2026 Commencement Address

Mr. Clark, member of the PCA Board of Directors, Mr. Runey, member of the PCA faculty and staff, members of the Class of 2026, family and friends, welcome to our graduation ceremony. In a few short minutes the young men and women wearing these gowns and mortar boards will graduate from high school. A question I suspect that many have asked themselves is, what comes next? By the way, I’m not trying to imply that question is in any way original. I had similar thoughts in 1975, when my high school graduation meant that I had about a month of freedom before the first class cadets of West Point expressed to me in no uncertain terms that I represented an unfortunate accident in biology which could best be dealt with by quitting my introductory training, commonly known as “Beast Barracks.” I hope that for our seniors, the next steps inspire less fear and discomfort than my personal road.

Class of 2026, you live in interesting times. Our society is marked by culture wars, with some groups holding very low opinions of those on the opposite end of the political spectrum. Democrats and Republicans in Washington seem to have lost the art of compromise and cooperation. Christianity is perhaps less welcome across our country than it has been for most of our nation’s history. In the US, we cannot all agree on what pronouns to use for each other. To be sure, this is a sad state of affairs. At the same time, it represents a tremendous opportunity. You can help set the standards of the next generation, first in college or the military, and later in the workplace or the home.

Class of 2026, you have the tools to succeed in life. You can factor polynomials, conjugate verbs, write lab reports, and hold a conversation in a foreign language. Some of you can hit a ball, some of you can sing on key, which no one will ever accuse me of, by the way, and some of you can make entertaining videos. You have curiosity about the world around you, and you’ve learned that your relationships with other people will play a huge role in your lives. Most of you will spend the summer here, enjoying friends and the beach, trying to bolster your bank account a bit before college experience begins to drain it.

What advice can I offer you? First and foremost, I hope that college helps to expand your faith. You’ll have the chance to worship in many different styles and faith traditions. I hope you visit some of the alternate chapels and churches around your campus. I suspect such experience will deepen and ground your faith, letting you make a more informed decision about how and with whom to worship our Lord. I hope that you develop a better sense of the distinctives that characterize your personal faith tradition, and your faith in Christ deepens as it becomes more informed. I hope that your faith includes a component of service. That might be either within or outside your denomination. Those of you who are a bit uncomfortable dealing with people you don’t know may find that is much less intimidating to teach fellow believers than to share the Gospel message with those you don’t know at all. In any case, I hope that you continue your spiritual journey with your first new job and new place to live.

Second, I suggest that the church is about the best possible place to meet a prospective spouse. Some of you may have already made your choice for a life partner. I went on a date as a high school senior in 1974 that changed my life. I developed a close relationship with a young lady who I thought was, and still think is, wonderful. My engagement and marriage helped solidify my personal faith in Christ these past five decades. Sharing a common faith with my wife has been a blessing in so many ways, as she has helped me see past some of the blind spots, suggested alternative ways of understanding Scripture, and shared the thoughts of other writers/theologians. Having a shared faith is likely to reduce moral dilemmas within a marriage, as a couple sees problems through a common lens. Of course, our shared faith in turn colored the heritage of our children. Now, two spouses who have a faith in Jesus don’t get any sort of guarantee that their children will turn out the way they want. I do think that a genuine and winsome faith from parents is a tremendous gift to our children, and the single most powerful factor in influencing their personal decisions for faith. I can’t stress enough that having a marriage partner with a shared faith simplifies a lot of issues in life.

Third, I would suggest that for many people, religion takes on a new meaning when they have children. Those children need moral instruction, and many young parents want to call in reinforcements to help train their kids. Getting kids to Sunday School is a solid formula for getting at least one parent, possibly both, to the church building and some sort of instruction or service. Both tracks can bring us closer to the Lord. While attending a young adult Sunday School class in Maryland in the early 1980’s, I was asked by the teacher, Jim O’Dell, to serve as his co-leader. Feeling that I was clearly unqualified, after all, everyone else in class had been a Christian longer than I had, I was tempted to say no, but I decided that Jim knew much more about Christianity than I did and that I ought to respect his opinion. Teaching that class has deepened my faith enormously; it helped me connect the dots on so many aspects of faith, and it led to my teaching many other classes in many other churches. I can’t tell you how wonderful I felt when I learned my daughter Mary, PCA Class of 2004, and her husband Angel began leading a small group of young families in their church in Virginia.

