Inaugural Address - Charles Paul Conn
Inaugural Address of Charles Paul Conn as President of Lee College
October 31, 1986
October 31, 1986
What’s it all about, anyway, this place called Lee College?
Why is it here? Why should we care? In a nation where there are thousands of other colleges and universities, some of them five—ten—twenty times larger than this one, why should it matter whether this particular one lives or dies, whether it grows or not, who its president is, and whether he leads well or poorly?
We have come together here, in the middle of a weekday, on this gorgeous fall morning. The music is stirring, the robes are colorful, the marching down the aisle is solemn and dignified. There is a feeling of ceremony . . . and celebration . . . but after it all is over, the last prayer is prayed, and the last hor d’oeuvre is eaten, what difference does it make—really—whether we even have a thing like Lee College?
If we could answer that question this morning—or perhaps, if we could even ask it seriously—we will have spent the morning well, because Lee College is eating up lots of time and energy from lots of people, just keeping the doors open. It is draining off the manpower and money and attention of lots of people—and you and I who are here this morning make up a large percentage of those people.
Inaugurations are presumably for presidents, and after today I am more or less boxed into this thing, so it makes sense that I should want to know what it’s all about—but you, too, are involved in the effort to keep Lee College going—one way or another, almost all of you are investing your time, or your money, or your energy, or your prayer—and you need to know, as much as I do, what there is about Lee that is worth all the effort.
I would offer to you, on this day when you have each honored me by being here, I offer you this single idea: that Lee College is worth the effort. And I offer it, not as just an idea, but as a conviction, a deep, unshakeable conviction, a conclusion based on thirty years of personal experience, that Lee College, and other schools like it, are unique parts of the Kingdom of God, that they fill a critical place in the spectrum of American education, and that it matters greatly that they remain vital and strong.
It may seem strange to you that a person of my age should talk of having thirty years’ experience with Lee College. But it is true. I am forty years old, and I have been tromping around Lee College campus for morethan thirty of those years.
It would take a long time for me to trace for you the intertwining of my life with Lee College over these many years. When I was a little boy—preschooler—I lived just over the hill within sight of here, on this very street, 11th Street. I attended elementary school at Mayfield School just three blocks away.
As a little boy I used to walk with my mother and father, and my many brothers and sisters, down to this very block on my way to school. At that time Lee College had an old building which was inherited from Bob Jones College; Bob Jones had inherited it from someone else. It provided housing for married students at that time. It was such a ramshackle old building that the school was almost embarrassed by it. That old building was named “Providence Hall.” You may have noticed that the buildings around our campus are named for former presidents of the college. I wondered, when I got older, why that building had been named for God Himself rather than for one of the ordinary mortals who had occupied the president’s office.
Ten years ago, when we began the fundraising drive to build Conn Center on this very location, I wrote an article for the Cleveland Daily Banner about the building that had occupied the site—Providence Hall. I decided to check into the history of why a building would be named for God. What I learned was that originally the college had named the building for one of its former presidents, Reverend T. S. Payne, and that when we moved here in 1947 the building was named Payne Hall. That lasted only a few months, only until Reverend Payne’s family visited the campus and laid eyes on the building named for their father. It was such a decrepit old building, that they protested to the college and demanded that the name “Payne” be taken off of it. So the college did. So they needed a new name, and not wishing to run the risk of offending yet another presidential family, they named it Providence Hall, with the idea, I suppose, that only God Himself would allow a building like that to be named for Him.
After I graduated from Bradley High School, I came to college here. I intended to stay only one year. At the end of that year, I decided to stay a second year. And after two years, I decided to stay two more. So I graduated.
I left here in 1967 with a bachelors degree and a good woman named Darlia McLuhan, who shortly after became my wife, and I never expected to return. Well, surprise! In less than five years, I came back to teach psychology, and, with two years off for postdoctoral work at Harvard, I have been here ever since.
So I hope you will please understand if I come to this time, of this inauguration, with a rather high level of emotion. This is not just a career move for me. It’s not just a job. It has been an emotional time, and as I sort all the emotions out, I think they fall into three categories.
I think the emotions I am feeling are these: first, a sense of personal inadequacy; second, a deep sense of gratitude; and, third, an enormous feeling of challenge and excitement about the potential that lies ahead.
Let me talk about these emotions for a moment.
The first is a sense of personal inadequacy. I have been in a position to see the job of the presidency, up close, for many years, and I have no illusions about it. Perhaps more than any previous president, I come to the job with a full understanding of its many frustrations and demands, and I am no more a masochist than you are. I realize that being president is more than just fun and games on commencement day. I am quite aware of how difficult the job is, and I wake up on many days, early in the dark morning, and I must confess to you that my first thought is a fear that maybe I can’t cut it.
