A Joyful Celebration Graduates’ Milestone Undeterred by Year of Pandemic


Seated six feet apart across a football field, yet bound together like no other class in decades, North Greenville University’s 2021 graduates celebrated their degrees on a beautiful foothills evening Friday, April 30.


With their families looking on from the stands in Younts Stadium – socially distanced but thankfully inside the campus landmark – the graduates were challenged to “listen to God.”


“Do you do that?” asked commencement speaker Bill Reeves. “Do you spend any time in the day listening to him?”


Reeves is CEO of Educational Media Foundation, parent company of K-Love, the world’s largest contemporary Christian music radio network. He told the graduates his career path in the Christian entertainment business started when he listened to God as a 15-year-old at summer camp on NGU’s Tigerville campus.


That 33-year journey has taken him from Word Records to Big Idea Produc- tions’ VeggieTales® brand, and work with Thomas Nelson/Harper Collins products before founding Working Title Agency and marketing major motion pictures including God’s Not Dead, I Can Only Imagine, and War Room. Reeves said when Centrifuge camp staff told teenagers to spend morning time in God’s Word, it directed his life.


“That morning in the middle of the summer in 1985, I listened to God, and I heard Him as if it was this morning. He said, ‘You’re going to use your skill sets to minister the Gospel.’”


Citing biblical accounts of Moses and Saul listening to God’s words, Reeves also relayed the story of a discouraged young pastor who sat on a hillside in 1949, listening to God. Like that man, Billy Graham, the graduates had the opportuni- ty to hear God’s call on their lives, Reeves said.


“You’re facing a dark world,” he said. “There’s a lot of people that say your faith is a joke. Are you listening to God? Nothing you receive today when you walk across this stage will be worth anything if you’re not using that for what God’s telling you to do with your life. They have to go together.”


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