Liberty names Dondi Costin next president, Jonathan Falwell as chancellor; Leadership Lessons From a Fellow Laborer; Inning by Inning

=Trustees for Liberty University announced in a press release today (March 31) the appointment of retired Maj. Gen. Dondi E. Costin, PhD, as its next president and Jonathan Falwell as chancellor.

Both will assume their duties ahead of the 2023-24 school year, trustees announced at their spring meeting.

Costin, who earned two of his five master’s degrees from Liberty, is the current president of Charleston Southern University (CSU), which is affiliated with the South Carolina Baptist Convention. Falwell is the senior pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg and son of the late Jerry Falwell, who founded both Thomas Road Church and Liberty University.

Like his father, Falwell will continue to serve both as senior pastor at Thomas Road and chancellor at Liberty.

Rick Lance leads the Alabama Baptist state Convention. He’s learned a leadership lesson or two across the years. He shared some thoughts on leadership with Baptist Press. Lance draws from 1 Corinthians when he says,

Trying to imitate someone else in leadership is not effective.
Be yourself!

Nurture and develop the best gifts/qualities in your life, and do the same in others.
Be a developer not a dictator!

People will follow a vision with a strategy.

You can read more of Lance’s thoughts on leadership in the article at BP.

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In a piece in the Baptist Press Toolbox, Florida pastor Dean Inserra talks about an experience at an Atlanta Braves games that taught him about discipleship.

He sat behind a woman and a man and listened to her teach him about baseball. Inning after inning, play after play he had questions and she would explain the game.

Inserra writes, “I probably would have given him an overview of the game before it started and then asked, “Any questions?” With the overload of information I would have given, his head would hurt too much to even know where to begin in asking questions.

How often are we great at making an invitation or giving information, but unwilling to be in it for the long haul? How often do we simply expect people to know things they aren’t supposed to know?

Have you ever considered that people are the same way towards the gospel and church that this man was toward baseball? We need to always make sure people understand. That requires not just an invitation to the game, but nine innings of investment.

Inning by inning with no assumptions. Inning by inning of not using “insider” language. Inning by inning with patience.

Why? Easy. We want people to understand. We want them to experience what we’ve experienced through Christ and in the Church.