I know only one solution for that feeling, and that is prayer and hard work, and if plenty of prayer and hard work will get it done, I will get the job done as God wills. Other than that, I don’t intend to dwell on my inadequacies, since, as president, I’m sure I can count on my colleagues on the faculty to explore that theme more fully in the months to come. My second emotion is gratitude. I would like to take this occasion to express my deep and heartfelt gratitude to these people who have had the confidence in me to trust the presidency into my hands. I wish to thank the thirteen men on the Board of Directors for their support—and also to three men no longer on the Board, but who were part of the board which selected me—Richard Tyler, Robert Daugherty, and Bill Higginbotham. I must also thank the General Executive Committee of the church, who has entrusted the leadership of the college to me. I pledge to these gentlemen that I will not let them down.
I would also like to thank all those friends from the community of Cleveland and Bradley County who are here, for your willingness to support the work and goals of Lee College, even though you are not members of the Church of God, our sponsoring denomination.
I am a Clevelander. I suppose, in my heart, I will always be a Clevelander, even if I should move far away. I grew up here; I attended local schools; I bagged groceries at Toby’s Food Store; I delivered newspapers up and down Ocoee Street, even to the houses of some of you here; I graduated from Bradley High School. And now I am raising my family here. I am as much a Clevelander as anyone in this town. But I am also fully a member of the Lee College family, and of the Church of God family, and those roots are deep and permanent.
It has always seemed to me that Lee College and the community of Cleveland and Bradley County have been unnecessarily distant. We have not known each other well enough, and have not supported each other well enough. With your help, I plan to try to improve that situation. We share too many values, too many things in common, not to know one another better. Some of you, who have lived in Cleveland for many years, are on the Lee College campus today for the first time in your lives, and we want to give you a reason to return, sooner, I hope, than the next inauguration.
I believe Lee College should ask itself the question: Is Cleveland a better place to live because Lee College is part of it? And the answer, for the typical Clevelander, ought to be “yes.”
Every citizen of Cleveland and Bradley County should find this a better place to live and raise a family because Lee College is here. It is our responsibility at Lee to make it so, and it is the responsibility of Clevelanders, then, to take advantage of what we do.
The 1980’s have been a tough time for private colleges, the pressure has been great on all of us—merely to survive. Lee College has not escaped these pressures, and we have had our battles to fight. But during this period we have had good leadership from three presidents, we have had strong support from the church, we have had a committed effort from our faculty and staff, so we are a better college today than when the 80’s began.
We are leaner, we are fitter, we are more confident of our role and our durability, and we are now ready to grow again. By “grow” I don’t necessarily mean growing numerically, in number of students that we have, but we have emerged from this period of shake-down and consolidation, and we’re moving forward with better programs, and a better college.
Why does Lee College matter? Why is it worth our time and effort?
I believe Lee College is valuable because we are truly, inalterably committed to the process of Christian liberal arts education. However our curriculum may evolve over the years, however many new programs and majors we may add, however large we become and much we develop, Lee College will always be a Christian liberal arts college. And if we are truly a Christian liberal arts college, we will always be worth working for, because true Christian liberal arts is one of the rarest and highest pursuits of man.
I am not talking just about a college that calls itself Christian. I’m not talking just about a religious name on the door. My commitment, as president of Lee College, is to guarantee that it will always be a campus where Christ is King. A campus where Christ is not merely studied, or discussed, or acknowledged, but where He is Lord and Master in the lives of individual students and faculty.
What are we trying to teach these 1,214 students who live and study here at Lee? We are trying to teach them that the greatest force in human history is produced by the fusion of man’s ability with God’s power. We want them to understand that the ultimate expression of the human experience is to train and prepare oneself with discipline and hard work, and then to submit oneself to the sovereignty of God to do as He wills with us. I want to teach them that the greatest power in the world is unleashed when the enormous energy of the human spirit is undergirded, channeled, and empowered by the hand of Almighty God.
I believe in the liberalizing power of education. This is the best since of the phrase “liberal arts.” It refers to the power of education to free the human potential, to free it from the ignorance, from prejudice, from the fear that limits it. As men and women learn, they become free to express their full humanness, as God created and intended them to do. God created a magnificent piece of equipment when he made us; He intended that equipment to be used. The human being, made in God’s image, is the most complex and intricate mechanism in the universe. It is capable of a staggering range of thought and behavior. I hope the metaphor is not offensive, but if God made us as Rolls Royces, He surely intended us to be driven—not to sit in a garage!
