Joseph McRae Mellichamp
Emeritus Professor of Management Science
The University of Alabama
What is the driving motivation for how we spend our time and energy?
During my academic career at Alabama, and now in my 12 years as a national rep for Faculty Commons I have seen the great differences among Christian faculty because of how we see ourselves. Am I a Christian who happens to be a professor – or a professor who happens to be a Christian?
What Really Matters
If I am a Christian who happens to be a professor, I see all of life in terms of my relationship with God. I understand that I am God’s representative here in this life and that earning the commendation of Jesus is what really matters. I seek to represent Him faithfully in a variety of venues, including the home, the neighborhood, the church, the community, and the world.
Now how one goes about representing Jesus faithfully in these different venues depends on a host of things including one’s spiritual gifts and abilities, one’s opportunities and interests, and one’s background and education. The salient characteristic of such a person is that he or she evaluates opportunities and makes choices based upon how the resulting outcomes will impact the advancement of God’s Kingdom.
What if I am a professor who happens to be a Christian? Different operational priorities: my focus is success in academics, and maybe in other areas of endeavor as well. The overriding interest for me is not the Kingdom of God.
A couple of weeks ago we had a well-known football coach of a major state university speak to our Christian faculty group at Georgia Tech. He began by stating that his primary goal in life was to be a faithful follower of Jesus—he went on to say, “I am a Christian who is a football coach, not a football coach who is a Christian.”
This Is Success
Our speaker explained this by saying: “A few years ago a fan asked me, ‘Coach, what kind of year did you have last year?’ I replied, ‘It was a great year.’ ‘But your record was only 7 and 4,’ replied the fan. ‘I know, but we had seven or eight of our players make personal commitments to Christ; in my book that is success!”
The coach went on to say that on the field with his players he prayed to win. Not to do so, he said, would be “lying to God.” But his major goal in coaching was developing the character of his athletes. As I left the meeting, I thought, “He really gets it. Too bad college athletics isn’t populated by men and women with his same value system.”
Is our bottom line the number of refereed publications we publish each year, or the funding for our grants? Of course, the publications and the funding and the awards are important. Those are part of our witness; to belittle them is to belittle part of the work God has given us. But don’t we want to live for something – actually Someone – greater?
© 2007 Rae Mellichamp Used by Permission of Faculty Commons
Rae’s Summer Reading List:
The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life, Os Guinness
The Training of the Twelve, A. B. Bruce
Ministering in the Secular University, Rae Mellichamp