Cultural suffocation

The application of religion's ultimate insights to specific situations is, of course, a tremendously difficult task. There are no blueprints, no simple rules to go by. Christianity does not present...a tool kit of easy-to-use rules and precepts by which problems can be solved. The doctrines are not bound up in a simple list of "do's" and "don'ts" somewhat in the style of a book of etiquette...But it does offer a frame of reference, a universe view, which instead of giving peace of mind easy and success...often breaches the barricade of self-assurance, focuses on difficulties, and erases naive hopes of...progress ever onward, ever upward. Harold L. Johnson, Harvard Business Review, 1957.

How do we avoid cultural suffocation?

Am I making too much of this? Am I correct in suggesting that there are areas of our life in the Canadian culture that need a significant overhaul, if Christian teaching is to be taken seriously, but we just can’t see them?

i. When I was lecturing at the Univ. of British Columbia, I had to be careful how I talked about the management topics with which I was dealing, as overt reference to religion is not acceptable in our public universities, whereas at privately-governed Trinity Western I had the academic freedom to say what the motivations were for my personal values and principles.

Therefore, when I talked about my personal views, the most I would say is something like this: “I draw my management values from my Judeo-Christian heritage, which emphasizes the right of every person to be treated with equal dignity and respect.”

In my student evaluations for the course, one student wrote, “I wish all the Christian professors at UBC had the courage of Prof. Sutherland.”

My reaction was, “Courage? That scant reference took courage? Are my Christian UBC colleagues seen as that timid or uncreative as they ply their trade on public campuses?”

ii. On another occasion, I was doing research on a Christian view of labour relations. I wrote to approximately fifty Canadian denominations and church-related bodies asking for anything they had by way of policies, sermons, or rules of thumb that they could send me. I received less than ten responses, most of them to apologize for the lack of study that they had given to this important area. The Canadian Council of Churches admitted that much work needed to be done on the topic and wished me Godspeed in doing so.

iii. When BC teachers struck in Abbotsford, a troubled teacher went to her pastor and asked if he would be willing to conduct a class on the subject of labour relations because the strike was becoming divisive in the church. He responded, “There is no Christian view on the topic.”

iv. I was Dean of Business & Economics at Trinity Western Univ. The bulk of my research and publishing focused on the importance of integrating our faith with economic life. And yet, when one of the university’s student recruiters was at a Christian high school and was asked, “What difference does being a Christian really make to the study of the various majors?” her response was, “Well, for some majors—Business, for instance—obviously nothing.”

In fact, I faced open opposition from some of my new TWU colleagues when I first arrived on the campus in 1978 as the second full-time Business professor. More than one said that management studies simply did not belong at that august, faith-based, liberal arts institution because one could not be a faithful Christian and be successful in business. And is it any wonder, when one of our board members, a highly successful and very rich businessperson who donated extensively to missionary work as well as the university, said to me, “It’s nice to have a Christian liberal arts university, but in business we have secular minds.”

v. I was part of a panel of Christian municipal politicians who were asked what difference being a Christian made to the way they did politics in a pluralistic system. The other Christian school trustee on the panel, who later became mayor of her community, offered this: “One of our employees was ill and I visited her in the hospital.”

vi. In the last dispute between the provincial government and the teachers, trustees were asked to vote in favour of a lockout of our employees as a way of bringing home to them how serious the government was in its bargaining stance. I voted against the lockout. I explained that my faith taught me that using innocent third parties—in this case students, their families, and non-teaching employees—as pawns in a power struggle was, by definition, unjust. Therefore, whatever merits the teachers’ demands or the government’s position had (and each side did have legitimate concerns), I could not resort to injustice to achieve them.

I urged my colleagues to offer a non-exploitative alternate means to address the impasse. I personally favour what’s called final offer arbitration. But my fellow trustees, including the three professing Christian ones, were unmoved by these arguments.

[By the way, the separation of church and state, and the extent to which we should look to government to address moral issues, are topics in which I have considerable interest, and have blogged extensively on them if you’re interested.]

Now understand that the people to whom I am referring in these illustrations are all fine fellow Christians, stalwart in their faith, pillars in their local churches. If asked, they would doubtless all say that they want to make a difference in their respective spheres of influence.