When one looks at the complexity of the human equipment, it is clear we are all individual walking miracles. We are made—even the most modestly gifted of us—with extraordinary powers of thought and expression. We were given the sensory equipment to experience the richness of a marvelous world.
Surely God would not have given us this great gift if He did not intend us to use it. Surely he did not give us these splendid brains of ours, and intend us to use them for nothing more challenging than to watch TV and talk about the weather! Surely He did not give us all these wonderful minds, and intend us to live mindlessly.
To so underutilize the human mind, and to live in a way which does not express the richness of the human experience, is to show contempt for the great God Almighty who gave us these gifts.
It is the purpose of the liberal arts to teach students to use these gifts. That is what Lee College should be doing. We should be teaching students to understand the richness of life, to explore the breadth and scope of God’s world. We should teach them to appreciate the enormous wealth of experience which awaits them as they explore new ideas, as they discover past cultures, as they meet the books and music of the great masters, the art and philosophy of other generations, the precision of the sciences. We must take them by the hand and introduce them to the staggering accumulation of genius and creativity which man has produced over the centuries.
A Christian liberal arts education is the fusion which takes man’s highest achievement and combines it with a Christ-centered life. To do that, to be a Christian liberal arts college, we must know where man has been and what he has done. The principle of “liberal” arts is that is liberates the human spirit. It frees us from ignorance. It is then that the liberally educated person gains the confidence to express fully that extraordinary, powerful, resilient thing we call the human spirit.
It is a Christian liberal arts education that says to the individual, if you’ve got a song to sing, sing it; if you’ve got a bell to ring, ring it; if you’ve got a flag to wave, wave it; if you’ve got a story to tell, tell it; if God gave you a Rolls Royce for a brain, for goodness sakes, drive it!
But this liberal arts education, by itself, ultimately fails. It fails. Period. It is of no value. By itself, with no higher purpose than itself, liberal education always fails to meet man’s needs. Why? Because man is made in God’s image, and he is more than body and brain; he is soul and spirit, and a liberal education, however impressive, however expensive the tuition, cannot address the emptiness of the soul. Liberal education is a worthy pursuit only when it issues from its true source, God, and when it is directed again to God in service to Him and his children.
Lee College is committed to the principle that the human experience, however logically reasoned or brilliantly expressed, is empty and valueless unless it finds meaning in Jesus Christ.
It takes a certain intellectual boldness for a person to be willing to impose onto all his learning—and all his search for knowledge—to impose over it all a single overarching truth—the truth that all of it comes from, expresses, and ultimately belongs to the Almighty God.
It is much easier, much safer, to simply learn for learning’s sake, to explore the treasure house of the Humanities, the arts, and the sciences, and never reach a conclusion, never attempt to explain it. The secular pursuit of the liberal arts simply says, Well, there it is! Isn’t it marvelous? Listen to the music, look at the art, read the philosophy, enjoy the literature, marvel at the sciences and then, at the end, the unbeliever can only say, “Well, there it is.” He looks at the accumulated glories of centuries of human discovery and says, “I don’t know where it came from—I don’t know what it means, but there it is.”
But the Christian dares to account for it all with a statement of sheer, unadulterated faith. The Christian liberal arts education teaches us to explore and enjoy this great smorgasbord of human achievement, and then, to dare to explain it by believing that all of it comes from and belongs to God and God alone.
To take that position is an intelligent expression of faith. But it is simple faith, nonetheless. And, like all faith, it is dogmatic and nonnegotiable. It is a bold, emphatic, dogmatic assertion. It comes from the part of man that is more basic, more primeval, than his mere intellect. It comes from his soul—it transcends his cultural and his training and his individual personality.
When an individual dares to bring a statement of Christian faith to his education search, he makes that faith the core and center around which all the arts and sciences are then organized. When we dare to do that, the process of education is transformed. We are no longer merely amassing a catalog of information and competencies, we are no longer merely stacking up impressive piles of knowledge. Instead, we are taking that knowledge and grafting it onto a living, dynamic, eternal core of truth. That truth is the Lord Jesus Christ, who is Himself the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
That is what we try to do at Lee College.
That process is what makes a Christian College different from others.
I recognize that Lee College is a diverse family, and many people will disagree with almost any position taken. But after fifteen years on the faculty, I think I can safely speak for the entire team of committed professional Christian educators who work here, when I say we will not fail to think, and we will not fail to feel.
