Most faculty now have a website or a homepage.
I have a homepage (http://kenelzinga.com/), something that was done for all the members of my department of economics at UVA.
This happened several years ago, but I still remember my graduate student, who was very web-savvy, and was hired to set up a homepage for all the faculty members. She came up to me in the basement of our building and said she was completing mine, and part of the format was to list interests of the faculty members.
She came up to me and said, “Mr. Elzinga, I just about have your homepage done and under interests, I’m going to list Jesus Christ and water-skiing.”
Slalom skiing is my recreational passion—I still love to water-ski. She knew that about me, and she knew that Jesus Christ was an interest of mine. So she just put them both down there. I’m really a shy person, and that just struck me as really bold. I decided to let Monica run with that, so you can go to my homepage, and you can click on waterskiing and join the American Water-ski Association; and you can click on Jesus Christ and go to a variety of things about the gospel.
Have you ever wondered if Jesus had a website, what that would be like? How many links there would have to be.
I would encourage Christian faculty to have websites that in some way identify themselves as followers of Jesus.
I had a grad student in my department who was an atheist question me about why I was a Christian. Unbeknownst to me, she had been visiting my web page, and using the link there, she was regularly reading a Bible verse and a lesson for the day. She would not have known the term devotions, but she was doing devotions every day off of my website.
I had another young lady stop me one time outside my office who said, “Thanks for having devotions on your webpage. I make my boyfriend do devotions with me on your webpage.”
All of this is something I never would have thought how important a webpage might be— because I don’t spend time looking at these things. But students have a different cost-benefit calculus than most of us do, and if you’re a teacher or have some other position of leadership in a university or college, don’t “hide your light under a bushel” by concealing from others that the very focus of your life is that you see Jesus as rabbi or master teacher.
You can be bold here—topics that it would be inappropriate for you to talk about in class, you can have links to from your homepage.
Kenneth Elzinga
University of Virginia