Down to Business

Image by Nattanan Kanchanaprat from Pixabay

No, the title doesn’t mean that business is “down” in the sense of being mundane or something less than academic. In fact, a proper view of business is centered on the biblical concept of stewardship. I could title this interview with Dr. Andrew Cropsey “Better Biblical Business.”

What follows is an approximate transcript of the podcast on this topic:

Mike Gray: Welcome to this, the 7th season of the Deep and Durable Learning Podcast. I'm your host, Mike Gray. I have 45 years of teaching experience in higher education. I've taught over 10,000 students. Many of my students would say that I taught them how to think. I've also been involved in faculty development for over 30 years, and many of those faculty participants would say that my approach to teaching was personally and professionally transformational. This season will be a series of interviews with faculty whose teaching has been transformed. My guests will come from a variety of academic disciplines, but they're all applying the principles of transformational teaching.

I welcome today, Andrew Cropsey, who teaches in the Bob Jones University School of Business. Thanks for coming.

Andrew Cropsey: It's great to be here. I appreciate the amount of work you put into this ongoing effort.

Mike Gray: It's my pleasure! Let's get acquainted from the academic side because I'm sure some of the personal side is going to come out with some other questions, but just up front, what is your area of expertise?

Andrew Cropsey: Okay, I am a professor in accounting and associate, I think is the rank I'm at now. And I've been teaching I'm starting my 20th year at Bob Jones, and I did a class in a community college before that. So that's kind of the extent of a class. Meaning I taught it! I found out I wanted to teach by trying out an evening class.

Mike Gray: I did not know that. That could be a tough crowd sometimes.

Andrew Cropsey: Well, the sad thing, I had a student who told me, you're the best teacher I've had, and I thought, that's terrible. So that was like, well, I like this, I like doing this.

Mike Gray: That might be part of it, that students kind of sometimes have low expectations.

Andrew Cropsey: That was true.

Mike Gray: You shouldn't expect too much, and we won't expect much either.

Andrew Cropsey: There's a deal going on. Yeah, exactly.

Mike Gray: The art of the deal, I guess. So, What’s your professional preparation? What degree?

Andrew Cropsey: Okay, so I did an undergraduate degree at Bob Jones in accounting, and then I wasn't sure. I was considering going into ministry and wanted to pursue that, so came back for a grad degree. My wife and I, we'd just been married, and I started in seminary in the Master of Divinity program.

And then that first year we concluded, the Lord was not calling me to go into church ministry, and I thought that it would be good to take my public accounting opportunities and just say, okay, Lord, I should at least try to get the CPA. So, I went to Dr. Thurman Wisdom's office and said, what can I leave here with after a year of seminary classes? And he said, well, we have this Master of Arts in Teaching Bible. You'll need to take some graduate education classes, and I'll substitute. He substituted things that I didn't know could be substituted. I found out that Deans may have something of a magic wand when it comes to that. And I thought he was very wise. His name was Dr. Wisdom. So, he helped me get that Master of Arts. Basically, I only had, like, two classes left after the semester, but I had to sign up for graduate education classes, and my parents were in Christian education. And one of the things I was convinced of was that I didn't want to be in Christian education. I thought, I will never need these classes.

So, I think God has a sense of humor. So, I did that. Then we moved to Atlanta, was there for four years, earned my CPA, took, you know, passed the CPA exam, earned the license, and let's see, a couple of years later in 2004, returned we lived in Des Moines, Iowa, for a while. After living in Atlanta, we're four years in Atlanta, two years in Des Moines, and then we returned to Bob Jones. And I started an MBA program somewhere around 2007, I think, finished that in 2009, something along those lines. I then decided to start a PhD program in 2013 and was able to finish that early in 2018. And so that was by the grace of God. I had a boss who wanted me to get that done. My wife was 100% supportive, and without those two people, it would not have happened.

Mike Gray: So, what's that degree in?

Andrew Cropsey: It is from North Central University. It's a PhD in Business administration with a specialization in Advanced Accounting. A nice long name. Okay, so I would just say, what's your degree in? I just say accounting, unless someone really wants me to explain it.

