Bakke Graduate University School of Business

BGU Mission | BGU Distinctives | BGU Focus | BGU Values

Mission

To participate in God's redemptive plan for humanity by helping to transform communities globally. We do this through Christian business education, entrepreneurial business engagement, and leadership development in both the private and public sector, with special emphasis on economically marginalized people, communities, and nations.

Biblical Foundations | Building Bridges | Core Distinctives | Outcome Distinctives

Biblical Foundations

Bakke Graduate University theology, urban studies and business programs use common distinctives to teach organizational leadership. The following four words, in addition to their use in describing characteristics of God, as well as human, ethical and organization pursuit, also describe four core distinctives taught by BGU about for-profit and non-profit organizations. Each of the four distinctive is rooted in a core principle of the Bible.

1. Love: The purpose of the organization is to serve the needs of society. We are persons created in the image of God out of His love in order to love. The greatest commandment is to love God and the second is to love others. The corporation is legally a "person" created by a group of people in order to organize their gifts to accomplish a specific purpose of service and love.

2. Justice: Organizational stakeholders have equal status but they are not treated the same. The organization is like a body, made up of interdependent members, all with equal value but with different roles. The more visible members should not have more status than the least visible members.

3. Dignity: Decisions should be made by those affected most by those decisions. Humans were created to make decisions in order to steward all of creation. It is an essential aspect of human nature to desire to make decisions, in community of others, with accountability for their results.

4. Integrity: These must be combined in oneness - they work as a whole. Humans were created in oneness with God, themselves, each other and the world. The unity in all four of these areas was broken by human independence. It is the role of transformational leaders to pursue reconciliation in all three of these areas and practice unity of purpose, roles and work as they lead their organizations.

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Building Bridges

Viewed differently, BGU's School of Business (BGUSB) is part of an ever-expanding, dedicated community of colleagues who assist each other in maximizing the impact of their lives through the business skills they acquire in our programs. It is also our fervent prayer and hope that the individual and collective impact of these students will help transform a hurting world, especially those who are caught in cycles of poverty, addiction and injustice. In this sense, BGUSB's primary commitment is three-fold:

1. Degree Programs  Through our values-driven, Christian degree programs, to educate the future leaders of for-profit companies and not-for-profit organizations within our cities who will be among the wealthy, the influential, and the powerful in the coming era;

2. Certificate Programs  Through our certificate programs to educate those promising future leaders who are within the poverty pockets of our world by giving them the business skills they need to start Christian-led, values-driven businesses that will create jobs. Those jobs create wages that, when spent, economically multiply throughout the community to benefit all of its citizens; and

3. Social-Responsibility Through our social-responsibility emphasis, to instill within those leaders such a heart for the marginalized within their cities that they will use their business skills and their business and organizational resources to seek Christ-centered community transformation at all levels of society.

We do this through:

• A business education that expands their vision and opportunity,
• A biblical worldview and value-set to lift them spiritually and eternally,
• An eye for building a bridge between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, the powerful and the powerless, and
• Building a bridge between the church and the marketplace.

In this way, people's individual lives can be significantly improved, cities can be truly transformed, and poverty and injustice appreciably impacted.

In practical terms, BGU is committed to educating leaders for the globalizing, pluralizing world of today and tomorrow. Through those leaders and their lives, BGU commits to foster the creation of values-driven, socially-responsible, Christian-led businesses that are focused on city transformation globally. In that regard, the following tenets are guidelines for every BGU business program and course:

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Core Distinctives:

1. Acquiring Solid, Values-Driven Business Skills  BGU exists to help people acquire solid business skills that will allow them to advance their personal lives, their career-paths and their wealth-creation, to use those skills for the benefit of their own organization and its stakeholders, and to deploy those same skills and the organization itself to be an instrument for the good of people and society. Specifically:
   

   1. Our E-MBA degree focuses on advanced business studies that take business education to a higher level of professional understanding and subject it to more deeply penetrating analysis. The core courses-such as Globalization, Strategic Planning, Organizational Behavior, Management, Human Resources, Marketing, Accounting, Finance, Capital Markets, Law and Ethics-are common to most MBA programs, but we deal in those specifics in the context of shared core Judeo-Christian values and a distinct philosophy of business that makes BGUSB genuinely unique.

   2. Our MASCE degree is a one-of-a-kind degree - in fact the first in the world to focus on social entrepreneurship. Its structure is also exceptional with its 40% contextual focus on the theology of work, biblical servant leadership models, issues of cross-cultural engagement, poverty, diversity and social justice and actual inner-city immersions. Its 60% focus is on the more elementary business skills that give those who are not in business full-time an understanding of basic business principles that can be profitably integrated into their churches, organizations or governmental positions.

