IDENTITY PURPOSE VOCATION LOCATION

a semi-pro baseball team in Italy, Lavender developed the firm belief that God’s Kingdom is better served by people who are prepared in fields other than ministry but who know how to proclaim the Gospel.

“Because I managed and played on their city team, I had evangelistic inroads that I would not have otherwise had,” said Lavender of his time coaching in Italy. “So I’ve always had this vision of the power of every student at a university becoming involved in God’s mission, the vision of taking missions out of the Bible department and making it the heartbeat of the university. Every student has the amazing possibility of being on mission with God—no matter what vocational choice they make.”

Within the last decade, as the demographics of faith have changed both in America’s congregations and at Lipscomb, Lavender has made a point each year to personally interview each and every student in his general education required Bible courses.

Lavender’s piles of notebooks from his qualitative interviews with students has made at least one trend among today’s emerging adults and their approach to faith very clear, he said.

Thirty years ago, most Lipscomb students were from Church of Christ backgrounds and came to campus with “little interest in the biblical story. They were here to be trained to go into the world and live a prosperous life,” he said.

Today’s student is much different, his interviews show. “They know that they want to create value instead of just earning money.”

The numbers of Church of Christ-raised students enrolling at Lipscomb has been steadily declining over the past two decades. Many of the students Lavender sees today have no faith background or only a vague sense of wanting to attend a faith-based school. So they typed “Christian university South” into a Google search to discover Lipscomb.

“Today’s students come to campus searching and saying, ‘Teach us what we need to know,’” said Lavender.

“Earl began teaching his classes as an invitation to God’s story,” said Dr. Leonard Allen, dean of the College of Bible & Ministry (CBM). “He challenges his non-Christian students to think about how this story could enhance their best self, and he has found that some of these students do go on to become Christians.”

Based on that analysis and success, the CBM re-worked its four general education Bible courses in 2006 to become “a narrative story of Israel, Jesus and the Church that is designed to say to students: ‘This is a narrative in which you are invited to participate.’”

The final general education Bible class, Faith and Culture, says to students: “Now that you know the story, how are you going to live it out?” said Lavender.

A traveler joins the journey…

In 2018, a new traveler joined the journey toward the CVD. Dr. Steve Bonner (BA ’01, MA ’02, MDiv ’04, MACM ’20), professor and associate dean of undergraduate Bible, brought additional perspective and scholarly tools to bring the vision to fruition.

Bonner spent almost a decade at Lubbock Christian University researching adolescent psychosocial development. His task at Lipscomb was to overhaul the undergraduate Bible curriculum based on his expertise.

As mid-adolescence extends, psychosocial behaviors that were once limited to high school students are making their way into the collegeaged population, said Bonner. “College students are not adults. Developmentally they are just not there yet,” he said.

Specifically a psychological behavior called “multiple selves” is becoming more pervasive among today’s college students, he said.

Students think of their own self-identity in different ways based on the specific situation they face. Such “multiple selves” are exacerbated as a method of self-protection in the face of social pressures and adults’ inconsistent pressures for mid-adolescents to perform, to the point where many college students are cognitively unable to apply abstract learning from one of their selves to situations faced by another one of their selves, Bonner said.

“We can no longer assume that students can apply what they learn in one class to another class,” said Bonner. “Imagine the implications for the Church. We assume our teens are practically applying what they learn about morals and Christian values in youth groups, but the reality is that they don’t have the ability to apply those lessons across the board in their lives.”

Lavender, who had already started doing his own research into Generation Z to understand why they showed an inability to connect the dots, embraced Bonner’s research conclusions and re-formatted his general education Bible classes to include more consistent reminders of content, with corresponding study guides and Powerpoint slides, and accommodations such as open book tests.