MTP 66: Roundtable Discussion, How to Recenter Your Identity on Jesus Instead of Work, Part 1

In this unique roundtable format of Meet The Prof, we gather over a dozen Christian professors from campuses across the country to discuss a timely and personal question: how do we avoid getting our identity from our work instead of Christ? Inspired by a powerful clip from Sara Myers, the episode explores real struggles, vulnerable stories, and practical steps professors are taking to keep Jesus at the center.

Main Takeaways

• Professors often derive their sense of worth from their productivity or professional status, but this can lead to burnout and discouragement.
• A Christ-centered identity offers greater peace, purpose, and emotional resilience.
• Vulnerable stories from professors show how course evaluations, promotions, and academic rejection can influence mood and self-worth.
• Professors need to intentionally create boundaries and reframe their roles as part of God's story.
• Regular community and reminders help Christian professors stay grounded in their faith.

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2. Read A Grander Story: An Invitation to Christian Professors: https://a.co/d/8VoYXSV

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Transcript

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Hey everybody, welcome to Meet the Prof. My name is Shane Hartley and my friend, Spence Hackney and I are so glad you're here. This is a podcast where we interview Christian professors using questions from college students. And our goal is to encourage Christ-centered conversations on the college campus. We're trying something new today. So just to keep you on your toes, we recently did a virtual round table discussion with a group of professors. and you'll recognize many of these from earlier interviews, and then there's a lot of new folks you'll see too. And we discussed this question of how do we keep our identity in Christ rather than trying to get our identity from our work. I hope you'll find this really helpful and encouraging. This is just part one of the roundtable discussion, so stay tuned for next week for round two. And before we start, if you please remember to click on like or subscribe if you're watching this on YouTube or listening to this as a podcast. I do encourage you, if you're just listening to this, to check this out on YouTube, Meet The Prof, because then you can see these professors who are on the roundtable. All right, well, let's just jump in. Here is part one of our roundtable discussion. So welcome everybody. This is our first Meet the Prof Roundtable discussion. And I'm so excited about what we're talking about. It's a topic that I need and I think it relates with all of us of how do we avoid getting our identity too much from our work, but instead how can we recenter Christ as the source of our identity. So I am really looking forward to hearing from everybody here and anyone who wants to share. We do this through our ministry, Faculty Commons, which is a Cru ministry for faculty, staff and grad students. And a lot of what my passion is, is helping professors make disciples. That's what we all in our hearts wanna be able to do. We wanna be a part of God's kingdom, making disciples for Christ. And so I've been on staff with Cru for 33 years now, and I have never been as excited as I am now with things getting to work with faculty, like you all, faculty, staff, and grad students. I'm so excited about stuff that we're doing. steps of faith that a lot of you are taking. And we do a Meet the Prof podcast with my good friend, Spence Hackney, who's here on the call. And so many of you even here have gone on and let us interviewed you on the podcast. And I'll tell you, the question itself, this was inspired by our interview with Sara Myers recently. And I'm gonna show you a clip of our recent interview and let you see when this came up in the interview. First, I'll tell you, This was a spontaneous question. Spence and I weren't planning to ask this. And then also we didn't prepare Sara for this. So we threw this question out and her answer, as she was answering this, I just found myself saying, I need to think more about this answer. This is such a need and such a temptation for all of us. All right, so here we go. How do you know when you've made your career your identity? Yeah, well I think it's more of an attitude than anything and I don't have a perfect answer to that. I pray constantly for God to show me his will and I often will say things like, know me, God, and I have to be really certain to know what you want me to do. But I think when we make career, our identity, there's going to be problems and signs that arise from that. Things like not being able to recover from disappointment, that's a big one for me. It's easy for me to get discouraged. Sara, would you share some of the perspective you've had on this and any thoughts you have? And we also uh let people know like your department and where you are. Thank you, Shane. So I'm Sara Myers. I'm over at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. And my department is biomechanics, but my primary role now is in the Office of Research and Creative Activity. And just to share a little bit about uh identity as an academic, I'm going to give a plug for the book, A Grander Story. If you haven't read it yet, uh I highly suggest it, but I'm just going to read a couple things. A faculty member comes to affirm the difference between being a professor who is Christian and a Christian who is a professor. This distinction is life-defining and flows from the reality that our career designations are not the ultimate referent in the world. Rather, the grander story is the ultimate meta-narrative that shapes life. Our lesser particular stories rightly find their place in relation to his grander