   3. Our Christian values and ethics, and our biblical perspective undergird all of our courses. In that regard, we are committed to teaching business based upon the leadership principles of Jesus and expressed through centuries of best practices for positive social change in a variety of global cultures. A particular focus will be on businesses and organizations that are operated by those innovations demonstrated in Dennis Bakke's Joy at Work and by other exceptional current business leaders who have applied these principles well.

2. Promoting the True Purpose of Business The primary purpose of business is to serve the needs of people, both individually and in community. While profits are an essential aspect of sustaining business, there is a larger true purpose. BGU understands people as created in God's image to steward the world. Business is an essential means to organize human effort for that purpose. At the deepest level, the purpose of business is to live out the principles of Jesus, including "to love our neighbors." We do this by providing high- quality, fairly-priced, honestly-promoted, diligently and cheerfully-serviced goods and services that people need in order to improve the quality of their lives. We do this by being faithful stewards of the precious, limited resources we utilize: people, property, power, money, and the environment.

3. Honoring All Business Stakeholders Shareholder value is important, but it is only one of several important measurements of a business. BGU understands that a business exists to serve all of its stakeholders. All stakeholders - employees and their families, clients and customers, suppliers and vendors, investors and creditors, communities and government - are to be treated with equal respect and dignity, are to be honored for what they contribute to make the business successful, and are to be given due consideration in all of the business' decisions. The role of the business leader is to point each stakeholder to a purpose higher than his/her own interest in the business.

4. Synchronizing Practices Among For-Profit and Not-For-Profit Organizations  BGU understands there is no major distinction between for-profit and not-for-profit organizations except the source of their capital - one from investors, the other from donors. Both types of organizations exist to meet the needs of others and transform the communities they serve. Both should be managed by similar principles and practices.

5. Integrating Skills, Values and Culture BGU's faith-based culture, courses and learning systems nurture the student's understanding that business skills are only and always to be used in a manner that is consistent with the business person's value system and with promoting those values broadly and in the local, community cultural context.

6. Distinguishing Management and Leadership It has been said that a person manages power, resources, systems and organizations, but leads people. Businesses bring all of these factors together, but those who would truly lead people biblically must be willing to invest in, be concerned about, and engage people as whole, complicated, often untidy human beings. This necessitates a willingness to take risks that go far beyond formula-management, but truly define the cultural and moral base of the company.

7. Encouraging Multiple Bottom Lines The purpose of business is realized through internally generated funding to serve multiple bottom lines:

   • A financial or economic bottom line, i.e. making a profit;
   • An environmental bottom line for a business to conserve, promote and not degrade environmental quality;
   • A social bottom line that promotes the business' responsibility to holistically build the life of the communities in which it serves and to meet their needs as the company's capacity and calling permit;
   • A stewardship bottom line that continually seeks alignment between the company and the biblically expressed role of humanity as earth-stewards and peacemakers; and
   • A spiritual bottom line that fosters humility, the capacity to love, a solid connection to higher purposes in the business leader and the employees, and an alignment between all the company does and stands for and scriptural principles
   
   BGU recognizes that specific companies may also have other bottom lines that are appropriate to the business context and calling.

8. Empowering Employees and Fostering their Joy  God created people in His image to be decision-makers and managers in their stewardship of the earth and its resources. Joy at work comes from being a valued, honored, contributor to the company's vision, mission and purpose. Key elements of this job satisfaction and joy are the freedom, trust and responsibility enjoyed by employees who are allowed to make decisions within their levels of expertise and their impact areas.

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   Outcome Distinctives

9. Knowing One's Own Gifting, Talents and Calling  Perhaps the key to a person learning effectively is understanding who they are, how they are gifted, what talents they have, and how God would have them use those for their own personal benefit and for the benefit of other people. BGU's courses are all values-driven and focused on socially responsible businesses as a means to realizing genuine, long-term, sustainable transformation. Students will encounter and wrestle with these challenges in ways that will be transformational in their worldviews, aspirations and life-paths.

10. Acquiring Solid Business Skills  As noted above, BGUSB is, first and foremost, a learning catalyst for leaders of businesses, churches, organizations and governments in solid business skills that build their personal lives, careers, organizations and ultimately transform businesses, societies, communities and cultures.

11. Equipping to Make Profits  BGU recognizes that profits are a necessary means to an end, i.e. the business' survival and sustainability. Without profits businesses cannot continue to deliver the necessities of life or their valuable goods and services to the community. Equally important, profits provide the resources and capacity essential for accomplishing the business' other bottom lines.