But sisters and brothers, are certain areas of our culture impervious to new, faith-driven perspectives? Do we lack confidence to apply our beliefs in places that others have not thought to do so? Is moral courage the problem? Or are we sufficiently complacent that we don’t even recognize the need?

If your answer to the above questions is No, that still leaves us with the challenge of finding a way to address cultural suffocation. Let’s go back to that quote I gave you in my last post from sociologist Margaret Anderson:

[M]embers of a given society seldom question the culture of which they are a part, unless for some reason they become outsiders or establish some critical distance from the usual cultural expectations.

“Some reason for becoming outsiders.” What did St. Paul say to us about just that subject in Romans 2: Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Another translation puts the verse this way: Don't let the world around you squeeze you into its mold.

The world’s mold is culture. And we are to avoid letting culture tell us when faith is relevant and when it isn’t.

But even if we agree on the WHY, there is still the issue of the HOW.

Margaret Anderson gives us a good clue here as well when she talks about establishing some critical distance from the usual cultural expectations. How does one do that when we are so immersed in our culture?

Well that’s where the teaching of Scripture and the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit come in. God takes a bird’s-eye view of culture, whereas we are stuck with the worm’s-eye perspective. To get out of this cultural ocean in which we swim, we have to climb onto the life raft of biblical principles, values, and norms. British writer Harry Blamires called this, “developing a Christian mind.”

But this is very hard to do. Biblical principles with which we can evaluate life seldom come in nice, neat packages. This is particularly true of the Old Testament, which is where most of the ethical teaching in Scripture is found.

Because I have a seminary degree in Old Testament and I have spent a good deal of my time in those scriptures looking at the principles and ethics of our faith. I want to turn for a moment to the opening five books of the Less Recent Testament, often called the Pentateuch or the Law of Moses.

The Israelites of the period depicted in these books were not a people with a unique culture. A collection of small families related by blood (Jacob and his twelve sons) when they departed Canaan for Egypt in Gen. 46 and following, they fled Egypt under Moses, returning to the Promised Land one or a few centuries later (depending on whose dating you accept) a much larger group, in most ways culturally indistinguishable from the surrounding ancient near eastern peoples. It is not likely that all (or even most) of them were monotheistic (believers in one God), and few would have had much idea of how being followers of Yahweh (or Jehovah) would make them in any way unique.

What we see in the latter four books of the Pentateuch is God carving out of the prevailing culture a people for himself. Having taken the Israelites out of Egypt, he now proceeded to take Egypt out of the Israelites.

God accomplished this through the towering presence of Moses, along with brother Aaron and sister Miriam; the promulgation of the Ten Commandments as that which would distinguish their worldview from that of other peoples; the establishment of a system of worship and the rituals that would be associated with its practice; and a series of laws and institutions to regulate everyday life. In most cases, these laws focused on the external--appearance, appropriate relationships, even allowable foods and textiles.

While in many cases mystifying to us now, beneath these seemingly strange and even arbitrary directions and restrictions one can discern a principled foundation, even though its moral logic was not spelled out in so many words. In no particular order, such principles included:

• 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.
• Letting punishment fit the crime (which is what eye for an eye really means).
• Life balance.
• Personal integrity.
• A mutually dependent, one could say organic, relationship among God’s people (vine and branches).
• 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 love oneself.
• Worship that was sincere, not ritualistic or perfunctory.

But what the Israelites were taught, by and large, were not the principles but only the applications of those principles, often quite limited in the extent of their application, and typically contrasting with surrounding peoples and their practices that were hostile to the new culture that God wanted to establish and then develop. God was blasting, in a pretty hard-hitting way, through the enculturation that characterized his people.

Some later biblical teachers (including the prophets Isaiah and Hosea, Jesus, and the apostle Paul) affirmed that it was these underlying principles, and a commitment to them, that endure over time rather than merely legalistic adherence to ritualistic practice.

There’s the challenge. Scholars must work hard to discern the principled foundations of Scripture, along with their accompanying values, ethics, and objectives—all of which transcend time and culture and underlie what are mostly presented in Scripture as applications to cultures far away and long ago.

