Cedars, October 2018

October 2018 13 CAMPUS Meet the New Chair of the Social Work Department by Shelby McGuire H e has labeled Apple 122 the “No Stress Zone” with a wooden sign hanging on the wall. Soft lighting and trickling water also add to the calming effect for stressed students who come to his office for help with classwork and course scheduling. This is the office of Dr. Michael Sherr, Cedarville’s new chair of the Department of Social Work. He’s been through the stress of an unusual life path and is here to help. Sherr has been a professor and administrator at sec- ular and faith-based schools. He comes to Cedarville with an impressive resume including extensive practical experi- ence in behavioral health, hospital and hospice settings and is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment. Sherr is an internationally recognized authority in the field of biblical social work. He has been published over 80 times including three books with a fourth coming soon. Sherr’s unlikely path to becoming an internationally recognized Christian scholar started in Long Island, New York, where he grew up in a close-knit Jewish community. He was born the grandson of the wealthy head elder family of the local synagogue. He attended 10 years of Hebrew school learning the language of the Torah, learning how to pray to God, and getting in a lot of trouble. With a constant routine of turmoil and strife in his home, Sherr said he was left to have free range of the streets of Long Island as a lost and wayward teenager “believing in nothing and partaking in everything.” He knew from an early age how depraved he was. He called out to God every time he got in trouble hoping that his God would have mercy on his lonely, miserable soul and get him out of trouble just one more time. During his college years, things didn’t get much better at first. His dad paid his rent for an apartment near his local community college and he enrolled in classes, but he only put effort into keeping up his grades for the first few weeks. He eventually dropped out of school. Then Sherr met Stacey Wells. Wells was a believer and came from a devoted Christian family. Stacey and her fam- ily showed him the love of Christ through the love they had for each other even though they had little else in material wealth. It was a stark contrast to the Mishegoss (yiddish for family drama) from his own home despite the plenteous provisions they had been blessed with. Sherr married Stacy and began attending church with her to be a good husband. He started to get more and more involved in the church, singing and playing softball. Sherr appreciated howmembers of the church would always come around to help them when they needed it. As a young Jewish man attending a Christian church, Sherr was having an identity crisis that he continuous- ly tried to push to the back of his mind. When Sherr was 23, his mother became sick and died of cancer, and he was forced to confront his beliefs. His rabbi couldn’t provide a definitive answer to whether his mother was in heaven or hell, and at that point he realized “it was all too human.” He didn’t want to have to go to leaders and rabbis to find the answers he needed, so he went to the Bible that his wife had bought for him. As he read the Bible he could not ignore Jesus any longer. He realized that Jesus was the promised Messiah who could rescue him from his sins and doubts. Sherr went back to school to earn his degree in social work with a new motivation and direction in life. He worked hard to earn his degree while delivering pizzas to support his wife and children. After earning his bachelor’s and mas- ter’s degrees, he went on to finish his doctorate in just two and a half years, delivering pizzas up until the day he de- fended his dissertation. As a full-time educator, he confronted the most mean- ingful turning point in his career at a conference for Chris- tian educators in Louisville, Kentucky. Something caught Sherr’s attention at the conference during a group discus- sion that Dr. George Huff, social work professor at Cedar- ville, happened to be a part of. There was a young social work student who was volunteering at the conference who suddenly started crying in the middle of their discussion on biblical integration in the classroom. When they asked her what was wrong, she explained that one of her classmates had recently passed away. The leaders of her department did not address the situation and counsel their students effectively after the loss, and directed themoth- er places to be comforted and ask questions. The girl explained how the department’s reaction to the loss invalidated all of the prayers and class devotionals and other aspects of the school’s biblical integration because the faculty wasn’t ready with bib- lical counseling when the students needed it most. Sherr was deeply affected by this girl’s story. He began to understand the missing piece of all of the research and studies on effective faith integration in Christian higher ed- ucation. No one had gathered input from the students on how effective faith integration was at their schools. From that point, Huff and Sherr worked together for five years to gather data from students and faculty at eight different faith-based schools of eight different denominations and studied the true effectiveness of faith integration. Sherr said this was the most meaningful milestone of his professional career. Sherr came to Cedarville after facing increasing pres- sures at Middle Tennessee State University where he had been a chair. He was accused of being sexist based solely on his Christian faith. He stepped down from his position as chair so that he could focus on teaching his classes and writing without having to worry about keeping everyone in the department happy. Two days after he stepped down as chair at Middle Ten- nessee, Cedarville called him and asked if he was interest- ed in applying for chair of its social work department. At first, Sherr was uncertain about many logistical factors that would play into coming to Cedarville. However, he says God worked everything out for him to be able to come. Sherr is passionate about equipping Cedarville social work students as “servants of common grace.” He is already working on some big plans and ideas for the department. His goal is for it “to be known as the social work program for conservative evangelicals, unwavering in our commitment to the inerrancy of God’s word and Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, biblical integration through every course.” To accomplish this goal, he is working with the depart- ment on creating a document with nine statements for the biblical foundation of social work as a discipline and what that looks like at Cedarville University. The document is sit- ting on Sherr’s computer titled in bold red letters as “VERY ROUGH DRAFT,” but the plan is to present a final draft at the end of the year. Shelby McGuire is a sophomore journalism major and Cam- pus News Co-editor for Cedars. She enjoys working out as well as feeding her caffeine addiction pretending that she has her life together. Photo taken by Kelsey Feuerhak Dr. Michael Sherr, Cedarville’s new chair in the Department of Social Work, brings extensive practical experience to the position and is an internationally recognized authority in the field of biblical social work.