As an educational leader, you are confronted with a variety of competing priorities. To be sure, failure to ensure that student enrollment and donor support revenue streams are flowing will render other priorities irrelevant. Poor results in those realms will inevitably ensure there will soon be no institution to lead. Focus on these priorities largely determines whether the institution will survive but does little to determine what institution will survive.

Unfortunately, for many people, the term Bible college evokes a dismissive response: inferior, irrelevant, even injurious, according to critics like Donald Miller and others. So how should we characterize ourselves and what do we callourselves? We’re presently working with David Kinnaman and his Barna Group team, investing in research designed to test perceptions and guide our self-portrayal. For the time being, however, our collective understanding of this ethos has become crystallized in terms of the following four concepts: biblical, transformational, experiential, and missional.