I hope that each of you finds a church in which you feel privileged to worship. Part of that, of course, depends on church doctrine. Doctrine is important. It keeps a church between the lines of orthodoxy and not wandering out to heresy. But doctrine alone doesn’t decide where we all worship. That depends even more on church practice. Church practice organizes the seating arrangements, watches over the childcare, and determines the worship songs for each service. Church practice helps us get dressed for church in a way that tends to resemble most of the other members. Church practice is less about right and wrong and more about providing a flavor that makes us comfortable, or maybe uncomfortable. I hope that each of you is able eventually to find a church where you believe that sound Christian doctrine is taught and that the worship style gets you jazzed about meeting with other like-minded believers to come before the Lord on a regular basis.

Most of you will need to earn a living. Some of you may inherit wealth, some of you may marry someone with plenty of money, and some of you may earn a great deal of money at a particular stage in life. Most of you, however, will need to stay employed in order to meet your financial obligations. I hope that you find a line of work that lets you serve people as you earn a living. My brother-in-law worked for John Hancock. He found little reward in providing fiscal oversight to investment programs for others beyond receiving a paycheck. His work meant that he could pay the mortgage and feed his kids, and, sadly, it meant very little more than that. I have the privilege of serving the US Army, and later Portsmouth Christian Academy. I never had to wonder if the Lord approved my professions, and I have had the privilege of working with some very fine men and women. Here at PCA, I still miss Jon Tyman, John Bonnaville, Susan Pletiche, and Bev Shevenell, among other wonderful colleagues. I will be a poorer man next year because I won’t have the privilege of seeing Steve Foley, Pete Beal, and others on a daily basis. I will never qualify as rich in worldly terms, but the Lord has provided everything that my family has ever needed in a material sense, and I had the pleasure and encouragement of working with some great people. We did have a student once who cheered for the NY Yankees, but fortunately he left after 4 years.

You are going to run into some experiences that you just haven’t planned for in life. One morning I was trying to teach a class, and a large person walked into my room dressed in what was supposed to be a rabbit costume. Or maybe it was a chicken; I’m not really sure. This was in the middle of my American History lesson, but the school secretary, a normally sensible woman named Deb White, indicated that the visitor, hired by a student’s parent, should be given the opportunity to complete his mission. I walked out into the hallway, where I had a brief yet spirited debate about whether I would return to PCA the next day. I have still the occasional nightmare about terrorists dressed in similar animal costumes taking over the school. Some years later, at the beginning to the fall schedule in 2001, I saw televisions being wheeled into the hallway outside my classroom. My mind ran to another family-based interruption, and I stepped out into the hall to find out what was going on, and I was immediately invited to bring my students out to the common areas. I sensed quickly that this could be a bit more serious than the previous interruption. It was. We saw film footage of repeated attacks on tall office buildings in New York City, using aircraft as giant battering rams. Shortly thereafter, we learned that the father of two of our students, a pilot, was killed in his cockpit, and later we had a student who joined our school after his mother had been killed working in one of the NY towers. No other schedule interruption in the history of our school has ever approached the gravitas of that event. I was proud of the way our school handled the aftermath of those bombings. I’m also grateful PCA never faced anything else on that scale of devastation.

