Leadership Development:

Our Once and Future Mission

The following are excerpts from Dr. Joseph Castleberry’s Inaugural Address, given October 27, 2007. To hear the entire address, visit www.northwestu.edu/president. For a photo gallery, click here.

Northwest’s Past

As this audience well knows, Northwest University began in 1934 under the name of Northwest Bible Institute. The founders of our school were part of a revival that was characterized by a Christ-centered foursquare Gospel that stressed deep commitment to holy Christian living and a pragmatic urgency to see people saved before the soon-return of Jesus.

Whereas the traditional path to ministry involved a four-year course of liberal arts studies followed by three years of seminary, the Bible colleges pragmatically sought to provide a faster, cheaper route to Christian service that would rise to the need of the hour.

While Northwest University has long been seriously committed to teaching the liberal arts, it has never been recognized as a liberal arts college by the secular agencies that classify institutions of higher education.

We have, however, offered substantial instruction in the liberal arts, all the while remaining true to our original pragmatic mission of training church ministers and biblically-trained lay-people to Carry the Call of God in a wide variety of ministries in the Church and the world.

While we are currently classified as a Baccalaureate University focused on professional training, we have the potential to move up a level and become a full-fledged, comprehensive, master’s level university.

In short, Northwest University has undeniably succeeded in terms of our founders’ hopes, as well as in the ever-expanding, increasingly ambitious dreams of their successors.

Vision for the Future

The question for us today, however, is not whether our predecessors succeeded. Rather, the question is, “What will Northwest University become under our watch?” “What will be the vision of the university and what strategy might we pursue in ensuring its fruitfulness in the future?”

My answer is that we will dedicate ourselves anew to the once and future purpose of the American college—the training of transformational leaders who will rise to the call of ministering to the emerging needs of our nation and of the world, with energy, vision, and anointing from God, and to tell a better story of our future than any other leaders in our society.

Transformational Leadership

Central to this vision is one of the most important theoretical insights that has emerged in the last 40 years of leadership research—James McGregor Burns’ theory of transformational leadership.

In his classic book, simply entitled Leadership, Burns classified leadership in two categories: transactional leadership and transformational leadership.

According to Burns, transactional leadership is essentially a market relationship. Leaders trade what they can offer followers for what followers can give them. There is no high moral dimension involved—nothing personal, it’s just business.

In contrast, transformational leadership is based on a profoundly moral vision.

A transformational leader articulates a vision that inspires followers to set aside their narrow and immediate interests in favor of a higher, greater, and more common goal. Leadership is not hoarded at the top of a hierarchy, but rather distributed to followers.

Burns explains that such a process makes it possible for both leaders and followers to fulfill the higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, resulting in moral development for the whole community.

While Burns recognizes the value, necessity, and prevalence of transactional leadership, he persuasively argues that the world is in critical need of more transformational leaders.

While America has always needed visionary leaders to guide its progress, there has never been a time when it has needed them more than now.

The University’s Role

Evangelical colleges and universities stand in a unique strategic position from which they could provide such leaders for America. As universities with the soul of a church, they offer the possibility of combining the strengths of spirituality with the strengths of the university.

The university, on one hand, is the only institution in American society that credibly pretends to offer knowledge about every sphere of human existence. Through its gates march the most optimistic and idealistic young people in society.

It trains the personnel—the leaders—for every other institution in society. It is the principal institution to which our society has assigned the development, expression, challenge, and refinement of ideas (Malik, 1982).

Only the university possesses the breadth of scope to foster a new societal vision and form the leaders necessary for its establishment.

The Church, on the other hand, is uniquely dedicated to moral and spiritual values.

By combining the Church’s strengths in moral values and the university’s unique position of intellectual leadership and access to young minds, Evangelical higher education—and especially Northwest University—stands in a privileged strategic position to bless our nation and secure its future.

The SAGES Strategy

And so, the question must be answered: What kind of education must we provide at Northwest?

The answer involves a commitment to spiritual vibrancy, academic excellence, global visibility, ethnic diversity, and societal significance.

