Ouachita Stories

Emphasizing that Ouachita Baptist University is educating 1,500 students “who are difference makers now and will be in the years to come,” President Rex Horne told messengers to the 2014 Arkansas Baptist State Convention annual meeting that “Christian faith infuses all that we do” at Ouachita.

Citing one specific example, he noted that “there’s no Southern Baptist college or university that has sent more missionaries through the International Mission Board to the mission field than Ouachita Baptist University.”

Introducing two Ouachita seniors who are difference makers on campus and beyond, Dr. Horne invited Gracie Lundstrum and Jayson Harris to share about service and ministry projects in which they are involved.

Lundstrum, a mass communications and speech communication major from Springdale, Ark., serves as president of the Ouachita Student Foundation, a campus service organization celebrating its 40^th anniversary this year.

Highlighting OSF’s motto of “Students Helping Students,” Lundstrum said members serve as ambassadors for the university, including raising money for student scholarships through Ouachita’s annual Tiger Tunes talent competition.

Noting that the scholarship funds often make the difference in students continuing their education, she said the scholarships are provided each year “through God’s work and His mercy and grace and through the work of countless hands that make Tiger Tunes possible.”

“It has been a humbling experience to be part of OSF,” Lundstrum added. “It has been a rewarding experience to see the lives of those around me changed.”

Bryan McKinney, dean of Ouachita’s Hickingbotham School of Business, shared briefly about Ouachita’s involvement with Enactus. He said the global service organization “brings undergraduate business students together to help them create entrepreneurial business opportunities to elevate the lives of people in need across the world.”

Enactus projects provide “a great way for our students to combine their interest in business and international missions,” he said, adding that recent Enactus projects at Ouachita include helping establish a pregnancy resource center in southwest Arkansas, helping children at the Arkadelphia Boys and Girls Club create college savings accounts through fundraising projects and partnering with a local restaurant to pack 102,000 mobile food packs to provide meals that will feed 277 children in Nicaragua for a year.

McKinney introduced Jayson Harris, a business administration/finance major from Maumelle, Ark., who is serving this year as general manager of Dr. Jack’s Coffee.

“Dr. Jack’s story began with a couple of student trips to Honduras back in 2012 and 2013,” Harris explained. Ouachita established the coffee company with a portion of the profits going to help fund an orphanage in Honduras.

The effort “has been a tremendous project involving the collaboration of students and administrators on campus,” Harris noted.

In addition to the partnership with the orphanage in Honduras, Harris announced that Dr. Jack’s also is partnering with the Arkansas Baptist Children’s Home by providing coffee for Arkansas Baptist churches to sell and serve. “For every cup of Dr. Jack’s coffee that is sold and served in an Arkansas Baptist church, we’ll donate a third of those profits to be used by the Arkansas Baptist Children’s Homes,” Harris said.

“As a student at Ouachita, I’m grateful for the support the Arkansas Baptist State Convention has provided OBU,” he added. “It only makes sense that we would enter into this partnership. We hope and pray that great benefits from this will follow for the Arkansas Baptist Children’s Homes.”

Concluding Ouachita’s report, Dr. Horne expressed appreciation to Arkansas Baptists “for your support, for your prayers, for the students you send our way.”

Citing the decreasing number of evangelical colleges and universities throughout the nation, President Horne said, “We need you perhaps as never before.”

Acknowledging “the assault upon Christians around this world and in our own nation,” he added, “You need us as never before as we continue to challenge young men and young women to go to the mission field, as we encourage them in every walk of life to make a difference for Christ, to serve their neighbor and to serve the nations.”

 

By Trennis Henderson, OBU Vice President for Communications