Teachers and preachers must take these findings and work them routinely into their sermons and lectures. Students of the Word of God, which includes all of us here, must creatively apply these principles to cultural situations in which we find ourselves, even if that means that some things we think are desirable, accept as inevitable, or practice routinely must change. This is when we really find out that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts J.

It won’t be easy. I was talking to my wife’s cousin who is part of the large, now quite modernized Swiss Mennonite population of Waterloo County, ON. I told him that the also large and modern Russian Mennonite population of Abbotsford tends to vote for conservative, free market political parties. Sharon’s cousin was gobsmacked. He said that the Mennonites there mostly support the NDP because of their commitment to social justice.

In other words, equally fair-minded Christians using the same scriptures and sharing the same heritage of faith may come to very different conclusions. We do, as St. Paul said, see through a glass darkly. But we must put in the effort and leave the enlightenment to the Holy Spirit. We have our job to do, and He has His.

Of worms, birds, and the Bible

Always remember, a bird’s eye view is way different from a worm’s eye view, when in fact, they’re looking at the exact same thing.- Paula Peralejo

Worms have a tough life. They are the furthest thing from strong, long-lived, or attractive. Their niche is a crap pile, a robin's beak, a fishing hook, or in the case of Mark 9:44, Hell, where the worm never dies. Worms are a metaphor for low-life humans. And their perspective--the worm's eye view-- is decried as too minuscule to be of much use (that's assuming that worms even have eyes). 

Yet from the point of development of a faith-infused worldview, we all start off as worms. We are products of a particular upbringing, set of friends, sub-culture, and culture that to the largest extent makes us what we are. We learn enduring norms, values, and perspectives at a very young age, and typically make adjustments only to the extent that we want to stay in, or move to, another societal niche. It's probably fair to say that we are immersed in our culture. And normally, we like it like that.

Hence my reference to humans as worms-- not to all those negative aspects of worms mentioned above, but strictly to their perspective. If we are immersed in culture, we have a hard time taking an arm's-length look at it--a bird's eye view as it were--and assessing its goals, values, and norms from an objective perspective.

I preached on this issue shortly before departing our home of 35 years--Abbotsford BC--for Ontari-ari-ario in 2015. Here are some excerpts and how I arrive at the issue of worldview.

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I’m convinced that we Christians are so deeply immersed in our culture that a large part of the potential impact of biblical teaching for living is lost on us, not because we don’t take the teaching seriously, but because we tend to filter the teaching through our culture, rather than filtering our culture through the Scriptures. This can distort, at times, the meaning of the teaching, and more often its applicability to cultural issues that confront us.

There are two important questions here that I want to explore with you:

1    What do I mean about being deeply immersed in our culture?

2    If my premise is correct, what resources are available to Christians to address the challenge of cultural suffocation?

A. What is culture and why is it important?

American writer Walter Lipmann usefully defines culture this way:

Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.

Sociologist Margaret Anderson goes on to show how important culture is:

Because culture is learned, members of a given society seldom question the culture of which they are a part, unless for some reason they become outsiders or establish some critical distance from the usual cultural expectations. People engage unthinkingly in hundreds of specifically cultural practices every day; culture makes these practices seem "normal." If you suddenly stopped participating in your culture and questioned each belief and every behavior, you would soon find yourself feeling detached and perhaps a little disoriented.

While all of this is true, it is not necessarily something we are conscious of. We are born into a culture and are immersed in it for all or much of our lives. Most of our priorities, values, and habits are to the largest degree dictated by our culture without our even thinking about it. This applies to the culture of the city, province or country we grow up in, our faith or ethnic tradition, organizations for which we might work, and of course, our family upbringing.

Can I give any examples of how culture shapes our judgment? Here’s a cute one from the writings of Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, the man who discovered mainland America and described the inhabitants he found there:

The manner of their living is very barbarous, because they do not eat at fixed times, but as often as they please.

But to bring things much more into the present--the economic trauma going on right now in Greece--consider this ingrained Greek cultural perspective, which they defend against a Canadian alternative point of view:

The Greek island of Zakynthos in the Ionian Sea is famous for its sublime beaches and sparkling turquoise waters. It is also where one of the most brazen scams to plunder Greece’s beleaguered treasury took place.

