Specifically Neil asked me to lay out how God prepared me personally to be a business professor in a faith-based university. This led me to contemplate how I was able to develop a worldview that brought value-added to my teaching and publishing at TWU. While this does not constitute a recipe for everyone to develop the kind of worldview we are exploring, it is an illustration of the process I want talk about with you over the next several posts.
So here it is: eight years of a young man's life that saw my fledgling interest in a worldview driven by faith-informed principles, values, and aspirations develop and grow.
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When President Snider asked me to write a brief
chapter on how God prepared me to give leadership to the Business and Economics
program in its early years, my mind immediately went to Robert Frost’s beloved
poem, The Road Not Taken. Readers will remember the key lines: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…[I] looked down one as
far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth, Then took
the other…Two roads diverged in a wood and I—I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. Nothing could provide a
better metaphor than that poem for how the Lord took me from normal and
expected point A to very unanticipated point B.
Let’s start at the edge
of that yellow wood. Sitting in my MBA class at Queen’s University in 1970, I had no idea that
in a scant eight years I would be an assistant business professor— and
eventually Professor and Dean-- in a Christian university in Langley BC. First
of all, I had never heard of Langley, much less what was then called Trinity
Western College. Secondly, while in my youth I had thought that I might become
a teacher, I had certainly never considered being a post-secondary educator.
And finally, I knew next to nothing about how one went about integrating one’s
faith with one’s career.
How, then, did God prepare me to move from Ontario
to the Canadian west coast, taking the only two grandchildren on either side of
the family and giving up on a promising career in the mainstream culture, to set
out on a road very much less travelled by, the world of private, faith-based
education?
The answer seems wonderfully simple at first
glance. If I had a one-paragraph chapter to write, I would say that I got a job
in business, decided to attend seminary for a year to increase my knowledge of
the Bible, worked as a college professor, returned to seminary to complete the
degree program in which I was enrolled, made friends with people who had heard
of TWU, applied to work there, and Bob’s your uncle. And from my vantage point
as a retired person, it seems like it went just about that fast!
But the richness of that eight-year interval, along
with the incredible broadening of my worldview that occurred during that period,
makes it pivotal to the shape taken by my professional life.
A brief look at each of those steps from Kingston
to Langley may be instructive in illustrating how God’s work with a person can
lead down some quite unexpected paths, and through some equally unanticipated
woods.
I set off to Queen’s determined to become a
chartered accountant, but my encounter with actual accounting courses, coupled
with my exposure to the study of marketing, led me to pursue instead a career
in marketing management. This was, as I thought then, an easy career path to
visualize for many decades out.
I have to say that my years in market research and
product management were both enjoyable and successful. In spite of this, they
were not entirely satisfying. There were aspects of the forces that drive
marketplace decisions, plus the politics of office life and what it took beyond
sheer competence to get ahead, that caused me to reflect upon my career choice.
For the first time I began to think about business ethical dilemmas, a subject
that was never considered in my university education. Unexpectedly, the opportunity
arose during this period for me to teach a business course for the local
community college. I thoroughly enjoyed that experience. It was at this point
that I felt my chosen professional path beginning to diverge.
[That is not to say that there is anything
inherently wrong with a career in business—quite the contrary. To be given the
opportunity to provide needed goods and services, create employment and wealth,
contribute to the good of society, and to handle the temptations posed by
money, power, and ethical challenges both competently and Christianly, is a
wonderful calling. But not everyone is suited to it.]
At the same time as I was wondering about my
professional life, I was thinking of how I could make myself more useful to my
local church, where my wife and I were very involved with youth leadership. A
good friend, an engineer by profession, had interrupted his career to attend
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School near Chicago, and came back very excited
about the experience. I decided to take a year off to do the same.
As much as I learned tremendously from my
professors and research done at the seminary, just as broadening was my
exposure to fellow Christians from a host of denominations and countries. Never
again would I be satisfied with easy answers or the feeling that one had
learned all that there was to know. A year was hardly enough to satisfy my
longing for this new learning environment, but our first child was born
during our time there, and the need to be gainfully employed was too compelling
to ignore.
Consequently, I took the plunge and decided to try
full-time post-secondary teaching, this in a town I knew little or nothing
about other than the usual stereotypes—Sudbury Ontario, where, as Canadian
songster Stompin’ Tom Connors warbled, “Well the girls are out to bingo and the
boys are getting’ stinko. We think no more of Inco on a Sudbury Saturday Night.”
This was not a likely incubator in which to hatch a career as a business ethics
professor in a Christian university!
