Good Neighbor Podcast: North Shore
Bringing together local businesses and neighbors of North Shore
Good Neighbor Podcast: North Shore
EP #52 - Zack Johnson: Exploring Education through a Christian Lens
Join us for an insightful conversation as we welcome Zack Johnson, the visionary president of Sattler College, a revolutionary institution in Massachusetts. Sattler is redefining the norms of higher education by intertwining a rigorous core curriculum with Christian values, offering a tuition-free model that fosters a sense of service and giving back, and emphasizing character development through discipleship. Zack unpacks how the college draws from historical educational values and Dr. Finney Caravilla's vision, creating a community dedicated to both academic excellence and strong Christian principles. His personal journey into education adds a layer of depth and inspiration, offering a fresh perspective on what true education can be.
Moreover, we explore the transformative power of simple yet profound conversations. Discover the beauty of dialogue and how it can lead to meaningful connections and growth. This episode sets the scene for a series of thoughtful discussions, celebrating the potential of words and shared ideas to create remarkable change. As we engage in these exchanges, we're reminded of the essential role communication plays in fostering understanding and inspiration. Prepare to be moved by the synergy of education, community, and the art of conversation.
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Yuan Godfrey.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Good Neighbor Podcast. Today we're delighted to introduce to you our listeners, zach Johnson. He is the president of Sattler College. Zach, how are you doing today?
Speaker 3:Doing really well. Thanks, Yuan. Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 2:We're so excited to have you and we're excited to learn more about Sattler College. Can you please tell our listeners about the college?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it'd be my pleasure. So I'm assuming a lot of our listeners live in the state of Massachusetts and Massachusetts is the hub of academia. When you look at how many colleges and universities there are in the state, there's over 130, which is phenomenal. But when you look at how many new colleges there are, there've only been three colleges established in the last 40 years, and Sattler is the newest one. We just brought in our first group of students in 2018. So we've only had three graduating classes and there's not too many people who live the experience of only having one class through, and you build them from freshman, sophomore, junior to senior, and so we're right in this mode where we actually have some alumni. We're in the group of things and I'll just talk a little bit about our distinctives, if that's okay. So when you think about education and Massachusetts, a lot of people think about Harvard and MIT, and I always like to share that.
Speaker 3:We're actually trying to disrupt the higher ed industry by going a little bit backwards in time to what we think education used to be like, and so our three distinctives we call them our three C's is our core curriculum, our cost model and then our Christian character development sort of a synonym for that is discipleship. So our core curriculum is the set of classes that all our students take in order to graduate. And we have a pretty rigorously defined set of classes that all our students get to take or have to take, and it includes biblical Greek and biblical Hebrew, christian apologetics, fundamental texts, and that's across biology majors, computer science majors, business majors, history majors, and then we have a biblical and religious studies major as well. So all of our students are taking those core curriculum, which is really interesting. We're the only college in the world now that requires all students to take the biblical languages which, if you think about what education used to be for a Christian, you used to think about just like learning. The tools to understand the Bible was just basics, like 101. And now we see a huge decline in biblical literacy, I think, across the country and across the world. So our founders are really passionate about reestablishing a set of young people who care so much about the Bible that they're willing to actually train themselves in it, even though they're not, so to speak, a professional Christian or somebody who is going to seminary or something like that. So that's our first distinctive is our core curriculum, and then our cost model is very interesting in that this is something that I'm very passionate about talking about. It's been one of my biggest initiatives.
Speaker 3:We actually don't charge tuition as a college, so we launched something in January 2024 called Entrustment Tu tuition. So when you look at the word entrustment, if you get into the college, you get a fully funded offer to attend, and we ask in exchange for that deal, we ask you to basically give your all while you're standing at the college and then, over the course of your life, consider contributing back to the college as you experience it to make the opportunity available for somebody else. So no tuition to attend here. We still, if you choose to live in our dorms, we still charge about 980 a month right now to live in the Back Bay area, and that includes room and board.
Speaker 3:And that is something I just can't talk about enough is the Christian community stepping up and funding our own education. We're the only Christian college in the country who doesn't charge tuition, that doesn't receive any federal or state money, and so we're doing this on our own terms. We have no strings attached to any funding sources. I like to say if you take someone's shackles, you take their shackles, and so we are unshackled from any sort of entity that can tell us how to do education, and that's very important. We are accredited, so with some caveats there on the quality of our programs.
