Greenville College Annual Report 2003-04

Message from the President

Homecoming this fall was one of those classic Midwestern college fall weekends! The Saturday sun was bright, the sky was blue, the leaves were brilliant, and the air was crisp with chill and the anticipation of great football and soccer. Warm jackets, pom-poms, smells of hot dogs, and pints of orange and black body paint punctuated the stands. If you weren’t there I wish you could have been!

The day before, one of our students, an alum of our Africa Semester had determined to send money and blankets to Darfur in the Sudan. Not content just to send what he could afford, his GC inspired passion and creativity combined to propose an all-night Ultimate Frisbee competition whose participants would be sponsored for each hour they played. He had circulated his signup in chapel and solicited student sponsors at $10 an hour. But by leveraging a friendly competition between a colleague and me he’d managed to get each of our sponsorships up to 100 times that much!

As I walked from Joy House up campus that evening to attend our Parent’s Cabinet dinner, the competitions were underway. I shouted to his fellow players that they must be sure he remained on his feet. He was there but shouted back that my colleague had raised the ante yet again. Not to be outdone, I raised it further still and closed the bidding competition by declaring the Frisbees were flying so my sponsorship should remain the top.

By 9pm I was walking down campus and again shouted to his friends to keep him on the straight and narrow. No loafing on my dime! At 10pm I returned for a concert from one of our college bands, and checked on him again. Just before retiring to bed at midnight I made a bedtime excursion to Scott Field to monitor my investment. He was alive and well.

I set my alarm for 3:30 am and found him “taking a rest” which I promptly interrupted and insisted we play Frisbee together from 3:30 am until 4:00 to get him back on his feet. I slept two more hours then arose at 6 am to begin the Parent’s Cabinet breakfast discussing how they can be of support to the parents of our newer students. My student friend was on his feet. He was still throwing at 11 am when I finished and headed off to reunion luncheons in Armington and Mario’s Pizza for the classes of ’99, ’94, and ’89. He was still at it when Ellen and I left campus to deliver the 450 cookies she’d baked for our soccer and football teams….it takes a lot of cookies to feed 80 football players! By 3 pm, with my face now painted orange and black, exhaustion had set in…for me, not my friend. He was still hard at it. I collapsed for a nap, and only later found I owed him so much I would need to sell a child to pay my bill.

But by the combination of his passion and creativity, and the cooperative support of friends and at least one worried sponsor, this student had shown once again that in community we can do far more than we can individually. He and his friends did not send just the $50 and 2 blankets he had originally planned to send, but $5000 and 50 blankets instead. In Community there is strength.

The Old Testament reminds us over and over of this truth. Whether in the words of Jethro exhorting Moses to share his administrative burden or in the Lord’s words to Moses commanding him to use Aaron and Hur to hold up his hands so that Joshua could defeat the Amalekites, the truth is the same. With God’s help we can do far more together than we can ever do alone.

This fall the challenges at Greenville College are large. We covet your prayers. But in reunion luncheons, soccer and football team efforts, Parent’s Cabinets, and even just the usual collegial competition for top sponsorship and a faculty-student partnership in an all-night Ultimate Frisbee competition, we are reminded constantly of our need for one another. God has called us to this ministry of transforming students for lives of character and service, not as individuals but as members of a vital spiritual community of scholarship. May we celebrate that community that stretches over the generations by making our life together a token of our worship to the One who is our Head.

Last updated: October 31, 2005