Excellence: The Steps of a Righteous Ma

By Adam Palmer

Tulsa, OK - They may not carry guitars or perform elaborately choreographed dance numbers, but make no mistake: when it comes to the academic arena, Wonsuk and Julie Ma are rock stars.

The pair has followed a circuitous path on their way to the theology department at Oral Roberts University, but it is one that they've seen as God-ordained every step of the way.

Wonsuk and Julie were both born in Korea, then Wonsuk had stops in early adulthood in Vietnam, the Philippines, and the United States before the couple found their calling in the Philippines, where they served as academic missionaries for a decade. From there, the Lord called them to Oxford, England for the next decade of their lives and ministry before finally calling them in 2016 to their next great challenge: Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Why here? Because of the global vision of Oral Roberts, especially as it's being carried out in the modern day.

"I think the vision of the president and leaders, to make the university a global center of research, to strengthen the global spirit-empowered movement," Dr. Ma says, "and not just training people, but training people at the top level of leadership through a Ph.D. program: all of this was quite attractive to me."

"But personally, both my wife and I served in England at an incredible global institution, serving the wide Christian world," he continues. "I led an institution that offers a Ph.D. program to more than 120 students at a given time, so I felt that those experiences can be quite valuable, and we were also praying for the next phase of our life to serve in a charismatic community."

That community, it turns out, was ORU. Dr. Ma, now the Distinguished Professor of Global Christianity for the Graduate School of Theology and Ministry, has been tasked with no small feat: to create and sustain a Ph.D. program in theology, something that has been tried twice already at ORU.

"The vision is to bring the global dimension of Christianity and the study, so I was brought," he says. "It is being developed in a very intense process, [and] our goal is very ambitious: to launch this in the fall term of 2018. It's challenging but doable."

The challenge rests upon approval processes from the Association of Theological Schools and the Higher Learning Commission, but Dr. Ma remains confident that these hurdles will be overcome on the way to a more expansive program.

"My vision is not just to have one top research degree program but that we'll become a catalyst to create a research culture, a dimension to this fine university."

Dr. Ma aims to accomplish this through the relaunch of ORU's defunct theology journal Spiritus, a peer-reviewed theology tome, as well as the possible introduction of a publishing imprint to focus on producing literature and textbooks, ORU Press.

"The function of a university is to train people," Dr. Ma says, "but also another very important function is the creation of knowledge. The university has been doing brilliantly in the training, but what the president wishes, and rightly so, is to make the university a premiere thought-leader, especially for the global spirit-empowered movement, than just producing workers."

He continues: "We want to create spaces where different thoughts, reflections, and research will be encouraged… It's not just ORU faculty members who will show to the world what we are thinking and doing, but it will also be a space where the world will come with their thoughts and experiences. So we want to promote exchanges, interactions, discussion, debates, and at the end, it will be a process of new knowledge."

As they lay all these plans, Dr. Ma and Julie, who also joined ORU as an Associate Professor of Intercultural Studies in the Undergraduate School of Theology and Ministry, are finding their footing in their new school community and hometown.

"What we really like is the community here at ORU and the vibrancy we feel from the students and chapel and all the interaction," Dr. Ma says. "We just love it. We still need to discover what we're going to hate about Tulsa, but we haven't found anything yet!"

###