Twelfth Tuesday after Pentecost

It's faith journey day again. My first  two years at Greensboro College went well, although Marianne and I both felt overwhelmed with work. She was teaching in High Point and had a half-hour commute each way. I could get to GC in 15 minutes. I managed the departmental conflicts well and got along with everyone. We had a beautiful chapel that seated about 200 right across the street from the building where my office was. I headed the Religious Life program. Like Tennessee Wesleyan, we had no competition from conservative evangelical national groups like Inter-Varsity and Campus Crusade. The Student Christian Fellowship was smaller than I wanted but did well. I taught a full four course load each semester as well as doing the Religious Life Program and preaching at a weekly Chapel service. I was also teaching Sunday School at Christ UMC.

Dr. James Barrett was the President of Greensboro College who hired me. I was Jim's man. He liked what I was doing and supported me well. Then, in my second year there, totally unexpectedly, he resigned. A new president was hired. I was wary from the beginning, showing a bit of my own prejudice, in that the new president was an Asbury Theological Seminary graduate. In those days Asbury was more conservative than it is now, pretty close to being fundamentalist. Despite its being named after Francis Asbury, one of the two first bishops of the Methodist Church in the United States (the other was Thomas Coke), Asbury Seminary was not, and is still not affiliated with the United Methodist Church.

If I was Jim's Barrett's man, I was definitely not the new president's man. I could feel it from our very first meeting. During the summer before my third year at GC, the new president added a number of new duties to my list of responsibilities. The job was already well beyond a reasonable work load. I had the distinct feeling that the president was trying to force me out so that he could put his own person in charge. 

I had from the beginning of my seven years in college chaplaincy seen it as a way into college teaching, which I was doing but wanted to do full time. I was in a bind. I wouldn't be able to do well all the new president was assigning me. I didn't have tenure or even a tenure track. I was afraid that he might eventually find some reason to fire me. I didn't want to move. I really liked GC. Marianne was in a really good K department in her school in High Point. John was settled in Page High School. April was now living with her mother in Raleigh, easy driving distance. I loved my Sunday School class and Christ UMC. We had made a lot of friends in Greensboro. I had the option of going back into the parish, but I could have been assigned anywhere in the western half of North Carolina. Things were looking bleak. I decided I would stay at GC and do my best. Perhaps I might be able to please the new president and negotiate a better work load. I prayed for God's best help and guidance.

Then suddenly I got word that the New Testament and Greek professor at Elon had just become Associate Dean, and they were looking for a replacement for his teaching position. Within three weeks I had the job. It would be full time teaching New Testament and Greek. I was thrilled. We would not have to move. It was a forty-five minute commute each way to Elon, but I would get used to it. 

It would be hard fully to explain how remarkable this situation was. Teaching jobs in my field are very, very rare. Church related schools were dropping Religion requirements. State schools were dropping Religion departments. State schools that had Religion Departments were becoming more and more aggressively secular. It was ok for a professor to be a member of a religion, any religion, or to have no religion at all--but state schools did not want people who were ordained ministers in their Religious Studies departments. Ph.D.'s in Religion looking for jobs were everywhere. The new graduate program at Temple University in Philadelphia was turning out about 30 a year. The job market for people in my field was at its worst, but I had gotten a job. Thanks were to God.

In the fall of 1986 I began what would be 18 years at Elon.

Faithfully,

Christian