On Nov. 7, I met with the Connection Table of The United Methodist Church, a gathering of global church leaders who meet to review and guide the church's mission. Here are some of my remarks.
In 1949, George Washington Carver returned to his alma mater, a small Methodist college in Iowa, and remarked, "at Simpson, I learned I was a human being." Previously rejected at a college in Kansas because of the color of his skin, this man had his life transformed when he made the long walk to Indianola, where he discovered he was fully human - and full of potential. He changed the world through his peanut research.

In 1849, a group of Methodist Episcopal South clergy in Monroe, Tennessee opened a college at  Bat Creek Campground. They named it Hiwassee, Cherokee for "meadow place at the foot of the hills." Their desire was to bring educational opportunity to the people of the region.

One hundred years earlier, John and Charles Wesley opened Kingswood School in England, an outgrowth of their response to the educational needs of coal miners' children, persons cutoff from the opportunity to grow intellectually. On the school's founding day that Charles Wesley introduced his hymn "Come, Father, Son and Holy Ghost."  It included the line "Unite the two so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety."

What do these three events have in common?  From the beginning the Wesleyan educational thrust was one that reached out to persons not being served.  It also reminds us the Wesley spirit of education is an education that touches the heart and mind.

There are 123 United Methodist-related school, colleges, universities, theological schools, and preparatory schools in the United States carrying on this institutional mission.  More important, there are 775 institutions globally carrying out the Wesleyan vision of combining knowledge and vital piety.
These schools are missions, each in their own individual way, contributing to the denomination's concern for developing principled leaders for the church and the world.

Students go to college for a variety of reasons: to get an education; to play sport; to punch a ticket on the way to securing a successful job; because everyone else is going; because parents make them go; or because of a dream. For whatever reason a student appears at the door of one of our colleges, the United Methodist-related college has the marvelous God-given opportunity to plant within the minds, the hearts, and the soul of the students, the seeds that may germinate to create principled Christian leaders for the church and for the world.