story. Our desperate attempts to find life through a litany of accomplishments and relationships that will never deliver are met by his offer to satisfy our hunger and thirst forever in himself, of course, his meaning Jesus. And so I think that Jesus can change our hearts and give us an identity that's tied to his worth and identity rather than to accomplishments in our careers. I probably am not to the point where I've reached that satisfaction completely. It's a process for me. However, I will say when I was solely focused on academic accomplishments, I was very unhappy in pretty much all aspects of my life. God's way is much better and being part of his story provides us with so much more meaning than living for ourselves or our own accomplishment. First question I'd love to throw out is why do you think this question is important for faculty today, especially Christian faculty about how do we recenter our identity on Jesus versus our work? I'm pediatrician, graduated from Ohio State undergrad med school, residency, residency. But you and I don't know your backgrounds. The problem is in college, we all get retrained. We all get diluted. We all end up making up our religion. I always believed in God, but Jesus, who is he? know, good. guy that Islamic says good prophet and believes that he's God. then the Bible, is it the word? Is it really truthful? I'm John Chen, I'm from Baylor. One of the assumptions that I quickly ran into uh early in my doctoral days is uh your research is more important than anything. And one of the ways it manifested was we used to have our big deadlines for a conference submissions to the biggest conference. It used to be January 3rd. Something like that. And it's like, yeah. why would you make a deadline January 3rd? Well, that's because Christmas and New Year's... You got time off, you can really nail down your. your submission. um that just sort of speaks to the, you know, the ethos behind, you know, our work. I think it's important. A friend of mine once said, you know, when we get all this criticism about what the university is and isn't, we need to understand that it's more like a neighborhood than a business. There is no single point of view. I found Jesus in college, some of my mentors early in my journey, faith journey were professors. So this idea that all professors are this, or all colleges this, or every classroom experience is this, I think is a is a misguided notion that locks us into a very defensive victim mentality. We're in a neighborhood. There are neighbors we get along with, there are neighbors we disagree with. And so what I've tried to do as a faculty member is not either or my identity, but merge into making a natural normal integration of my Christian identity as a faculty member. So my discipline happens to be communication studies. So maybe that makes it easier than some others, but I will talk about communication breakdowns that I've had as a member of the church music team and relational repair. And I'll use that as an ordinary example. And the next example might be the Simpsons and the next example might be my marriage. The whole idea is to just introduce and integrate my faith into the collage of human experience that my students are navigating. Well said, Rick. I appreciate what you were sharing. My name is John Walker, and I'm Instructional Coordinator for History at Forsyth Tech Community College in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. And after I got the invitation to come today and began to kind of contemplate the theme of identity and academia, et cetera, I began to sort of think about some of the ways that life and academia is designed uh that really sort of sometimes runs counter to gospel-oriented living. And I'll kind of give you the list that I've come up with so far. I think many times the way that we learn in higher ed, uh operate in higher ed as a full-time staff, faculty positions, uh we're all the time planning. We're all the time putting backstops in place to make sure that uh You know, things are covered. We're often very specialized in what we do. Living in silos is kind of a phrase that's often thrown around based on, whatever our area of study is or wherever our college or university is. And I think many times those things are kind of like a, like I mentioned, counter to the sort of more, I think, free flowing, you know, trusting manner. of leaning on your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We're all the time, I think, trying to overplan. And I know our occupation and our particular vocation is not unique in that sense. Many of us, many other occupations suffer from some of those things. Those are just some of my initial thoughts. Yeah, thank you, John. So my next question, this is more of personal question, as much as anyone's uh comfortable answering this, of when is a time that you could identify your mood or your feelings of self-worth changed based on uh how your work was going? Hi, this is Karen Liller from the university of South Florida in Tampa. We teach students how to be advocates. um Yeah, well you know, a life in academia I think is a life full of disappointments. right? We get very good at getting turned down. Whether it's a grant, or whether it's a publication. So it's very easy discouraged. um You know, me, I think we go through periods of time. Everything I touched today went wrong. You know, it's like I found out we didn't get the grant. I found out we didn't get published. found out our paper didn't get at the conference and you know it seems like you go you go through that period of time and you know like all the time. I mean, that's like pretty much part of the profession. I think, you know, tell students the doctoral students, get ready because this is a tough road; it's not what people think. It's not that we have the best lives in the world because we're

