissertation?” See http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=47 for more. Just ask about the content.) If you don't understand, ask us to explain.
   
10. Don't respond to a novel research method or theory with, “Well, that makes sense.” In the academic world, statements like that mean, “That’s so logical, you should have thought of it sooner.”

What else have you found to be helpful encouragement as you pursue your calling in the academic world? What have you found unhelpful?

Doubly Marginalized, Part 5: The Importance of Networking and Support

Christians in the university very often feel like outsiders in both their churches and their institutions. In this series, I take a look at the different aspects of this situation of being doubly marginalized.

I'd like to close this series of posts with a few practical thoughts for Christians in the university and their churches. I think the greatest need that we have right now is for networking and support. Even though we are in the corner, we are by no means alone. There is a growing desire among Christian graduate students, post-docs, and faculty to learn how to pursue their studies and teaching to the glory of God and to the benefit of others (the concept of shalom in the Old Testament). Organizations like the Emerging Scholars Network or Christian Study Centers are providing networking opportunities for us to engage in this conversation and encourage each other.

It can feel awkward, sometimes, networking with those outside of your discipline; it's easier to feel like you have more in common with non-Christians in the same department than you than you have with a Christian in another (even related) department. And in a very real sense, that's the way it's supposed to be; Jesus builds His church out of all kinds of stones, and we need the support of other Christians who are not like us. (By extension, that means we need the support of those not in the university, but I'll talk about that next time.) So, here are a few thoughts that I hope will encourage us to seek fellowship with other Christians from other disciplines.

1. There's a big push for interdisciplinary collaboration---why not work up a collaboration with a fellow believer, especially when a successful interdisciplinary project would be promoted and cheered by your institution?
2. How many times have you discovered the solution to a problem in your field while you were thinking about something else? Maybe listening to that Christian physics professor drone on about femtosecond infrared laser pulses will give you the key insight into rewriting everything we believe about Mr. Darcy.
3. You might actually learn something about another field!
4. We can help each other learn how to serve Christ faithfully with our teaching.
5. We can model Christ-exalting community to our non-Christian colleagues. Isn't that part of how Jesus wants us to evangelize?
6. The struggles we face as Christian scholars are universal. I may have different conversations with my colleagues than a Christian art professor would, but we can help each other learn how to pray for our colleagues.

When have you had helpful opportunities to network with other Christian scholars? How have you found it to be helpful to your walk with God?

Doubly Marginalized, Part 4: The Advantages of Being in the Corner

Christians in the university very often feel like outsiders in both their churches and their institutions. In this series, I take a look at the different aspects of this situation of being doubly marginalized.

My previous post showed a little of the downsides of life in the corner, but I think the benefits far outweigh the struggles.

1. Christians in the university get to view God's world in detail and trace that view back to Him in praise.
2. We're able to offer a compassion and care to our students that outlasts and outshines that of our colleagues.
3. Each semester, we have the opportunity to serve as Christ's ambassadors to a new generation of developing culture-makers.
4. We can offer unique viewpoints or expressions of Scriptural truths that are often missed by clergy.
5. We can provide logic and insight to help church issues.
6. We can live a unified or non-compartmentalized life.
7. We live out daily the interaction between faith and culture.
8. Our schedules are often very flexible, increasing our availability to God's service and to our families.
9. We develop and present the academic framework through which our society views and responds to reality.
10. We are a prominent public voice for the reasonableness of the Christian faith.

The list could go on. Based on these thoughts, there are two things that I wish would develop in the church.

First, I would like to see local churches utilize their local Christian faculty more. This could mean encouraging college students (current or aspiring) to talk with them, or hosting a discussion panel, or hosting seminars about their thoughts of how their studies relate to their faith, or encouraging the Christian faculty to publish in Christian literature. What kinds of ministry activities have you seen that have successfully brought out the gifts and experiences of Christian faculty?

