Editor’s note: This address was given by GCC President Bradley J. Lingo ’00 to the 2025 Faculty Retreat.
I walked down my driveway to my mailbox one summer day in the late 1990s. I reached in and pulled out a letter from a Grove City College professor that I had never met, Dr. Charles Dunn. If I had never received that letter, I doubt I’d be standing before you today.
The letter read something like this:
I’m the dean of the Calderwood School of Arts and Letters and a political science professor at Grove City. I’ve heard about you from some of my colleagues, and I’m writing because I think you’d be a great candidate for a Rhodes or Fulbright scholarship, and I’d like to mentor you. If you are interested, I’m teaching a political science class in the fall—I hope you’ll consider taking that class and that you’ll come by my office and see me during the first week of school.
You can imagine my excitement. You better believe I rearranged my course schedule and signed up for his class. I showed up in his office the first week of school. Sure enough, he pitched me on the idea of applying for a Rhodes Scholarship. I told him that I’d been dating my high school girlfriend (now my wife) for several years, we’d been apart for a while, and I wanted to get married and go to law school after I graduated. And I wasn’t sure about taking a year to do something else, especially if it involved going overseas.
You can tell by that response just how much help I needed.
He said, “Law school, huh? Where do you want to go?” I told him that I wasn’t sure, but was thinking about applying to Case Western Reserve, Washington & Lee, and a few other schools.
“Cross those off your list,” he said. “You need to apply to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and the University of Chicago. If I can’t persuade you to apply for a Rhodes, then I’m going to work with you to help you get into one of those schools.”
He did just that. He showed me how the game was played, worked with me on my application, and invested in me as a student and as a person.
I still remember having breakfast with him in MAP one morning—I sat down with a big stack of pancakes, poured syrup, and cut the stack into pieces.
He said, “Mr. Lingo, what are you doing? If you are going to go to Harvard, you need to learn to eat like a civilized human being. You don’t cut all your food at once and then shovel it into your mouth. You cut one piece at a time, eat it, and then cut the next. Try that again.”
We’re here today at this retreat to talk about vocation—our shared vocation as professors and how we help our students step into their callings.
As a law professor, I’d think of Dr. Dunn’s impact on my life. How a relatively small investment of his time had such a big impact on me. It was huge for me, but I wasn’t the only one who got a letter like that. I wasn’t the only one who responded positively to it. He understood that as professors, we have a super-power. We can help our students achieve their dreams. We can help our students discover the dreams they never knew they had.
Proverbs 18:21 tells us the tongue has the power of life and death. That verse was made for us. Our words have great power. Great power to encourage, great power to challenge, and great power to inspire. In five minutes, we can write a letter or make a phone call that can change someone’s life. We can take a kid to a breakfast that he will remember the rest of his life.
We all have the power to be Dr. Dunn in someone’s life. When I’d think about the kind of professor I want to be, I think about the kind of professor I want you to be. When I think about our shared vocation, I think of Dr. Charles Dunn.
Before I came here, I was the dean of a Christian law school. That means that I wasn’t just a professor, but I was also hiring professors and trying to explain to them what our job is, what it is that we really do. What is our vocation? I’d sit down with prospective hires and tell each of them, “We’re hiring you for two equally important roles—you are a scholar/teacher and you are in ministry. You are a maker of disciples.”
After saying that for a year or two, I read something by John Mark Comer that made me realize that there’s a better way to describe our work, a better analogy to be made. And it’s this: rabbi.
When I think about our calling as professors at Grove City College—or at least my aspirations for what I hope it can be—the best way to capture it is by saying we are modern-day rabbis. Also very convenient, it makes it easy for us to find a role model to pattern our work and our lives after: Jesus Christ.
As Comer describes it, rabbis like Jesus were learned teachers and scholars who taught through their lectures and their lives, using an apprenticeship model to help disciples “master living in God’s world.” Jesus lived relationally with His disciples and through that life together taught them much more than what could be conveyed in a sermon or lecture. As Comer has written, learning from Jesus was “less like learning chemistry and more like learning jujitsu.” As he describes it, Jesus’ methods of teaching were “intentional, embodied, relational, and practice based.”
The life of the rabbi, and life with the rabbi, showed the disciples how to press into what is good and true and beautiful. The rabbi showed them what it looked like to act justly, to love, to show mercy, and to walk humbly. They didn’t just lecture. They lived with them, ate with them, met with them, walked with them, and called them into their life’s work. The apprentice would become like the rabbi until the apprentice was ready to be a rabbi himself.
You’ll hear me talk about what we do at Grove City as a discipleship-based approach to higher education. We live, work, study, and pursue truth alongside our students, in community with them. Over 97% of our students live on campus. They learn here, they play here, they sleep here, they eat three meals a day in our dining halls. As professors, our doors are open to them.
Our calling as members of the Grove City College faculty is to be more than just a professor. More than just a scholar. We are makers of disciples.
In fact, I can hardly imagine a better opportunity for discipleship. Jesus says go and make disciples of all nations. We don’t even have to go anywhere. Talented and eager students come to us. They come to us during some of the most transformative years of their lives and they come because they want to learn from us. Think about that. We have an opportunity to be the best four-year discipleship program on the planet.
Every person in this room has a super-power. They have the same super-power as Dr. Dunn. For each of us as professors—that’s an opportunity not only to change lives, but an opportunity to experience renewed joy in our work.