Mike Gray: Let me say that one of my contacts is actually a daughter who's a numbers person, and she got a CPA. She views every aspect of life as an opportunity to create an Excel spreadsheet, kind of the major tool for organizing everything.

Andrew Cropsey: Yes.

Mike Gray: And yet she's extraordinarily people-oriented, so much so that she became a CFP, a certified financial planner to help other people. Similarly, I know man in my church who actually keeps the books for our church who characterizes himself as a people person in an accountant's body.

Maybe that plays into some stereotypes. Some people characterize accountants as derisively, as bean counters, which perpetuates, again, kind of a jaundiced stereotype of what an accountant does. So accounting is a subset of business, but perhaps it involves different abilities and inclinations from other areas of business. Your PhD is actually a blending, right? How would you sort that out? Do you agree that accountants approach business differently than entrepreneurs or managers, or is that an artificial distinction?

Andrew Cropsey: Well, there is lots of blending. As, you know, many people start in one place and end up in a very different one. I'll say that part of the background I'm going to come from is that my PhD dissertation, I was approved to study personalities, and so I had a theory that we were using. It's related to the well-known Five Factor Theory of Personality. But this one was a 6th factor that added one called Honesty-Humility and there was support for it in the literature, but nobody had looked at do accountants have any? And I thought I would be honest.

Mike Gray: An honest accountant would be good, I think!

Andrew Cropsey: It would be a happy thing to study and so I was able to survey accounting students. One of the personality characteristics is extroversion and introversion, as you mentioned before. And the stereotype very much is of the introvert stereotype. But the actual numbers in the population do not bear that out. We certainly have a majority who are not introverts in accounting and that's probably true in most other fields that are stereotypically introverted.

Obviously, there's nothing wrong with being an introvert. Oh my, no. I have different things to say about all that. But in the population somewhere north of half of the population is extroverted and it might be as much as three fourths of the population is extroverted. That means that we have to teach all kinds of students in our classroom. We need to have opportunities for our students to talk to each other, to communicate, because human beings need to be able to communicate. And there's no such thing as going out into a job where you don't have to talk to human beings. And especially if you want to lead as we have in our corporate slogan or as our university slogan of Learn. Love. Lead, then communication is obviously one of the great things—the skill you need to have in order to do so. And we like to encourage our accounting majors. If they don't have other inclinations, we'll tell them, hey, take more communication classes and that helps. I don't care who you are, that helps you.

And I will say that accountants do have an approach. That because we do look at the numbers regularly, we are happy to think about things financially. Is this activity making money? Is this activity costing money? That's what we're sensitized to that because of our training. So, we talk about it all the time, so we're hypersensitive about it. That gives us perspective on really the use of time and resources. There are many times, though, that we would consider it a mistake—that happens very regularly in business where you if I can use quotes—where you put the accountants in charge. And that can be a major mistake in a business where all they focus on is efficiency, but they forget about effectiveness.

Are you actually working on the goal or the values of the organization? Are you fulfilling your mission? Where we can say, hey, forget the mission, we're going to save a lot of money and that doesn't help you. That does not get you where you need to go across the board. And so that would be where I would say that would be a typical accounting profession. Mistake is to assume that the costs are everything and the revenue is everything. And so, we would say, no, we need to have a healthy organization. We need to fulfill the mission. And by the way, yes, we need to conserve resources, and we need to be wise in our stewardship in order to accomplish the mission.

Mike Gray: That's helpful. So, if my sources are correct, business education can only be traced back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries as an academic pursuit.

Andrew Cropsey: That may be.

Mike Gray: One of my sources is Chat GPT. So, we know that . . .

Andrew Cropsey: Well, I like to talk about something older than that.

Mike Gray: I think some of that's looking at when schools of business were established, particularly US schools, that kind of thing. Not that anybody was not approaching it with some systematic sense.

