President's Welcome
Welcome to the BGU web site. If you are a student, faculty member, friend or someone who has heard about BGU and would like to learn more, we want to provide all the information you need, and, most importantly, we want to help you catch BGU's unique vision and mission.
Bakke Graduate University (BGU) is the place to learn the new realities of the global, urban world. A major reason is our network. BGU is connected to and building on a global, urban, theological network created over 30 years by Ray Bakke and others. That extensive network gives BGU unique access to the thinkers, leaders, and practitioners in the global Christian church.
BGU is Perspective Education:
Considering the drastic changes in the last decade, most of us need a path to better understand a world that is:
- Vastly more global through the internet, world capital markets, and massive changes in post- Cold War alliances;
- Vastly more urban as countries such as China are transferring 20 million people each year to urban centers to fuel the expected need for urban industrial workers;
- Vastly more pluralistic - Ten-year-old assumptions of race and culture are obsolete.
No matter what their area of concentration, all students are immersed in a context that recalls and retrofits them with a perspective for ministry in this new, global, urban world.
This is how we do it.
BGU is Experiential Education:
Nothing speaks louder than the real thing. Cities are often our classrooms . . . our labs. BGU creates city immersion experiences or 'plunges' designed to expand everyone's worldview. These plunges always include rich spiritual, biblical, historical and community reflection. Diversity is a hallmark of BGU cohorts, where you always find students from a variety of denominations and creeds and from numerous continents. Another hallmark is the number of accomplished national and international urban ministry leaders who comprise our student body.
BGU is Practical Education:
Urban leaders don't put up with long theories that don't land someplace that makes a difference. BGU faculty have the highest academic credentials, but they share their teaching load with street practitioners and front-line innovators. Assignments are rigorous, but they have immediate application to real life and ministry. We know there is no margin for wasted time.
I invite you to learn more about BGU's approach to education. We believe the urban world is the best place to understand what the rest of the world is experiencing or will be experiencing before we know it. Global cities enlighten and discomfort those who come to learn from them. They are the places where God is often heard best, because our own voices make the least sense. In these places BGU prepares those who join us at supersonic speed and tectonic depth to live the rest of their lives aware of and prepared to join in God's global work in a new way.
The journey awaits, and there is a place for you - as a student, educational traveler, or supporter.
Brad Smith
President
P.s. If you don't find the information you need on this site, please contact my assistant, Carolyn Cochran.