I have created the acronym SAGES to summarize this strategy, since it fits the university’s calling to serve our society as a source of wisdom:

Spiritual Vibrancy
Academic Excellence
Global Visibility
Ethnic Diversity
Societal Significance

Spiritual Vibrancy

First, we must be committed to Spiritual Vibrancy.

If we are committed to a strong godly influence on our society, it must begin with a community centered on the abiding presence of Christ.

Our Chapel must be a filling station of the Holy Spirit, forming Spirit-filled students now so that they may be Spirit-filled leaders in the future.

Today’s Christian university must maintain holy standards of lifestyle for its community, modeling to the society the quality of life that deep faithfulness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ provides.

We must also maintain a rock-solid commitment to being a confessional community.

Time has proven that those colleges that do not remain committed to a specific, personal confession of faith on the part of students and faculty do not retain any specific institutional confession of faith.

In some ways it is oxymoronic to speak of a “Christian” university, since bricks and mortar and books and mortarboards have no eternal soul to save, nor even a will with which to accept Christ as Savior.

The only way in which a university can truly be said to be Christian is for its members to be Christians.

Importantly, our students must gain knowledge of the revelation of God through the Bible and personalization of that knowledge through participation in worship and prayer and theological reflection.

They must learn to read the Scriptures in the presence of the One who once inspired them, and now inspires us through them.

Studying the Bible in the Spirit means we will not be enslaved by dead-letter legalism, but rather empowered for moral reasoning and spiritual discernment.

Academic Excellence

Second, we must be committed to Academic Excellence, beginning with a first-rate liberal arts education for students of every major.

In order to produce leaders, the early American colleges placed emphasis on the teaching of the liberal arts, so called because they were believed to be instrumental in the liberation of human beings from tyranny.

Despite all that has changed in America, the tandem of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the liberating arts is still the key to freeing both women and men from the slavery of oppression and making them leaders of freedom.

It is time, however, to reinvigorate and reconceptualize once again the “liberating arts.” This calls for instruction in the art of leadership itself—the quintessential liberating art.

A liberating arts education includes reading at the highest levels, sharpening and opening the mind through communion with great ideas, rather than merely soothing the bondage of ignorance with easy entertainments.

It depends on the skills of writing and speaking and the use of rhetoric for persuasion. It demands the cultivation of intercultural skills. It includes

familiarity with the principle epistemologies that guide literary, scientific, and social scientific research. It includes moral and aesthetic training in the beautiful arts. It calls for physical education and conditioning, and the lifelong enjoyment of bodily activity to ensure health and longevity.

And finally, we must at long last come to acknowledge that no university in today’s world can pretend to be “full-fledged” without a commitment to research and discovery in the training of young leaders.

A chief component of the curriculum should be the involvement of all students in the forms of research and evaluation that are appropriate to their academic or professional discipline.

Global Visibility

Third, we must be committed to Global Visibility. Our historic missionary culture has given us a vast network of personal relationships with leaders around the world. We must now take advantage of our missionary culture to make sure that students in every major literally become citizens of the world; at-home wherever they may travel.

They will be able to say as Miguel de Unamuno once did, “I am a human being; no other human do I consider a foreigner.”

Just as Unamuno was the greatest and most vigorous patriot the Spanish nation ever produced, our students can best show their American patriotism by making the world—and every human being in it—no longer alien to them.

Throughout our history, Americans have gone out into the world as the heralds of salvation, as liberators from oppression, as promoters of human progress. Because men and women are still lost and in need of Jesus Christ, and because people still suffer oppression, that mission remains valid today.

It is changed, however, by the reality that many other nations are now more advanced than we are, and many other, less technologically advanced nations have more vibrant expressions of the church than we have recently seen.

Today’s Northwest student and alumnus or alumna goes out into the world to teach AND to learn, to serve AND to be served, building a two-lane service road around the world.

To serve our nation as well as the world, Northwest University and its students must be visible around the world—making friends, building networks, conceiving and starting and operating global businesses, competing in sports, nursing and healing the sick, practicing professions, sowing the Gospel of Jesus Christ and reaping personal spiritual renewal, and recruiting students to come to Northwest even as they themselves study in another land.

