Ottawa ? The Rev. Dave Davis admits he wasn’t exactly an angelic student at Ottawa University in the 1970s.

“I was not a good church kid on campus,” he says. “I was one of the rowdy ones.”

He’s hoping to make up for that now with his new job.

Davis has started as director of church relations for the university. He’s charged with strengthening connections with American Baptist churches, with which the university is affiliated.

“Ottawa has had an affiliation with the American Baptist Church since its inception, but we haven’t had as strong a relationship with them in the past five to seven years as we’d like,” says Fred Snow, who started as Ottawa’s president last summer. “This is us reaffirming to them that relationship.”

OU family

Davis, 54, is a native of Kansas City, Mo., and graduated from OU with a degree in health, physical education and recreation in 1974. He went on to get his Master of Divinity degree from Central Baptist Theological Seminary.

Davis has served as pastor at various churches in Nebraska, Montana and Kansas since then. Most recently, he was at a church in Holton for six years.

The OU job came out of a meeting in the fall with various university constituents. Snow wanted to know what the university could do to strengthen ties with its affiliated churches, particularly the 200 or so in the Central Region, which includes Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas.

Davis agreed to write a job description for a church relations director. After discussions, Snow decided Davis was the right man for the job.

“Dave is intimately aware of Ottawa University and the kinds of students we attract,” Snow says. “Dave also has a great personality.”

Some of that awareness comes from his family’s involvement at OU. He already has had two daughters graduate from the university, and a third is a sophomore this year.

Complete students

Davis says he’s a believer in the function that small, church-affiliated, liberal arts schools serve.

“We want to develop well-rounded students,” he says. “That’s not just mental or academics. It’s the spiritual side, too.”

The Rev. Dave Davis is the new director of church relations for Ottawa University.

Davis stresses schools like OU aren’t out to push religion on students, and he notes events such as weekly chapel services aren’t mandatory.

“We don’t want (students) to be sheltered,” he says. “We want them to experience. We hope that will help them grow in their faith, that they will be stronger in their relationship with Jesus Christ.”

Davis expects to be at an American Baptist church almost every weekend, giving presentations about OU and sometimes preaching.

Snow says the outreach should help enrollment, which currently is around 400 students on the residential campus. There was a time, decades ago, that OU enrollment was more than 1,000.

“We’d obviously like to see a larger percentage of students from our American Baptist churches,” Snow says. “As we expand our marketing, a great deal of that will be with American Baptist churches. That’s our mission – one of the things we’re supposed to do.”

Ottawa option

The Rev. Marcus McFaul, senior pastor at Lawrence’s ABC-affiliated First Baptist Church, 1330 Kasold Drive, says students growing up in the church are aware that both OU and William Jewell College in Liberty, Mo., are both American Baptist affiliates.

“We don’t pit the small liberal arts, parochial schools against (Kansas University) as much as we say, ‘Here are a variety of options, and we encourage you to pursue those,'” McFaul says. “And it isn’t God is a stronger player at Ottawa than at KU. The bottom line is you will learn, and it’s a matter of which place will facilitate that best for you.”

He says he thinks OU’s addition of Davis will be a positive one.

“I think it’s good that colleges can have liaisons,” he says. “It makes the process for selecting a college more helpful.”

OU does receive a small portion of its annual budget from church contributions. Davis says he hopes he can keep those relationships going, and that his service at churches can be a way of thanking members for their contributions.

He notes that the university started in 1865 with land donated by the Ottawa tribe as a show of gratitude for work done by missionaries in the area. He wants that attitude to continue today.

“We want churches to look at Ottawa as a mission,” Davis says. “It’s as much a mission station as sending a missionary overseas.”