So, I went off to Oklahoma Baptist University in August of 1992 as an eighteen year old conservative Southern Baptist preacher boy. I thought I knew quite a bit.

Rick Byargeon was my Intro to Old Testament prof. He always wore suits, except for on test days. He always lectured, but was the best lecturer I ever had. He was a very tough teacher, but very good. His sections always closed first. His tests were very difficult. When asked, "How do we prepare for the test?" He'd say, "Memorize the lecture outlines." And when one of the test questions was something like, "Reproduce the outline for the lecture entitled . . .," you knew he was serious. His final was comprehensive and, therefore, could ask ANYTHING about the Old Testament. One question I remember missing was "Name the sons of Eli." But you left his class knowing a great deal about the Old Testament, and his students loved him.

I have described my freshman year this way. I entered with my worldview built upon a solid foundation and Rick Byargeon, Joe Hall, Don Wester, and others took sledgehammers to it and destroyed it. I then spent a couple of years trying to piece something back together, until I finally realized that I could only build a raft to stay afloat with and that the pieces of that would be constantly changing as well.

I thought I knew the Bible. But that first week of class Dr. Byargeon said that there were two Creation accounts. Yeah, that seems obvious now, but it wasn't then. And Isaiah was probably written by two people? And . . .

In Joe Hall's Honors English class we discussed lots of things about the nature of language, media influence, etc. But, most importantly, we read Don DeLillo's White Noise. Thing changed me.

And stuff kept happening, in class and out of class, to challenge the worldview I entered school with. By spring I had come to accept women in ministry. By spring I had quit compartmentalizing my science and religion and accepted the theory of evolution. I still remember the day when I was driving back to Miami after a philosophy class and argued myself out of a literal Adam & Eve. That scared me at the time!

And life at OBU continued that way. Our sophomore year the administration threatened to kick Sean out of school because he was gay. I remember spending the afternoon mulling it over while pacing my dorm room. Would I help to defend Sean and stand up against the un-Christian actions of the administration or not? I decided then that I could not live with myself if I backed down from defending what I knew to be right. Though I still held very conservative views of homosexuality, I knew that what the school was doing to Sean was not fair and was definitely not the loving grace of Jesus Christ. So, I became an open and public opponent of the administration on this policy, which stance I continued to argue in the years ahead in my roles of student leadership and later as an alum.

Sometime in my sophomore year I remember being in my dorm room listening to Billy Joel's River of Dreams album. I loved the second side best (yes, it was a cassette). It said so many important spiritual things, yet in a postmodern way, I thought. I finally felt at peace with the direction my worldview had taken in the two previous years. I no longer had any anxiety over the loss of my foundation. The raft would be okay.

And, so, I became the resident "liberal" of the religion department, further to the left of any other student (though, oddly, still very much a conservative and MUCH moreso than I am now). But mine was a respected voice even among my peers. A couple of weeks ago at the BGCT two OBU alums that I only vaguely recognized came up to me to thank me for being their philosophy tutor many years ago. The guy is a pastor in a small church in Texas. Wow, I thought. I hadn't even remembered that I tutored philosophy.

So, I hate to hear about the changes currently going on at OBU, because it helped to make me who I am. It made me a "liberal," which is SO funny.