Dr. Ben Leslie is Provost and Senior Vice President for Gardner-Webb University. In his essay Gardner-Webb: The Relationship Place, Dr. Leslie praises the familiar bond that makes the University’s identity one that is committed to cultivating community of faith, education, and guidance.
In 2005 I received a phone call from an old friend, who just happened to be a professor at Gardner-Webb University. He asked if I didn’t want to apply for the newly advertised position of Provost at his school. For several minutes I explained to him that while Yes, indeed, I did have a sense that the Lord was leading me to seek out a new opportunity of service after having spent 15 marvelous at a Baptist seminary in South Dakota, there were all sorts of reasons why I would probably not be a good fit for that particular position. “Well, for the price of a stamp, you might just find out for sure,” was his response. And I took the bait.
Months later I arrived on campus for a two day visit and interview. Over the course of that visit I met scores of faculty, students and staff members connected with the school, each of whom had his or her own particular story to tell. After only a few of these, a handful of unmistakable themes began to emerge. Of course, I was told repeatedly that Gardner-Webb was a fine institution, that the school had an outstanding faculty of committed educators, that Gardner-Webb was financially stable, and that a bright and glorious future lay before it. These were the sorts of things that I expected to hear.
What surprised me the most, however, was a refrain that repeated itself in a variety of subtly different ways:
“There’s something about this place that grows on you.”
“Gardner-Webb is more like a family than a college.”
“It’s not the education you get that makes Gardner-Webb so special, even though the education is excellent. It’s the people you meet.”
“Gardner-Webb really turned my life around. I became the kind of person here that I believe God wanted me to be.”
“Gardner-Webb is lot like that old TV show, the place ‘where everybody knows your name.’”
After hearing comments like these repeated again and again over the course of a two day visit and interview, I knew that Gardner-Webb had either mounted one of the most successful marketing campaigns in history, or else there really was something special about the place. And it was that deep-seated intuition (that it was not just an ad campaign) that really tipped the scales in my decision to join the staff of Gardner-Webb.
In the three years that I have spent immersing myself in the life of this institution, that belief has been repeatedly confirmed. Gardner-Webb University is not about programs, even though we have more of those than you can shake a stick at. Gardner-Webb is all about relationships. It’s about the relationships we encourage students to build with one another particularly through campus ministries and a Christ-centered division of student development. It’s about an educational environment that encourages the growth of mentoring relationships between faculty and students. It’s about the spirit of community that unites our faculty and staff in a common mission to provide an education rooted in Christian faith, service and leadership development. And it’s about that one relationship that binds all these others together— the relationship of faith in Jesus Christ.
There are many other characteristics of ‘the Webb’ that persuaded me to make my professional home here, and it would take a much longer essay than this to list them all. But at the foundation of all Gardner-Webb’s strengths, this is what you find— a community of men and women bound together by a common mission and commitment to educate and transform lives in ways that will make a positive difference in the world. And it’s that vast and complex network of relationships, ultimately rooted in Jesus Christ, that makes Gardner-Webb something special.
