Living Out Your Life Mission Statement in a Secular Classroom

Dana Ferris, ferrisd@skymail.csus.edu

About 6 years ago I was in a perpetual state of confusion—too much to do, too many directions to go, wanting to please God in all areas of my life and fulfill His unique purposes for me and calling upon my life—but not sure how to focus myself. Through some intensive Bible study, prayer, journaling, and discussion with my husband and others, I found myself able to articulate a "personal mission statement": To be an encourager and an equipper. At the time I wrote it, I thought it applied primarily to my church ministry and to my parenting. A couple of years later, though, I realized that my personal mission statement could and did also apply to my teaching. When asked by my university to write a "personal teaching philosophy," I found myself casting it in terms of several core values derived directly from the "encourager and equipper" life mission statement.

So now that I have a clearer sense of what my mission statement and core values are—as a person and as a teacher—I can try to flesh out how a Christian professor lives out her core values in the real world. I have recast three of these core values as dichotomies or tensions.

Justice and Mercy
The first core value is respect for my students. For me, part of respecting students is holding them responsible for doing their best work and for making good choices as they go along. However, the tension this value creates for me is between justice and mercy. As Christians we know that God is both just and merciful, and that in fact is why we need and have the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ. But what does this mean in our relationships with our students? Justice might say, "I told you really clearly what the due date was and what the consequences would be for late papers." Mercy might say, "I can see that you've been struggling (with illness, with time management, with a difficult marriage or a child in trouble), so I'm going to give you some extra time to get things together." Justice might say, "Part of my job is teaching you how to accept responsibility for your choices. If you chose to take too many classes or work too many hours or have too much fun on the weekend to get your work done on time and with quality, well, that doesn't make you a bad person, but it also doesn't make you an 'A' student." Mercy might say, "We all make bad choices and life happens to all of us. Don't we all need a second chance, a 'do-over' sometimes?"

Though the idea of building personal responsibility in young students through setting and enforcing clear standards is a compelling one to me, as I think about this more and more, I am coming to the conclusion that compassion and mercy are very high values for a Christian teacher. Scripture tells us that God's mercies are "new every morning" (Lamentations 3:23)¹ .  God gives us chance after chance to make things right, to do things better, to change. In his letter to Christians, James said "judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy triumphs over judgment" (James 2:13, emphasis added). So I have to ask myself: When I go to work, when I am in my classroom or in my office or responding to student e-mails, are my mercies "new every morning"? Do I look on each student with compassion—or do I respond to them with irritation or judgment? 
 
Fairness and Favoritism
The second core value is fairness, and the tension it creates is between fairness and favoritism. I have a reputation with students of treating everyone fairly, and I usually get high marks on this on my student evaluations. Everyone plays by the same rules, has the same expectations, and is judged by the same standards. I was pretty confident that I don't play favorites.

Recently, though, I was listening to a sermon series on the book of James (Appel, Beach, Breaux, & Frazee, 2007). The first part of James 2 pointedly mentioned how Christians should not show favoritism, talking specifically about honoring the rich over the poor. James said this:

Suppose someone comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor person in filthy old clothes also comes in. If you show special attention to the one wearing fine clothes and say, "Here's a good seat for you," but say to the one who is poor, "You stand there" or "Sit on the floor by my feet," have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?"-James 2:2-4 (emphasis added)

As I said, I didn't think I was a person who showed favoritism. But then I started thinking about my relationships with students and how this text might apply to them. I realized that for me, the "rich" students would be the ones I enjoyed or connected with the most—the ones I click with personality-wise, who are interested and engaged, who are conscientious and responsible, and whose talents and abilities I respect. I realized that I do show special attention to those students. They are the ones who get extra time and energy and personal attention from me. Then there are the "poor" students—the ones who don't manage their lives well, who are not quite as bright or as capable, who may have emotional or social problems, and who suck time and energy from me and may be frustrating and irritating to deal with. Though I am not unkind or rude to them, I definitely relegate them to "sitting on the floor by my feet." I don't show much interest in them because, if I am brutally honest about it, I don't want to encourage them in any way to seek out more of my time and energy.

So going forward in my teaching, I'm going to ask myself if I "play favorites" by lavishing my energy and attention on those students I find most appealing and withholding it from students I am less drawn to.

Excellence and Balance
The third core value or tension I struggle with is excellence versus modeling balanced priorities. I feel very strongly about excellence as a core value for a Christian teacher (or worker in any setting). I am guided in this by Paul's words in the letter to the Colossians: "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters. . . . It is the Lord Christ you are serving" (Colossians 3:23-24, emphasis added). If my students know that I am a Christian, and I come to class poorly prepared, waste their time, do not return papers promptly, or do not respond carefully to their questions and their work, how does that example reflect on me as a follower of Jesus Christ? 

However, my diligence and my work ethic are not the only things I am modeling. As I have already mentioned, I also want to model mercy, compassion, and care for them as individuals. I also want to model that I am a healthy, whole person, not a workaholic, a person with important personal relationships, a person who finds time for community service, and a person who relaxes and has fun. So sometimes I show them pictures of my dog, mention my church involvement, or tell a story about one of my kids or talk about the latest episode of American Idol or 24.

So while I am committed to excellence, I also recognize that it can lead to workaholism and become a false idol. We do not honor Christ in our own lives and we are not good ambassadors for him if we model stress, exhaustion, and living on the edge. In my own career, I have also noticed that sometimes a commitment to an abstract notion of "excellence"—say, the perfectly crafted lesson or the most amazing PowerPoint presentation—can cause me to miss what true excellence really is: For Jesus, it was all about people—taking time for them, listening to them, asking them questions, meeting their individual needs. So for me, the tension between excellence and balance includes asking myself the question of whether at that particular moment I am about public persona or about valuing people made in God's image and whom Jesus died for.

In my life, the journey toward integrating my personal mission statement—to be an encourager and an equipper—and my core values as a teacher has led to me to recast and rethink what those teaching values mean for me as a follower and ambassador of Jesus Christ in my sphere of influence. I would not at all say that I have resolved the tensions, and as time goes on, I realize more and more that I need to react to students, issues, and opportunities on a daily, case-by-case basis rather than having a rigid, static set of answers that can be easily applied to every person or situation. When I go to work each day, I need to ask the Holy Spirit to guide my thoughts and words in the classroom and out of it, and I need especially to ask God to keep my eyes, ears, and heart open to the people He treasures.

Dr. Dana Ferris is a professor of English (applied linguistics/TESOL) at California State University, Sacramento.  In her spare time she feeds and supervises hordes of junior highers; plays Frisbee with Winnie the Pooch, her yellow lab; watches USC football (her alma mater); and serves as the faculty advisor for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at her university.

¹ All Scripture texts are from Today's New International Version of the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: International Bible Society/Zondervan, 2001/2005).

Reference

Appel, G., Beach, N., Breaux, M., & Frazee, R. (2007, January-March). "Fuel" sermon series. South Barrington, IL: Willow Creek Community Church. iTunes podcasts downloaded from www.willowcreek.org.

SLW & CALL October 2007 Volume 11 Number 3: Table of Contents