The Mirage of Stability

By Eric Anderson

April 24, 2008

I’ll confess that I started this job with a misconception.  When the Board invited me to become president of Southwestern Adventist University in the summer of 2005, I had the vague notion that my assignment was to seek stability.  The school needed equilibrium, I assumed, after several years of rapid and unsettling change.  The Board was seeking to bring enrollment back to “normal,” balance the budget and find the right-sized staff.

I never announced “Prudent Stability” as my motto, but that’s what I was thinking.  My assignment was to recruit a few more students, eliminate a few weak programs, hire a few more outstanding teachers—and then maintain an educational equilibrium.

I’m beginning to think, nearly three years later, that perfect stability is a mirage.  There isn’t a natural stopping point in the growth of an institution.  In fact, you could say that schools (or churches or nations or individuals) are either growing or declining.  What appears from a distance to be a permanent plateau is only a temporary resting place.

How many pastors start out with the dream of nurturing a small, stable congregation in a beautiful sanctuary?  I think, for example, of the pastor and the church in Marilynne Robinson’s lyrical novel Gilead.  The narrator, an aged pastor in small Iowa town, has spent most of his career in one place and knows all his parishioners well.  His study is filled with years and years of exquisitely crafted sermons that he delivered only once.  The book ends with a moving example of forgiveness, an action that would only be possible in such a rooted character.

It’s an appealing picture—but perhaps a misleading one.  I remember a real church that I attended as a graduate student.  It’s been described recently by Rick Rice (another member of the congregation) in Believing, Behaving, Belonging: Finding New Love for the Church.  The church building was wood-framed and white, topped by a picturesque steeple.  Inside were colorful individualists—characters and rebels and long-haired students—who created a rich fellowship every Sabbath.  But that church isn’t there any more.  It didn’t grow, and instead of staying the way it was, the congregation faded away.

How many teachers struggle through years of study and writing to earn a research degree and then hope to rest indefinitely on their laurels?  At the end of graduate school, no doubt some of them are tempted to whisper the prayer of Simeon–“Lord, let thy servant depart in peace”–and put away the notebooks and photocopies and tables forever.  Only later do they learn than a static defense of knowledge is fatal.  A few years of unrevised lecture notes, re-answered old questions, suspended curiosity, and no new reading, and you are not a scholar at all, even if there is a PhD after your name.

And how many husbands (to choose a really dangerous example) have imagined that a definitive declaration of love—in church and before a company of witnesses—was sufficient?  Only later do they learn that they need to find ever more eloquent ways of saying “I love you.”  (And, yes, perhaps ever more compelling ways of saying “I’m sorry.”)  Only love which is renewed and changed stays alive, as any happily married person knows. 

So I am ready to give up on the mirage of a perfectly balanced Southwestern Adventist University. I’m beginning to understand that my job is likely to involve bigger dreams and more distant goals than I imagined.  In order for Southwestern to keep doing what it already does well, the college will have to change.  We may have to reach beyond prudence and equipoise to what one recent President of the United States called “the vision thing.”

A century ago G. K. Chesterton, that weighty, witty defender of the faith, recognized the paradox: defending tradition requires innovation.  He called himself a “progressive” because he wanted to preserve tradition and authority. Because “things naturally tend to grow worse,” stability is not an adequate goal.  “If you leave a thing alone, you leave it to a torrent of change,” wrote Chesterton in his marvelous little book Orthodoxy.  “If you leave a white post alone, it will soon be a black post.”  There is only one way to fight decline, he argued, and that is by dramatic reform.  If you want a white post to stay white, “you must always be painting it again; that is, you must always be having a revolution.”

As Southwestern seeks to be true to our mission then, we will be taking risks.  Remembering those past leaders who aimed high—and (with God’s help) hit impossible targets—we, too will pursue difficult goals and unlikely dreams.  I believe that this University must both grow and stay the same.

Search