Year 7 at IWU (2003-2004)

0. 1997, Year of the Hire
1. 1997-1998 First Year Schenck
2. 1998-1999 Married Schenck
3. 1999-2000 Go New Testament
4. 2000-2001 Williams Prayer Chapel
5. 2001-2002 The Year of 9-11
6. 2002-2003 The Greece Trip

1. In the fall of 2003, Charlie Alcock joined the Religion Division. He had a history with IWU. He went to college at IWU. His brother Roger worked at IWU. He was youth pastor at Lakeview.

We are the same age, as is Chris Bounds. In 2006, as Jim Lo was headed off to Bethel for a year to be Dean of the Chapel, Angie commissioned a student to draw a 40th birthday picture for all of us to frame.

This was a spectacular gain for IWU and STM. Charlie was coming from Skyline, where he had worked as youth pastor briefly for John Maxwell and then for Jim Garlow. Charlie would develop youth weekends for both high school and middle school students (when Stacy Shaw was a student, while I was at the seminary, she would help him put these together). FUSION (for high school students) and Never2Young for middle school students now both bring over a 1000 students to campus in the spring. They are like mini-Ichthuses.

In fact, I would say they are more or less in the lineage of Ichthus. Ichthus was a Christian rock festival started by Bob Lyon at Asbury in the wake of Woodstock (1969). It was actually founded to be a sort of Christian version of Woodstock. It would meet out on the grass of the Wilmore camp meeting grounds. I was actually Ichthusman in the late 80s for the festival, in tights and a cape, but that's a different story.

Ichthus was seriously in decline in the early 2000s. They tried to move it. Then I recall them asking Charlie to give it one last ditch effort. I think he tried it in Fort Wayne around 2004. Eventually he would start FUSION and Never2Young. He's also heavily involved in Never the Same, run by Jeff Eckart. This summer it seemed like Never the Same was everywhere, a kind of portable music-discipleship festival that meets at colleges like Houghton and IWU.

2. In my seventh year, I took my first sabbatical. In January 2004, my family and I went to Tübingen, Germany for three months on a Fulbright scholarship.

That meant that I only really taught in the fall. Courses I found in my records included:

• General Epistles, with students like Julie (Collins) Penta, Jonathan Dodrill, Brent Dongell, Jess (Dvorak) Schmerse, Paul Kind, Alicia Myers, Nathan Richardson, Daniel Searle, John Wickstrom, and others.
• I also started another Greek cohort--35 students. I think I used Mounce knowing that I wouldn't be there in the spring to continue my new voodoo method and Dave Smith would be left holding the βαγ. Students included Matt Beck, Jared Bell, Julie Collins, Jon Dodrill, Aaron Duvall, Daniel Freemyer, David Paul Jones, Paul Kind, Barton Price, Kara (Snyder) Kensinger, Debbie Wooters, Kevin Wright, and more.
• Plus the usual NT Survey and philosophy gen eds
• I also taught a master's intensive in the fall, "Paul's Life and Ministry."

3. This was the year that we divided up the larger Bible classes, for good or ill. Hebrews and General Epistles became two courses: "Hebrews" and "General Epistles."

• Paul's Earlier Epistles became "Corinthians and Thessalonians" and "Romans and Galatians."
• Paul's Later Epistles became "Prison Epistles" and "Pastoral Epistles."

We were on a growth trajectory and (if I remember correctly) ministry students had to take 18 hours of Bible. In fall 2005 we would hire two more Bible professors. To be honest, I am better at the big picture than the details, so I'm not sure how good a move this ended up being. With less students in recent years, we went back to the older system last year.

Since I came back from the seminary, I have felt much better about my Bible teaching. For whatever reason, I didn't have many group activities in those earlier days. I'm embarrassed to say that Bible classes back then with me often consisted of going student by student reading a few verses from the biblical text and then talking about them. It was like a live commentary. Student reads. I comment. They comment. Student reads. I comment. They comment. Dave Smith was much better than this. He had charts.

They used to say in those days that the best part of such classes was the tangents. Students who thought the focus of a class was my overhead would be frustrated. Students who more enjoyed learning and lived for the tangents enjoyed them more. I had study guides for tests.

(Elizabeth [Glass] Turner was remembering recently how tests would often have a silly answer as the fourth option on multiple choice questions. There would be waves of snickers during the test as different people got to those questions. You could tell how far each student was by when they snickered.)

In the end, I almost never felt really good about the Bible classes I taught in those years. If it wasn't your verse, it was all too easy to tune out. I have more group activities now. When we read the text, we read it from biblegateway.com on the screen. I've actually not felt too bad these days about my Bible classes.

4. I was making the switch to PowerPoints just before I went to the seminary. I had not fully done it with New Testament Survey and philosophy until I came back. Funny story while I'm thinking of it. Dave Ward let me adjunct a couple STM classes in my later days at the seminary. I taught Latin for him, for example.

I also taught an evening philosophy class for him in the worship lab. I was so excited. But the old tricks didn't work. The students didn't know me from Adam. I used to think my humor could carry the day but it didn't. I used to show movie clips on VHS in my early days, but I hadn't made the transition to YouTube clips. They had never heard of Deep Thoughts.