A college is traditionally long on thinking and we will do plenty of that, but some people act as if there is a switch in the human brain that separates thinking and feeling so that only one process can operate at a time. A great benefit of our Pentecostal tradition is that we understand that one can both think about God and feel His presence at the same time, without doing damage to either process. We believe that is the only way to truly know God in the best sense. There are those who would tell us that being a Christian means kissing one’s brains goodbye. We don’t believe that. And there are those who would tell us that intellectual pursuits require anesthetizing one’s feelings. We don’t believe that. Here at Lee College we commit ourselves to the joyful pursuit of thinking and feeling. That is what we will practice, and with God’s help, that is what we will teach the students who come our way.
Why is Lee College worth the effort?
Because it can be the truest kind of Christian liberal arts college, a place where students learn to work as if everything depends on them, and pray as if everything depends on God. It can be a place where both the mind and the spirit are encouraged to operate, where we can both think and feel.
Now, that’s a very lofty goal. It would be much easier for me to talk about increasing enrollment to 1500 —and I think we can do that— or to talk about building new buildings —and I know we must do that— or talk about raising more money —and we’re trying to do that. But if we can truly make Lee College a campus where Christ is King, all the rest will come easily.
And let me tell you, without a moment of hesitation, that I believe Lee College can be that kind of college, and that is why I am willing to be its president. I have better things to do with my life than to be president, if I thought this were an ordinary, mediocre college that is going nowhere and doing nothing. But I am here today because of my passionate conviction that Lee is and can be a great college. I believe in Lee College.
And when I say I believe In Lee College, I am not talking about an abstraction, a concept. I believe in what I have seen for 15 years. I believe in Lee College because I believe in Lee College students. They are not children. They are not here because Mom and Dad told them to come. They have made sacrifices, they have travelled far from home; some of them work 40-hour weeks, they scrub floors and mow grass to pay their tuition; they are hungry for God; 80% of them are on financial aid of some sort.
They dream of great things they can become, they share with one another loyalty and faith, they are tough and resilient kinds. They are not just my students; they are my brothers and sisters, I love them, and I believe in them.
I believe in the future of Lee College, because I believe that God intends to do great things with this generation of young people. I must tell you this is not an idle thought of mine; it is a matter of conviction. Lock up your sons and daughters, if you don’t want them to come here, because I will recruit them if I can! Hide your checkbook, if you don’t intend to give, because I will get your money if I can! This is not a job to me; it is cause; it is a crusade; and not just to me—there is a large number of young men and women who feel just as I do.
We are products of Lee College. We feel intensely because the school affected us intensely. We have sampled the secular brand of higher education, and have found it wanting.
It has been said, on several occasions, that this presidency marks the passing of a torch. There is a sense in which I represent a new generation of leadership, and it is natural that some should wonder whether the Lee College flame will burn as brightly, or as purely, in the hands of this generation.
Let me pledge to you, on behalf of all those others whom I represent, that you are passing the torch to a generation that believes intensely in the values which I have expressed today.
We understand the magic in this place. We understand its potential. We are sobered by the responsibility we face. But we find the challenge of building a truly Christian campus such a compelling idea, that it unlocks in us the vast surges of energy and sacrifice, and gives us the will to carry the torch.
Lee College is not just a sterile combination of buildings and sidewalks, brick and mortar—30 acres of land with buildings set on it. We are not just a set of courses and curriculum. Lee College is a living, breathing place. This place is the product of the vision and sweat, the dreams and blood of thousands of men and women over many decades. It is to this place that they have come and had their lives changed. And it is from this place that they have gone to change other lives.
This is the place where Robert Humberston gave himself without holding back. This is the place where Roosevelt Miller spent a lifetime investing his smile and his music. This is the place to which Paul Dana Walker had committed his future on the weekend of his death.
This is the place to which thousands of fathers and mothers have sent their sons and daughters, with a suitcase full of clothes and a lifetime of prayers. This is the place where the church has sent its dollars, that have been enthusiastically given, even from purses that were nearly empty. This is the place in which the finest men and women who ever taught in the college classroom have invested themselves.
Lee College is not a new place, a hastily constructed, prefabricated campus. It did not come from the action of a planning board, or the single stroke of a pen of a public official. It has been built, brick by brick, inch by inch, prayer by prayer, dream buy dream, by the collected energies and passions of thousands of men and women. We are recipients of this great gift from them. And I hereby pledge to you, that by God’s help, we will not squander this inheritance we have received. We will not back away from our birthright. We have been handed the torch, and buy God’s help we will carry the torch. We cannot do it alone. We will need your help, but with your support we will carry the torch. We cannot do it solely by human effort. We cannot do it by depending on the arm of the flesh. But with the enablement of the Holy Spirit, we will carry the torch!
We will carry the torch, we will lift high the flame, we will march through the darkness with the light of His name. Till the glory of God is seen by the world, we will carry the torch of the Lord!