12. Valuing Stewardship and Philanthropy  As a corollary, BGU also recognizes that business is not only about personal wealth creation. While there is no sin in providing well for one's self and family, wealth is meant for social good and building the quality of life within the community. This is accomplished through responsible stewardship of the power, resources and wealth one has been allowed by the Creator and through social partnerships and philanthropy in their many forms. The issue is not how much money someone makes, but what they do with it.

13. Expanding the BGU Global Network and Community  BGUSB sees today's global business environment as one in which partnerships, alliances and networks are as valuable as patents, copyrights and intellectual property. BGUSB brings to its students a life-long relationship that is accessible at every stage of their careers and in virtually every business or organizational setting.
    
    BGU is, after all, not just a university. It is a global network of committed followers of the principles of Jesus who are devoted to transforming the cities of the world holistically into the safe, healthy, stimulating, nurturing, creative, joy-filled environments that God intended. Collectively, the BGU board, regents, faculty, staff, students and alumni have vast global networks that form unique, invaluable resources for all BGUSB graduates as they move into their business, vocational and ministerial callings.

14. Equipping to Navigate and Change Systems  Today's business education cannot be separated from the economic, political and social contexts in which business will operate. Each of these contexts is a web of power-systems that carries its own values and mores. Business can be either the means to perpetuate existing systems of injustice and poverty or an agent to transform those systems for the better. BGUSB provides students with the understanding of how existing business, economic, political and social systems are often misused to distort competition, impede business activity, reward corruption, create poverty and foster injustice. BGUSB students will be equipped to understand, navigate, use and change systems to make a difference in their businesses, organizations and society.

15. Engaging the Future  This fast-paced, rapidly changing, interconnected world is bringing challenges to every aspect of life, not just business. Systems everywhere - economic, environmental, physical (infrastructures), governmental, social and religious - are collapsing under the pressure to remain relevant to current societal needs. The future, with all of its uncertainties, will require a new type of leader. BGU looks for students and faculty who seek an opportunity to engage this new, undefined world through in-depth dialogue and mutual struggle and to discern what the leader of the future should look like and how/where they should lead.

16. Advancing a Perpetual Entrepreneurial Spirit  BGU is well suited to students and faculty who have an entrepreneurial spirit and gifting, who want to be part of something new and exciting, and who seek to successfully navigate the future with its daunting challenges and inevitable crises. In short, tomorrow's leaders must be perpetual entrepreneurs and life-time learners.

    Educational Method Distinctives - How our students learn:

17. Utilizing the City as a Laboratory  The BGU degree program is ripe with opportunities for students to experience life-altering exposure to the cities of the world. Through urban and corporate immersions and "city plunges," we collectively seek innovative solutions to urban problems through business - using the cities themselves as living laboratories.

    • Our E-MBA classes will seek out businesses and practitioners within the teaching context to provide living examples and probing dialogue about the class topic, e.g. VIP tour of Boeing Aircraft, holding class in the Nordstrom Board of Directors room, and extended discussions with top executives of Nordstrom, Boeing and Microsoft.

    • Our MASCE students will take extensive journeys into the inner cities to meet leaders and clients of Christian NGOs and probe the real challenges they face, their methods of facing those challenges and the role of business entrepreneurship in providing solutions and hope. For example, extended city plunges into Pittsburg, PA (East Coast, industrial, Europeans), Fresno, CA (West Coast, migrant workers, Hispanics) and the Lummi Indian Reservation, WA (Northwest, fishermen, Native Americans).

18. Collaborating with Creative Partners  BGUSB is committed to achieving its goals through urban and global partnerships that enhance the student's educational experience and draw on seasoned veterans who daily confront business and urban issues.

19. Building Solid, Practical Skills  Adult learning is not solely about theory. It is about connecting the best thinking of the past and present with practical application to the student's life, business and/or ministry. Students are encouraged to make every class paper and project fulfill a dual benefit: (a) Academic credit for quality work and (b) practical usefulness to some organization for which the student has a passion. Similarly, the capstone options and the entire immersion core of the program are focused on giving the student an experiential learning opportunity directly related to his/her chosen topic.

20. Maximizing Peer Learning  BGU students and graduates are from dozens of countries on every urban continent in the world. They are current or future leaders who bring their experiences, life-lessons and intellectual/spiritual capital to their classmates. The resulting mix is ripe for serious, deep forays into the challenges of business in our time.

21. Utilizing Personal Learning Communities  BGUSB requires all students to have their own Personal Learning Community (PLC) and a mentor. Each PLC member will contractually agree to read all of the student's papers, provide insightful, constructive feed-back into each academic experience, forge deeper relationships with the students and serve as an expanded learning resource.

