Education in the

was given 10 minutes to talk about the spiritual mission of Seventh-day Adventist education in the 21st century. I can do it in 10 seconds! “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us”1—end of story! That is the sum total of why we have denominationally sponsored higher education. God became flesh for us so we could know Him—and we em-body that message to future generations in faith-based learning environ-ments where we put flesh on abstract doctrines. We create environments where the Word becomes flesh every day, in every class, in every contact with every student, and through every employee. Steven Garber has studied the mature Christian college graduate who, over the years, has integrated belief with behavior. He suggests three traits that these adult Christians have in common2: 1. Convictions—a worldview sufficient for life’s questions and crises For 600 years after the founding of the first colleges and universities in the Western world, all institutions of higher education were operated by churches. All education was religiously based. Its purpose was to build a coherent, faith-based worldview—a worldview that answered life’s basic ques-tions: “Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going?” But today, humanity’s innate drive for meaning in life is more often approached with scorn in polit-ically correct universities. Vaclav Havel said: “The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.”3 The response when con-fronted with meaningful questions about life is too often a thoughtless “Whatever works for you ” be-cause postmodernism suggests that there is no absolute truth