Developing the Next Generation of Christian Leaders

What’s your ultimate purpose in life? It’s a big question, of course, but one Joseph Clair, associate provost of the Division of Humanities, Honors and Education and professor of theology and culture, believes everyone asks at some point in their lives.

And college is one of those times. Students seeking a Christian education want more than clarity on a vocational calling — they’re also asking who is God calling me to be?

“As a college student, you want to be given the tools to have a livelihood after college, but you also want to be given the resources to have a meaningful life and the resources to be a mature Christian believer in the world,” Clair says.

The George Fox Program for Leadership and Formation

Integrating faith into academics, vocational calling, and professional training is a passion for Clair, who helped the university develop the honors program. Now, he and Travis Pickell, a theology and ethics professor and director of the Cornerstone Core, a series of undergraduate courses focused on character formation, are collaborating to shepherd the newly established George Fox Program for Leadership and Formation.

George Fox is one of 29 colleges and universities awarded a grant as part of the Educating Character Initiative, supported by Lilly Endowment Inc. and Wake Forest University. The Educating Character Initiative calls for new approaches to holistic student formation. The $500,000 grant, distributed over three years, will allow the university to build a program that further integrates the university’s mission to help students grow spiritually, academically and professionally.

Since receiving the grant, a group of university leaders have been meeting to chart a course for the program. Clair and Pickell are excited about the momentum, especially around the development of a unique first-year experience. The vision also includes establishing living-learning communities and a speaker series with interdisciplinary and cross-curricular discussions around leadership and character. 

Connecting Sunday to Monday

As a theologian, Clair is trained professionally to see the seeds of faith in all things. But his personal experience has also been a driver behind his leadership of the new program. Clair started his undergraduate studies at a public university, where the religious skepticism he experienced in his religion classes felt corrosive to his faith. “I was exposed to questions of the reliability of Scripture and the resurrection of Christ, and I was overwhelmed by the skepticism and antagonism of my professors,” he recalls

After transferring to a Christian university, he experienced what he calls the “riches of the Christian intellectual tradition,” discussing thinkers who had been wrestling with these questions for 2,000 years. The difference in how the questions were presented was life changing. “When you leave home and enter adulthood, you’re in the process of making your faith your own,” Clair says. “The strength of mentorships and a rich learning atmosphere can transform your life.”

Pickell, who graduated from a public university, had a different experience, noting that his undergraduate years were positive in many ways. Still, his robust spiritual life felt separate from his studies and career plans. Putting it all together felt like a solo lift.

“When I graduated I had no idea how to connect Sunday to Monday, faith to work, other than to be honest and kind and look for opportunities to share the gospel,” he remembers. He soon discovered a Fellows Program in Washington, D.C. that focused specifically on helping young adults bring together faith, learning, and vocation under a coherent vision of what Pickell describes as “Christ's renewal of all things.”

  The experience was transformative. “I became convinced that God cares about our work in the world. Now, I am dedicated to helping students discover where God may be calling them and to developing a Christian theological imagination for how their vocations can become ways for them to love their neighbors, work for the common good, and bring about shalom in every sphere of life,” Pickell says. 

The Gift of a Christian Education

As the director of the Cornerstone Core, Pickell oversees a general education package that integrates faith formation across 10 academic disciplines. When asked how the new program will expand this vision, he celebrates the university’s ongoing success while acknowledging there’s work left to do. “Many Christian universities struggle to achieve their faith-based missions because of a historic divide between academics and co-curriculars," he explains. “At George Fox, questions about faith and the Christian worldview are explicitly addressed in each Cornerstone course. And this is a great achievement, but we want to do more.”

As they look to the future, Clair and Pickell believe the Program for Leadership and Formation offers a well-timed opportunity for the university to build a bridge over that historic divide. “The invaluable gift of a Christian higher education is that it invites these deep questions into the classroom, the dorm room, and the chapel, with faculty and staff demonstrating faithfulness and encouraging students to trust God,” says Pickell.