Ethnic Diversity

Fourth, we must be committed to Ethnic Diversity. America, like the Jerusalem of the First Century, has been filled with people “from every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5).

As I have mentioned earlier, this brings us both challenges and opportunities, and Northwest University dares not fail to rise to the call of the nation’s needs in our time.

In order to prepare transformational leaders for America’s future, we must create an educational environment in which all students, regardless of their ethnic identities or cultures of origin, can come together and learn from each other, where cross-cultural skills can be honed in the context of authentic friendship, where a new vision for a pluralistic yet united society can be forged for the delight of the Creator who planned from primordial time the emergence of a dazzlingly diverse humanity and its redemption around the throne of Heaven.

If our students are expected to lead an ever more diverse nation in the future, they must be immersed, and steeped, in that diversity now.

For these and many other reasons beside, Northwest University must become ethnically diverse even faster than America itself.

Societal Significance

Fifth, we must be committed to Societal Significance. In short, the New Testament concept of servant leadership must be fostered in a Christian university (Greenleaf, 1977), and accordingly, the practical application of learning in service must become a defining characteristic of Northwest University.

Equipped with a transforming vision of the dignity and worth of every human being, based in the love of God for all creation, our students will move out into society to realize the vision of a re-invigorated nation.

Our Story

Harold Gardner has stated, in his brilliant book Leading Minds (1995), that five-year-old children follow the leadership patterns of apes, following the specimens who have the best genes in terms of size, strength, skill, intelligence, and attractiveness. Adults, on the other hand, follow the leader who can tell and embody the best story.

If we allow God’s Spirit to lead us, we can produce graduates who can tell and live out a better story of a transformed future than the one we have been told.

The leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony that founded Harvard once dared to tell a better story than the one they had known in their native England. They dreamed of a city set on a hill, a nation that would mirror the values of the Kingdom of God.

Their vision is memorialized in that well-known verse of the patriotic hymn “America” that reads like this: Oh beautiful, for patriot dream that sees beyond the years, thine alabaster cities’ gleam undimmed by human tears.

Our nation’s founders knew that in the culture of Heaven, there would be no tears, and their story for the future aimed at the creation of a society that would conform to the ways of their eternal homeland, that would not be characterized by the tears they had shed in their former habitations.

They were not, however, utopians, and they knew that their efforts must temporally fall short of the Kingdom of Heaven.

While our cities in America today are not made of alabaster, and while their gleam is certainly not free from the tarnish of tears, it would be the height of foolishness and ingratitude to claim that our ancestors and predecessors failed us.

Their vision of conformity to God’s Kingdom has brought about the greatest national story ever told.

And even if our eschatology, like theirs, will not allow us to believe in a human-built utopia, the inexorable success of God’s Kingdom fuels our stories with hope as we imagine and strive to create a future America—yea even a Global community—that is better than the one we have known.

As we have sung for years, “We’ve a story to tell to the nations that will turn their hearts to the right.”

We have a sacred calling to tell that story, and by it, to create a better world.

The Cost

Still, that story will not be told without sacrifice. One of the areas in which we must allow God to help us, and to inspire our sacrifice, is in the area of finances.

The cost of being a full-fledged global university has been growing at double the rate of inflation for the past 20 years and shows no sign of abating.

If we are going to train leaders to transform our nation, it is going to cost us hundreds of millions of dollars.

If I were not ready to lead in generating and asking for that money, I would not have come to join this family and to lead its future and to tell its story wherever I can find or create a platform.

The mission we have accepted is well worth a billion dollars if that is what it will cost to achieve. But together with and beyond that sacrificial financial investment, we are going to have to pay the cost of a consecrated life.

Parents, students, teachers, staff, and partners will have to join together in seeking God’s revelation and vision for our generation and the future ones we can serve in our time.

I am offering today to invest the best years of my life and the peak years of my career, to make Northwest University a transformational leader for our students and our world. While I am still young I will see visions. When I am old, I will dream dreams. God will pour out his Spirit on us all if we will look up to him.

Today I invite you to join me in seeking God and God’s provision for Northwest University, for our nation, and for the world God loves.