Andrew Cropsey: The CPA license has been around about 100 years, something like that, in the US. Yes, it's a somewhat young profession, as far as that goes, but the discipline is 500 years old. And we date that back to a book written by a man named Luca Pacioli in northern Italy, if I'm recalling my details correctly, who apparently was a friend of Leonardo DaVinci. And he wrote a math textbook. And one chapter was how the merchants of this area handle their math. And that was the beginning of double entry accounting. But he did not claim to have invented it, he merely recorded it.

Mike Gray: Okay, so he was reporting on something that was in existence already.

Andrew Cropsey: Who knows how long, that's right. Perhaps a century or two before that. I don't believe it goes back to the Babylonians or anything like that. I don't think we have evidence of that, but sometime in there.

Mike Gray: Even granting that, which is news to me, there's a large gap in there.

Andrew Cropsey: It was very practical, very trade oriented, very commercial.

Mike Gray: Right?

Andrew Cropsey: Very much. Not a deep intellectual exercise to figure out if your dollars two plus two equals four. We're not yet [sophisticated]; it was very practical.

Mike Gray: Is there then a way the business field is divided up these days? Is there a sense in which business became an application that emerged from, say, some other disciplines? You mentioned math, for instance, or maybe something like sociology that there's this how do we appeal to people? You mentioned communication courses a while ago. So, is it kind of like there's this practical bent to convergence of applications from other fields that makes business essentially multidisciplinary in nature?

Andrew Cropsey: Yes. So, the way I like to think about it—you are absolutely right that there are many different ways a person can look at business. I like to emphasize to my students, and this is because of the way I think about it, is that accounting, I believe, is more related to law because of our rules that we make, and they're somewhat arbitrary. Laws are essentially arbitrary in some respects. Accounting rules, generally accepted accounting that's what we call as GAP, Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. We go, well, generally accepted by whom? Well, us, obviously.

So, it's somewhat arbitrary, but you have to look at the text of what the guiding rules are, and you have to be able to apply them to these situations. And we make cases. And so, we don't want to practice law. That's our friends, the attorneys, who we owe a great deal to. But I don't want to claim that we're math either. That's the first thing I tell my students. That's probably the biggest fear of the largest number of people walking into an accounting classroom. They think that it's math, and one of the first things we'll tell them is, no, this is not math. I will be happy to have my colleagues in math—actually, I would be embarrassed to claim that in front of them. They would not be happy with me.

Mike Gray: That's why Excel is a beautiful thing.

Andrew Cropsey: Excel is very useful. Everyone can use Excel. You can set up formulas. It's one of the safest recommendations we can make to our students. If you take an Excel class and get an Excel certification, you will use it. So, it's very practical.

Mike Gray: Now, God moved you into teaching.

Andrew Cropsey: That's right.

Mike Gray: And this podcast is called Deep and Durable Learning. So, is that where you started in the teaching profession? You mentioned your community college experience, and your self-evaluation was not real strong.

Andrew Cropsey: I enjoyed teaching. I didn't want to hold myself out. I just had a CPA and taught a night class. And there's no way that you would think of yourself as some great teacher and that you shouldn't. But to have a student react very positively, and the other students were at least not super negative, and then thinking for my own self, I found that that was where I wanted to go.

I was working in recruiting at the time, so I was dealing with people all the time and talking about accounting tasks and responsibilities, that sort of thing. That kind of sealed it for me. I was looking for the Lord's will, and that experience at that community college in Des Moines was a confirmation for me that this is the right path for me to go. And so that was the Lord shedding some light on my path and then coming to Bob Jones and being able to teach. One of the first things I started in the School of Applied Studies in 2004, and that was open until 2009. So those students, when I walk into that classroom and I look at them as bearers of the image of God, and they are practical people, and they don't want me to explain all the things in the textbook necessarily. They want me to get to some immediate applications as quickly as possible.

I learned that I couldn't teach the students in my classroom the way I enjoyed learning as a student myself, and I had to change my approach. And I learned a number of things. I had to polish off a lot of rough edges in order to effectively serve my students. And so that's how I got started. And then sometime, I think it was around 2010, I ran into your team. That was, I think, possibly the first or second go around of the Excellence in Teaching Institute.

Mike Gray: Second time.

