No one in Martinez’s family had ever attended college. So when he graduated from high school in 1981, Martinez felt his natural next step was to follow in his father’s footsteps and enter the military.
He spent two years moving through what would eventually become the Naval Nuclear Power Train- ing Command, and then he was stationed for four years on a nuclear-powered surface ship. Martinez says he was “relieved” by the routine of Navy life.
For the first time, he even had Christian friends who motivated him to grow in his faith.
“We all had that little orange Gideons Bible,” he remembers. “So I’d stand — we called it ‘standing watch.’ Five on and ten off. It was two o’clock in the morning, out in the middle of the Indian Ocean. It’s 140 degrees in the nuc plant engine room area, and not much to do. I had my little Bible, and God convicted me, ‘Alright, it’s time to stop playing around.’ And that was when I decided I was only going to live for Christ.”
Martinez excelled at his work. In fact, his Navy supervisors asked him to step up to train his peers for the last year and a half he was on the ship.
“I loved training right away. I mean, it wasn’t —” Martinez pauses. “I was going to say, ‘It wasn’t rocket science.’ But it was nuclear stuff.”
In the meantime, he also started taking a few col- lege courses through a program offered to military members at sea. Ten, when he left the Navy in 1987, he decided to work towards a college degree.
Martinez went on to study political science at Arizona State University, with intentions of going to law school. Before even graduating, however, he was offered a position with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He and his contacts at the CIA talked it over and decided it would benefit them both if he continued his education before joining the agency. So Martinez entered the Master of
Business Administration (MBA) program at Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business.
While Martinez was in grad school, his path took yet another unexpected turn:
“Te professors in my MBA program sat me down and said, ‘We think that you have a calling to be a teacher.’ My calling didn’t occur to me; it occurred to other people,” Martinez laughs. “God used these wonderful people to change the direction of my ministry into Christ-centered business education.”
Martinez set aside his plans for the CIA and landed a position in the business school at Baylor. After teaching there for two years, he began work on his Doctor of Philosophy in Management at Texas A&M University’s Mays Business School, consistently ranked one of the top business schools in the nation. He completed his degree in 2001.
Since then, Martinez has continued working in Christian higher education, formerly serving at Cedarville University, Charleston Southern Uni- versity, Houston Baptist University, LeTourneau University, and, most recently, Oklahoma Baptist University.
During his time at Charleston Southern, Martinez served alongside Dr. John Duncan — now the dean of the College of Business and Entrepreneur- ship (COBE) at North Greenville University. Te two had kept in touch for years.
As Duncan began to revise the COBE at NGU in 2019, he reached out to Martinez with a job offer.
“In my mind, Martinez is the top management professor in Christian higher education. He’s in a class by himself,” Duncan explains. “I can’t say enough about how fortunate we are that he has joined NGU.”
Martinez stepped in as the associate dean of NGU’s COBE because he loves to “build things.” What’s the COBE building at NGU?
NGU.EDU | 19
“A culture of innovation and entrepreneurship,” he says proudly.
Working together, Duncan and Martinez have already updated the core curriculum for COBE programs and written proposals for both a new de- gree in management with an entrepreneurial focus and a course on innovation to be required for all business majors at NGU.
“Te marketplace is changing so rapidly. Tere’s a chance that what I teach my students today, by the time they graduate, it will be outdated,” Martinez says. “Tat’s why I want to teach them how to think, so they can transition through these changes and keep up with the marketplace demands of tomorrow’s world.”
No matter which class he’s teaching — whether Business Ethics or Innovation and Entrepreneur- ship — Martinez’s main goal remains to help his students understand business from a biblical perspective.
“I want to dispel the notion that the purpose of starting a business is simply to earn money,” he says. “Businesses do have to be profitable to exist, but that’s not our purpose.”
Martinez goes on to explain that Christians are called to add value to others’ lives through the act of creating; this fulfills their ultimate purpose to reflect God. Martinez has been heralding this message for more than two decades, speaking at academic conferences and publishing work on the topic in all sorts of prestigious academic journals.
His work has appeared in publications such as “Business Horizons,” the “Christian Scholars Re- view,” and the “Journal of Management.” Te list goes on. He’s also served on the editorial staff for the “Christian Business Review” and the “Journal of Biblical Integration in Business.”
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36
