 Welcome to the December graduation reception at Colorado Christian University, the College of Undergraduate Studies, December, 2020. My name is Dr. Janet Black, and I'm the Interim Vice President of Academic Affairs for the College of Undergraduate Studies. This is a December graduation reception, not a commencement. We invite you to come back in May, May, 2021 for a commencement that is full of music, pageantry, a sea of black gowns and banners, and celebrate with us then. But for some of you, you may not be able to do that. Graduation reception is meant to be a celebration of your achievements and provide you some closure for this season of your life. At the beginning, I wanna say thank you. Thank you for choosing CCU, for your academic career. Thank you for bringing your gifts to the community at CCU. Many of you have very strong academic gifts. Thank you for being scholars with us. Some of you are athletes, and I admire the way that you can persist in competition and scholarship. Some of you've poured out your lives in student leadership and student life. Thank you for that. And many of you've worked with us in your work study hours across campus. Thank you most of all for your friendship, friendship to the faculty and the deans, friendship to one another as a senior class, friendship to the sophomores and juniors and freshmen. Thank you for the friendship that you bring here at CCU. I offer my sincerest congratulations to you. It is my honor to introduce Dr. Don Sweeting, the president of Colorado Christian University since 2016. He serves not only here as our president, but he also serves a greater Christian community. He's on the board of the National Evangelical Association and on the executive committee of the Fellowship of Evangelical Seminary Presidents. He's a scholar and author, a president with a pastoral heart, a husband, a father. Thank you, Dr. Sweeting, for sharing some of your wisdom with these December graduates. Hi everybody. It's my joy to join you for our winter graduation. So I wanna welcome you. Today we celebrate one of the most significant achievements in your life graduates, graduation from college and university, Colorado Christian University. So on behalf of the board of trustees, I wanna express my congratulations. We're so honored to have been a part of your life. And with great anticipation, we look forward to hearing from you about your future achievements. You have been blessed to graduate college. Did you realize that in the world, only 6.7% of the world's population get a college degree? That's not a big percentage. You've been blessed with a unique privilege that God has entrusted to you. And so we're thankful for that. But you've also been blessed to be a part of Colorado Christian University. This is a special place with a very special distinct mission. And we hope it's changed your life. We hope you've been built up in a particular way. Our focus at CCU has been more on construction than deconstruction. You hear a lot about deconstruction in secular higher education. They take you apart, but they often don't get to that putting you back together again. So our focus and passion is construction. We've been building intentionally building into your life. We have been distinct, intentional about it on behalf of the faculty and staff. And I'd like in the next few minutes to share with you some of my own hopes about what we've built into your life. I wanna do this briefly, but I wanna employ eight Cs to letter C to do that. Again, be brief, don't worry. So what have we been building? Well, the first C is curiosity. We hope you have grown in your curiosity about the world. We hope you've grown in your love of learning. The idea of a liberal arts education is you've become free. You have free time to reflect on a wide range of subjects to connect with the past, to explore. One writer called it four charmed years of learning. To develop habits, to develop new interests. And we hope that in that process, you become more curious and you've developed habits of learning that will become lifelong habits so that you're a lifelong learner. The first C is curiosity. The second C is competence. We hope we built into your life competence and not just competence to do something well, but do it with excellence. We wanted to train you broadly, first of all, giving you a foundation with our core curricula. We focused on English comp and literature and government and economics, math and science. But we've also done with focus to train many of you in certain subjects for competence and excellence in business might be health science or psychology or sports, nursing or biology or education. We hope that you come away with a sense of competence and a passion for some excellence that you're able to think about certain things and do things well. Because once you learn it in one field, you can easily learn it in another field. It's transferable. So the second C is competence. We've been aiming to build not just curiosity, but to build competence into your life. The third C is citizenship. We've all heard about studies of students graduating from college and they don't know anything about their own country, their own political order. And it's very sad. I don't think that's the case with CCU because we've been very intent about teaching you about our own nation, our own civilization. We require American history and Western civ. It's part of the core subjects