Andrew Cropsey: Second time in 2010. And so as soon as we started that, I thought, wow, this is what I want. I want to get better as a teacher. And so, I definitely grabbed on to the things that you guys were saying. I can't remember all of them, of course, at this time, which is one of the things we learned. You cannot expect your students to learn everything. So, what are the big things? And let's make sure that you get those big things in front of them in very memorable ways. I can remember that.

Mike Gray: So, what was your initial reaction to those ideas? You said that's what you were looking for.

Andrew Cropsey: I could tell that it was going to be immediately practical. Just the idea that students are not like their teachers in certain respects. That those of us who are on the faculty need to understand that we are kids who love school, and most of the students in our classrooms are not those kinds of people. And if we are going to humbly serve them, we need to take that into account. You need to understand that just because you love it doesn't mean just because your enthralling rabbit trail is really cool for you does not mean that that is benefiting everybody else in your classroom. Now, maybe at lunch, that's great. And so, you have to have your objectives and you have to stick with them, and that is how you best serve your students.

Mike Gray: Yeah. And it's a student orientation that I think has been so often—even to the present—missing. We talk about faculty development in terms of teachers getting ready for the semester rather than student learning that needs to take place during the semester.

Andrew Cropsey: Right.

Mike Gray: And some people are really bothered by a term like student-centered learning. But after all, it's only the students who are actually tasked with learning. I learn to serve my students, not learn to puff myself up.

Andrew Cropsey: Right? Yes. So, this thing of teaching is not just hanging out in its own void.

Mike Gray: Right.

Andrew Cropsey: It exists for a purpose, and it's connected. And I, as a person, am connected to this learner who is with me. If I'm doing it correctly—I could see that someone would be a little bit leery of student-centered if you take it too far. By that, what we mean is that we're lowering our standards and we're not, in fact, requiring the best out of these students to maximize their own gifts and capacity, then, yes, I have a problem with that. If we're going to serve others. We have to be student-oriented.

Mike Gray: Yes. Another distortion of that is making up the curriculum based on what students want to hear. Students don't have enough experience to know what they ought to hear. If teaching is supposed to transform students, then it's going to have to come from outside the students’ skulls and change their view.

Andrew Cropsey: I've witnessed this week in my first ever accounting EDUCamp with my colleagues and other people participating with these campers. They are learning things they've never heard before. They may have heard 30 or 40 brand new things they've never thought about today from a couple of my colleagues, and they would not know what they need to learn. They don't know we're here to help them grow. And they have all had positive reactions to the things going, “oh, that is good.” But they wouldn't have known it was good until we presented it.

Mike Gray: What's the biggest principle about teaching and learning that distinguishes the way you teach today compared to the way, say, you taught in 2009 (or pick a date out there)?

Andrew Cropsey: I will say that the default that runs through my mind very regularly is that I need to teach answers to questions, and I need to provoke the students to care about the question, and that is my default.

I also keep it short, just practically speaking, because of the weariness and the inability to focus that students tend to have. I will try to keep things short, and probably one of my most frequent things that I'll have my students do in class is to do a quick discussion with their neighbor next to them or the team they have. I typically teach in a classroom that has three people per table, and so when the class is full, then I've got teams of three. I tend to think that teams of two is better, but that's not what I get to choose. In business, it's very easy to say, you need to network. I want you to get to know the people around you. I'm going to ask you to speak with the people around you pretty regularly. And so, I invite my students to get to know each other, and they are not quite to the level of doing a lot of group projects, again, at a low level, but that's what I do. I will have questions that I expect them to ask, and if I could sense that they're not really enthralled with what I'm doing at the moment, I'll get them to talk to each other about it.

Mike Gray: Thinking behind the scenes as you plan for a class period. I assume there's been some thought about those questions, and they're not generated necessarily on the fly, although some of them may be. Big questions that fairly represent the thinking of the discipline are the result of your, let's call it big picture thinking that has, over time, isolated some of the core ideas that are used to function in this environment to solve the kinds of problems that people expect accountants can step up and provide some help on. So, generating those questions is not a simple matter. It's much easier to deliver volume and I'm not talking about acoustic volume, right, volume of information. Buried somewhere in there may be some ideas, but they're not made explicit.

