Photo by: Abby Bellow
Working two full-time jobs requires weekly air-travel for Brian Simmons, the new Oklahoma Christian University professor of communication and associate dean of the college of liberal arts and honors.
Simmons graduated from Oklahoma Christian in 1987 with a degree in mass communication. He furthered his education in California and Indiana, earning his master’s degree and doctorate in mass communication.
Prior to returning to his alma mater, Simmons made Oregon his home for the past two decades teaching at Cascade College and the Univeristy of Portland.
“I’ve always believed you can live anywhere and be happy because it’s always about the people more so than the place or the weather, the culture, anything like that,” Simmons said. “Here at OC, in just my third week, I already feel as though I’m beginning to carve out a place. That’s because the people I work with and the students I teach have made a place for me in their life, and that’s a blessing.”
Simmons was one of the pioneers of Cascade College, an Oklahoma Christian branch campus formerly known as Columbia Christian College, in 1993.
“I’m proud to say that I was the very first faculty that they hired, which meant that I was there from the very beginning,” Simmons said. “It meant that I got to know, or at least be familiar with, every student that ever came there. And then, sadly, I was also literally the last person to leave.”
When Cascade College closed in 2009, Simmons did not want to uproot his family by returning to Oklahoma so he accepted a position at the University of Portland in Oregon, where he taught for five years. After his daughter graduated high school, however, he and his wife decided accepting a teaching job at Oklahoma Christian would be more beneficial for the family, according to Simmons.
“I wanted to come to a place where what I did mattered eternally,” Simmons said. “I was a good teacher at the University of Portland and I enjoyed my students and I loved my job, but it was just a job and the difference I was making in the lives of my students at the University of Portland was only academic. Here, I hope, at Oklahoma Christian, I not only can influence my students’ lives academically, but I can also maybe help them sort out eternally important things.”
In the same way the difference between state universities and private Christian universities provided stark contrast for Simmons, the difference in student-teacher relationships from high school to college differ significantly as well, according to freshman Dillon Byrnes.
“I feel like in high school it’s an adversarial relationship where it’s you against the teacher in the class,” Byrnes said. “But [Simmons is] there to back us up and help us through the class and help us learn and pass.”
With only few weeks into school, Simmons has already become a favorite among students due to his unique and interactive teaching style, according to freshman Devin Turner.
“He’s more on a friend level,” Turner said. “He wants us to call him by his first name, Brian, instead of Professor or Doctor. He wants us to feel like we’re close to him so that we can have that relationship and we can talk about anything in his class.”
This semester, Simmons is teaching courses in Oral Communication, two honors courses called The Quest for Meaning: Christ and a Senior Philosophy Seminar.
“Honestly, I wish I had a story like I felt called to be a teacher because I want to mold young minds and all that, but I don’t have that story,” Simmons said. “I just fell into teaching and I think it’s a good fit for me because I would do it for free. I have the greatest job in the world because I get to teach Christian young people and I love it.”
In agreeing to move to Oklahoma from the Pacific Northwest, Simmons still maintains his ministry position at his home church in Oregon.
“For the past eight years, in addition to teaching college as a full-time job, I’ve been the every Sunday full-time preacher at the Metro Church of Christ,” Simmons said. “Because my wife and I love that congregation as much as we do and because we want to maintain the connection with the church family there … everyone agreed – the elders, the congregation, me, my wife, Oklahoma Christian – that I would, three out of four weekends, fly back to preach at Metro in Portland on Sunday morning and then I would fly back to Oklahoma City Sunday afternoon.”
The travel time is productive time to grade and write future sermons, according to Simmons.
“The understanding we have is that we’ll do this for the first year and I’ll reevaluate at the end of the school year,” Simmons said. “So far, there hasn’t been anything negative about it other than the screaming baby on the flight from Salt Lake City last Sunday evening.”
Simmons’ two children, junior Luke Simmons and freshman Madison Simmons, both attend Oklahoma Christian. The family plans on living in Edmond during the school year and returning to the Pacific Northwest during the summer, according to Simmons.
“I have always believed that what we humans explain as coincidence is often the result of God’s hand,” Simmons said. “I feel as if the way things have happened in my life — that it’s not just coincidence that I’m doing what God wants me to do by continuing to preach and fly back every three out of four weekends. I feel like God has given me things to do here on this campus.”
0
0
Be First to Comment