Dear Warner University alumni and friends,
Last Monday I was incredibly honored when the Board of Trustees selected me to serve as the fourth president of Warner University—your university. The last few days have been emotional for me and my family as we have processed the exciting new calling that God has given us. I want you to know that I will covet your prayers as I engage with the challenges and opportunities that lie before me and before the institution. I believe strongly in the power of prayer, and I will need God’s help and guidance at every turn. With deep sincerity, I thank you in advance for your prayer support.
I also want you to know that I understand how close Warner University is to your hearts. As many of you did at Warner, I too had a life-changing experience at a small, rural, Christian liberal arts college. I too was relentlessly pursued by faculty and staff who desperately wanted me to grow in my relationship with Christ; I too learned how important it was to see my future career as a calling that must be anchored in and viewed through the lens of God’s unchanging Word; I too met my lifelong best friends at a place like Warner; I too am indebted to faithful Christian educators who saw more potential in me than I saw in myself; and I too found a home away from home and a sense of family at an institution a lot like Warner. I understand what Warner University means to you, and I vow to frequently remind myself of how much you care about it.
I want to briefly share four things that I shared with the campus community last week at chapel. The first thing I shared with them was that I will be focused on communicating and crystallizing the university’s identity, and I proposed a motto to capture that identity—“academically challenging, biblically faithful, and culturally courageous.” I believe Warner has a rich history of being all three of these things, but I want more people to know, and I want this identity to be solidified in the collective consciousness of the Christian community in Florida and beyond.
Our nation is facing some significant challenges, and many of the careers that can most powerfully address those challenges require a college degree. Warner’s graduates must have the academic prowess to compete for jobs in those careers and work up the career ladder so that they can be in the most influential positions. However, they must also understand how to apply biblical truth—God’s truth—to the challenges they will encounter. For the last few decades, our cultural leaders have tried to solve problems without biblical truth, and they have largely failed. Thousands of years after it was written, Scripture still has the answers to our problems. Biblical faithfulness, though, must be complemented by cultural courage. Warner’s graduates will need the courage to act on biblical convictions and endure criticism in a culture that often mocks those with unpopular biblical beliefs. Our graduates can change our culture, but they must reject the all-too-popular mantra that they are to keep their faith to themselves in the public square. Warner’s faculty and staff will encourage them toward a bold and assertive faith.
Similarly, the university itself will remain grounded in biblical orthodoxy, and this grounding will be an understood part of our identity. We will not simply adopt Christianized versions of bad cultural ideas, trends, and movements. Rather, we will evaluate ideas wholly through the lens of Scripture, and our primary sensitivity as we interpret the biblical text will be a focus on what God intended to communicate to Scripture’s original audiences, not what the most trendy or politically correct interpretations are today. God’s Word does not change, for God does not change.
Second, I told the campus community that I will focus on proclaiming Warner University’s importance. Over 5,000 colleges and universities currently exist in the United States. Many of them are bigger and better resourced than Warner, but few are doing what our faculty and staff are doing when they give their whole hearts to challenging our students academically, equipping them to be biblically faithful, and exhorting them to have cultural courage. We may be a small university, but we serve a big God, and we try to see in our students the potential that God sees in them. That’s a lot of potential. I shudder to think of a world without Warner University. What our nation actually needs is a thousand Warner Universities. Our institution is important, and I will shout its importance from the rooftops.
Third, I shared with faculty, staff, and students that I want to be an institution that promotes and celebrates excellence. A culture in which excellence is celebrated facilitates even more excellence. I want celebrating excellence to become a part of the university’s DNA, and I want our alumni to be a part of that ethos. Consequently, if you know of alumni who are demonstrating excellence—in the home, in the workplace, in the church, or anywhere else—please let us know. We want to call attention to it.
Fourth, I told the campus community last week that what I love most about Warner University is its institutional recognition of where true excellence comes from. The greatest excellence is embodied in, enabled by, and a result of the person of Jesus Christ and the work He did on the cross. Peter wrote, “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire” (2 Pet. 1:3–4, emphasis added). In other words, we are called to excellence, and we may achieve it because of Christ, who is the very embodiment of it. Warner University will continue to prioritize the gospel, for the gospel is the foundation of everything else.
When I arrived at Warner in July 2019, I never imagined it would impact me the way it has. It has done far more for me than I have done for it, often through its amazing alumni and friends. I am motivated in part by a personal desire to repay our wonderful university for everything it has given me.
I have been privileged to meet many of you during my time at Warner; I want to meet more of you. I want to hear your Warner stories so that I can retell them and so that I can better understand the university’s impact over the last 57 years.
Toward the bottom of the university’s home page is the heading “Upcoming Events,” and if you click “view all events” under that heading you will see our calendar. I sincerely ask that you use this resource to keep informed about what is happening at Warner. I would love to see you on campus; I invite you to participate in the life of the university whenever you are able. I am honored to serve at Warner University—your university—and I look forward to interacting with you.
Blessings,
Gentry Sutton, D.Ed.Min.
President
Warner University