In a notorious scheme that may provide guidance to eurocrats trying to figure out whether this country deserves another big bailout, as many as 700 people of the island’s 35,000 residents falsely claimed that they were blind. They were rewarded with more than 350 euros a month in compensation.

The scheme, which operated for years, was finally shut down in 2011 after one of the “blind” was said to have been caught driving his Porsche. Among the cheats receiving the monthly stipend, which cost the government several million euros a year, were a taxi driver and a hairdresser.

One of the local residents rationalized the practice this way:

“I know from a good friend of mine who grew up in Canada before returning to Greece that your country was built on the rules of Her Majesty. Every country has its own mentality and it has never been the same as that here. What we have is the mentality that rules are made to be broken.”

The Greek gentleman I quoted simply accepts that culture rules, and that another point of view is fine for you but not for me. This is easy to see and criticize in the Greeks. But what of ourselves?

I’m the furthest thing from a sociologist, but from what I’ve seen from literature on the topic, cultural priorities, perspectives and values—what we often refer to as a worldview—are remarkably persistent. Transforming culture takes tremendous effort, whether it’s the micro-culture of a business organization or a church, or the macro-culture of a country or ethnic group.

Some very different kinds of people feel exactly the same way about the impact of culture and why it is necessary to recognize the stranglehold it can put on priorities and values, not to mention potential change.

Feminist and human rights activist Charlotte Bunch says:

Sexual, racial, gender violence and other forms of discrimination and violence in a culture cannot be eliminated without changing culture.

The estimable Pope Francis, in recent comments concerning the environment, observed as follows:

We should not think that political efforts or the force of law will be sufficient to prevent actions which affect the environment because, when the culture itself is corrupt and objective truth and universally valid principles are no longer upheld, then laws can only be seen as arbitrary impositions or obstacles to be avoided (sounds just like Greece).

Canadian political commentator Mark Steyn also recognizes the impact of culture:

You can't have a conservative government in a liberal culture. Schools in the U.S. are liberal and churches are liberal. The hip, groovy elite is liberal. Makers of movies and pop songs are liberal. Liberalism fills the air; it is the climate….Liberals expend tremendous effort changing the culture. Conservatives expend tremendous effort changing elected officials every other November--and then are surprised that it doesn't make much difference.

And, finally, my old cartoon favourite--Pogo the Possum, wading through a grossly polluted swamp--who observed that humanity is its own worst enemy with his famous quote, “We have met the enemy, and he is us”—‘he’ and ‘us’ referring to our very own culture.

That’s not to say that there are not many good things about our Canadian culture. Canada has once again been recognized as the most admired nation on earth for a reason. It’s a genuine privilege to live in this great land despite politicians, particularly those in the Opposition, constantly trying to convince us that we’re going to Hell in a hand basket, and that the only way to make life palatable again is to vote for them. Of course, our present government said exactly the same thing when it was in opposition. 

But what does a good living situation breed in its residents? —Complacency. If we conclude that things are great and that very little needs to be changed, then very little will change, and our worldview will carry on in an untroubled fashion. St. Paul's admonition (Romans 12:2) that we don't conform to the pattern of the world we experience will lose any punch; in fact, we probably won't really understand at all what he could possibly mean.

But there is a way to prevent that from happening. I'll discuss this next.

The times they are a'changin'...and a'changin'...and a'changin'

 What's so scary about free speech on campus?

"Back in the 1960s, a free-speech movement swept North American campuses and launched a

new era of social and political ferment. It was a heady, liberating time – time for dissent, challenge and dangerous ideas. It was perhaps the counterculture's finest hour. Today, university campuses are where free speech goes to die. Undesirable speakers are cancelled or shut down and unpopular opinions are suppressed. The inheritors of the counterculture believe that free expression is like kryptonite – so deadly that it will cause lethal damage unless it is contained or neutralized." – Margaret Wente, Globe & Mail, November 14, 2017

I was a university student from 1965-70. At that time, the desire for freely expressing

opinions,and promoting them in new ways, was part and parcel of the university ethos, even at relatively peaceful Queen's U. The times, the folk singers warbled, were a'changing (https://www.youtube.com/watchv=e7qQ6_RV4VQ).