Stompin’ Tom to the contrary, we had a wonderful
time in that somewhat remote mining town. The Business Administration
Department at Cambrian College was a great place to work, and I particularly
enjoyed the interactions with young people, both in the classroom and on the
campus. Wanting to put my year of seminary education to use outside of church
activities, I taught courses for the college’s extension program in Apologetics
and Church History. These proved to be quite popular. I began to think that I
was finding my niche, but perhaps not quite. I still felt inadequately prepared
to place my faith in the center of my career, although I was not at all sure
what it would take to make that happen.
Just as important to subsequent events, I was
invited to replace a rather well-known Sudbury pastor, Jim Cantelon, who was
moving to greater Toronto, as host of a Sunday night open-line radio program
aimed specifically at young people. In dealing with diverse topics in which youth
have a particular interest, I took an explicit Christian approach. This was
challenging, to say the least, as nothing in my church upbringing, university
education, or even seminary experience had taught me to integrate my faith with
so many everyday topics and ethical dilemmas. I loved the experience, and was
asked to speak to classes and groups all over the city, as well as having a
steady stream of students coming to my office to talk.
Consequently, we decided that we would return to
Chicago-land, now with two children in tow, to complete my
seminary degree and to see where God would take us from there. I enrolled in
the master’s program in biblical studies, with a major in Old Testament, which
required that I complete a thesis. This is, as they say, when it all came
together.
The chair of the Old Testament program, knowing of
my MBA and business experience, suggested that I do my thesis on the topic of
usury; i.e., the charging of interest on loans which was, of course, forbidden
between fellow Israelites in biblical times.
While thesis creation can be, for many people, drudgery with a capital D, it was for me a magical time. I dug into the Old Testament in ways I had never thought possible (or necessary) in my conservative church upbringing. I was amazed to find any number of eternal principals underlying those often strange applications to life in biblical times:
While thesis creation can be, for many people, drudgery with a capital D, it was for me a magical time. I dug into the Old Testament in ways I had never thought possible (or necessary) in my conservative church upbringing. I was amazed to find any number of eternal principals underlying those often strange applications to life in biblical times:
- The sanctity of the family unit as the building block of society.
- A culture characterized by justice (distributive, restorative, and retributive) and the rule of law.
- Life balance.
- Personal integrity.
- Wholesome relationships; i.e. a fellow Israelite was never to be exploited in any fashion as a means of achieving self-gratification--whether sexually, economically, or politically.
- Loving others as one would oneself.
Many of these had obvious application to doing
business Christianly, of course. But I also had to put the usury doctrine into
its proper economic context, leading me to an eye-opening study of God’s
purposes for economic life. Never having studied anything remotely connected to
business ethics at university, I now felt able to integrate my faith to my
discipline in creative and original ways that could be transformational in the
marketplace.
And at just that same time, a fellow seminarian
with an Evangelical Free Church background said to me, “Have you heard that
they are looking for business professors at Trinity Western College?” My
response--“Where’s that?” I soon found out.
Over the years at TWU, these lessons learned from
earlier life found their way into both program development and the approach to
individual courses. I structured my courses and the strategic plans for the
Business major around what I called the four C’s:
- Competence – There is no substitute in the marketplace for personal competence; therefore, we built considerable rigour into our expectations for students.C
- Calling – Unique among Canadian Schools of Business, we emphasized that a business career was no less a calling from God than was education, pastoral ministry, or pre-med and nursing programs. Of course, this approach has implications for how one views business objectives and the nature of ethical dilemmas.
- Character – In conjunction with the liberal arts, the Student Development Department, and the chapel program, we placed much emphasis on how a character infused with biblical virtues, priorities, values, and goals was indispensable to living for God in the marketplace.
- Crisis – There is nothing like a crisis in business life (and there are crises aplenty) to test one’s competence, one’s sense of calling, and the strength of one’s character. Case studies, “real world” research, guest speakers, and so on were used to deal frankly with the problems, temptations, and dilemmas that are all part of marketplace realities.
The business major soon grew to become the largest
single area of study in the University. This could not have happened without
the participation of a host of fellow professors involved in its growth: the
late Dr. Kenley Snyder, the founder of the business faculty, laid the
foundation for the growth of the program; Robin Dalziel and Teri Jones, both
professional accountants, developed that popular program choice while also
achieving full accreditation with the various accounting bodies; Kevin
Sawatsky, a gifted lawyer set the bar for quality teaching, and now gives the
University senior administrative guidance; the late Dr. Harold Harder, interrupted
his TWU academic career to work with MCC in Bangladesh and subsequently founded
the International Development program within our Business Faculty offerings; Dr.
Michel Mestre, formerly a Fortune 500 consultant, showed students what
strategic thinking really meant; Lt. Col. Rick Menking, gave leadership to the
program option of Information Systems; and finally Dr. Senyo Adjibolosoo, from
Ghana, whose International Institute for Human Factor Development transformed
the way in which one regarded Economics. Each of these contributors has his or
her own story of God’s preparation in making the Faculty of Business &
Economics the success story that it became.
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