because we want you to be able to function as a thinking citizen, to be an influencer in a democratic society that's so important. And so we have been intent on preparing you to become a good citizen. That's the third C. The fourth C is character. Character growth in particular, inner growth, not just smarts. Character is about something more important than that. We're not just interested in you coming away with our take on the latest political issue of the moment. We want you to become better people, become good people, virtuous. We hope that's taken place by exposure to models such as our faculty and other students by exposure to wisdom from the past and great lives and great books and all that. One of the things I noticed in my own education is there took place an imperceptible growth that I wasn't aware of at the time until I left that place, that there was a character change where I had new loves and there was more wholeness hopefully in your life more integrity, a deeper love for the Lord and his word, a sense of right and wrong. Character is bedrock. One of the first things employers look for isn't skill, but it's character. You can be trained in skill, but character, that's different, that takes time to develop. And so when you're training to be a scientist or an engineer or a politician, but you don't have a moral compass, look out, it can lead to big trouble. But we wanted to train you so that you have a sense of what is right and with a moral compass. We wanted to give you not just information, but a sense of ethics, not just career preparation, but character preparation, not just help you to earn a lot of money, but give you a moral base to help you not just make a good living, but to live a good life. Bill Armstrong, my predecessor in the role of president, often said, we don't need to make smarter devils. The world doesn't need another university making smarter devils. We need a university that will help form good people. And so the fourth C is character. We hope that there's a strengthening of your character that's taken place. The fifth C is community. One of the attractive things about CCU on the front end is we talk about how there's a wonderful community here. We're small, but the kind of people who come here will have a deep indelible impression on your life. We know that you'll probably graduate with friends for life, and we're so glad about that. Look back at your four years and think of the relationships that you've started and that some of them will fade away, but some of them won't. I remember hearing a student say to this particular female student said, I didn't come to CCU to find a husband. I came to find my bridesmaids. And we hope that you've found your best men or your bridesmaids, if that's the Lord's will for you. Perhaps it's a spouse. Perhaps you've built a relationship and you've met somebody very special in your life and it will lead to marriage and family. And that's wonderful too, but this is a community that's special. Our teachers, one just passed away and on his desk was a long list of the students that he had taught and the areas that they went on to having an impact. He kept in touch with them. That's also a part of that community. That's the fifth C. We hope you've come away with a deeper, bigger community in your life. The sixth C is Christ centered faith. I hate to put this as number six because it's really the foundation of everything. It's the rock on which we build. Jesus is the light of the world, the way, the truth and the life. We believe that. He's the eternal word made flesh. The one in whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are found says Colossians one. We hope we've built you up in your faith that you understand God's word better, the Old Testament, the New Testament, basic theology, worldviews, what a disciple is. We hope you have a better sense of Christian apologetics and you're able to share your faith. Well, most of all that you love Jesus in the gospel and the word of God. And you're able to look at every subject with a Christian worldview and better integrate your faith with your life. So the sixth C is Christ centered faith. The seventh C is calling. We hope you come away with a sense of calling that you're not just gonna be looking for a job but you leave here with a sense of I'm called by God to do different things. First of all, I'm called to know and love him and serve him no matter what job I have. That's my primary calling. But my second calling, maybe you have a better sense of what that is that you had some teacher point out to you that you're good at this, that you should do this and it's been confirmed and you feel called to be a nurse or called to be a teacher or called to be a pastor. I was talking to some of our nurse teachers and this one gal was saying that the difference with CCU nurses is they're just much more motivated and they're not just because it's a job but they are called and they have a different sense of care with the people they're with. And in a time of COVID, that's really important because she was making the point that a lot of the nurses that she's been seeing they become very fearful and then they pull away from that but the ones who are called to be in it they go forward with a deeper motivation and a deeper courage, which takes me to the eighth C and that is courage. We hope that during your time here you have grown to be a more courageous person that you