Last month I invited you to share your dreams for your work in the academy. This month I am going to share mine. After all, turnabout is fair play. What I write reflects 48 years of working as a campus minister with InterVarsity.
I grew up in a family that valued both the love of God and the love of learning and saw them as seamlessly related. For us, loving God with all our being included loving him with our minds. When I arrived on campus, what so excited me about InterVarsity was how seriously they took loving God with their minds. They read books they weren’t even assigned, to meet the intellectual challenges posed in their classes and by their skeptical friends. As a campus minister, part of my discipleship efforts were to help students and faculty connect their love for God with their academic field. I dream of students and faculty feeling the pleasure of God upon their lives as they pursue their studies.
As I pursued this work, I discovered a calling, where my great passion met a great need. I observed that despite the great number of Christians in our country, our societal impact seemed shallow or misguided or absent. Often, it seemed for many Christians I met, there was little connection between Sunday morning and Monday through Saturday. One of my ambitions became that students and faculty would be able to explain their lives Monday through Saturday in terms of their calling to seek God’s kingdom and pursue His glory. I dream of people who live with a deep sense of vocation from God, no matter their occupation.
In InterVarsity, we often speak of the campus as not simply a pond in which to fish but of our love of the pond. For over 20 years, I had the privilege to minister with grad students and faculty at The Ohio State University, one of the largest universities in the country. I thought of it as being invited to a big buffet! Or to change the metaphor, every time I walked on campus I felt like a kid who had just received his allowance, walking into a candy shop. I delighted how all the diversity of our country and many of the nations of the world were represented in this place. When I walked around campus putting up posters or going to meetings, I was fascinated with the incredible array of things people were studying. And I gained a deeper awareness of the impact our university had in society–often for good, and sometimes not. My love for Ohio State was not blind love but a desire to see it fulfill God’s purposes for it as an institution and to work toward that end. I dream of people who love their campus for the glory of God.
I dream the same for all of you! May God refresh you during this summer and renew you with kingdom-sized dreams for the place to which He has called you!
A version of this article appeared in the July 2024 edition of Scholar’s Journey.
Bob Trube is Associate Director of Faculty Ministry and Director of the Emerging Scholars Network. He blogs on books regularly at bobonbooks.com. He resides in Columbus, Ohio, with Marilyn and enjoys reading, gardening, choral singing, and plein air painting.
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