GD: What is the Missional University Project?
JR: The University made a commitment a number of years ago that we would reimagine the role of our University in our changing culture. We wanted to make sure that every student from every major could enter in the world with the necessary skills to discern and live out the mission of God no matter what they did. We prepare them for life in the church that is not just about doing good things and sending missionaries overseas, but as mission points in their own communities. Now, when universities are experiencing what it means to be in crisis, when all the parts of university life are being challenged, the Missional Project gives us a chance to engage all of that.
JV: The Missional University Project is a means for the university to think about its place in the world of higher education in the next several decades, and about ways we live out our Christian Mission. ACU has always taken seriously educating students for Christian service and leadership throughout the world. This project helps us to think about that world where our students will live after they graduate, about the world our students are entering that may not give special privilege to a Christian worldview.
GD: Who is involved at Abilene Christian University? How are they involved?
JR: The steering committee for the project is the five academic deans of our four colleges and the honors college, and the provost. From the beginning we have made sure the President’s Office and key board members supported it. Our prior President and our new President have been very supportive. We have six or eight very invested key board members, including the chair.
JV: Quite a few faculty have been involved as well. All faculty have participated in some conversation about the Missional University, but I think it is fair to say that not everyone fully understands yet the implications of the word “missional”.
GD: Have students been involved in the project?
JR: Pat Ellison helped us do an ethnographic study of the University two springs ago. Students were a key part of that study. Students were interviewers and interviewees. At my college students are pretty engaged in partnerships with churches and faculty. Missional instincts and valuesare embedded in our radically different Core Curriculum for all incoming students from beginning to end.
JV: The student body as a whole has not really wrestled with the implications of the term as yet. But Pat Keifert has spoken to our faculty as a whole and has interacted closely with a number of our faculty over the past three to four years, as has Pat Ellison, especially with academic leaders.
GD: How have students responded to the project?
JR: Many students have not heard the word “missional” before, but the vocabulary is not that important. Every Monday we have a Spotlight Class with 500 freshman meeting in the morning. Elements of missional engagement such hospitality, welcoming the stranger, and being welcomed by the stranger are introduced early there. About mid-term Professor Stephen Johnson talks about what it means to be missional. Through his presentation students got to experience what a missional does. That’s how we make it part of university vocabulary.
GD: Why take up such a topic for a university rather than just having a school of theology and biblical studies?
JR: The last thing that we need is for only those who will end up serving churches as pastors and ministers to become the missions folks. If that happens, everyone else becomes proficient in their own profession and just pays the pastors and ministers to do the mission, to take care of God’s business. We want to take seriously that every person becomes a minister and every vocation is a part of God’s mission; every biology student, every exercise science student, all our students are equipped for God’s mission.
JV: Part of ACU’s heritage is that we have never seen the College of Biblical Studies as the sole part of the University responsible for the student’s spiritual development. That is the job of the entire University, every staff member, faculty member, and administrator. That is ACU’s strength So when we began to think about the Missional University Project, it was perfectly clear to the academic leadership team that this had to involve all of us. Are all involved equally? No, but we have always seen that the Christian Mission of our University could not be relegated to one department or one group of faculty or staff.
GD: If the missional movement becomes part of the culture of ACU, how do you imagine things will look and feel different?
JR: First of all, you measure the effectiveness of an academic institution ultimately by the outcomes of the learning process. You ask what kind of students are being formed here, not just what are they learning. What kind of citizens are we forming? We have shifted from outcomes that are primarily focused on vocations, professional skills and knowledge to equipping students to be people of character and virtue, equipping students to participate in the mission of God in the world. This is a significant shift and changes what we do on campus. We are now far more interdisciplinary. Faculty are collaborative. Professors in English and Accounting are just as responsible for instilling in students Christian virtues as the person who teaches New Testament. There is also a much closer coordination between academics and student life. We assume that what happens in the dorm is a part of the educational experience, and even there we are equipping students to live out the mission of God in the world. We are trying to be less atomized and far more holistic in how we engage students. What happens in the dorms, in the cafeteria, in fraternities and sororities, in daily chapel we need to coordinate.
JV: Our assumptions have shifted dramatically. We’ve always assumed that we were preparing our students to go into the world and to be members of God’s kingdom, sending students out into the world to change the world. But I think we are coming to understand that they are not going into a world that gives special credence or privilege to Christianity and may in fact be very hostile to Christianity. They need to go into that world willing to listen and to learn from people whose point of view may be absolutely antithetical to their own.
GD: Who are the new partners you might imagine working with in your city and in your fellowship as you become a missional University?
JR: We have learned to be surprised by that. Last year a group of first year graduate seminary students learning how to do ethnographic work essentially adopted a neighborhood. As they were walking the neighborhood, they discovered an abandoned building, the old hospital of St. Ann. They began to imagine this hospital becoming a sort of community center, or a place where they might live and not just study the neighborhood from the outside. The people in the neighborhood are now gathering community funds to make the hospital into a community center in this low-income neighborhood. It’s not so much “top- down,” going to the mayor and asking who can partner with us. It’s students partnering with neighborhoods. It’s partnerships that emerge because students are asking missional questions. We want students to live with their antennae up to God’s working in the world.
JV: We’ve talked a lot about how we reengage with churches and help them also think about the world into which their members are sent. Our students are going out into the world without the kinds of denominational allegiances they once had, so we want to prepare them to work in a local setting once they have left ACU. We have learned a great deal from the partners we’ve met through Church Innovations, and we want to continue to participate with those who have been thinking deeply for many years about the missional church.
GD: Is there anything else you would like to add?
JR: Our website has a blog and a video of all our Spotlight presentations. You can go there and see the presentation that Stephen Johnson did: “I Know A Man Who Lives In A Bus”. The link is: http://blogs.acu.edu/cornerstone/spotlight-schedule/i-know-a-man/
JV: We’ve learned a great deal as an academic leadership team alongside Pat Keifert and Pat Ellison. They have been very helpful to us as we plan for the future of the University. I am very grateful that they have helped us to think in some very new and fresh ways.