Transcription copied as it appeared in the 1987 Vindagua
Why is it here? Why should we care? In a nation where there are thousands of other colleges and universities, some of them five—ten—twenty times larger than this one, why should it matter whether this particular one lives or dies, whether it grows or not, who its president is, and whether he leads well or poorly?
We have come together here, in the middle of a weekday, on this gorgeous fall morning. The music is stirring, the robes are colorful, the marching down the aisle is solemn and dignified. There is a feeling of ceremony . . . and celebration . . . but after it all is over, the last prayer is prayed, and the last hor d’oeuvre is eaten, what difference does it make—really—whether we even have a thing like Lee College?
If we could answer that question this morning—or perhaps, if we could even ask it seriously—we will have spent the morning well, because Lee College is eating up lots of time and energy from lots of people, just keeping the doors open. It is draining off the manpower and money and attention of lots of people—and you and I who are here this morning make up a large percentage of those people.
Inaugurations are presumably for presidents, and after today I am more or less boxed into this thing, so it makes sense that I should want to know what it’s all about—but you, too, are involved in the effort to keep Lee College going—one way or another, almost all of you are investing your time, or your money, or your energy, or your prayer—and you need to know, as much as I do, what there is about Lee that is worth all the effort.
I would offer to you, on this day when you have each honored me by being here, I offer you this single idea: that Lee College is worth the effort. And I offer it, not as just an idea, but as a conviction, a deep, unshakeable conviction, a conclusion based on thirty years of personal experience, that Lee College, and other schools like it, are unique parts of the Kingdom of God, that they fill a critical place in the spectrum of American education, and that it matters greatly that they remain vital and strong.
It may seem strange to you that a person of my age should talk of having thirty years’ experience with Lee College. But it is true. I am forty years old, and I have been tromping around Lee College campus for morethan thirty of those years.
It would take a long time for me to trace for you the intertwining of my life with Lee College over these many years. When I was a little boy—preschooler—I lived just over the hill within sight of here, on this very street, 11th Street. I attended elementary school at Mayfield School just three blocks away.
As a little boy I used to walk with my mother and father, and my many brothers and sisters, down to this very block on my way to school. At that time Lee College had an old building which was inherited from Bob Jones College; Bob Jones had inherited it from someone else. It provided housing for married students at that time. It was such a ramshackle old building that the school was almost embarrassed by it. That old building was named “Providence Hall.” You may have noticed that the buildings around our campus are named for former presidents of the college. I wondered, when I got older, why that building had been named for God Himself rather than for one of the ordinary mortals who had occupied the president’s office.
Ten years ago, when we began the fundraising drive to build Conn Center on this very location, I wrote an article for the Cleveland Daily Banner about the building that had occupied the site—Providence Hall. I decided to check into the history of why a building would be named for God. What I learned was that originally the college had named the building for one of its former presidents, Reverend T. S. Payne, and that when we moved here in 1947 the building was named Payne Hall. That lasted only a few months, only until Reverend Payne’s family visited the campus and laid eyes on the building named for their father. It was such a decrepit old building, that they protested to the college and demanded that the name “Payne” be taken off of it. So the college did. So they needed a new name, and not wishing to run the risk of offending yet another presidential family, they named it Providence Hall, with the idea, I suppose, that only God Himself would allow a building like that to be named for Him.
After I graduated from Bradley High School, I came to college here. I intended to stay only one year. At the end of that year, I decided to stay a second year. And after two years, I decided to stay two more. So I graduated.
I left here in 1967 with a bachelors degree and a good woman named Darlia McLuhan, who shortly after became my wife, and I never expected to return. Well, surprise! In less than five years, I came back to teach psychology, and, with two years off for postdoctoral work at Harvard, I have been here ever since.
So I hope you will please understand if I come to this time, of this inauguration, with a rather high level of emotion. This is not just a career move for me. It’s not just a job. It has been an emotional time, and as I sort all the emotions out, I think they fall into three categories.
I think the emotions I am feeling are these: first, a sense of personal inadequacy; second, a deep sense of gratitude; and, third, an enormous feeling of challenge and excitement about the potential that lies ahead.
Let me talk about these emotions for a moment.
The first is a sense of personal inadequacy. I have been in a position to see the job of the presidency, up close, for many years, and I have no illusions about it. Perhaps more than any previous president, I come to the job with a full understanding of its many frustrations and demands, and I am no more a masochist than you are. I realize that being president is more than just fun and games on commencement day. I am quite aware of how difficult the job is, and I wake up on many days, early in the dark morning, and I must confess to you that my first thought is a fear that maybe I can’t cut it.
