“The LORD has chosen Bezalel and filled him with the Spirit of God, with skill, ability and knowledge in all kinds of arts, as well as the ability to teach others.” –Exodus 35:30-33
We’re still field testing the new Two Handed Warriors web format for our January 2012 relaunch. This article from Q Ideas seems like a great test case. The Mustard Seed Foundation’s Harvey Fellows Program is in many ways a template for what Two Handed Warriors is attempting in the Bezalel Hollywood Training Initiative–Identifying, Training, Mentoring, and Funding the world’s best young filmmakers of faith. However, The Harvey Fellows program is much more focused on formal education, as is appropriate for training educational leaders.
The success of the Harvey Fellows gives us great hope for more long-term approaches to nurturing culture makers of faith–what we call Two Handed Warriors–instead of continually relying upon more stop-gap and quick-fix strategies.
Let us know what you think of the article, the long-term strategy, and the new website (still under construction).
Enjoy!
WHERE ARE THE CHRISTIANS IN ACADEMIA?
Gabe Lyons: The Academy is unique in a lot of ways, both as a place of opportunity and also complexity and challenge for people of faith. I’m here with Duane Grobman, Executive Director of the Mustard Seed Foundation and Director of the Harvey Fellows Program. When you talk to Duane, you realize just how strategically he and some others have been thinking about the role of believers in the academy and the importance of developing great scholars, the importance of thinking long-term, not just short-term, and thinking about, “What does the next 20 to 30 years of philosophy look like in major campuses around the U.S. and the world?”
Duane, tell us about the Harvey Fellows Program.
Duane Grobman: Sure. The Harvey Fellows Program began in 1992 and it was started, and it’s continued to be funded by, the Mustard Seed Foundation. They founded the Fellows Program because they wanted to encourage Christians to innovate their faith with their vocation and also to encourage them to pursue leadership positions in what we call strategic fields where Christians appear to be underrepresented.
And so, their hope was that through the program they would encourage students to pursue culturally influential vocations, that they would actually help equip students with tools necessary to lead integrated lives and that they actually help validate exceptional abilities and academic leadership and gifts as gifts from God worthy of cultivation development. Because, often times the church hasn’t been terrific at validating individual’s abilities in the areas of leadership and academics.
Gabe: I loved the long-term thinking that obviously has gone into this entire program. Really, this is a pretty strategic attempt to connect with some of the most astute leaders in society for the long-term. Right?
Duane: That is correct. To our knowledge, we’re the only program of this kind. (THW Editor’s note: Lord willing not for long.) You hit the nail on the head there, in that, I think one of the reasons is because it is so long-term. We’ve often said that it’s sort of a 20-year experiment, that we won’t fully know the effects of the program culturally and its impact for 20 years.
There’s not a lot of foundations that are willing to invest in that long-term vision. But given, now, that we’re in our 16th year, from the fruit that we see and the impact, we find this incredibly encouraging. So we’re feeling really confident that it’s a worthwhile investment.
Read Gabe and Duane’s entire interview