Speaker 3:And then our third distinctive is just Christian character development or discipleship. If you go to our website we have a little tagline and it says light the world through academic excellence and relational discipleship. So all of our students go through a four year intensive discipleship program where we're really looking at character development. We're looking at the Christian disciplines that a lot of people probably don't talk about enough your prayer life, your fasting life, confessing sins. If you look at the young demographics, if people are addicted to pornography, we pay a ton of attention trying to break that cycle, and so I just think that more colleges should be thinking especially about that character development piece. And those are sort of our three distinctives.
Speaker 2:Beautiful, beautiful, very thorough and very in depth. Thank you for the information and how did you get into this business?
Speaker 3:government and I was having a really hard time trying to find a church and a chaplain at the school actually said hey, you need to go to this thing on a Saturday morning, run by a man named Dr Finney Caravilla. So I showed up on a Saturday morning in grad school If you Google him you'll find him quickly. But he volunteered to teach Christian apologetics, which is sort of the defense of the Christian faith alongside Greek, on Saturday mornings while I was in grad school and I had lunch with him and he sort of painted a vision of a group of really dedicated, faithful Christians starting a college in the Boston area, as we sort of have a lot of concerns with really the Christian character development side of things. So meeting him was how I originally got involved and wasn't planning on a career in higher ed, but I am passionate about Christianity and so I was very compelled by the vision.
Speaker 2:Beautiful, beautiful. It started with a conversation.
Speaker 3:Always starts with a conversation. Always starts with a conversation.
Speaker 2:So what are some myths or misconception that you've discovered in your industry, in your journey?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean the biggest myth. There's a huge myth about higher ed and some of it's true and some of it's not true around the necessity of college for anybody. Right now, I think a lot of people are thinking about that, and so I always like to say that college is a door for a specific group of people. The right mission fits students, but we're not trying to say that everybody has to go through this door. In order to be a Christian, you don't have to go to college. In order to be a competent worker, you have to go to college. However, the experience of going through a four-year rigorous training process is really phenomenal for a young person, and so that's why I always say that the college is still very, very, very important. And in the world, when you look about, when you look through history of the across who has changed the world, oftentimes you'll find that a lot of those networks were established in, in colleges, where people actually meet their, the people that will help them do the important work that they're trying to do in their life. You can find this in the abolition movement in the UK with William Wilberforce. You can find it in the civil rights movement here in the US with Martin Luther King Jr. He actually went to school in the Boston area. You can find it in the liberation from India. You can find it all over the place of how important it is to go somewhere. That's attracting similar thinkers, and so the necessity of college is a big, a big thing that I like to talk about.
Speaker 3:Can I talk about one more myth? Sure, and then and this is more in the realm of the Christian domain there's a lot of chatter right now around like the veracity of scriptures or the, and how true they are, and I always like to tell people that people think it's not, like, necessary or relevant for people to study the biblical languages anymore. That's, the majority of scriptures are written in Greek and Hebrew, but I always like to say that if you read the scriptures and if you get to the point where you can read in Greek and Hebrew, they take on. I like to say it's almost like seeing something in color. It used to be in black and white and now you're seeing it in color.
Speaker 3:There's a lot of other other analogies around. If you, if you equip yourself with that, it's like watching a football or a sporting event on TV versus being in the stadium. It gets you that much closer to the scriptures and I just think the more people that take that on, the better the scriptures will be understood for our generation. So that's another just big selling point on why we need people across professions taking this on, not just so, so to speak, the people who will make money from it, but just your average person, your average father, your average mother teaching their children, developing this passion within the family. I think it's so important.
Speaker 2:Thank you for sharing. So, outside of work, zach, what do you do for fun of?
Speaker 3:work, zach? What do you do for fun? I'm a father, so that's definitely my biggest fun. I've got a three-year-old, a one-year-old and a zero-year-old, so I'm very busy and so my fun has definitely been dedicated to my family. But I love reading. I'm a big believer in fitness. I have a. In my previous career I was in the military, so I love the disciplined life that comes with fitness. And then I'm also very intrigued with traveling and learning languages. I could go all over the place, but those are kind of the big ones.
Speaker 2:Thank you for your service.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:What branch of service sir?
