Three Lies About Your Education

I sat down today to address this question: “What does your schoolwork have to do with your witness as a follower of Jesus?” 

From the very beginning of my task, though, I’ve encountered a problem: you’ve been lied to about your education. Not once. Not twice. Three times!

We’ve all heard these lies, and many of us have quietly believed them. But if you want to follow Jesus in the university — and  share compellingly about him on campus –   you’ll need to untangle the hold these lies have on you.

1. Your education and your faith can exist independently.

You bring your Christianity with you into every classroom, every experiment, every paper, every group project. When you become a Christian, God’s Spirit dwells in you and you — in some wild and mysterious way — are united with Christ. Where you go, God goes. When you go to class, so does God.

This doesn’t mean you have to awkwardly wedge the gospel into class discussions about Venezuela or implementation fidelity for systematic reviewing. Being a Christian isn’t merely about what you say — it’s about who you are (which will impact what you say from time to time, necessarily). 

You are someone who has received the love and forgiveness of Jesus, who believes God created an orderly and rational universe, who knows all this has been damaged by evil and desperately needs healing — healing that we’ve been sent together to bring.

You might find yourself navigating campus a little like my friend Dr. Cristina. She teaches finance and loves Jesus. On campus, she has a passion for her academic discipline because she believes that her students will be doing work that makes a real difference in real human lives (how many homes do financial scandals destroy?). And she isn’t shy about sharing that she goes to church and participates in missions trips — she’s just being authentic.

Where have you tried to keep your faith and your education separate? What kind of impact has that had on you and on your witness?

2. Your education defines you.

Education can place you in a box. Think about the ways people talk about themselves on campus. “I’m a philosophy major” or “I’m pre-med” or “I’m a professor.” Definitional language. Identity language. The same kind of language you’d use to say “I’m a Floridian” or “I’m Latino” or – well – “I’m a follower of Jesus.”

Your educational identity isn’t big enough to contain you. You contain multitudes. God has stitched you together and spun you into existence as a learning being. You need to retain the freedom to learn and grow and discover all that God and life and the academy have to offer you.

The danger of the definitional lie lies here: if you accept the boundaries of the definition, you’ll be tempted to perform to the definition. You’ll be the law student who always argues. Or the business student who’s always talking about money. Or the engineer who pretends like emotions are for other people. You’ll fold neatly into the nearest stereotype.

We Christians have always been meant to be a little weird, a little goofy, a little out of sync with the beat of the rest of society. The Bible calls us strangers and pilgrims. We’re not what people expect. We’ve been transformed by a life-changing encounter with a living God.

Jesus begins to re-define you when you follow him — even to redefine your life in the academy. Secure in Jesus, you discover a freedom to take academic risks. Risks like questioning an orthodoxy in your discipline or practicing sabbath. Risks like shifting your research priorities toward initiatives that reflect God’s preferential option for the poor. You might even become more comfortable sharing credit!

Take stock of some of the educational words you might use to define yourself. How might your “I’m a Christian” remake some of those other definitions?

3. Your education is primarily a stepping stone.

Like all of the best lies, this one contains a kernel of truth. Your education is preparing you for your future. That could be a future career. And that is wonderful.

But an education is more than this career-prep transaction focused on diploma acquisition.

Consider these three elements: the credential, the connections, and the content. All three of these can help you land that awesome job in the future. But the stepping stone lie puts blinders on you and narrows your sight so that you only see the credential. You get your degree and you move to the next level.

What happens next?

You live a “Move to the next level life.” You bounce from degree to degree. You climb the career ladder. You pressure your children to climb. You train your dog to compete in the dog Olympics, climbing to the next level too. You attempt to climb all the way to heaven and eventually come crashing to earth.

Don’t miss the connections and the content of your time in college. 

Your education gives you time with peers and wise scholars who can open your eyes, take you wonder by wonder. So, take your schoolwork seriously and have some fun with these connections. Take advantage of the opportunity these connections give you to engage with the content of your education. 

When you do this, a mysterious thing begins to happen. As you take your schoolwork seriously — and don’t take yourself too seriously — you begin to receive opportunities to talk with people about Jesus. And they take you seriously.

Who is God inviting you to connect with in this season? What kind of educational content are you getting access to through them? What witnessing opportunities would you hope to have with them?