have grown in moral courage that maybe through being a part of the March for Life you're not as afraid to stand up and speak out for the sanctity of life. You're not as afraid to speak out for the name of Jesus or to speak for the truth of God's word. We hope that you come away with a stronger sense of what is right and you're not afraid to be bold and faithful even though it will cost you. That's our hope as we think about you, eight Cs. Call us not CCU, but C-C-C-C-C-C-U or something like that and put them all together and I think it makes for a more resilient person. This has not been an easy year, the year of COVID. We have had to do a lot of things very differently but let me tell you something about this graduating class this year. You're going to be different. You are going to be more resilient than the classes before you or some of the classes after you. Why? Because you've gone through a national crisis. Everything's been thrown upside down. You've had to learn to do things differently. You come away with a greater sense of appreciation for the normal simple things of life when things go right. You know that things don't always go right. You have a more realistic sense about life in a fallen world. You've had to be creative. In other words, you become more resilient. And our hope is that because of building in you the things that we built into you that you have been constructed into a stronger person that you're more curious, that you are more competent, that you are a better citizen, that you have a stronger character, that you have a sense, a deeper and a wider sense of community, that you have built on a Christ-centered faith, that you leave with a sense of calling and that you have a courage as you go forth. That's what we've been intending to build, praying to build. We don't always do it successfully and not every student actually takes us up on the challenge, but most of them do. And that's our joy in seeing you cross the stage and receive the diploma, you know, this graduation. It's been said that what happens at college doesn't stay at college. And we've seen signs of that this year, but we hope the things that happened at college go with you and bless the world. See, our gift to the world is our students. I particularly believe that the world needs CCU and CCU students and our mandate as a school is to send out leaders, thousands of leaders year after year, wave after wave, a movement of students that will be salt and light in our world and influence it for the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so we release you today with our blessing and we release you with a blessing. The blessing I want to give you comes from the last line of a liturgy from Christian worship. It's actually found in the Book of Common Prayer. It's recited in some churches every Sunday. This is how the service ends. The minister will say, go in peace to love and serve the Lord, to which the people all respond in the name of Christ, amen. Thank you and God bless. Good evening everyone. I'm Cara Johnston. I'm the director of alumni and parent relations here at Colorado Christian University. I'm sorry I couldn't be with you tonight but I want you to know I share in your great joy at graduating tonight and becoming full-fledged alumni of this great university. I want to read to you our alumni charge. This is something that we read at every commencement as a formal way to welcome you into the ranks of the Alumni Association. You are now certified to the world at large as alumni of Colorado Christian University. She is your alma mater, your kindly mother and you are her cherished sons and daughters. You entered her halls as future alumni and tonight you leave as alumni. Congratulations. Tonight we do not note your separation from CCU but rather the next step in your lifelong relationship. Commencement does not signify the breaking of ties and a life lived apart. Rather it marks your initiation in the fullest sense into the fellowship of the university as a bearer of grace and truth. Her ambassador and promoter of her mission in your workplace, in your community and as faithful servants in your church of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. The university is not the campus. It is not the buildings on the campus. It's not the faculty. It's not the students here at any one time. It's not a line on your resume and it is not the memories that you will draw upon in later years and it is certainly not a piece of paper. The university is part of you and it is you that will carry her influence and her knowledge wherever you go. With grace and truth, I welcome you into a lifetime membership in the CCU Alumni Association and I invite you to strengthen this relationship as you go along your life's journey. Visit our website, follow us on social media and come to our events. You will always have a place at our table of fellowship. May the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you and the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace. Draw near to God and he will draw near to you in all situations and at all times. Please make sure too, as you leave tonight, take one of the blue junior writing pads that we have given to you as our gift and we look forward to meeting you in person someday and congratulations again. Go and set the world on fire. Thank you. Hello CCU graduates and family and friends also tuning in. My name is Dr. Jonathan Demos. I'm