When I was growing up I planned to go anywhere but Geneva,” Ken Smith says candidly from the Geneva College president’s office where he has come to work for the past year. He recognizes the irony—or more aptly the providence—in which a series of events completely changed his mind about where to attend as a student.

Having set his sights elsewhere after graduating from Geneva with two bachelors degrees, God has led him back. Raised an RP who felt like many people expected him to attend Geneva, and then having taught at a large university, Dr. Smith brings a unique perspective to the issue of college choices among covenant children.

Dr. Kenneth A. Smith was inaugurated a year ago as 19th president of Geneva College, Beaver Falls, Pa. Many Reformed Presbyterians have come to know this Ken as the son of Pastor Kenneth G. Smith, RP missionary, educator, pastor, and speaker. There was yet another Ken Smith who was influential in President Smith’s life, the chairman of a program at the University of Maryland where he received a doctorate in strategic management.

Pres. Smith was an international management consultant and thus traveled the world; then he served for 14 years at Syracuse University, where he became chairman of the strategy and human resources department of the Whitman School of Management.

He and his wife, Becky, have six children who were homeschooled until last year, when they made a transition to a Christian school in Beaver Falls. They are members of the College Hill RPC there.

He also served for 10 years on the board of trustees of Geneva, the last five of those years as president of the board.

When the Witness asked for time to sit down and talk about the college and its relationship to its sponsoring denomination, Pres. Smith made it a priority to set aside the time. What follows is much of that conversation.

When you arrived last year, what had changed about Geneva that astounded you most from your time here as a student?

Ken Smith: The thing that most impressed me was how much more articulate everyone is about the integration of faith in the classroom in the various disciplines.

When I was working for the Cabinet we did some articles about the divide between the full-time faculty and the part-time faculty—in terms of their commitment to Geneva’s mission and convictions. Would you say anything has changed in that regard?

Smith: I don’t know as many of the part-time faculty as I would like, but I know that department chairs who are responsible work very hard to find qualified people to teach their courses. That qualification includes a strong, not just credible, profession of faith. Beyond that, I can’t speak of that which I don’t yet know.

It is one of the things that we’re working on, though. You ought to be able to pull any employee’s file and there ought to be a credible profession of faith written out in that file. I think that is mostly true now.

How would you say this job is different than what you thought?

Smith: Never having been a college president before, I wasn’t sure I knew what to expect. I really did come in with my eyes open. I think the most pleasant surprise has been how much fun it has been. I’m not only learning things about the job, I’m learning a lot about myself. I warned the trustees when they asked me to do this. I said, “I’ve been a consultant for many years, I’ve been a professor; so I know management and administration from an experiential standpoint as a member of an academic institution. I’ve taught strategy. I know how to do organizational analysis. I’ve never had to own the decisions, never having been a senior administrator before. I’ve made recommendations as a committee member. I’ve made recommendations as a consultant, but it has always been somebody else’s responsibility to decide whether they’re going to take the recommendation and act on it. Here I have to make decisions or else I have to have other people make decisions and back them up.

Given your background, you probably see value in a Reformed Presbyterian teenager choosing a secular university as well as choosing a Christian institution, including Geneva. Specifically, what counsel would you give someone trying to decide on a school?

Smith: There’s an interesting dichotomy right now in how people perceive education. There’s one school of thought that says Christian education is OK, but what I really want is a good education; so where do I go to get that? There’s another perspective that says if all of truth is God’s truth, I really can’t understand what I’m studying if I don’t do it from a Christian perspective.

The challenge for us is to begin to say (and it almost sounds mercenary to say it this way), “What’s the value added of a Christian dimension to education?” The best education is a Christian education because it looks at discipline, it looks at a field, it looks at the source of study from a different perspective than a secular education’s perspective. It puts what we study in right context in its relationship with God who made it and man who’s examining it in our fallen state. That’s a critical context within which to study whatever you study.

I guess my advice to students is, “If you can find a Christian education, Christian education is the better way to go.” We have a cost disadvantage relative to some state institutions, which arguably give you a reasonable classroom experience—maybe excellent in terms of taking apart a discipline or a field of science. But the context within which that happens is truncated because it is not studied from a scriptural perspective.