Thus we saw an outpouring of student vilification re the war in Vietnam and racism, strong promotion of the new feminism, and an awakening concern with the environment. Throw in the sexual revolution, consumer rights, and a strong sense of egalitarianism and its concomitant suspicion of all authority, and you've pretty much captured how my culture attempted to shape me as an impressionable young person. To a large extent it was successful, particularly the belief that all ideas should be on the table and freely debated.

It is particularly in this latter case that I find today's Canadian universities virtually unrecognizable. There was a time when academic freedom was the be-all and end-all in the pursuit of knowledge, and looking for a good debate was akin to a sporting event. Now campuses are characterized by a secular fundamentalism about what is and is not allowable to even discuss, and "safe spaces" for select groups (but definitely not others) is paramount. 

The intellectual ferment that led to the liberation of many previously unacknowledged or suppressed societal segments (e.g., feminists, gays, pacifists, environmentalists) is now squelched in order to protect the psyches of just such people, and the newly suppressed are kept firmly in hand. In some ways we've gone back to the 1950s. But of course I would be vilified in the social media, and possibly expelled from the universities, for saying so.

How culture has changed since my youth is not my main point, however, but a segue to this: Culture is at best a shaky foundation upon which to build a worldview, if one is attempting to live Christianly. As I illustrated above, in many ways university culture has done a one-eighty since my days as a student. Many bedrock beliefs have been discarded. We were absolutely sure of certain truths regarding free speech and fulsome debate then that are no longer accepted. Was the culture right then? Or is it right now? How to decide?

The trouble with living in a post-religious faith culture is that we are bereft of enduring principles and values with which to think through issues of right and wrong. Faith has an absolutism about it that does not fit well in our "that's fine for you but not for me" age. Are we wrong to look to faith for principles, values, and goals that run counter to the prevailing culture?

That's next. 

Worldview - what I learned from CNN

The concept of a worldview is not new, although most people with whom I interact appear to have little or not interest or awareness of the topic. Then why do I think that it's important?

I happened to watch CNN for a few minutes today. The program participants were discussing the latest machinations in Washington (DC, the crazy place, not Washington State, the truly lovely place) regarding the attempts by the US Senate to do something with Obamacare. Underneath all of the rhetoric about eliminating and replacing the former president's health care legislation versus tweaking and preserving it, and how this is linked to political ideology, and how this rules out bipartisan cooperation, and on, and on, and on, one thing became crystal clear to me:

A large percentage of the American people appear not to see health care as a public good. Adequate minimum universal health care is not a human right.

Americans would never pass legislation that let people opt out of an adequate minimum education. They would not permit people to withdraw tax support for police and fire services, or defence, paving the interstates, or having a functioning government. These are seen as sufficiently important that all should receive such services and pay for them whether they want them or see them as necessary or not. The strong (some might say, hyper) American focus on the freedom of the individual to the contrary notwithstanding, certain services are deemed to be so important to a properly functioning society that all should participate at least to the extent of helping pay for them. These are what are called public goods. Some might even call them human rights.

But in the US, health care is not a public good. Therefore, able bodied individuals (or anyone else for that matter) who don't feel the need for health care and are willing to take the risks of not having access to it except at huge costs, are allowed to make that decision. People with certain pre-existing conditions are denied coverage in many instances. Millions and millions are left uninsured. And the remainder pay for coverage at much higher prices than would otherwise be the case if everyone were contributing.

In Canada, health care is a public good. We all contribute via the tax system and the provincial governments run the health system. Rich and poor alike have access to our public system, most of it at no additional cost. No one is allowed to opt out. The man seen as the father of our public, one-payer system, former Saskatchewan premier and NDP leader Tommy Douglas, was chosen as the greatest Canadian ever in a CBC poll. While political parties debate whether the public system should be supplemented by private participation to reduce wait times, no party across the political spectrum disputes the fundamental principle that universal health care is a public good. This principle is part of the Canadian worldview.