Speaker 3:I spent seven years in the Air Force.
Speaker 2:Thank you for your service again. So let's change gears. Zach, can you describe one hardship or one of life's challenge that you rose above and can now say because of it you're stronger, you're better? What comes to mind?
Speaker 3:I think there's always, there's always personal and professional is there? Would you, is there one, one or the other that you you think would be better to address?
Speaker 2:whichever one you're comfortable with. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think anyone who's lost a parent knows all the hardship that surrounds that. My mom died in 2017 from pancreatic cancer and she was one of my favorite people in the world and I think just really committing to give it your all after her death is just something that I have been. You know you miss when your parent passes away. Before you get married, before you have kids, there's always this longing that you wish they could be around. So that that's the personal side of things just becoming stronger in the absence of a parent I think is a really big, big topic that I actually love talking about, because I think so many people who have lost a parent can relate to the pain that's involved, but also the healing that comes over time, with having having children trying to learn, trying to distill what you learn from your parent and passing it to your children is a huge. I think you just grow so much from reflecting on what did this person teach me and what will I take and give to my children that they won't have the opportunity to teach. So I think, personally, that's that's that's definitely one of the big ones. And then I think professionally in New England, I was going to talk a little bit about the Christian higher ed scene that in the last six years we've seen Christian colleges closing left and right. When you look at even in the Boston area, there's a college called Eastern Nazarene College that just announced closure this summer. That's been around for 125 years. King's College in New York was another evangelical school that announced closure. We have Alliance, or previously NIAC, closing in New York. So the New England area we're seeing small Christian liberal arts colleges really struggling and so when you come in, if you come and visit Sattler College, I think you'll see the exact opposite and I'll just say holistically that like grinding to build a new college that stands for the Christian values In the city of Boston, a lot of people kind of raise their eyebrows at us and say what are you doing here?
Speaker 3:But I think that, just professionally, Sattler College as a project has faced a lot of challenges, but I think we're thriving. Our students are doing great. When you look at the trends across Christianity, the recent Gallup polls are finding less and less people attending churches, less and less people who attend college, less and less people attending churches, less and less people who attend college. I think a Gallup poll showed that 70%, that's seven, zero percent of young people who attend a public institution no longer believe in the Christian faith after college. We have around a hundred percent. A hundred percent of our alumni are still, I think, strengthened. So I think that's a huge win. Professionally is just the whole project that is Sattler College. So I think that's a huge win professionally is just the whole project that is Sattler College. And I could talk, I could tell you so many stories of hey, COVID hit, are we going to make it? And just all the pain, the blood, sweat and tears that go into starting something new and sticking with it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, zach, we thank you for sharing and expanding on both challenges that you've overcome and you're still going through the loss of your mother, so thank you for sharing that. Can you please tell our listeners one thing that they should remember about Sattler College?
Speaker 3:So our website is sattleredu S-A-T-T-L-E-Redu, and the one thing you should remember is that you should come visit us if you're downtown. We have a view of the Charles, we have the state house right next to us, and I really think that if you're in the area and you're intrigued by a Christian college, come visit us. That's just. Number one is you won't believe it until you see it. So I'm always extending invitations to come and attend the college. And then I think the other thing that you should remember is I'll just leave you with a tidbit of who our college is named after. So a lot of people this is another sort of hobby horse of the college is Christian.
Speaker 3:History is so important in understanding what has happened, and Michael Sattler and his wife Margareta were some of the leaders of what was known as the birth of the free church, and 500 years ago, actually on January 21st, there was a general thinking that hey, what if the decision to become a Christian happens at an adult age? And there was a group of people Sattler was one of them had said I want to actually pursue this faith as an adult? And they actually were martyred two years after they decided that, and I just think that looking up the blood that's been spilled in order for the church to have survived is so important, and so if you're wanting to learn more about sort of the martyrs of the Christian faith in this movement, come and visit again. We have history displays that tells those stories. I think you'll just be really inspired by some of the people that we try to emulate here at the college.
Speaker 2:Thank you for sharing. Well, Zach, we really appreciate you being on the show with us today. We wish you and Sattler College all the very best moving forward. Thank you again.
Speaker 3:Thank you, juan, it was an honor to be here.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor Podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to GNPNorthshorecom. That's GNPNorthshorecom, or call 857-703-9406.