You will have your own significant emotional events. I don’t know what they will be, but I think that the odds are really, really high something significant will at least threaten to rock your world. I hope your personal challenges are never as destructive. Even more, I hope that you handle them with a focus to understand the Lord’s will as best you can. Then, I hope you are committed to follow that will to the utmost of your ability. I also hope that along the way, you are able to consider various sequences of events and determine whether people are acting in accordance with the teaching of the Lord. If necessary, I hope you will have the courage to speak up in cases where friends or leaders might not see things correctly. In one of the dozen plus churches where I was a member, the pastor endorsed a particular candidate for local office and shared with the congregation that the candidate was a member of a particular political party. As I thought about what I heard, I concluded that those remarks strained the boundary of permitted public speech from a leader of a tax-exempt organization. That week, I wrote a letter to the pastor, sharing my view that his actions probably skirted the limits of the law. I was worried that the event could destroy my relationship with a local church that I enjoyed. Instead, the pastor did some research and then emailed me, sharing that he believed that my criticism was valid. The next Sunday morning, he apologized to the entire congregation, openly identifying his error and sharing his intention to never make a similar remark again. I was certainly relieved that he had agreed with me and that we had understood the boundaries of the law in like fashion. The way the pastor handled being corrected, by accepting the legal limits of behavior for those claiming tax exemptions and publicly admitting his mistake first to me and then to the church body, rather than trying to justify a careless choice gave me a very high opinion of his character.

What advice can I share with you about choosing a profession? I am reluctant to think that I might know best what road you should follow. I am sure, based on their academic track records, that Chloe Tan and Kennedy Rengkung can succeed at the student of history. However, I suspect that Chloe might also do very well in stage or musical performance, and I think that Kennedy will likely excel in some variant of engineering. Many of you have the potential to earn a living in a wide variety of fields. I do suggest that you talk with those whose faiths you admire. If you think you are being called to a specific field of endeavor, I suggest you confirm with those who know you well that you truly have a gift in that field. I have known or known of several people who had a passion to write but really lacked the skills of written expression. Some of those people remained deluded about their giftings during their entire undergraduate career. Nobody ever dropped a truth bomb. The graduate world was, shall we say, less inclined to be kind and gentle. I have always been sad that my dream of playing for the Boston Celtics had faded away, but I have some consolation in the fact that no one ever counseled me just to follow my heart and go for it; instead, various friends laughed, loudly, whenever I made comments in that direction. I suggest that you look into salaries earned in fields in which you have an interest and make sure that those earning levels can support the family size you hope for. Consider also where you might want to live. It’s nice to be close to family. At the same time, salary in Jacksonville, Alabama goes a lot further than the same income in New York City, or even the Seacoast region of NH.

I am going to suggest that you at least consider a tour with the military. That could be Army, Marines, Air Force, Navy, or Coast Guard, anyone sense a priority there? The armed services will give you training in a particular career field and further initial experience in that professional context. You may have your interest in a particular type of job either confirmed or firmly ruled out; if it’s the latter, you will avoid running up major debt for a career field that may not suit you. At least you will start a resume and acquire funding for future training. You will also earn several other benefits. You will most likely get in better shape, you will most likely learn to work as part of a team, and you will most likely develop greater self-confidence. PCA has had a large number of graduates who became military veterans, many of them serving overseas, and some even in a combat zone. Look into programs such as ROTC as well as enlisted services. The stronger your academic skills, the more likely the US government, AKA “Uncle Sugar,” will pay a portion of your college tuition. The military is not for everyone, but at the same time it can benefit a broad slice of the young adult population. That includes those who intend to earn a military retirement as well as those simply looking for a single tour of duty. There is frankly no way that I could have afforded to teach at PCA without the benefits of the retirement check that I earned while serving with the US Army. A military record will stand you in good stead, and increased confidence and broader perspective will make you more prepared to join the workforce.

Class of 2026, I congratulate you on completing your education at PCA. For some that has meant the last year of your life, for others that is a four year, or even a twelve year or longer experience. You have academic and social skills that have prepared you for the next big step in life. For some of you, faith is an engrained part of your lives. I admire those who have built foundation from the beginning, but I want to encourage others that your faith walk is not hopeless just because you did not convert at an early age. For most of you, the next big experience will involve college. For some, it may mean the mission field, or possibly the military, or even direct entry into the work force. You can count on the fact that the Lord will watch over you wherever you go, and that He will hear all of your prayers.