An economist, E. F. Schumacher, made this rather blunt statement: “Any intelligent fool” . . . think about that for a minute—"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”

What do you think? Do you agree with Schumacher?

Andrew Cropsey: Yes, that seems generally correct. That one of the things that is most valuable, I think, in the profession of accounting, and presumably for human beings anywhere, is that those of us that are tasked with looking at the details of any situation are going to be benefiting the ones who are overwhelmed by the many tasks in front of them and don't have much reflection time. And I'm thinking of the relationship of an accountant with a chief executive in . . .

Mike Gray: An organization who doesn't want all those spreadsheets.

Andrew Cropsey: I've seen this multiple times with client work. It's very common to have this big boardroom table, different vice presidents sitting around. Maybe perhaps the founder of the company who is still the CEO (came up through sales). And you have a VP of operations, and you've got people people, and then you have your accountant who's very much wants to go right down that road of, let's talk about the numbers. And they put—I can quote a chief financial officer that I spoke with about this—He says, “I put that Excel spreadsheet up on the screen, and all these guys are looking at it, and they just glaze over in about two sentences.”

And I say yes, that's a problem. So that's challenging. I have become convinced that one of the best things I can help my students to do is to learn how to present information in a way that's engaging and that matters. And one of the phrases I learned in EITI was to not answer questions that no one is asking, and that applies in boardrooms or in conference rooms. And so, to try to help students with that, we have different things that we need to do, but to make the complex simple is actually valuable, very valuable.

And you might say, so those of us that are on the thorough side and the detailed side. But what if you make it too simple? Well, actually, when you have an executive that has more to do than they can get done (and they do not get it all done every day), they don't get their list done, you can have thousands of emails in your inbox. They're filtering the importance. If you're walking into that environment, you have to make sure that you're going to talk about the things you know are most important to them. And you have a short amount of time, and you can't have too much. If you have too much to say, they will not listen to most of it. And to me, that sounds a lot like our teaching problem, very similar. So, it's like, wow. It's like almost like you got human beings with the same problems in different areas.

Mike Gray: So why do you think Schumacher calls it courage? It takes courage to move in the direction of simplification.

Andrew Cropsey: Well, it's easy for me to just take my spreadsheet that I'm comfortable with and make you look at it, and I'll say, look, see this? And I can point to different places on it. Obviously, the result is this. And what I'm doing is leaving you behind. You have no certainty that I've done any kind of correct calculation, or you can't verify. You're in unfamiliar territory. Everything's unfamiliar. And I think a natural reaction for most people is that you just kind of shut down, going, “well, I can't agree with that because I can't verify it.” And obviously, this person is giving me no time to actually agree, so I'm just going to shut down. I'm not going to agree. I'm going to go somewhere else mentally because this is hurting my brain too much.

And I've actually heard, I talked with Dr. Pettit [former BJU President] about this problem on one occasion. On the sidewalk. Naturally on the sidewalk, that's where you talk about very important things. He told me that he had something like that happen once, and he just said, “hey, can we stop? I lost you on the first sentence. We need to start over.” And he was saying that to someone who was making a presentation with Excel. I think that's courageous to take control of a meeting and say, look, that's not using our time well, we're not going anywhere productive. Let's stop right there.

Mike Gray: Why do you think then what we're talking about is still atypical. That we're typically actually engaged in answering questions that we're able to answer, but that nobody else is asking at this point? Why do you think that continues to be the default?

Andrew Cropsey: Well, good teachers are rare, and I think to learn this, there's not enough of that. I'll say this, I answer the question all the time. Why do we learn accounting in a classroom at a university? And the typical accountant, that's not what they want to do. They want to be productive. They have tasks. They have things that must get done for people. And stopping to explain to a younger person who does not know is hard for them.

It's challenging to teach young people. And so, consequently, it's a pretty valuable, in my opinion, a pretty valuable and rare thing when you can productively teach someone. Get them from a zero to one in your field, and then they can be productive and self-funding somewhat.