Then you have the other aspect of the context of the education—who are you learning from? I hear stories over and over again of folks who’ve gone to secular institutions and had their faith really ridiculed—not just shaken, but ridiculed—by faculty who are empiricists and naturalists and don’t believe in the supernatural. Generally speaking, I think that kids of the kingdom are well served by Christian higher education. I don’t understand why it’s not the default for a lot of folks. Cost could make it impractical, but what I don’t understand is why Christian college isn’t even on some people’s radar screen, much less one of the things they would start with.

So, what advice would I give to an 18-year-old who’s looking for a place to go to school? Has God given you a sense of call? Do you have a calling to a field or a discipline, or does this call even matter to you? If you are still seeking God’s call, what better place to go than an institution where that’s important to people and they ask you that question? Today most people change majors a couple of times because they’re trying to figure out who they are. What context is the best context to go through that learning process and self-discovery process? Do you want to go to one of the big state institutions where you’re going to be distracted by all of these other secular forces, or do you want to be in a context where the faculty, staff, everyone is here to help you discern that and then prepare for it?

Of course you will at some point ask, for example, where will I get the best business education? Accounting is accounting. And if you come to Geneva we’re going to teach you strategy according to Michael Porter. He is, to my knowledge, not a Christian, but the context within which we are going to examine his strategy is the context in which we hope you see yourself living your life. The context is the kingdom of God, not just how I can raise my standard of living.

What does Geneva provide specifically that is hard to find elsewhere?

Smith: I’m really interested in that question and have not answered it to my own satisfaction yet.

When you start thinking about an institution like this and you start thinking about why we exist, I think you have to ask several questions. One of those is, Whom do we seek to serve? The answers range from the traditional 18- to 22-year-old full-time students to non-traditional adult education students to traditional and nontraditional graduate students. We seek to serve people from a strongly articulate theologically sound and Reformed background or people from a well-churched, strongly Christian, articulate but not Reformed background, to folks who are nominal, folks who have no statement of faith whatsoever.

Geneva has always had an open enrollment policy. You don’t have to be a Christian to come here, but we want to be very articulate that we are about Christian education. Students should not come here and be surprised. You can’t teach all majors or all programs, so is there some subset of who we want to serve? And then what are the needs of those people that we serve? Another question is, How different are we, and should we be? There’s at least one school of thought that says higher education is a commodity. It’s only four years of your life; what you really need is a baccalaureate degree. The rest of your life is after that. I don’t believe that. This is a part of your life, and it should be an opportunity for growth and discipleship and preparing for service in the kingdom of God. I see a really clear distinction between Christian colleges and non-Christian colleges. Within the subset of Christian colleges, we are committed to understanding our discipline from a biblical perspective. It seems to me that another subset of Christian colleges would be those that have a Reformed worldview. We could argue whether that’s big R reformed or little r reformed, but if our purpose is to educate and we want to do it in the context of biblical truth, I think it is important for us to recognize that God created things. Man is fallen, what we see around us is this interesting add mixture of God’s good creation and the results of fallen curse and we’re trying to figure out which is which.

Your eschatology makes a difference. Are you just hanging on until Jesus comes back, or do you believe that there is an ongoing creation mandate for the development of creation for God’s glory? Do you believe there is a restorative or redemptive role to be played?

I think that we should be as an institution articulate in how we approach Christian education. I think our foundational concepts of Christian education statement is very good. It kind of stakes out and says, “Here’s what we believe to be about higher education.” But we are feeling the need now to go the next step and say for the 21st Century, What is Geneva college? That’s our roots, that’s our foundation, but now what is our philosophy of education given the changing context?

The foundational concepts of Christian education helped Geneva College move counter to the flow of church-initiated colleges that were drifting from the faith from the mid-1960s to today. Our trajectory has been just the opposite; we’ve become more and more intentionally Christian in everything we do.

How do you, being fairly new on the scene, deal with the tensions that can exist between a sponsoring denomination and students and faculty that might come from backgrounds very different from the RPCNA?