Second, I would love to see Christians of every vocation develop their own personal list like the one above. Just ask yourself, "How could God use me in my position in the world?" It's not a question of how many co-workers or clients you can share the gospel with in one week; it's not a matter of analyzing the moral quality or "holiness" of what you do; and it's not a matter of how much tithe money you generate each week. It's a matter of asking how God has called you to honor Him by making a difference in the lives of others, what the Old Testament calls "pursuing peace (Hebrew: shalom)." Perhaps if all Christians started looking at life that way, none of us would feel like we were in the corner.

Doubly Marginalized, Part 3: The disadvantages of being in the corner

Christians in the university very often feel like outsiders in both their churches and their institutions. In this series, I take a look at the different aspects of this situation of being doubly marginalized.

Life as a Christian in the university hurts, from both sides. Fellow Christians and fellow scholars react to us with distance or even hostility, simply because they do not understand the commitments that we hold closely that they do not share.

I think part of the issue on the church's side is that "careerism" has become a popular phobia among Christians (somewhat akin to eating meat sacrificed to idols in the 1st century church). Academics are of necessity very career-minded, since we have to largely be self-driven to be of use to our institutions. I think perhaps this drive is often misunderstood by other Christians, who sometimes perceive it as self-centeredness.

When have you felt misunderstood? How do you think Christians can encourage each other to pursue their callings as an act of faith? How do you think Christian academics can better communicate themselves to their fellow believers?

Undergraduate Corner: For a limited time only...

On this blog, the first and third Tuesday of each month are dedicated to presenting discussion geared toward undergraduate students, in a series called, "Undergraduate Corner."

College is only temporary. This is a big relief, since even the most seasoned student feels dogged by exams and term paper due dates and miscellaneous grade requirements that he read about in the syllabus on the first day but the professor never mentioned them again so he forgot about them. It means that "real life" will, one day, begin.

But the temporariness of college life is also something of a challenge. It means that you only have four five a limited number of years to take advantage of all of the resources available to you. When will you ever again have access to a college library, or to full-length electronic journal articles? When will you ever again be able to to waltz into a laboratory and experiment with the equipment? When will you ever again be able to sit down over coffee with the most studied minds in the world? When will you ever again be encouraged to pursue the connections between the different fields of study? Most importantly, when will you ever again have the free time to investigate the questions of the universe, and receive credit in return?


Don't waste your learning. Don't let your college years pass by without digging into the questions that raise your curiosity. Don't miss the opportunity to network with other interested individuals. Don't turn down the chance to develop novel answers in your field of interest and impact your corner of the academic world for Christ. And don't let these years pass by without contemplating how all these pursuits ultimately point you to the glorious God who holds all the answers and loves to see us ask, seek, and knock for them.

"Doubly Marginalized" returns on Thursday. Many thanks to the Emerging Scholars Blog for listing it in last week's Week in Review!

Doubly Marginalized, Part 2: How the church is marginalized

Christians in the university very often feel like outsiders in both their churches and their institutions. In this series, I take a look at the different aspects of this situation of being doubly marginalized.

I admitted in the last post that it might not seem like the university is marginalized because there are so many higher education institutions. The same could be said about the church. In most parts of the US, you can't swing a cat without hitting a Baptist church, a Methodist church, and some kind of "Christian Fellowship" or "Christian Life Center" that seems averse to the word "church."

But, just as with the university, I think this plethora actually speaks to the church's marginalization. The rest of the culture looks at us and asks, "Why does our city need fifty Baptist churches?" or "What the heck is a 'Christian Life Center?'" Most of the onlookers seem to come to the conclusion that Christians can't get their act together---and in a very real sense, they're right.

Ever since the split of the Roman empire, local congregations have been getting more and more divided. Sometimes, divisions have been for good reasons; sometimes, the reasons are so petty that the rest of us are ashamed. But I think the main source of divisions among Christians today is feeling a false sense of having to choose between faithfulness to the gospel and relevance to the rest of the culture.

Those who sacrifice relevance for the sake of faithfulness claim they're trying to preserve the purity of the gospel, because if they make a mistake with the gospel, they themselves will be cast into hell forthwith; they very much enjoy quoting Paul's letter to the Galatians.