One of the problems in business is we can't just hire anybody off the street who doesn't know anything because they're unproductive. It costs us too much to get them to be productive. And so, you can only hire people that will produce some kind of productivity for you at some level, and you can bring along someone who has a basic level. And so that's what we're trying to do, is to get them from no productivity to a basic level of productivity. Then you can start your career. I think that's challenging. Most accountants are gifted to get their tasks done, and there's not that many of us. In addition to the shortage of accountants, there's also a shortage of accounting professors. That's something we're very conscious of. It's difficult for us to find colleagues.

Mike Gray: So, we haven't used the word, but I think you're saying that if we went to an apprenticeship type model, it probably wouldn't work very well because most accountants can let you watch what they're doing, but they don't have ability to articulate in a helpful way why they're doing what they're doing.

Andrew Cropsey: Yeah, and I don't want to throw all of my colleagues in the profession under a bus, so to speak. But it's challenging. It's challenging to have the patience when you're used to being highly productive yourself. That's challenging for anyone.

I'll say this in business, we'll say that delegation, you should be able to delegate. If somebody can do something that's about 80% as well as you can do it, well, it's pretty challenging for a lot of people to do that because I can imagine well, what does that mean? You're getting 20% of my stuff wrong? That's intolerable. I can't have that. And so, I think it's a challenge because we do consider our internships. Those are essentially apprenticeships, and those are prepared. They are prepared. That's three years of class by the time they're doing that, or two and a half years.

Mike Gray: So maybe there's a parallel there with coaching. There are very few athletes that performed at a high level in a sport and can turn around and be effective as coaches who try and get the most out of players. Everybody wants to win the game, but the best thing to do is to build players to their potential. And there are very few coaches, which is why, if we're talking economics, like no faculty member gets paid, like the football coach. There aren't very many of those.

Andrew Cropsey: That's right. I mean, I'm thinking Division One football coaches or any of the major sports, yeah, they can't find enough of them. They're going to win to get your team out there to win. And I think I like that coaching analogy maybe a little bit better, that it's challenging. And I think a lot of our professionals are the players, and that's what they're best at. And we need everyone.

Mike Gray: We're not demeaning their profession.

Andrew Cropsey: We need every single one of them. Right.

Mike Gray: A lot of times a player turns around and thinks he's going to be effective as a coach, and he lasts for a season or two, gets fired a couple of times, and that's the end of his dream job. He learned that he's got to do something else.

Andrew Cropsey: I learned it in sales is that nobody actually knows how you're going to do. We do have to try it, and we have folks that try it and doesn't fit for them, and some that just—that don't try it.

Mike Gray: Well, let's talk about one practical application that you've actually already mentioned about the way you conduct class, and that is the use of questions to drive the class. And you mentioned, actually, that if the question doesn't seem to be getting traction, you're going to take that on yourself. How do you make questions compelling to students? There's not a 100% success rate, so you have to circle back around if you see this is just not accomplishing what I thought this question would do. But strategically, you've constructed questions that will allow you to start helping students construct the core ideas that they're going to be using all the time. And yet some of the questions don't seem to work. So how do you do that? How do you make a question compelling, either first shot, second, or third shot?

Andrew Cropsey: Well, I'm not sure how to do it on the first shot. I listen to feedback from students. So, I think where any of us would be would be that you try to do on your first try. You try to do what seems clear to you, but you definitely have to listen. And you listen to the feedback, and I think the student feedback.

I know a number of professors will do something like, I do a three by five card at the beginning of the semester. What are you hoping to learn from this class? And you get those answers, and we've got reflection questions as we do assignments. What do you think you learned from this? That question, what do you think you learned from this? And do you have suggestions for what would work better? And so, when I look at that, that's not the only thing, because I do have to bring in what do we know is important in this field? I do listen to what students say and the most common reaction I get from my—I have a family budget project that I have students do at the end of my Intro to Accounting class. So, they have to do a big spreadsheet. They have to show me how much money will you make this month, in one month, and how much will you be spending in all these categories? And probably the most common reaction that they'll give me is, “I had no idea that it was this expensive to be an adult.”

