Thanksgiving 2025: A Thankful Caretaker
November 25, 2025
I’m a thankful caretaker.
In 2007 the Biola University Board of Trustees charged me to take care of Biola, leading as its eighth president, following a beloved no. 7 and preceding one day’s no. 9. On that inauguration day, eighteen years ago this month, I promised that in this role I would steward, defend and advance the mission of Biola University for as long as the Lord keeps me in this chair.
I’ve been thankful for this sacred stewardship since day one, and for the foreseeable future, leading Biola, I will be more thankful than ever for who Biola is and what Biola stands for and where Biola is going.
In my custodial role of Biola’s 117-year-strong mission as a comprehensively and robustly Christian university, it is one of the honors of my life to hold in trust our 5,567 students who today call Biola their university.
With thanksgiving, we are experiencing the goodness of the Lord this year in ways I have rarely seen since I stepped into this role when George W. Bush was still president. We enrolled our largest incoming class since 2019 without lowering our bar. We announced a few weeks ago the largest gift in Biola’s history — an unmistakable sign of God’s grace and the confidence that so many place in Biola’s future. People believe in and are investing in Biola.
The spiritual climate on our campus has been so joyful this semester, and I talk regularly with students who tell me how much they love this place and how eager they are for the Holy Spirit to do something big and renewing in their generation. I have seen confirmations of our strengths in our biblically rooted chapels, in prayer gatherings, in last month’s Torrey Memorial Bible Conference, in residence hall Bible studies, in worship — it’s been a great start to the year.
And we work always knowing we can improve.
Despite the random flaws of any organization run by people, my endgame is to bequeath a university stronger missionally and fiscally than the one entrusted to me. That was my predecessor’s hope. And it is my hope that the president who follows me will joyfully say the same.
Last month at dinner in San Jose with generous Biola parents, the father — like me, a CEO — commented that leaders must lead toward high ideals through all seasons. He reminded me of Teddy Roosevelt’s speech about “the man in the arena,” an arena those of us in leadership know well, inhabit willingly and are thankful for.
In President Roosevelt’s 1910 remarks, given two years after the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (BIOLA) began, the Rough Rider noted,
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
President Roosevelt goes on to say that what counts is the faithful and gritty work of those who strive to lead a “worthy cause,” and it happens in the grit of the arena together, pressing on with determination and resolve.
And for the 118th year of Biola’s existence, we, too, are pressing on, with thankful hearts.
I am thankful to serve alongside about a half dozen vice presidents and about two dozen governing board members, all of us in the same arena leading Biola forward through our complementary gifts.
I am thankful for our shared will and stamina to stay the course on mission, always willing to learn from those who reach out in the spirit of Christian kindness to share their thoughtful critiques and suggest fine-tunings that make us stronger.
I am thankful for our resolve to remain the kind of institution our founders envisioned, steady and faithful, even when voices occasionally call out for us to become something else.
I am thankful our community is built on high-trust rather than high-suspicion. I am thankful for 700 full-time Biola faculty and staff with our different journeys yet common bonds. Together we yearn to cultivate a culture of grace, trust and shared purpose.
I am thankful we honor viewpoint diversity without insisting on uniformity. I am thankful we are a university unafraid to embrace principles of free expression within our conservative theological identity, helping students learn to think Christianly with conviction and curiosity.
I am thankful we do not stoop to the trending craze of maligning but take the road less travelled by engaging others with respect, dialogue and commitment to truth through grace, not malice. Disagreement, done politely, only makes us better.
I am thankful we hire and retain faculty who have a heart for Christian orthodoxy rather than those who have an appetite for ideological conformity.
I am thankful we do not spoon-feed our students with the pablum of the fashionable and fleeting but offer our students the richness of the enduring and transcendent. Their flourishing is worthy of the higher way.
I am thankful we educate a wide array of sincere Christian students with their thousands of distinct stories, not insulating them from the world but preparing them to engage it with courage, wisdom and the mind and heart of Christ.
For the nineteenth Thanksgiving I have served this academy, I am a thankful caretaker of this “Biola kind” of university, a university unlike any other and a university our world needs today as much as ever.