Do you remember responding to God’s high and holy call to become an academic?
Perhaps you imagined that being an academic meant tackling the world’s greatest problems around a crackling fire (picture Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and the Inklings in that Oxford pub) in the camaraderie of friends. Even if you didn’t see yourself in a tweed coat, smoking a pipe and dining with other scholars, you probably imagined fruitful scientific research, endless funding, and a smooth path to award winning discovery, crowned with a distinguished professorship, publications in top university presses and maybe a Nobel Prize. Perhaps, you also pictured thousands of adoring students, academic fame, and maybe even fortune.
But now, reality has interrupted your dreams. You find yourself rudely awakened by the:
- reality of rejected research grants,
- intense scrutiny by peers who are uneasy (or antagonistic) about your faith,
- overwhelming tenure requirements,
- leftover student loan payments,
- snarky student evaluations on ratemyprofessor.com,
- lonely office hours, and
- ungrateful students who protest every grade.
The call from God still beckons you, yet cruel reality has mustered the momentum to defrock it of its promised glory.
Is this the story you're facing? Is there perhaps a different story? Or different perspective that might offer renewed hope?
Although we’ve heard the stories, the stresses, the disappointments, and the isolation felt by many Christ-following professors, we’ve also heard incredible stories of triumph, God’s faithful provision and care, Jesus-like humility, and long-prayed-for-breakthroughs. There is another story at work.
Over the next two semesters, these FC Missional Moments will offer an invitation to Christian professors to live for God’s Grander Story, one where Jesus Christ–the source of all wisdom and knowledge–is at the center.
We believe this Story directly reflects on who we are as academics, and what we do. We hope this series of Missional Moments will cause you to follow Jesus Christ into and for the academy. We also hope our words (being collected into a new book, A Grander Story) will help raise generation after generation of new Christ-following scholars who long to be used by God in his great story in the academy. We believe that God wants to take the vast resources of the American university system (undergrads, grads, faculty, and research) to bless the world for his purposes.
Please join us.
Heather Holleman and Rick Hove