Mike Gray: Good to learn now.

Andrew Cropsey: Everybody wants them to learn that now, not anytime later. So that kind of feedback where they say, wow, they give me a wow and AHA! I think, okay, that made a difference for a number of these students. It's a very common reaction. And so, I would look at that as that's a keeper. I want to keep that assignment. I want to keep approaching it from that way. And I've had other reactions, other assignments, when students say, I think I would have learned just about the same thing if we'd have done about half of the work. And I listen to that, sure, because why waste anybody's time? I don't need to waste my time grading things. I don't need to waste their time working on stuff. They have presumably other valuable things to do. So, we'll try to put in valuable assignments that they react well to, that it appears that they learn something.

Mike Gray: Maybe we don't have enough background for this, but can you give us a concrete example of a question? You've talked about a project okay, I'm all in.

Andrew Cropsey: Oh, yes.

Mike Gray: But a question that's aimed at getting students involved deeply in thinking like an accountant.

Andrew Cropsey: I'll tell you, when we're talking about money, a basic problem that many students have is to just leave God out of how they think about money. And one of the main things that I'm going to teach them from a biblical perspective is that money is not the main thing. It's a stewardship. We've been given these resources and it's part of accounting to safeguard the resources, especially when we have a fiduciary responsibility to someone else who is presumably our employer, then we safeguard those. But it's not because of a legal punishment or because of an employer punishing us. We would think of, I have a relationship with God is my reason for being a steward.

The biggest problem students have is thinking of all the things they're going to earn, that income they're going to make as just being theirs. And so, from a biblical worldview perspective, that's probably one of the things that I want to make sure we address. Of course, many of our students walk in with a correct perspective on that, but many do not. And then many of them are wondering if they really have to do the work. That can probably apply in any field, but we have to convince them that, yes, this is how much work it takes in order to get to the result that we want.

Mike Gray: How do you think you could use a question to separate out the mindset of stewardship from the money being the important thing in its own right?

Andrew Cropsey: I have one where I have a couple of lectures where we talk about what does the Bible say about money? And of course, the Bible says, many; many more than you can cover in 100 minutes. Yeah, it's amazing how much it says. But there is a passage where I make a fairly strong case that students should strongly consider that the tithe is a valid consideration. And I don't go all the way I'll say I won't go all the way to saying you have to give 10%. But I come really close because I believe the New Testament comes. That's where where you end up, where it says, in the same manner as they did in the Old Testament, this is how you should support the work of the ministry now.

And I say, so what do you think? And I get students to talk about it, and we will talk about it. And I have students who will tell me, “No, I don't think 10% is the line.” I don't think that's an obligation. So, they consider it, and they do have to think about that. And so, it's like, well, I want to point you to Scripture, and I'll ask you to consider this is part of your life in the future. You need to be asking the Holy Spirit to get you to the right place, wherever that is, and you need to be confident in your answer.

Mike Gray: That's a good one. That's a stewardship orientation. I mean, no secular businessman would just automatically say, sure, we could take 10% right off the top, and it won't touch our bottom line at all.

Andrew Cropsey: When I was doing taxes, I found out as a second-year tax accountant that my tithe and my attempts to tithe, I had a larger charitable contributions line on my own tax return than most of my clients who were making lots of money ever had on their tax return. I never told anybody anything that other than a general statement like this, but that was eye opening for me.

Mike Gray: And that does get to, I think, the heart of what it means to be a steward. You cannot serve, as the New Testament says, you can't serve God and money.

Andrew Cropsey: No, you're going to have to make . . .

Mike Gray: Your decision about what's the priority here.

 Well, that's helpful, and I'm sure there are many other things that we could talk about if time permitted, but I do appreciate you making time in your schedule, Andrew. I hope you have many more productive years in the classroom. Appreciate your influence on your students.

Andrew Cropsey: I appreciate your input and the effect that your work in this area has had on me, and I'm glad to help.

Mike Gray: Thank you. I appreciate your kind comment.

Andrew Cropsey: Thank you very much.