Seattle Pacific University is a Christian university fully committed to engaging the culture and changing the world by graduating people of competence and character, becoming people of wisdom, and modeling grace-filled community.
In May, I received my first welcome gift as I prepared to move across the country to become the president of Seattle Pacific University. SPU’s School of Theology sent stickers of Alexander and Adelaide Beers, the University’s first President and First Lady.
Not to be outdone, The Falcon sent me stickers of the student newspaper and a camera icon. I didn’t know I’d be starting a sticker collection in my new job, but the mementos are meaningful to me. They represent Seattle Pacific’s history, and they signify the importance of our ongoing commitment to understanding who we are and documenting our stories of God’s faithfulness.
The Bible tells the story of the Israelites crossing the Jordan river into the Promised Land. “Choose twelve men from among the people, one from each tribe, and tell them to take up twelve stones from the middle of the Jordan, from right where the priests are standing, and carry them over with you and put them down at the place where you stay tonight.” (Joshua 4:2–3).
Those 12 stones of remembrance testified to God’s provisions and enduring commitments to his people. “He said to the Israelites, ‘In the future when your descendants ask their parents, ‘What do these stones mean?’ tell them, ‘Israel crossed the Jordan on dry ground.’ For the Lord your God dried up the Jordan before you until you had crossed over. The Lord your God did to the Jordan what he had done to the Red Sea when he dried it up before us until we had crossed over.’” (Joshua 4:21–24).
As I assume the mantle of leadership at Seattle Pacific, those stickers remind me that I share the commitment of the Beers and every subsequent president, to educate students for lives of service in God’s kingdom. The work of Seattle Pacific University is anchored in our 132-year history, and we look forward to how God will make a way for us to cross over to all that is ahead. The stickers I received as a welcome speak to the hopefulness of our community and the importance of the education we are offering. Our commitment to education teaches us to explore and investigate even as we tell our stories to remind us of God’s endless love and provisions for us.
Find out more about Seattle Pacific’s enduring commitments at spu.edu/7ECs.
With Prayer and Optimism, Deana
L. Porterfield President
Seattle Pacific University’s engineering program ranked in the top 100 of U.S. News & World Report’s “Best Undergraduate Engineering Programs.”
SPU’s senior design capstone course, with its unique sequence of interdisciplinary engineering subjects, mimics a high-tech incubator requiring students to work in diverse teams to develop the professional skills they need for success in the real world.
For the seventh year in a row, Seattle Pacific was named a “Best National University” in U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings for 2022–23.
Student-faculty ratio: 12:1
3,114
202 Undergraduate academic programs offered
19
Average undergraduate class size
SPU also ranked 33rd in “Best Value School,” which incorporates the overall ranking but credits schools for the amount of financial support made available to students with need. Currently, 96% of SPU students receive some form of financial aid. 32.60%
Students who complete an internship
My most impactful class in my major was probably Circuits 1. It sparked my interest (pun intended) in the field and confirmed my decision to pursue an electrical engineering degree.”
— KELLIE COBB CLASS OF 2021
On an unusually warm, spring day in 1923, students and faculty of Seattle Pacific College gathered to perform Handel’s Messiah. It wasn’t the first concert performed at the school. It was, however, the first concert of the school’s newly formed Music Department.
Over the past century, music has led the Seattle Pacific community in moments of praise, lament, worship, and reflection. For its 100th anniversary, SPU’s Music Department joined the Northwest Symphony Orchestra and ChoralSounds Northwest for a special joint concert at Seattle’s premiere music venue, Benaroya Hall, in April 2023.
Professor of Theology Doug Koskela’s book
The Radiance of God received the 2022 Smith/Wynkoop Book Award from the Wesleyan Theological Society. The award recognizes a recent publication of distinction in a research area related to the Wesleyan/ Holiness tradition. The award was presented at the society’s annual meeting in Wilmore, Kentucky, on March 3, 2023.
The M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust presented its scientific research award to SPU’s Professor and Chair of Biology Cara Wall-Scheffler ’00.
The 2022 Lynwood W. Swanson Scientific Research Award noted Wall-Scheffler’s “internationally recognized work uncoupling and re-coupling human locomotor evolution with reproductive fitness, and her unparalleled mentorship of undergraduate student researchers from diverse backgrounds.”