an assistant professor in the psychology department and it is my honor on behalf of the faculty of the university to offer up congratulations to our graduates. Being a part of this graduation ceremony reminds me of a movie I just saw. It was about a college graduate and she was graduating in the spring when most people graduate. So she was there with most of her friends that she went to school with and it wasn't during a pandemic. So there was a huge ceremony with family and friends there packing out the hall and she got to sit with her friends, walk across the stage and get her diploma, throw her head in the air with everybody else. And then after the ceremony, she went out with her family, got a nice meal together. She had a little bit of money saved up so she was able to do a small vacation before starting her first job. Paid decently well, but something that she hoped might turn into a career better opportunity someday and that was the movie. I'm just kidding, that's not a real movie, but was a real movie, it would be a terrible movie. I would never go see it and neither would you, but this, this right here, this is the start of a movie that would hook me. In this movie, maybe the first scene is you watching your graduation on a screen. Maybe you're with a few people, maybe you're even watching it alone. We can see you smiling, we can see that you're proud of what you've accomplished, but we can also see a sadness behind your eyes, a little bit of tightness in your smile. And then maybe in this movie, we flash back to your first day of college, showing up with so many hopes and expectations and then we cut quickly through scenes where we see you laughing with friends, crying after a breakup, but you can see you scrambling to take notes in a class before I, I mean the professor in the movie changes the screen too quickly. We see you leaving to work your second job while your roommates start playing a game. We hear you say, not tonight, I've got to study for a demo exam. When your friends are going out for dinner and we cut back to your graduation and we watching this movie know deep in our bones that you fought and sacrificed and grew and learned and you deserve so much better than this bizarre final semester in this kind of graduation. Now that's a movie that has me hooked. That's a movie I can't wait to root for the hero. That's a movie that I have to know how it will end. I'm invested. And honestly, it's a lot more like the kind of stories we get in the Bible than the first movie I talked about. I mean, can you think of a story in the Bible about successful happy people who make a series of great decisions that results in even more success and happiness? No, the stories in scripture are a lot messier as conflict is at the heart of every great story. Now, if you were a student at CCU then surely you've heard the phrase Amago Day a lot. Fewer family or friends tuning in tonight. Maybe that phrase is new to you. It's Latin and in academic settings we like to use Latin because obviously it's fancy and it makes us feel self-important. And this phrase means image of God. We were created Amago Day. And then we tell you why I think that is important for our unusual graduation tonight. We were made in God's image, which doesn't mean I don't think that we physically resemble God. It means that God breathed something of his nature and character into us. And if we could take a peek down one of the smaller passageways of the Amago Day tonight it is in our design to tell and love stories. To wit, how many of you have watched a movie or a TV show in the last week? How many of you have watched a movie or TV show in the last 24 hours? How many of you have a second screen on right now and are watching a movie or a TV show just in case this isn't interesting? When was the last time you binged Netflix so hard that you got the message of shame at a little box that says, are you still watching? Like you've been watching so long it's checking to see if you're even still alive. We love stories. And we've certainly corrupted this part of our design like all the others, but at its deepest core it is part of the Amago Day. We serve a God who reveals himself through messy and broken stories. We have us harrowing escapes from slavery, lion's dens, chariots of fire, which by the way, also a great movie. The climax of scripture, of course, is the death and resurrection of Jesus. But for me, maybe it's because I grew up in a Christian home and have heard the story my whole life, doesn't feel like a shocking plot twist. To me, it's always felt more like a satisfying resolution, like the perfect note to resolve the whole discordant mess. The biggest plot twist in the Bible for me is the ascension. Now after rising from the dead and conquering death and sin, after walking around a while and doing ministry, Jesus leaves, just floats up to heaven with a promise to come back someday. Now that is shocking. It's shocking because we aren't just spectators of popcorn binge watching the unfolding redemption story. We are participants. We are left shockingly with an important role in this redemption story, which brings us back tonight and your graduation. Our goal at CCU is to train you vocationally so you can get a job when you graduate. We weren't good at that, then we wouldn't have much point in being a university. But more than that, we long to equip and train you for the extraordinary role you have