Those who sacrifice faithfulness for the sake of relevance rarely state outright that they want to water down the gospel, but feel they should have a commonality with others first and then (at some undetermined future time) get to the gospel; they very much enjoy quoting Paul's sermon on Mars Hill.

(Yes, I did just say that both these camps enjoy quoting Paul. Interesting, eh?)

So, this is what the rest of our culture perceives when they look at the church: One the one hand, they see crabby doctrinologists who frown on everything while telling everyone to believe in God; on the other hand, they see smiling people who rush to every opportunity to help and serve but who can't tell needy people much about their God other than that He loves them.

As a Christian in the academy, I feel the need for faithfulness and relevance every day. If I neglect to develop my understanding of the gospel, God, and the Christian worldview that comes with them, I look like a fool; if I neglect to remain relevant and "in" the university culture, I look condemning. Either of those will cost me my witness and my usefulness to the kingdom in the university.

Where do you think this dichotomy between faithfulness and relevance came from? How do you see the need for both in your sphere of influence?

Doubly Marginalized, Part 1: How the university is marginalized

Christians in the university very often feel like outsiders in both their churches and their institutions. In this series, I take a look at the different aspects of this situation of being doubly marginalized.

It might not seem like the university is marginalized in America. There are certainly a lot of higher education institutions all around. Doing a Google search of "College Jacksonville, FL" turns up least 17 different institutions in my immediate area alone.

But I think this plethora actually speaks to the marginalization of the university. There are many institutions available because it's relatively easy to make money off of a higher education institution, and the more career/business-oriented those institutions are, the more profitable they are.

For example, if you search for physics departments or humanities departments or music departments in Jacksonville, you'll find much fewer results. And why should all of these smaller career-oriented colleges offer physics or humanities or music? There's a lot more money to be made in training physicians' assistants and computer technicians and court stenographers---because we need more of these people than we need physicists or humanities professors or trombone players. (Note I didn't say that we need PAs and techies and stenographers more than we need physicists and humanities professors and trombone players, just that we need more of them.)

But in this process of training people to fill roles with greater demand, the more traditional idea of the university has gotten lost in the conversation, and physicists and humanities professors and trombone players get put to the side and treated like they're not necessary for society. Hence the marginalization of the university.

John Sommerville (no, I won't mention him in every blog post) says it much better in his The Decline of the Secular University. I highly recommend reading it.

What do you think? How do you see the university as marginalized in America? In your city? In your church (now there's a thought that deserves a series of blog posts all its own)?

ESN Book Club Announced

http://blog.emergingscholars.org/2009/09/esn-book-club-the-outrageous-idea-of-christian-scholarship/

The Emerging Scholars Network has announced its second book club. Starting in October, we'll be reading through Marsden's The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. It's an excellent read, and should start some great discussion!

A Part of Something Special

I'm involved with two other faculty members in an ongoing undergraduate project funded by the EPA to install a greywater reclamation system on an apartment building on campus, with the goal of raising student awareness of conservation issues. We received the funding over the summer, so this semester is the beginnings of the project implementation. The project contains 8 hefty components that require a wide range of skills... and it needs to be completed by undergraduate students... and we needed to recruit them!

We were very nervous as we began this semester: What if we didn't have enough students sign on to the project? What if they didn't possess the necessary skills? What if the project came crashing down in mud and hurricanes? We spent the week before the semester began hyping up project as best we could; we scheduled a project informational meeting for the first Wednesday of the semester and crossed our fingers...

We were astounded when 12 students from a variety of majors showed up to the meeting, each of them bringing an overflow of excitement & dedication and a plethora of skills. We explained to them that the project would be difficult, and would require a lot of work... and the more they heard, the more excited they became.

Their excitement was refreshing, and encouraging. It reminded me that, deep down inside, every human wants to be a part of something special. Even if it requires drudgery or significant challenge, we want to leave a unique mark on the world. We want to give up our time and energy to be part of something bigger and more important than ourselves, to feel a sense of completeness by creating something new and beautiful.