For more than 15 years, Wall-Scheffler has researched human locomotion, studying differences in how men and women walk, run, and carry loads. Her work has been published in numerous papers and covered in the media.
Wall-Scheffler was also awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to continue her research in the Anthropology Department at Charles University in Prague.
Wall-Scheffler, an alumna of Seattle Pacific, has been a faculty member since 2007. She received a master of philosophy degree and a doctorate from the University of Cambridge in England.
Assistant Professor of History Alissa Walter ’08 won the prestigious Arnold L. Graves and Lois S. Graves Award in the Humanities. The $11,000 award helped fund Walter’s travels to Iraq, Kuwait, and Washington, D.C.
Walter, who specializes in the Middle East and speaks Arabic, drew from Iraqi archival documents and conducted oral history interviews for her forthcoming book on how authoritarian rulers governed Iraq’s capital city of Baghdad from 1950 to 2011.
The award also helped Walter create a virtual cultural exchange partnership between SPU students and students in the Middle East.
This year, Walter was selected by SPU faculty to deliver the 2023 Winifred E. Weter Faculty Award Lecture for Meritorious Scholarship. Walter’s lecture, “20 Years After the Iraq War: Stories and Perspectives,” covered the tumultuous two decades following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq. Walter’s presentation examined the forces that can unify or divide a society during periods of crisis and upheaval.
WATCH WALL-SCHEFFLER’S LECTURE ON WOMEN’S ENDURANCE MOBILITY AT SPU.EDU/SWANSONAWARD WATCH ALISSA WALTER’S WETER LECTURE AT SPU.EDU/WETER2023Katherine Douglass, associate professor of educational ministry and practical theology, received a $1 million grant from the Lilly Endowment as part of the Christian Parenting and Caregiving Initiative. The grant enables Douglass and the Director of Multiethnic Programs Joyce del Rosario to work with SPU professors Sara Koenig, Jenny Vaydich, and Brittany Tausen to study faith socialization in families and help ministry leaders and parents learn together. The funds will also take local leaders on a pilgrimage to learn about the intersections of disease, colonization, family structures, and religion within a leper colony on Moloka‘i, Hawaii.
The Center for Applied Learning in the School of Business, Government, and Economics held its 17th annual Social Venture Plan Competition in April.
The $5,000 Herbert B. Jones Foundation Grand Prize as well as the People’s Choice Award went to the Nemo Institute for their social venture plan to restore coral reefs in the Bahamas using education, ecotourism, and 3-D technology to manufacture coral. Nemo Institute team members were Justin Freeman, Austin Freeman, Elizabeth Horton, Hannah Miller, and Maddie Wright.
Second place honors and $3,000 went to the team Water Harvesters who developed a fog harp, a product designed to collect up to 9 liters of water each day from moisture in the air. The device would be particularly useful in areas without access to clean groundwater. Ebby Buchta, Handrae Henthorn, Abhi Kencherla, Amie Kujabi, Thomas Morton, and Thien Vo were members of the Water Harvesters team.
Special thanks to Herbert B. Jones Foundation, Cummins Family Foundation, Tschetter Group, Northwest Center, Belmont Cabinet Co., Eastlake Real Estate Partners, Highland Private Wealth Management, Pioneer Human Services, and Skills Inc. for sponsoring this competition.
In the face of a rapidly changing world, a volatile economy, and a variety of global challenges, it’s exciting to see inter-disciplinary teams of students consider how they can use entrepreneurship as a force for good.”
— MARK OPPENLANDER DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR APPLIED LEARNINGTeam Nemo Institute won both the Grand Prize as well as the People’s Choice Award for their social venture plan. READ ABOUT THE WINNING TEAMS AND OTHER SOCIAL VENTURE PROJECTS AT SPU.EDU/SVPC2023
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Instead of earning profits from producing a textbook, Associate Professor of Classics Owen Ewald published an open-source textbook on Elementary New Testament Greek to make learning Greek accessible to everyone.
The free textbook contains 20 chapters to help students learn basic vocabulary words along with grammar and syntax and is geared toward the beginner student with no prior experience with the Greek language.
