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Presented below is a short narrative of my spiritual journey.
My parents became Christians when I was five years old. For most of my growing up years, however, we did not attend a church where the gospel was actively preached. At the age of thirteen, I began attending a church youth group at a Christian & Missionary Alliance church. It was there that I first heard the gospel clearly presented. In September 1970, after attending a Youth for Christ/Campus Life concert at the Christian & Missionary Alliance church, the Holy Spirit convicted me of sin, and I yielded my life to Jesus Christ. During the following nine-month period, Christ truly made me into a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). Shortly thereafter, I was baptized in water by immersion as a sign of my new life in Christ.
The next few years were truly an adventure for our family. We started attending a little neighborhood Bible study, which soon grew into a large youth revival. Over a three-year period, over 300 students in our high school came to know Christ as Lord and Savior. Our basement game room became the meeting place for the Bible study, largely because of its size. Our newly-found evangelical faith, and the youth we brought to church-largely long-haired, hippie types-soon made our staid mainline Protestant church uncomfortable, and we found ourselves officially being requested to worship elsewhere. We ended up in a Christian Church of North America congregation (the CCNA is a relatively small, evangelical denomination with a largely Italian-American membership), largely because of that church's willingness to minister to the teenagers who were coming to know the Lord through the ministry of our neighborhood Bible study.
The reality of my Christ's work in my life and in the lives of the youth attending the Bible study helped make my Christian walk stronger. So did participation in Youth for Christ's Bible quizzing program, which was the beginning of a long personal involvement in Bible quizzing, which continues to this day. God's work in my life spared me from the normal prodigal wanderings of the teenage years. I found myself wanting to attend a Christian college so that my faith would continue to grow. After being accepted at several Midwestern Christian colleges, I decided to attend Oral Roberts University, which at the time was a young, vibrant, exciting, growing institution.
ORU had a positive influence on me academically, spiritually, and socially. It was there that I met an Assemblies of God preacher's daughter, Wanda Hammack, who eventually became my wife. After working together as youth directors in a Methodist Church my junior year, we found ourselves attending an Assemblies of God church my senior year. That spring, we were asked to become youth pastors of that church. We were given the opportunity to pour our lives into young people, with significant results.
While in pastoral ministry, we were able to be used by God to help many young people and families. We saw significant growth, both spiritual and numerical, in the churches in which we served. I was also given the opportunity to serve in several leadership positions, such as serving on the District Youth Committee, serving as a league, district, and regional coordinator for Bible quizzing, and serving on the national Bible quiz advisory board.
After nearly seven years of full-time pastoral ministry, I realized that I was using the skills that I had learned in my business courses much more than those learned in Bible courses, and felt God leading me back to ORU to earn an MBA degree. While in the MBA program, I was asked to join the business faculty, and felt that God wanted me to do so. Thus began my career in education, which continues to this day.
While teaching at ORU, we attended Christian Chapel-a large, progressive, missions-minded church. While there, we were given the opportunity to serve as home fellowship leaders, to teach lay ministry training classes, and to help start a Bible quiz team. More than a decade later, we still are close to many of the families in that exceptional congregation.
After six years of serving on the faculty at ORU, I was given the opportunity to teach at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. My time at KSU was a time of great professional growth; in a different environment than that of Christian higher education, with differing educational paradigms, I was able to learn many things that have been useful as a leader in Christian higher education. It also was a time of significant spiritual growth as I served on the “mission field” of the state university. I was privileged to be part of a denominationally-diverse, on-campus accountability group of Christian professors. I was also able to serve as an Elder in our church there, to begin a Bible quiz team, to serve as league and district quiz coordinator, and to be a home fellowship leader.
Eventually our time at KSU came to a close, and God chose to call me back into Christian higher education. I was given the opportunity to serve in a leadership position at Roberts Wesleyan College. While in New York, I once again was asked to coordinate the Bible quiz league in that area, and preached regularly in area churches. Then God called us to LeTourneau University, where I served as Dean of the School of Business, as an Elder in our church, taught adult Christian education classes, and served as coordinator for the East Texas Junior Bible Quiz league. I have also served in interim pastoral roles, coordinated an on-campus spiritual growth group, and assisted in our church's strategic planning efforts.
After serving as an accreditation commissioner for several years, I was asked to become the president and chief executive officer of one of the business accrediting associations. This provided the opportunity to live out my Christian faith in an organization that served not only Christian institutions of higher education, but also public and proprietary institutions, both in the USA and internationally.
Now that I have returned to Christian higher education, the focus of my Christian life is on my family. I have been blessed to see my two daughters accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, and see evidences of solid spiritual growth in their lives. My oldest daughter, Laura, is now a student at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, and is experiencing the benefits of Christian higher education. I have also been blessed to see spiritual growth in many of my students over the last several years, and praise God for the opportunity to influence others positively for the gospel of Jesus Christ.
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