2004 New Faculty Orientation
Found in Union University Core Values > Christ-Centered
Patty Hamilton, Associate Professor, Department of English, Union University
Christ-centered teaching starts with who we are and flows through what we do.
Of all the things that we can say about ourselves as a community of teachers and scholars at Union—that we are committed to the vocation of teaching in our respective disciplines, that we seek to serve God with the talents and abilities He has given us, that we are not only highly educated but also highly engaged—one of the most important things to remind ourselves is that we are sinners who have experienced God's grace.
Unlike many of the scholars and teachers at secular institutions who seek to find their self-worth and identity purely in what they achieve, we can drop the pretenses, forego the typical posturing, and refuse to engage in the knife-in-the-back academic politics that people employ to defend their value as individuals. We can bypass all that and enjoy the freedom that acknowledging the truth brings: We are sinners who have been redeemed by Christ's atonement to have a relationship with the Creator-God of the universe. Our worth and identity are secure. We don't need to prove them over and over again. A corollary of this truth is that we are free at any time to admit our weaknesses, errors, and failures and to press forward, continuing to grow in the light of God's grace. What a burden that fact lifts from us if we truly understand it! And how different that reality is from the training and acculturation most of us experienced in graduate school, where the perception of our worth was based solely on our performance and where character often counted for very little, if anything at all.
Our standing as redeemed people who have a relationship with the one true Creator-God gives us a kingdom purpose and a kingdom perspective. We are not just slogging along, working for a paycheck; we are not merely pursuing our own selfish ends. Rather, we have a calling from God. Our calling is derived from the general principles in the New Testament that are addressed to all the saints, but we apply those principles specifically to our work in our academic disciplines at Union.
In our teaching, our calling is to participate in building up the saints and equipping them for God's service. Our immediate responsibility, of course, is to impart discipline-specific knowledge and to cultivate our students' critical thinking skills. But our calling involves our students' long-term spiritual formation. This fact can be all too easy to lose sight of in the midst of preparing for classes, creating tests, grading papers, attending committee meetings, dealing with whiny students, and explaining for the four-hundredth time why the comma goes there. In the midst of the day-to-day grind, we need to be reminded periodically of our kingdom purpose. We can help one another with words of encouragement that keep us maintain a kingdom perspective.
In our scholarship, our calling involves pursuing and propagating truth in all its various forms. What this looks like in actual practice may be very different in the Fine Arts than in Nursing or Physical Education. But our common commitment to truth distinguishes us from the majority of secular institutions, where Pontius Pilate's cynical question "What is truth?" is reflected in the post-modern skepticism of much contemporary scholarship.
The notion of calling in teaching and scholarship leads us to consider the second prong of what it means to be Christ-centered in our teaching: not only is who we are important, but so also is what we do . . . and how we do it. Paul's exhortations to the Colossians is pertinent:
Slaves [workers, students], in all things obey those who are your masters [employers, teachers] on earth, not with external service, as those who merely please men, but with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord. Whatever you do, do your work heartily, as for the Lord rather than for men; knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance. It is the Lord Christ whom you serve." (Col. 3: 22-24, NAS, additions mine)
The fact that we ultimately do not serve our students, or department chair, or provost, or accrediting agency, or professional organization, but rather serve the Lord Himself provides us with a radically transforming perspective on our work. It means that our efforts are of value, even when we can't see the fruits of them. It means that our work counts for something, even if no one thanks us for it. In practical terms, it means that the things which frustrate us—an angry outburst from a student, friction with a colleague regarding a committee matter, not getting recognition for an accomplishment we are proud of—these things may spoil our day, but they don't have to spoil our whole semester, or our whole career. It is the Lord Christ whom we serve. He desires us to do our best, and that best is sufficient. The time-frame for measuring our success is not the tenure-clock; it is eternity.
Paradoxically, focusing on serving the Lord in our work is what frees us to invest our lives in our students. It allows us to give ourselves to them without expecting anything in return. We expend our time and our energy and our prayers and sometimes even our tears on them because they are valuable members of the kingdom, co-heirs of the promise.
This does not mean that everything between us will always be characterized by warm fuzziness, or that it needs to be. As we engage students in mastering knowledge and life-skills, we need to be willing to practice tough love when necessary: defining boundaries, upholding standards, enforcing rules. Sometimes we may need to just say "no." Students, in all their youthful idealism, tend to want inspiration without discipline. But we need to view our task from the long-range perspective and affirm, with the writer of Hebrews, that "all discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, bur sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness" (Heb. 12:11, NAS).
At the same time that we uphold high standards, we have the opportunity to be models of God's grace. We can best demonstrate that we are a grace-filled community by how we treat one another. When we find ourselves in disagreement with others—and let's not kid ourselves: we will have conflict—we can practice good conflict-resolution skills, especially by listening to the other party (student, colleague, administrator) and trying to understand his or her point of view.
We can also model Christ-centered grace in how we help our students deal with disappointment and failure. The moment you find yourself handing a box of tissues to the student in your office who is crying over a low test grade is the moment to listen carefully to the prompting of the Holy Spirit. It may be appropriate to sit patiently in silence, or it may be fitting to pray aloud. Either way, the opportunity may be ripe to offer your student a kingdom perspective of the present crisis.
Let me illustrate. A couple of years ago a student in a writing class came to me distraught over having received B minuses on her first two papers. She had strong critical thinking skills and was very creative but was having problems with coherence. Since she had always been an A student, it was a shock for her to receive feedback that she was deficient in her syntax and grammar skills, among other things. As we talked, it became clear that her struggle was really more with the threat to her self-image that the "low" grade posed than it was with the intricacies of sentence structure. In her economy, a B minus meant "F." She had branded herself a failure in her own mind.
Fortunately, she had previously shared with me that she was an education major and was planning to teach elementary school. In fact, that semester she was observing in a local classroom and seeing first-hand how problems in children's home life sometimes hindered their learning. Once she got her feelings out in the open, I was able to reframe her present crisis as a learner according to my perspective as a teacher. I suggested that the pain and embarrassment she was experiencing over her difficulty in mastering a set of basic skills was the very thing that would allow her to develop compassion for her own students, particularly the ones who struggle to learn. For the first time, she was experiencing life from their perspective. If she let herself, she could use this experience to develop empathy for others and to understand how closely learning and self-esteem are connected. By working through her own skills issues, she could learn how to help others work through theirs.
The student decided to adopt a "can-do" approach and earned—truly earned—an A on her next paper. More importantly, she has done well in the education program and shows the promise of becoming an exceptional teacher—one who will be Christ-centered in her own classroom and model grace in her own life. Isn't this what we are all about? We entrust the principles of God to the faithful, who will be able to teach and model them to others also, to the greater glory of God.