I want us to be professors whose core aspiration is to live out the mandate of Maundy Thursday—one of the final instructions of Jesus. Love one another as I have loved you.
That means we must aspire to love and care for our students in an extraordinary way: the way the Bible teaches that God knows and cares for and loves each of us.
What does that look like?
We serve a God who loves us sacrificially.
We serve a God who knows us deeply—He knows the number of hairs on our heads.
We serve a God who cares about us individually—a God who leaves the 99 to rescue the one.
We aspire to know and care for our students like that.
Of course, we are not Christ. We’re just fallen people a few years ahead on the journey our students are embarking on. We are a little older, a little wiser. In my case a little grayer. But at our best, we are beggars showing other beggars where we have found a few crumbs along the way. We shouldn’t be afraid of letting our students see that that is the case.
It’s not always easy to strike a balance between the pastoral and scholarly roles in our vocation as professors at a Christian college.
I remember when I first started teaching law. Having been a Christian my entire life and now being asked to teach law in a “Christian” way. That was challenging. I hadn’t seen that much at Harvard. I felt a lot of pressure. My class on contracts or my class on State Constitutional Law should look very different from what students might hear at the state school down the road. I felt guilty when, after looking at textbooks, I selected one that was also used to teach the same subject at the state school down the road.
There were not many Christians on the Harvard Law faculty when I was there. But there was one who’d come speak to our Christian Fellowship from time to time, Professor Bill Stuntz. Bill taught that one of the names that Jesus gives Himself is “the Truth.” He’d say that means that our work, truth-seeking, is not just at the heart of Christianity—it means that to seek truth is to pursue Christ.
It means that if you pursue truth all the way down—at the end of that, you find Christ. Bill would say that it means that the truth is not just a set of facts; to know truth is to be in relationship with God. To seek truth is to seek Jesus.
Our work is Romans 12:2 work: Do not be conformed to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds. It was said at Regent University that with each class session, reading, essay, and test, we work for the renewal of the minds of our students. As we prepare those lectures, syllabi, and do our research and write our articles—as we live out our vocation as Christian scholars—our minds are renewed as well.
For those of us who are bothered that their class sometimes looks a lot like it is taught at a state school, Professor Stuntz at Harvard would remind us that Jesus had a vocation. Before He was a rabbi, He was a carpenter. As Stuntz put it, we have no reason to think that the tables Christ built were different from the other tables made in that day. He likely used the same tools, same materials, and same methods to create them.
Stuntz would say, “Now ask yourself if you think His motivations and attitudes were different, if the way He treated his customers or co-workers might have differed from the other carpenters of the day?” To ask that question is to answer it: as Stuntz put it, “The answer to that question is surely yes.”
The same is true for us. Even secular professors know that it matters how to treat the students you teach, how you engage with them, how you love them, how you invest in them, and how to speak to them. But it matters a lot more to those of us who follow a Savior whose dying request was to love our students the way that Christ loves us.
Dr. [Cornelius] Plantinga makes a similar point in the chapter that Provost Pete Frank asked us to read [in his book Engaging God’s World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living]. He says we should care as much about how our students do their jobs as we do about which jobs they get. Surely the same is true for us. As Plantinga said, God loveth adverbs—meaning, He doesn’t just care what we do, He cares about how we do it.
Of course, before Plantinga and Stunz, there was the Apostle Paul. He makes this same point in 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18, “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances—for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” What is God’s will for your life?
As I start to close, I want to share a couple of quick thoughts about our students’ calling. We’re not just giving our students job training or equipping them with the tools and skills that they will use to feed their families. We are getting them ready to live out God’s call in their lives and we have only four years to do it. Four years to prepare them as best as we can to live out God’s call in their life. Four years to prepare them for their life’s work.
That sense of calling changes everything. It should lead us to take what we are doing very seriously. It should lead us to push our students, knowing that our calling is to prepare them for the work they have been called to do. So that when God calls them to do it, they will be ready. If students ever ask you why we are so demanding or why we have such high standards or why we take this so seriously or why we care so much—well, that is why. Because we are not just getting them ready to get a job and provide for themselves or to earn professional accolades. We are preparing them to step fully into God’s plan for their lives.
When we talk about students and calling, I find most of the conversation focuses on helping students discern their calling or preparing them with the tools they will need to do the work.
But that’s not enough. Ultimately, we don’t just want students to know their calling or to be trained to perform their job with excellence. We want students to step into their calling. For many students—and probably for many of you—that takes boldness, a boldness that comes from faith. I’m convinced that many students miss their calling not because they did not discern it or because they were ill-prepared but because when the time came, they didn’t have the boldness to step into it. If we want our students to fully step into what God has for them, we need to build students with the boldness and the faith to answer the call when it comes.
Finally, I’ll share just a sentence or two about my calling. My new calling here at Grove City College.
Thank you for supporting me as I step into this new calling—returning home to where my own life was transformed—with a sense of calling to do for the next generation of Grovers what professors like Dr. Dunn did for me.
One of the hardest things about that for me was stepping away from a calling that I love—the calling of a law professor who teaches and writes and mentors and disciples. I still hope to do some of that. But that’s no longer my primary work. It’s your calling to teach and to write, and it’s my calling to help empower you to do that to the very best of your abilities.
I look forward to working with you and helping you press as deeply as possible into God’s call on each of your lives.