and we have great gardens because you know we go home every day at 2: 12:43

00 to our garden. Yeah. I mean are you out of your mind. It's not anything like the world of academia. It can be very cut. right? It can be. I'm Sita Slavov, I'm at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, It happened recently during course evaluations became available. So, kind of basically reading feedback can really ruin my mood. whether that's from a You are a reviewer on a student evaluation, but then there's the flip side of that. Like positive feedback. can like, you find yourself in an unusually good mood. So it's like your mood kind of rises and falls. based on the input you're getting from other people you start to fixate on what others, other people think of you. and not your audience of one of what God thinks. Thanks. Hello everyone, I'm Dr. Pamela Kelly and I um actually teach adjunct at a couple of different universities, but I'm connected with Meet the Professor through UNCW where I am an adjunct faculty member in the Health Administration Program. um And I have been struggling with this concept that we're talking about today. um So it was for me to be here. don't think anything is by coincidence. I am and continue to strive to remember that Christian first and not only Christian first, but mother first and those things that are a priority so that work does not define who I am. It is a day to day reminder to remember those things that are important and what we should emphasize as a priority. Of course, definitely letting the Lord be Lord of our lives, utmost important. And then some of the other things, those folks that are dependent on us to be in the roles that we're called to first, to raise up our children and those kinds of things. So the way I have dealt with it, the way I try to deal with it is fencing off time. For work, am a planner by not only, I guess that's my skill set or gift, but as a career, that's what I was, the planner. so planners kind of are detail oriented and we don't want to not give our all to whatever it is that we're doing. So fencing off time is easier said than done because right at the end of the time that you fenced off, you didn't want to do one more thing or just, you know, and some of the other things get lost if you spend too much time. I feel like learning from you guys, but that is something that you have to strive for daily. That was what I wanted to say. And I thank the Lord for this opportunity to be with you guys and to hear and learn from you. The verse that comes to mind when you're sharing that is David in Psalm 16, I think of"the lines have fallen for me in pleasant places". And a lot of my struggle is when I'm not content with my own boundaries. I'm like, surely I could do more. I should get more done. I'm Jeff Colbert. teach political science at UNC Greensboro. I'm what's called a principal lecturer. I'm not in the tenured universe and I could tell by other people's responses. Some are sort of in my world, some of them in the other world. And most of you know, if you're not in the tenured world, then you're sort of on the tail end of the dog most all the time. And there have been any number of times in my years, this is year 37 at UNC Greensboro, that, you know, we moved to a new building. Who gets to pick their offices first? Not the lecturers. You who gets first choice of class, you know, and there are times in my career when sort I'm just sort of tired of this, but then guy gives me gifts like the one he gave me this morning. I got an email completely out of the blue from a student who graduated UNCG in 1992. And he'd been on campus last week was looking around, saw that I was still on campus, and so he sent me an email because he had taken one of my classes and in my American Government class he changed his major. He's been out of career for whatever and he want to get back in touch with me. I thought. I don't do this for awards. I don't do it for first check of offices. I don't do it for anything except for those kids. As long as I'm doing that, everything else is OK. It's still I still get angry. You know, we're all human, but there are moments you just, Alright, why are you here? Yeah, to take care of the kids; that's why I'm here. I'll say something. I'm David Minh from Illinois Tech, in Chicago. I teach chemistry. So I don't think it's terrible to be disappointed if something goes off or happy if something goes well with work. I guess it's just a matter of like is it like an existential crisis, identity in Christ, as long as it is overarching the smaller ups and downs of academic life, and I think we're in a healthy place. Well, we'll right there. Thanks for listening to part one of our round table discussion. Stay tuned for next week, you'll hear part two. And I love the way that David ended us there. Just don't we all want that? To be in a healthy place. I hope this was encouraging to you. Before we go, if you please remember to click on subscribe or follow or like wherever you're watching or listening. And if you're a Christian professor, would you consider sharing some of your testimony on meettheprof.com? And lastly, if you'd be interested in giving financially to our ministry, I'm on staff with Faculty Commons, which is a Cru ministry, and you can give online to our ministry at give.cru.org / 0424344. And so until next time, we hope this encourages you to have a Christ-centered conversation on your college campus.