2001 Point Loma Nazarene University poised to be a university of significance.

What words are more appropriate than "Thanks be to God." We have come this far, now what?

Wesleyans take human moral freedom seriously, so do not believe in a rigid predestination, or a divine plan for every person, or God's control of historical events. Destiny for Nazarenes is open. It is what we in partnership with God make of our lives and the lives of our institutions. A university of destiny is a university of influence. Influence on what? There is no set answer. If the college exists as a mating ground for the church, or a place of protected prolonged adolescence, its influence will be minimal. If there is to be a future of destiny, it will have to strive for more.

How much should a university that has been protected and delivered seek to achieve? The question may have little meaning in 2002, for the memory of those hard earlier years is gone, and those who were here at the deliverance are now few. The sense of the "specialness" of this institution may never be experienced by some. The location is beautiful, the buildings new, the salary reasonable, austerity programs are behind, and frustrations minimal. The university is a good place to be. After the austerity programs of the past, the institution has now "arrived."

For others, teaching at Point Loma is their offering of service back to their Lord, their act of offering and worship and ministry in the Kingdom. "Teaching is an act of grace for me," music professor Dan Nelson once said. These faculty members love what they do and they use their teaching and relationships with students as a means of grace to deepen their spiritual lives, shape their character and moral choices, and inspire them with hope to reach for higher levels of capability and service. Their act of grace is magnified because part of the "specialness" of this university is the personal and intellectual space to be different. It is not an insular community that applies social pressures to conform and defer, nor where academic freedom is limited to the freedom to be "right." This is a university that recognizes the dignity of faculty and ideas and open discussion of significant issues.

Still other faculty members see the chance to make a contribution, to build programs that will improve the quality of the university, enhance and enrich the education of promising students, and extend the moral role of the university beyond the campus. For them, the university cannot stop growing and expanding its offerings. To accept the confines of the Point Loma campus is to acquiesce.

Teaching at a holiness university for which there is no predestined shape and size, but in which the Lord has protected, delivered, and blessed, means there is opportunity and responsibility to move beyond the marginal, beyond the little, and offer to both the Lord and the students more than the present.

The college could have remained a Bible college in 1910.

It could have remained an unaccredited college for preparing preachers in 1944.

It could have remained in Pasadena in 1973.

It could remain boxed in at the Point Loma campus.

How much it would have missed; how much it could yet miss.

We are now again at a time of choice. Unless the university decides to become a high-priced elitist institution, the city-imposed cap on enrollment will also limit income and programs and, in time, quality itself. To avoid drift, the university needs to find new ways of expansion. Now while the university is strong and conditions favorable, the university needs to pursue a new vision, perhaps a destiny of significance.

There is, however, the dynamic of fear. To do more will be to change the institution, and there will be those who will resist change. Faculty meetings will be larger, and perhaps longer. Graduate faculty may outshine undergraduate faculty. There will be fear that the institution will not be able to wrap graduate students in the same kind of residential-chapel-covenant group embrace that it is able to do to undergraduates in an Athens model, and therefore it would not really be Christian graduate education, forgetting that graduate students are no longer late teenagers. Identity as a liberal arts university may become fuzzy, despite the fact that sizeable professional programs exist at the university-nursing, business administration, teacher education-and there is a growing use of the bachelor of science degree.

What the university does now, it does very well. But what it does is also done by a hundred other small Christian colleges and universities, many of which do the spiritual and academic tasks just as well. To remain a small regional institution turning out students to the same careers as it has for the past fifty years is important, but not a destiny. The destiny is not size-to be 4,000 or 5,000 at multiple sites. The destiny is the program-teaching, research, and policy development shaped by the values of the Letters to the churches and by the dynamics of grace, preparing students for the work of Isaiah 62:10.

If there is to be a destiny, a future of influence, there will have to be more to the university than just the Point Loma campus. If there is to be a destiny there will have to be a commitment to that future by a critical mass of faculty and students, those who serve not only what the university is, but also what it could be. There must always be a future-orientation to the institution. Not to the past of a romanticized view of what small liberal arts colleges were in the 1960s before the growth of for-profit universities, distance education, and globalization, but to a serious consideration of the future. Except for those who are determined to live in the past of their parents, the students who pass through the university will live in the future, and it is in that preparation of them for that future where a university of destiny will find its influence.

This university of destiny cannot do everything. Point Loma will never match the University of Chicago, or the University of Notre Dame. But it can focus on its heritage, and make that heritage real and relevant for the future. It can bring its Wesleyan approach to thinking to bear on the process of building that highway for the people, of removing the stumbling stones, and of raising the banner of holy living and social justice. It can bring that heritage and approach to thinking to bear in selected areas where its understanding of grace in transforming lives and shaping change and institutions can have important influences in the broader world. It can have a destiny of both success and significance. The path to that significance is to be a university in the service of grace.

From Promise and Destiny: Grace in the History of Point Loma Nazarene University, by Ron Kirkemo 2001


Back to Centennial Celebration Home