And this brings me to the concept of a worldview. My rough and ready definition is that a worldview is what we use to make sense of what we see around us, what we read, hear, and experience. Upbringing and parental values, our education, the views of our friends, and above all the culture or subculture in which we are raised, are formative in developing a worldview. Which is why no two worldviews are exactly alike. There may be wide areas of agreement on what makes sense in terms of a healthy worldview, but there are many differences as well. In the US, seeing health care as a human right is far from universal; in Canada is the reverse is true.

But which worldview is correct? Is there such a thing as one correct worldview? That comes next.

Building a faith-infused worldview 3 - The Christian Mind

Last year, the Students’ Society of McGill University voted in favour of joining the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, but the vote was overturned in an online vote. [F]ollowing the BDS debate, some Jewish students experienced harassment on campus. The student newspaper the McGill Daily has an editorial policy of not publishing articles that “promote a Zionist worldview.” (National Post, February 9, 2017)

It's emotional for artists who are women and people of color to have less value placed on our worldview. (Ava DuVernay)

Science is only truly consistent with an atheistic worldview with regards to the claimed miracles of the gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. (Lawrence M. Krauss)

I am totally convinced the Christian faith is the most coherent worldview around. (Ravi Zacharias)

Take a look at the quotes I have recorded above. They all have to do with the term 'worldview'--a heavyweight concept indeed. In just my four examples of its use, we see related to its meaning issues of human worth, race/ethnicity, politics, faith or lack thereof, organizing principles, and actions that flow out of beliefs. 

Yet for most people the term is probably virtually unknown, or certainly quite undefined. That is not to say that the topic has been totally untouched by writers and speakers. A number of excellent authors have addressed the concept of worldview (although not necessarily using that term for it). Here are some examples taken from a useful article by Charles Dunahoo (http://www.pcacdm.org/the-christian-mind-how-should-a-christian-think/):

1. The Christian Mind, by Harry Blamires. Blamires, an English scholar whom I met back in the mid-1980s in Vancouver, argues that there is no longer a Christian mind and that the modern mind is a secular one. [Blamires was a student of C.S. Lewis.]
2. The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, by Mark Noll. Noll was a
   
   professor at the seminary I attended. He concluded that there is no evangelical mind. His contention is that "...evangelicals are not exemplary for their thinking, and have not been for several generations. It has a popular but not serious intellectual life. Evangelicals sponsor dozens of theological seminaries, scores of colleges, hundreds of radio stations, and thousands of parachurch agencies, but not a single research university or a single periodical devoted to in-depth interaction with modern culture."
3. The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom. Bloom, an American philosopher, simply argued that the western mind cannot be seen as a thinking mind. His critique of higher education was particularly blunt: "Higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today's students."

Obviously the subject of a faith-infused worldview or, as it is also called, a Christian mind, is an important one. In my next post, I hope to define what a worldview is and what it isn't. 

Building a faith-infused worldview 2 - The road not taken

In the first post in this series on how one builds a faith-based worldview, I enlisted the great troubadour Bob Dylan to help us explore the certainty that whatever we are or do in life, however we interpret and assess what we see around us, someone or something will inform this process (http://whollystretch.blogspot.ca/2016/11/youre-gonna-have-to-serve-somebody_30.html).

I followed this with some writing I had already done on this subject, just to get us started. This was a discussion of how one might look specifically at an important sphere of human endeavour in which I have great interest--economic life. Is it possible to bring any kind of faith-based approach to that arena which presents two of the world's three great temptations: money and power? I found Catholic social thought of significant help in this regard (http://whollystretch.blogspot.ca/2016/12/building-faith-infused-worldview-1.html).

Now in this third post, I will have to get a bit more personal than I normally prefer to do. Last year I was approached by the former president of Trinity Western University, Dr. R. Neil Snider, to contribute to a book he was editing on the history of that centre of learning where I served for many years as Dean of Business & Economics and Professor of Management and Business Ethics.

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:

1. The sanctity of the family unit as the building block of society.
2. A culture characterized by justice (distributive, restorative, and retributive) and the rule of law.
3. Life balance.
4. Personal integrity.
5. 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.
6. 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:

1. Competence – There is no substitute in the marketplace for personal competence; therefore, we built considerable rigour into our expectations for students.C
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.