I know only one solution for that feeling, and that is prayer and hard work, and if plenty of prayer and hard work will get it done, I will get the job done as God wills. Other than that, I don’t intend to dwell on my inadequacies, since, as president, I’m sure I can count on my colleagues on the faculty to explore that theme more fully in the months to come. My second emotion is gratitude. I would like to take this occasion to express my deep and heartfelt gratitude to these people who have had the confidence in me to trust the presidency into my hands. I wish to thank the thirteen men on the Board of Directors for their support—and also to three men no longer on the Board, but who were part of the board which selected me—Richard Tyler, Robert Daugherty, and Bill Higginbotham. I must also thank the General Executive Committee of the church, who has entrusted the leadership of the college to me. I pledge to these gentlemen that I will not let them down.
I would also like to thank all those friends from the community of Cleveland and Bradley County who are here, for your willingness to support the work and goals of Lee College, even though you are not members of the Church of God, our sponsoring denomination.
I am a Clevelander. I suppose, in my heart, I will always be a Clevelander, even if I should move far away. I grew up here; I attended local schools; I bagged groceries at Toby’s Food Store; I delivered newspapers up and down Ocoee Street, even to the houses of some of you here; I graduated from Bradley High School. And now I am raising my family here. I am as much a Clevelander as anyone in this town. But I am also fully a member of the Lee College family, and of the Church of God family, and those roots are deep and permanent.
It has always seemed to me that Lee College and the community of Cleveland and Bradley County have been unnecessarily distant. We have not known each other well enough, and have not supported each other well enough. With your help, I plan to try to improve that situation. We share too many values, too many things in common, not to know one another better. Some of you, who have lived in Cleveland for many years, are on the Lee College campus today for the first time in your lives, and we want to give you a reason to return, sooner, I hope, than the next inauguration.
I believe Lee College should ask itself the question: Is Cleveland a better place to live because Lee College is part of it? And the answer, for the typical Clevelander, ought to be “yes.”
Every citizen of Cleveland and Bradley County should find this a better place to live and raise a family because Lee College is here. It is our responsibility at Lee to make it so, and it is the responsibility of Clevelanders, then, to take advantage of what we do.
The 1980’s have been a tough time for private colleges, the pressure has been great on all of us—merely to survive. Lee College has not escaped these pressures, and we have had our battles to fight. But during this period we have had good leadership from three presidents, we have had strong support from the church, we have had a committed effort from our faculty and staff, so we are a better college today than when the 80’s began.
We are leaner, we are fitter, we are more confident of our role and our durability, and we are now ready to grow again. By “grow” I don’t necessarily mean growing numerically, in number of students that we have, but we have emerged from this period of shake-down and consolidation, and we’re moving forward with better programs, and a better college.
Why does Lee College matter? Why is it worth our time and effort?
I believe Lee College is valuable because we are truly, inalterably committed to the process of Christian liberal arts education. However our curriculum may evolve over the years, however many new programs and majors we may add, however large we become and much we develop, Lee College will always be a Christian liberal arts college. And if we are truly a Christian liberal arts college, we will always be worth working for, because true Christian liberal arts is one of the rarest and highest pursuits of man.
I am not talking just about a college that calls itself Christian. I’m not talking just about a religious name on the door. My commitment, as president of Lee College, is to guarantee that it will always be a campus where Christ is King. A campus where Christ is not merely studied, or discussed, or acknowledged, but where He is Lord and Master in the lives of individual students and faculty.
What are we trying to teach these 1,214 students who live and study here at Lee? We are trying to teach them that the greatest force in human history is produced by the fusion of man’s ability with God’s power. We want them to understand that the ultimate expression of the human experience is to train and prepare oneself with discipline and hard work, and then to submit oneself to the sovereignty of God to do as He wills with us. I want to teach them that the greatest power in the world is unleashed when the enormous energy of the human spirit is undergirded, channeled, and empowered by the hand of Almighty God.
I believe in the liberalizing power of education. This is the best since of the phrase “liberal arts.” It refers to the power of education to free the human potential, to free it from the ignorance, from prejudice, from the fear that limits it. As men and women learn, they become free to express their full humanness, as God created and intended them to do. God created a magnificent piece of equipment when he made us; He intended that equipment to be used. The human being, made in God’s image, is the most complex and intricate mechanism in the universe. It is capable of a staggering range of thought and behavior. I hope the metaphor is not offensive, but if God made us as Rolls Royces, He surely intended us to be driven—not to sit in a garage!
When one looks at the complexity of the human equipment, it is clear we are all individual walking miracles. We are made—even the most modestly gifted of us—with extraordinary powers of thought and expression. We were given the sensory equipment to experience the richness of a marvelous world.
