When he was exploring potential colleges, Davie Bruce (2026) typed his priorities into the Google search bar: small Christian school with sunsets. PLNU was one of the first results. After visiting the campus, he felt fairly confident it was the right place for him. PLNU was the only school he applied to.
When he moved into Hendricks Hall in the fall of 2023, Davie was focused on making friends and playing basketball. He’d played competitively throughout middle school and high school, and his love of the sport hadn’t waned. It’s what decided his incoming major in kinesiology, and it’s what motivated him to find an intramural team during his first semester at PLNU.
Off the court, Davie was also starting to wonder what it actually meant to follow a loving God. He’d heard what his high school friends had to say about their experiences of Christianity, and he recognized an underlying hurt in their stories — some of which he could relate to. After some distance from his own faith throughout his time in public school, Davie’s transition into college prompted a plethora of questions with a common thread: what does it look like to pursue God in a way that not only doesn’t cause more hurt but actively moves to repair it?
The more Davie talked to his peers at PLNU, the more he discovered others with a strong, genuine desire to be near to God. He even found that some were asking their own hard questions about how to live out their Christian faith in a way that is welcoming, safe, and loving toward the people around them. However, amidst his deepening faith and some budding friendships on campus, Davie admits that his freshman year was challenging.
“After my senior year [of high school], my parents moved from my hometown,” Davie shares. “Having all this instability and this desire to thrive in college was so difficult. My freshman year was great, but at the same time, I felt so socially anxious a lot of the time and was wrestling with negative thoughts about myself.”
“Having all this instability and this desire to thrive in college was so difficult. My freshman year was great, but at the same time, I felt so socially anxious a lot of the time and was wrestling with negative thoughts about myself.”
In the moments it felt especially hard, Davie found comfort in learning more about God. He devoted his time to reading the Bible, watching YouTube videos about theology, and attending worship nights in the parking garage under Fermanian. He found himself starting to dream about teaching theology and leading people toward a genuine love for God and the people around them. Though his love for basketball remained strong, he felt a nudge to shift his major from kinesiology to a B.A. in Christian Studies within that first year.
“Being in the theology department has taught me to critically think about God and how we act,” Davie says. “Those things really matter. Those things result in how we live in the world and the world we are creating.”
Theology, for Davie, was quickly evolving into a genuine care for his college community. When it came time to plan for his sophomore year, he applied to be an RA. He was still navigating bouts of social anxiety, but the difficulty of his freshman year inspired a desire to support others through this big transition into college.
“That’s why I care so much about the RA process,” Davie explains. “It’s a call for people with such a heart of just wanting to create belonging, help people have stability, and walk with people relationally in such a drastically changing point of life.”
Davie has now been an RA in Hendricks Hall for the past two years, and the highlight of his undergrad experience has been the relationships that have come out of this role. He celebrates that his social anxiety has morphed into joy over cultivating a culture of belonging among his residents. Davie points to the mentorship of his RD, Sarah Beckham, as the catalyst for this personal growth.
“[Sarah] welcomed me,” Davie shares.“She saw something in me and the true heart that I do have. She really grasped onto that and helped me live into it. My biggest takeaway from being an RA is learning who I am, having confidence in myself, and learning how to function in a way that isn’t ruled by anxiety.”
Davie is now preparing to graduate as a third-year in May. Currently, he is an intern at San Diego First Church of the Nazarene. He continues to fill slivers of free time with intramural basketball. But the most unexpected item on his calendar is the Honors Research Project he hadn’t planned on doing.
Inquisitive by nature, Davie read The Cross and the Lynching Tree in a God and Philosophy class his second year, and it made him unshakeably curious about how racism interacts with Christianity in America. His professor, Mark Mann, encouraged him to follow that curiosity and see where it leads.
“Reading such graphic content about the lynching of Black Americans in our history — such recent history — and the silence of the church and the complacency to not take active resistance against those things… Christians caused so much hurt,” Davie shares. “If God desires for the flourishing and well-being of all creation, then in America, with all the racial injustice that we have, it is our responsibility to participate together with God toward justice. My honors project reframes the mission of God to co-labor with us toward God’s purposes.”
As he wraps up his research and prepares to graduate in just a few weeks, Davie looks back on his time at PLNU with humility for how it has both tested and strengthened him. He is especially grateful for how his department embodied a sense of acceptance of — even an invitation for — different points of view. Their openness to his bold questions struck him because of its rarity; he’s found that not many in the Church are able to engage peacefully with different perspectives.
“I still felt so welcomed. I still felt so seen and heard. [There was] this graceful invitation to critically think. In other Christian environments, that is not embodied very well.”
“Even when I was thrown off [in class discussions], despite those disagreements, I still felt so loved,” Davie shares. “I still felt so welcomed. I still felt so seen and heard. [There was] this graceful invitation to critically think. In other Christian environments, that is not embodied very well.”
This ability to ask hard questions within a caring environment is what fostered Davie’s deep and growing love of theology. After he graduates, he will take an important pause from his studies to get married in June, and then the newlyweds will be moving to North Carolina, where Davie will pursue his Master of Divinity at Duke Divinity School. He’s feeling a pull to become either a pastor or theologian, with some growing dreams of someday pursuing his Ph.D. and potentially writing a book or two.
“I love theology because I love God,” Davie says. “I love the God who’s been revealed to us in Jesus and the implications of who Jesus was and how he lived and what that means for how we are to live. That’s what I am most passionate about. Doing theology in a way that actually produces loving action.”