At the end of each chapter, Ewald provides short readings from the Greek New Testament and Septuagint as well as short, fictional stories of an early Christian family of Jewish ancestry to help students review their vocabulary and language knowledge.
Ewald earned his undergraduate degree from Yale University before he moved to Seattle in 1992. He received his master’s degree and doctorate from the University of Washington before joining SPU in 2001.
In 2016, Pivot NW Research was founded to study young adult relationships with churches and faith communities in Washington and Oregon through a $1.5 million Lilly Endowment grant. The researchers, led by Principal Investigator and Executive Director Jeff Keuss, partnered with the School of Theology and the IndustrialOrganizational Psychology program at SPU. (Keuss is also a professor of ministry, theology, and culture at SPU.)
Given the depth and breadth of the research findings over the past 5 years, an additional $1.25 was awarded in 2022 to Pivot NW. The sustaining grant will help the team develop public events to share its research findings, train mentors, facilitate fellowship cohorts for young adults, and create an open-source curriculum to be used by faith communities.
Its goals are formed around the word PACE: Prepare young adults for biblical and theological leadership in their communities; help churches and a faith leaders understand and respond to the hunger young adults have for social and cultural Activism within their communities of care; reintroduce young adults to the potential of social change from Churches; and Engage a new generation of mentors and mentees to form cohorts around the arts, social justice, economic development, and entrepreneurship.
Young adults are hungering for meaning and purpose in their lives today. Pivot NW’s research findings, and tools based on those findings, can help churches become the places young adults seek out to care and support them in their activism.
Weekly, students gather in SoulCare groups to ask the question, “How goes it with your soul?”
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I hope my textbook will be useful to a wide variety of beginning students from Los Angeles to Lagos.”
— OWEN EWALD ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF CLASSICS
Since 1992, Biology Professor Tim Nelson ’87 has led 13 study abroad teams to Belize and two to Maui. In August 2022, he took his first team to Bali, Indonesia. For two weeks, the group of 14 students and one other faculty member worked alongside a local community to rejuvenate its coral reefs, damaged by both climate change and past detrimental fishing techniques.
Students spent mornings donning wet suits and following their dive guides, local Bali fishermen, into the water. They helped conduct studies on fish diversity and learned techniques for growing and transplanting new coral onto the reef. In the afternoon and evenings, students explored the area and listened to lectures on coral reef ecology and restoration.
Nelson hopes to return in 2024 with additional professors and students from other disciplines to continue the cycle of restoration and to aid that same community in making sustainable change.
Alumnus Jordan Barde ’21 is a mechanical design engineer at Pallet, a Washington based organization that builds prefab homes to shelter people who are unhoused because of natural and personal disasters. This past year, Barde connected two SPU senior engineering teams to Pallet to help design projects related to homelessness and tiny homes.
Electrical engineering faculty are also working with students and Pallet to investigate the use of microgrids to provide electricity to tiny homes apart from the city’s power grid.
SPU nursing students partnered with Recovery Café, a program that helps people experiencing such things as homelessness, addiction, and mental health challenges.
The nursing students created easy-toread health sheets with word searches and crossword puzzles to help community members learn about sexual health, Type 2 diabetes, vaccinations, COVID-19, drug overdose prevention, and hepatitis.
I explored other schools before landing on SPU, but what sold me on SPU was the warmth and kindness of everyone I interacted with and the seeming dedication to serve others.”
— JORDAN BARDE CLASS OF 2021
Aniteye’s time of 2 minutes, 6.84 seconds for the 800meter race set a new indoor record for Seattle Pacific.
In March 2023, senior Vanessa Aniteye won the women’s 800-meter national title in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Her time of 2 minutes, 6.84 seconds set a new indoor record for Seattle Pacific. (The previous women’s record was held by Lynelle Decker for her second-place finish at the 2016 NCAAs.)
The top five finishers crossed the line with three-quarters of a second of each other, and seven of the eight finalists all bettered their preliminary times for the race.
“All the competitors came to race, and it showed early on,” Aniteye said. “I took out the first 200 hot like I planned to, and I think all of the others were like, ‘Hey, we’re also here to win it.’