And I think that's part of how we bear the image of God. God's glory is so exciting that, in an emotional sense, He "couldn't keep it to Himself," but created the universe to showcase His glory in unique and wonderful ways. And He gave us that same creative drive that seeks to make something new and special, something helpful and wonderful, something ultimately glorious.

Undergraduate Corner: Take your rest

On this blog, the first and third Tuesday of each month are dedicated to presenting discussion geared toward undergraduate students, in a series called, "Undergraduate Corner."

If I could give one piece of practical advice to undergraduate students, it would be this: Take your rest.

When God was leading the recently freed Jewish people across the desert and fed them with miraculous bread, He required that they spend six days going out and gathering the bread, but that one out of every seven days they not gather any bread. The idea (at least partly) was to remind them that everything they had was from God, and that they needed to spend time thinking about Him and loving Him so that they trusted Him with the other six days of the week. He also reminded them that even God Himself took a rest after creating the universe.

When Jesus came on the scene, this idea of rest had been turned into a legal requirement so wrought with details and stipulations that one had to do more work to understand & obey the rules than one did the other six days of the week. Jesus tore down this stricture with the statement that humans weren't created for the practice of rest, but that the practice of rest was created for humans. In other words, rest belongs to humans, like so many others of God's gifts.

And so, if f I could give one piece of practical advice to undergraduate students, it would be this: Take your rest. It's your rest that God wants to give to you. When we don't take time to rest, we're not just disobeying God; we're also shortchanging and hurting ourselves.

But it's hard to do that in college! You always have more on the list of things that have to be done, right up until the end of the semester, when you're whisked back home as soon as your last exam is over. Wouldn't it make more sense to get as much done as possible every day so that you can have some peace of mind when you do take a break? What if you set aside a day to rest but on that very day you figure out how to solve that circuits problem that's been daunting you all week?

Figuring out when to rest and when to plow through the work is tricky, and I think the answer is different for each person. Some students may need one day a week completely free from work responsibilities and some may need three sets of 8 hours of rest dispersed throughout the week. But here are a few practical ways that I try to ensure that I'm pursuing a healthy amount of rest; perhaps you'll find them a helpful starting point.

1. When I was in graduate school, I decided not to do any more school work after 9:00 pm---regardless of where I was in the assignment, or how much energy I felt I had, or if I had just entered "the zone" at 8:55 pm. At 9:00 pm, I put the books down and got ready for bed. And do you know what I found out? By getting enough sleep, I was able to actually follow the professor the next day in class, such that I was more effective at the next homework assignment, which meant that I got more sleep, which meant I was able to pay attention better... It's a lovely cycle.
2. I take my "day of rest" from approximately 7:00 pm on Saturday to approximately 7:00 pm on Sunday. I find that worship is so much more meaningful on Sunday morning if I've already had some time of rest beforehand, instead of arriving at church and saying, "Oh, I'm supposed to rest today. Right. I'll get right on that." Also, ending my rest at some point Sunday evening means I have a couple hours to get ready to return to work the next morning.
   
3. While I'm at church, I always have some means of writing down important thoughts (a notepad, the memo app on my phone). It's the nature of academic work that new research ideas or innovative solutions to a problem come in waves and flashes that can't be summoned or put on hold. So, if I have such a wave or flash at church, I quickly write down the thought, and (time permitting) I reason it out for a few minutes to make sure I understand the idea. Then, satisfied, I turn back to worship and rest. (If I don't write down such a thought, it tends to bug me all day.)
4. When I need to skip church, I skip church. I know this sounds horrible, but sometimes on my day of rest I need to, well, rest, such that going to church that day may be more stress than I (or my wife) can handle. Don't get me wrong; I think we need to perceive public worship as a time of rest (and church leaders need to make sure it's structured to be restful), but we also need to understand that public worship each and every week is not a requisite for rest.

What do you think? What have you found to be effective ways to take your rest? How has God met you while you've rested?