This section provides an overview and documentation of the service I have performed at the professional, university, departmental, and church/community levels since coming to ACU. You may navigate by using the menu below, or follow the links at the bottom of each page.
Service to the Community and the Church
Reflections on Service
In this section, more than the others, I experience a strong impulse towards reticence. Service is something you should do without being asked, and after you do it, you certainly should not be bragging about it. It is difficult to get out of this mindset, instilled so deeply by my family and church culture. This makes service harder to catalog and reflect on, I think, because I have a tendency to dismiss it in my brain as just something I routinely do. If the department needs a volunteer to meet with a student, and I’m available, I volunteer. If a colleague needs someone to cover a class and I’m available, I do that. If we’re short on Bible class teachers on Sunday mornings at Minter Lane, I brush up on “Father Abraham.” Both my department and my churches are relatively small, so everyone has to pitch in. This is all to say that this section doesn’t provide an exhaustive list of my service activities, but it does highlight some of what I see as contributions that have made a difference, both to me and to the academic and personal communities in which I live.
Sometimes I find it difficult to figure out the appropriate balance between teaching, scholarship, and service. I think the best approach is to think in terms of community and how I function within it. What does my department most need me to be and do right now? What can I do to help grow our student enrollment, promote cooperation among faculty, make students feel more welcome, build bridges of collaboration with other departments? Service should flow naturally from my engagement in my communities. I hope that I perform most of my service not because I feel constrained to do so, but because I genuinely care about making my communities better.