been given. And you, our extraordinary grads, in an extraordinary year, have been handed all the markers of a great story, of a story that we can't wait to watch because it's messy and it's broken and the stakes are high and we can't wait to see you overcome. The semester has been hard and this graduation isn't what you pictured, but this is the kind of story that makes you hope. And here's what the apostle Paul, who himself was the protagonist in quite the messy and amazing stories involving blinding lights and shipwrecks and earthquakes and imprisonment. Here's what he had to say about this. But we also glory in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance, character and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Hope will not disappoint us. Hope will not put us to shame, which is why we can't turn off those stupid Hallmark Christmas movies. And why those of us who have tasted the beauty of the real Christmas story will never let go of it. And now it is our prayer that you have the courage to go out and live your story well and with courage. The kingdom is depending on you. Go forth and use your gifts and skills and education well because it deeply matters. Congratulations, class of 2020 and blessings to you. The School of Business and Leadership is proud to announce the graduation of the following seniors. Corinna Archuleta. Olivia Christie. Natalie Cox. Olivia Duesenberg. William Farm. Nora Fort. Josh Fox. Trajan Hawking. Shane Hesling. Carter Johnson. Kyle McMillan. Richard Morris. Nathan Ostman. Richard Pease. Timothy Patette. Nathan Schaefer. Zachary Stein. And Nathan Strumfer. Congratulations. I'm Dr. Ryan Hartwig, Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, also a professor of communication. Congratulations, graduates. Madison Bruns. Jessica Canada. Riley Castleberry. Gabriela Davis. Christian Edwards. Katelyn Galon. Abigail Guadnola. Talia Hernandez. Mina Johnson. Allison Johnson. Chelsea Johnson. Jonathan Good. Dana Jones. Piper Koy. Grace Lloyd. Margaret McDonald. Ruthanne Massey. Savannah Mitchell. Eliana Jade Pereira. Mariah Pruitt. Marjorie Raddick. Erin Rash. Liana Robbins. Katelyn Sage. Sydney Sausado. Noah Wells. Greetings, School of Education graduates. I'm Deborah Sheffield, Dean of the School of Education at Colorado Christian University, and I wanna wish you warm congratulations as you celebrate completing your four-year degree at CCU, all the hard work, tenacity, and resolve it has taken to successfully complete your degree here at CCU. I want to read the names of the School of Education graduates at this time. Paige Charvat. Faith Johnson. Skyler Lucky. Megan Mendendorp. Katelyn Nicholson. Anna Wood. And Katelyn Woody. Again, warm congratulations, and God bless you. My name is Mark Parker. I'm Dean of the School of Science and Engineering, and I wanna congratulate all of our December graduates for this year. First graduate is Tyler Bergman. Jack Hollander. Mindy Mazza. Anthony McGee. Randall Lat. Nichols. And Sarah Jane Shaw. Thank you and congratulations to all. My name is David Cotter, and it's my privilege to serve as the Dean of the School of Theology, and I'd like to thank you all for participating in this virtual graduation ceremony. I'd also like to thank and congratulate the families and friends who have supported our graduates for these long years of trainings, and would like to express my congratulations to our graduates. May God richly bless you in your future adventures. The graduates from the School of Theology are Taylor Beno, Micah Haynes, Crosby Kuhl, Jane Lewis, and Caleb Sandburn. Congratulations to you all. Thank you for sharing with us in this celebration time. So glad that you could be with us. Those of you students who are scattered around the Lucrino classrooms at this moment, families at home or in hotel rooms, streaming in with us. Thank you so much for joining us. We celebrate you students. We congratulate you. We're so happy that God has used you to come to CCU, but also to go forth into the world using what you've learned here, how you've grown here to change the world, to perfect the world for Christ. Please pray with me as we close. Heavenly Father, you are a great, great God. Thank you for bringing these students, these December grads, into our midst for a season. Thank you Lord for giving them families that supported them, that helped them through, that talked with them on the phone and saw them on various kinds of messaging platforms to give them support as they work through this education process. Thank you Lord for the faculty for the staff here at CCU that return all the glory and praise to you when we see students do so well when they complete. Thank you Lord for the way you've given us your blessings. And I pray Lord that as we move forward from this moment into what you have for us next and for these students, the next may be scary, it may be wonderful. We pray Lord that you would give us that peace that goes with us, that you are leading us. Thank you Lord for these students for the way that you've already worked in their lives and continue to do so in your great plan. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. I would like to welcome you to stick around for some time with your fellow students in the various classrooms in Lucrino. I also would welcome you to move forward to celebrate with your families as you may have some plans. Again, thank you. Have a great night.