BAYLOR ORIENTATION
Dr. Leslie Hollon,
Pastor, St. Matthews Baptist Church, Louisville, KY

Editor’s Note: While attending Baylor orientation with my son, Lance, I ran into Leslie Hollon, a native Texan from Boerne, who was there with his daughter. Dr. Hollon is a good friend, a Baylor graduate and a talented preacher and writer. In Texas, we have heard a great deal of rhetoric from fundamentalists about Baylor leaving its Baptist and Christian roots. We asked Dr. Hollon to share his impressions of the orientation process at Baylor.

Time goes by, as time will do, and so I found myself sitting with my daughter and wife for new student orientation at my alma mater—Baylor University. Would her experience at this place and among these people be what she needed as her body, mind and spirit entered the next millennium? Was the Christian message still at Baylor’s core so that in all her truth-searching she would be guided by people who knew the truth that sets people free?

Having stayed involved in Baylor’s life through the years, I trusted that the regents, the administrators, and most importantly, the professors were being true to the commission etched in stone atop Pat Neff Hall. The preservers of history are as great as its makers. But the first-time experience of being father of a daughter on her own journey into adulthood meant I needed reassurance as orientation began.

Then speaker by speaker told the truth about Baylor. As Texas’ oldest institution of highest education, chartered in 1845 and directed by an all-Baptist board of regents which operates within the Christian-oriented aims and ideals of Baptists partnership with the Baptist General Convention of Texas, she is being true to her mission of being an institution of higher learning where education may be gained under Christian influences and ideals.

Dr. Ray Wilson, a scientist and recently selected as Baylor’s outstanding professor, spoke of Baylor’s Christian mission—as did the registrar, the director of security, the provost, the chaplain, graduate students, and… the consistent message by these educators from different disciplines confirmed Baylor is guided by a consistent Christian vision.

Students at Baylor are not required to be Baptist, though nearly 50% are, but everyone is to honor the university’s Christian ideals. That is, as students walk from geology to business to Old Testament to physics they are to be stimulated by the power of God and by the search of truth as it plays out its unique role in the educational community.

This challenge demands the best of everyone and for that purpose all must be commissioned in the conscience to light the ways of time. So our orientation concluded with a traditions tour. Another student generation was marching into the future but not alone, for with each one goes the living heritage of what it means to seize one’s potential because one has been seized by truth which sets all followers free.

September 1997