Most people travel to the North Georgia mountains for her beauty and tranquility, to find a place of respite from their everyday lives. The natural beauty of God’s created order is on full display through its diverse wildlife and rugged topography, through its mountains and waterfalls.
In the midst of this serenity is the campus of Truett-McConnell College, a 240-acre campus that has been a home away from home for thousands of alumni. Yet for most of the College’s nearly seventy-year history, the campus was perceived as the secret of the mountains, a Christian community of unknown to most of the outside world.
Today, this reality is changing as quickly as the landscape of the campus. What was once a small, two-year college with a few hundred students has been transformed into a college with more than 1600 students that now offers four-year degrees in business, Christian Studies, education, English, history, music, nursing, psychology, biology, and world missions. Indeed, the College now offers a Master of Arts in Theology degree with classes both on the main campus as well as in Alpharetta.
The unrequited calm on campus is now replaced with the sounds of construction, complete with the repeated beeping of heavy equipment to the echoing sounds of hammering on walls. These are welcome sounds as they convey the message that more students are coming to the mountains for a very special and eternal reason – to hear the voice of God challenge a new generation to be His witnesses in a troubled time.
With the construction of a 70,000 square foot Student Recreation Center and the planning of a new academic building, you can imagine how thrilling it is to be on campus. But these are just buildings made of brick and mortar. They are not the future; they house the future as students flood the hallways and classrooms.
Ultimately, the most exciting sounds on campus are not the reverberations coming from the erection of new buildings; the most exciting sounds come in our weekly chapels when students bow their knees and surrender their life to Christ. Or when a student hears the voice of God calling them into missions or nursing or education or ministry.
What makes Truett-McConnell College special is not something new; it’s something much older than our beautiful campus. It is the simple Gospel of Jesus Christ. Thank you for investing in the next generation to raise up a new generation that we pray may see an old-fashioned Great Awakening. It is our greatest hope – the radical transformation of the soul.
Truth is Immortal.