Surely God would not have given us this great gift if He did not intend us to use it. Surely he did not give us these splendid brains of ours, and intend us to use them for nothing more challenging than to watch TV and talk about the weather! Surely He did not give us all these wonderful minds, and intend us to live mindlessly.
To so underutilize the human mind, and to live in a way which does not express the richness of the human experience, is to show contempt for the great God Almighty who gave us these gifts.
It is the purpose of the liberal arts to teach students to use these gifts. That is what Lee College should be doing. We should be teaching students to understand the richness of life, to explore the breadth and scope of God’s world. We should teach them to appreciate the enormous wealth of experience which awaits them as they explore new ideas, as they discover past cultures, as they meet the books and music of the great masters, the art and philosophy of other generations, the precision of the sciences. We must take them by the hand and introduce them to the staggering accumulation of genius and creativity which man has produced over the centuries.
A Christian liberal arts education is the fusion which takes man’s highest achievement and combines it with a Christ-centered life. To do that, to be a Christian liberal arts college, we must know where man has been and what he has done. The principle of “liberal” arts is that is liberates the human spirit. It frees us from ignorance. It is then that the liberally educated person gains the confidence to express fully that extraordinary, powerful, resilient thing we call the human spirit.
It is a Christian liberal arts education that says to the individual, if you’ve got a song to sing, sing it; if you’ve got a bell to ring, ring it; if you’ve got a flag to wave, wave it; if you’ve got a story to tell, tell it; if God gave you a Rolls Royce for a brain, for goodness sakes, drive it!
But this liberal arts education, by itself, ultimately fails. It fails. Period. It is of no value. By itself, with no higher purpose than itself, liberal education always fails to meet man’s needs. Why? Because man is made in God’s image, and he is more than body and brain; he is soul and spirit, and a liberal education, however impressive, however expensive the tuition, cannot address the emptiness of the soul. Liberal education is a worthy pursuit only when it issues from its true source, God, and when it is directed again to God in service to Him and his children.
Lee College is committed to the principle that the human experience, however logically reasoned or brilliantly expressed, is empty and valueless unless it finds meaning in Jesus Christ.
It takes a certain intellectual boldness for a person to be willing to impose onto all his learning—and all his search for knowledge—to impose over it all a single overarching truth—the truth that all of it comes from, expresses, and ultimately belongs to the Almighty God.
It is much easier, much safer, to simply learn for learning’s sake, to explore the treasure house of the Humanities, the arts, and the sciences, and never reach a conclusion, never attempt to explain it. The secular pursuit of the liberal arts simply says, Well, there it is! Isn’t it marvelous? Listen to the music, look at the art, read the philosophy, enjoy the literature, marvel at the sciences and then, at the end, the unbeliever can only say, “Well, there it is.” He looks at the accumulated glories of centuries of human discovery and says, “I don’t know where it came from—I don’t know what it means, but there it is.”
But the Christian dares to account for it all with a statement of sheer, unadulterated faith. The Christian liberal arts education teaches us to explore and enjoy this great smorgasbord of human achievement, and then, to dare to explain it by believing that all of it comes from and belongs to God and God alone.
To take that position is an intelligent expression of faith. But it is simple faith, nonetheless. And, like all faith, it is dogmatic and nonnegotiable. It is a bold, emphatic, dogmatic assertion. It comes from the part of man that is more basic, more primeval, than his mere intellect. It comes from his soul—it transcends his cultural and his training and his individual personality.
When an individual dares to bring a statement of Christian faith to his education search, he makes that faith the core and center around which all the arts and sciences are then organized. When we dare to do that, the process of education is transformed. We are no longer merely amassing a catalog of information and competencies, we are no longer merely stacking up impressive piles of knowledge. Instead, we are taking that knowledge and grafting it onto a living, dynamic, eternal core of truth. That truth is the Lord Jesus Christ, who is Himself the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
That is what we try to do at Lee College.
That process is what makes a Christian College different from others.
I recognize that Lee College is a diverse family, and many people will disagree with almost any position taken. But after fifteen years on the faculty, I think I can safely speak for the entire team of committed professional Christian educators who work here, when I say we will not fail to think, and we will not fail to feel.
A college is traditionally long on thinking and we will do plenty of that, but some people act as if there is a switch in the human brain that separates thinking and feeling so that only one process can operate at a time. A great benefit of our Pentecostal tradition is that we understand that one can both think about God and feel His presence at the same time, without doing damage to either process. We believe that is the only way to truly know God in the best sense. There are those who would tell us that being a Christian means kissing one’s brains goodbye. We don’t believe that. And there are those who would tell us that intellectual pursuits require anesthetizing one’s feelings. We don’t believe that. Here at Lee College we commit ourselves to the joyful pursuit of thinking and feeling. That is what we will practice, and with God’s help, that is what we will teach the students who come our way.
