For Niko Kampouris, a career in business almost seemed a foregone conclusion.
Kampouris’ father came to America from Greece in the early 1980s, settling in the Boston area and beginning various businesses from selling fruit on the roadside to selling backsplashes and countertops for kitchens and bathrooms. Kampouris’ grandfather was also a businessman.
Last spring, Kampouris became one of the first graduates of Boyce College’s business administration major. He entered the program as a freshman as one of the first students in business administration, which was founded in 2014. Kampouris’ gifts as an entrepreneur emerged while in high school when he and some friends began selling duct tape wallets at varsity football games.
While at Boyce, he and a friend began a small apparel company called Fox in the Henhouse. He has worked for Access Ventures and now for Doe Anderson, an advertising agency in Louisville. With such an obvious calling to business, why did he choose a new and unproven track at a Bible College?
“I think when I was graduating high school, I came to the realization that wherever I went to school, I wanted to go somewhere where the education was built on a Christian foundation,” he said.
“Just being taught about areas of studies from a biblical perspective, and I knew I wanted to pursue business and I knew Boyce had just started their business program in 2014. I viewed it as a good opportunity to try something new and to receive an education from an institution that really valued the Bible.”
Training in biblical and theological studies helped him focus on a different purpose for business than merely the profit margin, supply and demand, and other important factors that are central to business.
“I think the theological training that Boyce has given us has made us realize that the purpose of our studies isn’t financial profit,” he said.
“It’s for the people and the people that we work with, the people that we’re creating solutions for and we need to be valuing them and valuing their experience and caring about them. I think it’s important that we keep in mind the theological training that I received because ultimately that theological training is just as valuable as our professional training.”
Kampouris certainly hopes to make a living from business, and that means making a profit, but his studies at Boyce help him see that all things, even business acumen, are gifts from God to be used for his glory. As historic evangelical theology teaches, for the Christian, faith and work are inseparable because God claims every square inch of earth, even his people’s work, to spotlight his greatness.
“I realize that worship is an attitude of the heart,” he said. “It’s the way you’re posturing your heart towards God. I think it’s a very special thing that I really only truly understood while I was at Boyce.
“Before then, it was kind of hard to understand how social media and copywriting and email marketing could be used to worship God but I realized if you’re doing it with a posture of your heart pointed towards God as a way to honor and glorify him, then yes it’s just as much worship as singing.”