22. Employing A Variety of Teaching Methods  BGU teaches a familiar array of business skills, but in an unfamiliar way. It is not just what we teach, but how the student learns that is important: BGU uses mixed formats of on-line and face-to-face interaction; rolling cohorts and peer learning; extensive use of site visits and well-informed guest lecturers; deliberate contextualization to cross-cultural, global and future business environments; heavy emphasis on the applicability of biblical ethical values, leadership models, and operational wisdom to business; and extensive reading, reflection and discussion.

23. Adjusting to Culture  Effective business is practiced differently in each culture. To survive and then thrive, it is essential that the business person learn about and adjust to local traditions, practices, power structures (formal and informal), political and legal systems and even the peoples' history and geography. Recognizing this, BGUSB seeks to help its students develop an understanding of and sensitivity to the cultural differences they will encounter. Simultaneously, that must be reconciled with an in-depth understanding of the timeless, universal principles of effective business taught by Jesus. BGUSB does this in many ways, but primarily by developing trusted regional partners who are aligned with BGU values and vision and who can bring a reliable contextual perspective to the class through guest lecturers, site visits and local immersion experiences.

24. Personalizing Each Student's Experience  Above all else, BGU is perhaps best known among our students for providing the highest degree of personalized service to each of them. After serving our Lord, our primary mission - our reason for existence - is serving our students. We are wholly committed to seeing that the educational and relational experience each receives through BGU meets his or her needs and maximizes their individualized personal, professional and spiritual growth. If you doubt it, ask our students!

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Bakke Graduate University (BGU) looks beyond itself to embody the commonly held vision of an international network. BGU serves and is served by a global network of urban leaders and partners and our vision is shaped by this network and our partners. BGU's vision includes the following key components:

1. Emerging and Experienced Transformational Leaders To strengthen current and future Christian leaders who are rooted in the timeless truths of Scripture, understand context and culture and proactively lead in the midst of today's global realities.

2. Whole Gospel, Whole Church, Whole World To connect the work of international Christian leaders through commonly-held, foundational perspectives of Christian theology and practice including: God's heart for the vulnerable, the call to work for justice, the proclamation of the Gospel, the value of cities, and the necessity to personally live in deepening relational community.

3. Kingdom Sharing To distribute resources - finances, leadership, authority, and insight - throughout the church worldwide. Many cultures that are financially-rich are relationship-poor. Regardless of economic trade policies, God has created a worldwide Kingdom economy that forces interdependence within the church world-wide. BGU's vision is to create the relationships, common values, and communication needed to stimulate the flow of resources to fuel a new era of sharing partnership.

4. Perspective and Values Education BGU provides a worldwide model of graduate education that invites students to evaluate and reinvent how they accomplish their work. This model includes education that results in changed values and paradigms, not just added knowledge. It is accomplished through "come and see" experiences that move students outside of comfort zones into new global realities and is committed to not uprooting students from their current ministry locations. BGU is facilitated by global faculty, global communication tools, and student cohorts diverse in church affiliation, gender, experiences and cultures.

5. Accessibility to Life-Long Learning BGU creates pathways for learning that offer front-line practitioners the hope of life-long, credentialed, high-quality education. Students are given tools to help them learn life-long habits of reflection and theological inquiry in the midst of their leadership action. BGU is not seen as a three to four-year relationship, but a life-long equipping partner, advancing them through degrees and serving them with on-going teaching, networking and platforming opportunities.

6. Virtual Services BGU utilizes technology, travel and network relationships to provide a high-level of service to students in various world locations. BGU is not only 'high-tech,' but also 'high-touch,' emphasizing relationships and the use of technology to dispense information more efficiently and bring community together.

7. Personalizing Each Student's Experience Above all else, BGU is perhaps best known among our students for providing the highest degree of personalized service to each of them. After serving our Lord, our primary mission - our reason for existence - serving our students. We are wholly committed to seeing that the educational and relational experience each receives through BGU meets his or her needs and maximizes their individualized personal, professional and spiritual growth. If you doubt it, ask our students!

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BGU's values serve as one of the primary distinctives and attractions to students. They create the means for BGU to participate in a larger network of national and international leaders.

1. We Value the Whole Church In response to Christ's command to seek the unity of the body, BGU celebrates and commits to collaborate with God's Church, risking organizational, personal and worldview changes that are necessary to see successful partnership and transformation across geographic, ethnic, cultural, denominational, and organizational lines. BGU believes that Christ's vision for the cities is bigger than any single denomination and will only be achieved through the wholeness of the Church.