Smith: I’m still learning what some of those tensions are. But I have tried to make it fairly clear that, while the church founded this institution, we aren’t a church. My starting point is that our missions are complementary but different. The church has some things to do and the college has some things to do. I’m not certain that we are as clear collectively on what the distinction between the roles are, so that’s one of things I’m hoping as a strategy exercise we can be more articulate about. Here’s what Geneva’s role as an educational institution is and here’s what the church’s role is. We don’t want to be working at cross-purposes by any means, but we’re not the same.

I look at Geneva College today as being a real ministry branch of the denomination that founded it. We have a rich heritage theologically, historically, that we would like to see continued. We would like to see others benefit from it, so my desire is that we do Christian education from a Reformed theological perspective; but we don’t preach that. I use that word intentionally, we don’t preach—we learn and we teach together. There is an engagement in conversation, there is debate and discussion in which people have a chance to engage with a Reformed worldview. For many, this is the first time they’ve been exposed to it; so I really welcome an opportunity to have students come in who may be unchurched or they’re churched but don’t have a world or life view other than personal piety. They don’t think about integration of biblical truth with what they do day in, day out, or in their job or their discipline. They can begin to see there’s a whole way to look at all of life under the kingship of Jesus Christ. That our institution can lead them into.

As you mentioned in your question, we have a lot of faculty who are not Reformed Presbyterian or Dutch Reformed or Associate Reformed or from a Reformed background. But the amazing thing to me is that as soon as you make very clear even in the interview process that we want people who are going to integrate faith with life, they start thinking reformationally. They start to talk about reforming whatever the discipline is. So my hope is that while we bring our students in and say, We hope you are going to progress through this spiritual development and be thrilled if you come away with a big R Reformed worldview. The same way the faculty that come here tend to be more and more reformational in their thinking and I’m thrilled when students or faculty come here and eventually end up embracing a Reformed theological worldview, and many have. They may not always be Reformed Presbyterian but we’ve had a lot of folks come here as faculty and move through that progression.

Your question gets back to peoples’ expectation about what the institution is supposed to be about. It ranges from basic evangelism at one end and the challenge to discipleship to training those with a reformed theological background.

A 2004 paper to Synod, written by two veteran RP ministers, asked for an evaluation of the relationship between the college and the denomination. The end result was that the denomination affirmed its relationship with Geneva and the college affirmed its relationship with the RPCNA. What are some of the ways the college has worked toward a new level of commitment, which is what it said it was seeking in 2004?

Smith: Both the corporators, and me personally, would like to see stronger ties with the denomination. For me the key element of that is communication. I personally want to get out and spend time letting people ask me questions and interact about what’s going on at the college. There are a lot of good things going on at Geneva College. Once again this past homecoming we heard the testimony of a young athlete who said, “I came to know Jesus Christ at Geneva College.” And one of the great privileges I’ve had is meeting alumni over this past year who’ve said, “I came to know the Lord when I was at Geneva.” Those stories go way back, and they are continuing. The quality of the faculty and the kinds of things they’re working on are exciting. We need to figure out ways to open up communication channels, because my sense has been that the denomination doesn’t know how effective its own ministry through Geneva College is and has been.

I think there needs to be “face time.” People who have questions are certainly welcome to ask me. I love to respond to invitations, as I do with alumni and donor relations. It’s a high priority of mine to start getting out to presbytery conferences and congregations just to be there and interact. I would love to see our faculty be invited to be conference speakers. Pick a topic; we have somebody here who could do a wonderful job on the topic. You might want a pastor to come and be the main speaker but have a parallel track in which a faculty member could come and talk.

I don’t know how frequently Geneva College is on the map of some of our own RP youth when they start thinking about where they should go to school. We’re working hard to say, Can we at least get into your list of schools to be evaluated?

There is a Corporators committee trying to identify ways to make it more financially viable for children of the denomination to come here. I’d love to see that happen. The institution is underresourced; our endowment is probably a third less what it ought to be or what it would be nice to be, if you’re just looking at successful benchmarks. And that’s typically where financial aid dollars come from. So, it would be nice to be able to make it more affordable, and that’s something we’re fighting all the time.

