Dr. Rich Brown serves as the Vice President for Student Development at Simpson University. Dr. Brown serves on the President’s Cabinet, the President’s Leadership Council, the Critical Incident Response Team, Strategic Enrollment Management Team, and the Strategic Planning Committee of the university. Additionally, he has been a licensed pastor with the Christian and Missionary Alliance since 1969.
Prior to coming to Simpson College in 1993, he pastored Christian and Missionary Alliance churches in Orlando, FL; Menomonie, WI; Arlington VA,; and Shell Lake, WI.
Dr. Brown received a B.A. in History at St. Paul Bible College (now Crown College) in 1969; an M.A. in Christian Education from Bethel Seminary (St. Paul, MN) in 1973; an M.Div. from Bethel Seminary in 1976 with a concentration in Pastoral Counseling; and a D.Min. from Bethel Seminary in 1986. He also wrote Restoring the Vow of Stability published by Christian Publications in 1993.
Prior to assuming his current position as Vice President for Student Development in 2006, Dr. Brown served as the Dean of Simpson Graduate School of Ministry (now A.W. Tozer Seminary from 1996 to 2005 and the Vice President for Spiritual Formation from 2005 to 2006.
Dr. Brown and his wife, Kathy, are proud parents of four grown children; Joni, Juli, Jeffry and Joey, all alumni of Simpson University, and seven wonderful grandchildren.
Trusting God with the Rest of Your Life
In a time when it is all too common to view the Christian life as a series of unrelated spiritual events rather than a long-term journey, too many believers view Christianity as a spiritual sprint that they quit when it becomes tiring or unfulfilling. Trusting God with the rest of your life is a process. It doesn’t happen all at once. While you may decide to follow Christ at a particular point in time, the implication of that decision is lived out over a lifetime.
Often we get to read the testimonies about believers at certain crucial times in their life when they had to lean on God but we do not get as many chances to see what it takes to trust God throughout a lifetime. That can only be done in posthumous biographies. The life of Abraham is a story of a man whose trust in God can be tracked over one hundred years. He wasn’t perfect. He made mistakes. He had to apply his faith to the same areas of life that we struggle with: relationships, money, doubt, guidance, marriage, fear, aging, death. He was trying to learn what it meant to trust God. That is why we can identify with his story.
Those who are in the middle years in their life of faith will be encouraged to stay the course. Others whose relationship with God may be fading because they never understood what it took to have a faith that would last a lifetime will be encouraged by the story of Abraham.