“The field made me race,” she added. “It felt great after leading D2 all season to be able to prove that I didn’t just do that all by myself. I could also do it while competing with the best in the nation, and that was amazing. I couldn’t think of a better way to end the season.”
READ MORE ABOUT VANESSA AND HER ROAD TO SUCCESS AT SPU.EDU/ANITEYE
The year after I had Josiah, I was practicing on my own. Going back into college sports where I practice every single day, it has really helped me to just be consistent.”
—VANESSA ANITEYE SPU SENIORPHOTO BY EDDIE KELLY
In May, Seattle Pacific University women’s rowing team competed for the NCAA National Championship in New Jersey. The Varsity 8+ boat captured a third-place team finish for the Falcons.
In addition to the strong finish at the NCAA DII National Championships, the group earned Great Northwest Athletic Conference Crew of the Week honors three times. They consistently were recognized in regional and national polls, and the team collected a total of 16 postseason academic and athletic awards.
“Overall, the team had a solid season marked by both physical and technical improvements and, of course, high-level racing,” said Head Coach Caitlin McClain.
“We were fortunate to earn an at-large NCAA bid based on our body of work. The team did a commendable job of executing highperformance preparation and racing,” McClain said. “It was really gratifying to see them proactively managing their hydration, sun exposure, and active recovery through utilizing the skills and resources of our incredible athletic trainer, Jason Durocher. We are grateful for the opportunity to sharpen and showcase our skills and speed at the national championships.”
Seattle Pacific hosted some 900 athletes representing 88 teams for the NCAA’s Fall Championships Festival held the first weekend in December 2022. SPU was the first West Coast city to host these competitions.
“It was a true honor to host the DII Fall Festival,” said Jackson Stava, then athletic director. “To have the entire DII community in Seattle was exciting, as this event had never been west of the Rockies. We are thrilled with the distinct Seattle experience that was provided to the student-athletes, coaches, and fans.”
The festival concept, unique to Division II, was developed by the NCAA to create an experience similar to the Olympics, with multiple events in the same city or geographic area over multiple days.
The women’s rowing team collected a total of 16 postseason academic and athletic awards.
Phyllis Sortor ’64 served as a missionary with Free Methodist World Missions in Nigeria for 10 years. On Feb. 24, 2015, Sortor was kidnapped for ransom by a terrorist group intent on ending her work with the Fulani, an indigenous nomadic people group. Twelve harrowing days later, she was released. In 2016, she founded Schools for Africa, which primarily serves the Fulani herdspeople. She returned to her beloved Nigeria this past January to continue her work.
In June, Sortor received SPU’s Alumna of the Year award at a special screening of Kidnapped Redemption, a documentary about her kidnapping and her work with the Fulani. Sortor also delivered this year’s Undergraduate Commencement address at T-Mobile Park in Seattle, Washington.
LISTEN TO AN INTERVIEW WITH SORTOR AT SPU.EDU/VOICESPODCAST
Sortor assisted Interim Vice President of Enrollment Management and Marketing
Bryan Jones as he cut the ivy at SPU’s annual Ivy Cutting ceremony held the day before graduation.
This year, SPU awarded the Frank Haas Integrity in Business Award to Steve Bell, founder of the family-owned Bellmont Cabinet Co., located in Sumner, Washington.
“My dad was a pastor, but I felt called into business,” Bell said. “This business turned into our ministry. People know that Bellmont Cabinets is a company of integrity.” Bell’s sons, Casey Bell ’02 and Tyler Bell ’04, now run the business as CEO of operations and CEO of sales and marketing, respectively.
From the late 19th century to today, SPU has been an expression of the Free Methodist Church’s educational vision that:
• commits to a Christ-centered holiness that prioritizes justice for the poor,
• recognizes the centrality of the Christian scriptures for a Christian education,
• prioritizes a liberal arts education that equips leaders for the manifold vocations of the kingdom,
• casts a worldwide perspective on education and mission, and lastly,
• provides a non-sectarian collaborative vision that has allowed for diversity of thought under the unity of Jesus Christ within a post-secondary educational environment.
Find out more about our Enduring Commitments at spu.edu/7ECs
Your support of SPU helped make it all possible — thank you!
