The 2012 Legacy Banquet

One Another Mindset Award Jeff Cook ’81 Jeff Cook was married and in the Army when he accepted Christ as his personal Savior. He had no idea about anything biblical until he came to Cedarville University as a married, 25-year-old freshman. He writes, “Cedarville steeped me in the serious study of the Scriptures.” While at Cedarville, he became involved in youth ministry and rest home preaching. After graduating from Cedarville and then seminary, he and his wife spent 15 years as missionaries, first in Europe where he planted and pastored two American military churches and then in a German church for three years. When they returned to the States, he taught in Kansas City, Missouri, at an inner-city Bible college and served on the pastoral staff of an African-American, inner-city church. For several summers, he also taught Arab pastors as an adjunct professor in Cairo, Egypt, and Beirut, Lebanon. Jeff came to teach at Cedarville in 1998. He is currently an Associate Professor of Bible and Urban Studies. He has worked to educate himself, his children, and our students in the importance of recognizing and celebrating diversity within the body of Christ. He has integrated this philosophy into every aspect of his teaching and personal ministry here at Cedarville. He talks the talk and walks the walk. He has opened the eyes of both majority and minority students to the importance of the one another mindset in developing a Christ-centered worldview. Jeff often uses Proverbs 20:4 with his students as well as with his children: “It is not good to have zeal without knowledge.” He believes it is not enough to simply be “excited about Jesus” or “excited about serving God” if it is uninformed and divorced from a clear knowledge of what God has said about Himself and reality. In fact, it can be destructive to have such zeal without biblical knowledge. He says, “Our knowledge, however, cannot be just scriptural, it must also be cultural. Like two wings on an airplane, we must have scriptural as well as cultural competency if we are to effectively represent God in an increasingly multicultural world.”