I was so excited at how my own daughter reacted to the Theological Foundations for Youth program at the RP Seminary this past year. She got wonderful training; and it was a good opportunity to be out in the field, and she made great friends in the denomination. I scratched my head and wondered why Geneva is not doing something like that. Those are the kinds of things that we’re starting to explore.

A couple of those specific issues brought up in the paper to Synod: Are all the things that really are corporate worship being conducted according to the regulative principle? Are Sabbath practices here according to the Reformed Presbyterian understanding?

Smith: My understanding of Synod’s official position paper on worship is that the regulative principle of worship applies to the called gathering of the people of God on Lord’s Day morning when called by the church. By our denomination’s own standards we have complete freedom.

That said, in this year’s pilot chapel program, we’re singing more Psalms. We’re trying to take even the unchurched and move them in this direction.

Some of it perhaps stems from the fact that the standards or the practices here at the college were at one time different from what they are today. Some who are hearing about the current practice are saying, “Well, why did that change?”

Smith: No question. I have very strong opinions that where the chapel/convocation program ended up was not where it should have been. We had completely muddied the waters between a devotional time and a time for cultural engagement. When Elizabeth Elliott came and spoke at a convocation when I was a student, we didn’t start it off with anything that looked like a worship service. There was no call to worship, there was no invocation. We may have started it with prayer. There wasn’t singing or a kind of benediction. It was a lecture. She talked about how God had worked in and through her life. And I remember the crux of her lecture.

In worship, this year’s pilot project is an interim solution. What you see today I guarantee is not going to be what it will be in the future. In fact I’m having a meeting starting in a couple of minutes to talk about how this is going. We had muddied the distinction between devotional (not church) worship and culture-engagement discussions. We had to reestablish the distinction. But when we get to what a chapel program will look like, it may or may not be like a church worship service. In fact, my preference would be it wouldn’t.

While the church called us into existence, in some ways we’re more an extension of a family’s responsibility for education. So family worship might be a better model.

We want our kids to go to church on Lord’s Day morning. So in what we do devotionally we have a lot more freedom. That said, we’re experimenting with use of Psalms in a way that is appealing.

One thing I’ve found that is kind of painful is when people don’t ask me how the faculty are doing. People don’t ask whether people are getting paid enough. People don’t ask if people’s lives are changing. They want to know, are you singing enough Psalms in the chapel service?

The commitment to the keeping of the Lord’s Day is something that is becoming a distinctive of the denomination because Christendom seems to have lost it. I am personally a strict sabbatarian.

I’m on record with the CCCU of being distressed that they’ve asked Christian college presidents to get together for conferences that extend over the Lord’s Day. I went to their institute this summer in Michigan and absented myself on the Lord’s Day. I went to the Southfield RPC and worshiped and spent my time with the congregation and family and came back at the end of the day.

When we made the decision to start pursuing membership in NCAA Division III, we investigated to make sure that we could hold to not playing games on the Lord’s Day. We just won’t do it. I challenge faculty and staff to protect the day.

So, I don’t see any change in that happening in the short term. If anything, we’re going to try and live more consistently. We’re not completely sure what it means for a college to honor the Lord’s Day. Do we have members of the denomination that own or run hotels? Do you close them on the Lord’s Day and tell people you can’t be there then? I know there are restaurants that close, but much of what we do is residential. We don’t run programs on the Lord’s Day—camps, conferences, whatever. They can’t just do their thing on the Lord’s Day here. Geneva has had the struggle over the years with when to start classes. Do you start on Monday? Or do you start on Tuesday so that people can travel on Monday? But we have lots of Christians who are saying it’s a lot easier for us to come over on Sunday afternoon so that we don’t have to lose work on Monday. Those are really tough calls, but we’re committed to honoring the Lord’s Day.

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Selected Geneva News Items

• Geneva’s enrollment is the largest it has ever been, but the new focus is to cap its size and strengthen the academic core.
• Of 13 new faculty this year, two are from the RPCNA: Diana Rice (psychology), and Keith Willson (math).
• Replacing the chaplain position will be a new Director of Campus Ministries.
• The pilot assemblies program consists of Monday assemblies for prayer, Wednesday assemblies for testimonies of God’s grace, and Friday assemblies focused on cultural engagement. Attendance is mandatory.