2. We Value Cities For the first time in human history the majority of the world's people live in cities which are God's gift of refuge, hope and common grace for countless millions. In the Bible, there are more than 1,000 passages about cities providing clues regarding how to live as persons and behave as institutions. BGU believes it is essential to value both places and persons and therefore seeks both the spiritual transformation of persons and the social transformation of places, until our Lord comes or calls for us.

3. We Value the Vulnerable The Gospel is for all people. This includes the rich, the successful and the powerful in our cities, although we especially notice in the Bible God's awesome and unrelenting concern for the poor, widows, migrants, unemployed (and underemployed), sick persons, prisoners, aliens, victims and refugees. BGU commits itself to working with the leadership of the city but always in partnership with the vulnerable who are "equally sinful but most often sinned against."

4. We Value Justice Ministry in Christ's Spirit and example celebrates the indwelling presence of God, who through His Holy Spirit begins to deliver people from their personal bondage to sin and guilt, and stimulates processes leading to the transformation of and liberation from oppressive and unjust laws and public structures. BGU calls powerful men and women that the Lord has raised up in every city to partner with the vulnerable so that the Gospel may be understood and the power of the Gospel may be demonstrated in the Church and in the world.

5. We Value Community BGU believes God's Spirit calls and empowers us to community, and that this calling brings both relational and institutional tension. As a result of this tension, ongoing reconciliation is critically important. BGU therefore proposes to be a community of people committed to the vulnerable and committed to a common vision that deals with legitimate conflict in a creative and redemptive manner. For the sake of the Gospel, BGU values diversity and is committed to collaborating with those with whom we may not share total theological agreement.

6. We Value Doing Theology Theological reflection is powerful, relevant and transformational when conducted in response to injustice and human suffering. This requires bold vision, the ability to adapt to rapid global change and urgent collaborative action from individuals, churches and mission agencies to bring the whole Gospel to these cities.

7. We Value the Local Church Churches and local ministries are both signs and agents of God's Kingdom. The goal of BGU is to see God glorified in a transformed city, where both storefront and cathedral, small outreach and large non-profit ministries, embody God's Kingdom purposes. BGU is not only committed to those leaders who develop new ministries, but also to those who believe in and seek the renewal of many historic churches and structures, some centuries old.

8. We Value Leadership Global, urban realities require competent, compassionate leadership in society. Such leaders have been entrusted with much and need continuous nourishment, appreciation, encouragement and accountability to grow and sustain their work. Jesus is the message, the model and the method. Leaders following Him must be servant leaders, giving away control by empowering and resourcing others who are doing Kingdom work to achieve their mission.

9. We Value Missional Education Drawing from the strength of effective indigenous leaders, BGU believes that learning is best accomplished when theology is studied and applied in the context of mission. BGU is committed to providing quality education accessible to historically under-represented leaders, provided in the context of new urban realities.

10. We Value Partnerships We commit to mutually transformational partnerships that reflect God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The primary life of God from eternity is community, reminding us that we are never more like God than when we are in community and relationships. The primary work of God is in partnership where each member of the Trinity has a primary calling as creator, redeemer and sustainer of the universe, but also each has a mutual investment in the work of the whole. The primary structure of God informs our concept of the family existing in unity, equality and mutual submission within a diversity of roles.

11. We Value Holistic Mission We understand that the Trinity is on mission reconciling us to God, to ourselves, to each other and to our world. The Trinity reconciles individuals, relationships, organizations and cultures long before we arrive so that every person and place is holy ground. Thus God's mission in the world delivers us from seeing only one kind of immediate evangelism as the sum of what the Trinity's mission is about. Mission flowing from the agendas of each person of the Trinity delivers us from the tyranny of pragmatics and particularistic views of our own role in mission.

12. We Value Work We understand our purpose, made in the image of God, is to steward God;s creation through our work in community with each other and in submission to God. All work, including work in business, government, churches, non-profit organizations and the family, is valued equally by God as the work reflects His gifts and purpose. In the image of God, we are created to make decisions on behalf of God, held accountable in both process and results by our community and by God

13. We Value Business Education We define business as the organization of God-given gifts in God-honoring community to produce both process and results that steward God's creation. We recognize that local and global business has both growing influence in our world as well as growing crises of purpose and ethics. BGU is committed to providing quality business education that provides essential and practical business skills from the perspective of its sacred purpose.

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• bgu@bgu.edu
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• Phone: 206.264.9100 or 800.935.4723
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• 1013 Eighth Ave. Suite 401
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• Seattle, WA 98104

• © 2009 Bakke Graduate University