What is CBU's purpose?

California Baptist University believes each person has been created for a purpose. CBU helps students understand and engage this purpose by providing a Christ-centered educational experience that integrates academics with spiritual and social development opportunities. Graduates are challenged to become individuals whose skills, integrity and sense of purpose glorify God and distinguish them in the workplace and in the world.

To that end, CBU targets the following values as outcomes each student should achieve along the way to graduation:

The University seeks to provide academic programs that prepare students for professional careers, as well as co-curricular programs that foster an environment supporting the intellectual, physical, social and spiritual development of each student. Within these arenas of the student experience the University, through its faculty and administration, has identified student outcomes as desirable and reflective of the impact it seeks to have in the lives of its students. Upon completion of a degree program, each student at California Baptist University should be able to:

  • Demonstrate spiritual literacy, including Biblical Christian faith and practice, Baptist perspectives, and the Christian's role in fulfilling the Great Commission.
  • Respect diverse religious, cultural, philosophical, and aesthetic experiences and perspectives.
  • Use critical thinking skills to demonstrate literacy: listening, speaking, writing, reading, viewing, and visual representing.
  • Demonstrate competence in mathematical, scientific, and technological skills.
  • Transfer academic studies to a profession and the workplace.
  • Implement a personal and social ethic that results in informed participation in multiple levels of community.

These outcomes, referred to as the "Core 4", are succinctly distilled as follows:

  1. Academically Prepared
  2. Biblically Rooted
  3. Globally Minded
  4. Equipped to Serve

CBU's Original Mission Statement

(from 1954 Articles of Incorporation)
The primary purpose of this corporation is to conduct regular four-year college courses in education, music, sciences and the liberal arts, and to grant certificates, diplomas and any and all degrees evidencing completion of any course of training, together with any and all honorary degrees and to provide training for Baptist youth and others desiring to be affiliated with Baptist theology and theological instruction and such other instruction as may be needful and advantageous in preparing and qualifying ministers and others for Christian work.