Why is Lee College worth the effort?
Because it can be the truest kind of Christian liberal arts college, a place where students learn to work as if everything depends on them, and pray as if everything depends on God. It can be a place where both the mind and the spirit are encouraged to operate, where we can both think and feel.
Now, that’s a very lofty goal. It would be much easier for me to talk about increasing enrollment to 1500 —and I think we can do that— or to talk about building new buildings —and I know we must do that— or talk about raising more money —and we’re trying to do that. But if we can truly make Lee College a campus where Christ is King, all the rest will come easily.
And let me tell you, without a moment of hesitation, that I believe Lee College can be that kind of college, and that is why I am willing to be its president. I have better things to do with my life than to be president, if I thought this were an ordinary, mediocre college that is going nowhere and doing nothing. But I am here today because of my passionate conviction that Lee is and can be a great college. I believe in Lee College.
And when I say I believe In Lee College, I am not talking about an abstraction, a concept. I believe in what I have seen for 15 years. I believe in Lee College because I believe in Lee College students. They are not children. They are not here because Mom and Dad told them to come. They have made sacrifices, they have travelled far from home; some of them work 40-hour weeks, they scrub floors and mow grass to pay their tuition; they are hungry for God; 80% of them are on financial aid of some sort.
They dream of great things they can become, they share with one another loyalty and faith, they are tough and resilient kinds. They are not just my students; they are my brothers and sisters, I love them, and I believe in them.
I believe in the future of Lee College, because I believe that God intends to do great things with this generation of young people. I must tell you this is not an idle thought of mine; it is a matter of conviction. Lock up your sons and daughters, if you don’t want them to come here, because I will recruit them if I can! Hide your checkbook, if you don’t intend to give, because I will get your money if I can! This is not a job to me; it is cause; it is a crusade; and not just to me—there is a large number of young men and women who feel just as I do.
We are products of Lee College. We feel intensely because the school affected us intensely. We have sampled the secular brand of higher education, and have found it wanting.
It has been said, on several occasions, that this presidency marks the passing of a torch. There is a sense in which I represent a new generation of leadership, and it is natural that some should wonder whether the Lee College flame will burn as brightly, or as purely, in the hands of this generation.
Let me pledge to you, on behalf of all those others whom I represent, that you are passing the torch to a generation that believes intensely in the values which I have expressed today.
We understand the magic in this place. We understand its potential. We are sobered by the responsibility we face. But we find the challenge of building a truly Christian campus such a compelling idea, that it unlocks in us the vast surges of energy and sacrifice, and gives us the will to carry the torch.
Lee College is not just a sterile combination of buildings and sidewalks, brick and mortar—30 acres of land with buildings set on it. We are not just a set of courses and curriculum. Lee College is a living, breathing place. This place is the product of the vision and sweat, the dreams and blood of thousands of men and women over many decades. It is to this place that they have come and had their lives changed. And it is from this place that they have gone to change other lives.
This is the place where Robert Humberston gave himself without holding back. This is the place where Roosevelt Miller spent a lifetime investing his smile and his music. This is the place to which Paul Dana Walker had committed his future on the weekend of his death.
This is the place to which thousands of fathers and mothers have sent their sons and daughters, with a suitcase full of clothes and a lifetime of prayers. This is the place where the church has sent its dollars, that have been enthusiastically given, even from purses that were nearly empty. This is the place in which the finest men and women who ever taught in the college classroom have invested themselves.
Lee College is not a new place, a hastily constructed, prefabricated campus. It did not come from the action of a planning board, or the single stroke of a pen of a public official. It has been built, brick by brick, inch by inch, prayer by prayer, dream buy dream, by the collected energies and passions of thousands of men and women. We are recipients of this great gift from them. And I hereby pledge to you, that by God’s help, we will not squander this inheritance we have received. We will not back away from our birthright. We have been handed the torch, and buy God’s help we will carry the torch. We cannot do it alone. We will need your help, but with your support we will carry the torch. We cannot do it solely by human effort. We cannot do it by depending on the arm of the flesh. But with the enablement of the Holy Spirit, we will carry the torch!
We will carry the torch, we will lift high the flame, we will march through the darkness with the light of His name. Till the glory of God is seen by the world, we will carry the torch of the Lord!
Transcription copied as it appeared in the 1987 Vindagua