So a student came up to me after one class and he said, "This is your first year teaching, right? You haven't taught much before?" He ended up dropping the class. :-)

Strangely, I moved around a lot more with overheads than I did with PowerPoints. Maybe it was the fact that you would sometimes write on an overhead and there was motion. Something about PowerPoints seems static. It has tended to tie me down to a location more, for some reason. And I never really got the hang of Prezi.

5. At some point in the fall of 2004 a female ministry student mentioned to me that she was a little down after a class. In the class it was said that, while she could study for ministry, it was unlikely that she would ever be able to find a Wesleyan church to take her as pastor. The message she received was, "Why bother?" I was pretty miffed.

That afternoon I wrote, "Why I Favor Women in Ministry."  It's not a perfect piece. You can possibly pick up some of my anger at this even being an issue. In those days I wasn't always very explicit in class about what I thought, especially on controversial issues. Facebook and blogging would later inadvertently make my opinions more widely known.

But on the issue of women in ministry, I was pretty much allowed to be blunt. It was core aspect of our Wesleyan heritage. I still would always feel bad if I got riled up about something in class. I didn't like showing my emotions. Still I remember losing it a little on this issue occasionally in those days. "If a plane is crashing, I want the person who can best fly the plane up front. You're not going to recruit someone on the basis of their genitals. 'Step aside! I have the right genitals!' God's not stupid, and that's just stupid."

Unbeknownst to me, there was a task force with Kerry Kind working on a booklet on women in ministry at this time. Frankly, I don't have a high opinion of the kinds of booklets churches and organizations tend to put out on such things. They tend to be very boring and verbose. I've always considered it one of my strengths (although also quite a weakness) the fact that I have a short attention span. If I'm boring myself, it's time to change things up.

So the church just ended up using my writing. It was published in 2004. I have sensed in recent years a desire to replace it. Dave Ward's video largely replaced it in the last few years, but now even that is feeling a little dated (and it seems to have disappeared from the web). We'll see what they come up with.

6. In the spring my family and I shuffled off to Germany, but of course the semester went on without me. I heard some tales later. The spring colloquium brought John Sanders from Huntington College to speak on open theism. Sanders was embroiled in somewhat of a controversy at Huntington at that time over his views, and the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) was after him as well. Often in the past, the sport of ETS has been deciding who to try to kick out each year.

Open theism is the idea that God either chooses not to know the future or can't know the future because it doesn't exist. In one version, if God knew the future it would be determined and we would not be able to have free will. Therefore, God chooses not to know. In another version, the future does not exist. God is omniscient because it is not a failure of knowledge not to know something that isn't. For God to know the future, he would have to determine it.

Of course I reject the premise entirely. I reject the idea that the future is determined if God knows it. Still, you can see how this suggestion would be especially abhorrent to Calvinists. It is, in effect, an Arminian heresy. I consider it a light heresy because, after all, God is not really portrayed as omniscient in parts of the Old Testament (e.g., Gen. 6:6).

What I heard was that, after Sanders had presented his case to the students, after the whole thing was at an end, Steve Lennox as Division Chair concluded the session by smacking it down hard. He made it clear that the students could not hold this position and be Wesleyan pastors. Of course I consider open theism misguided, but it is ironically a certain literalism about the Bible that feeds it. In that sense it is a "conservative" heresy.

7. I think it might also have been this year that some of the leaders of the university were considering a Doctor of Arts in Ministry to be IWU's first doctoral degree. [1] Barnes saw the Religion division as the heart of the university. He was strongly concerned about the "dying of the light," the story line that says Christian universities all eventually go liberal and lose their faith (e.g., Harvard).

In fact, rumor has it that he wouldn't let the students dance because he believed behavioral debates were a slippery slope. If you allow dancing, the students will move on to debate drinking. So why not just stop at dancing? I don't think he really cared about dancing. [2]

So Barnes insisted that a member of the Religion division be on every search committee, much to the annoyance of the broader faculty at times. The dying of the light was a predictable sequence to him. First the college detaches from its denomination and becomes generic evangelical. False modernist presuppositions often play into this--"The truth is the truth no matter what group you're a part of. Faculty are just pursuing truth. They should be able to go wherever the investigation leads."

You can see how this would happen? "Aren't we all Christians?" "Aren't we all mission keepers?" "Aren't we all called?" "Wesleyans are a sect; we're more mainstream." In 2003, Keith Drury saw the tide of "we are all called" coming and wrote, The Call of a Lifetime, arguing that God called some people to dedicate all their energies to ministry for a whole life. But, alas, culture eats strategy for breakfast.

So then the college becomes Christian in name but not in substance. Illinois Wesleyan might have Wesleyan in the name, but it is not Methodist any more. Eventually the school becomes like Harvard or Yale where there is no real Christian identity at all.

Duane Litfin, president of Wheaton, would publish Conceiving the Christian College that fall 2004. Of course I do not agree with all of Litfin's decisions, but Barnes would bring him to campus. In his book he expresses the "voluntary principle." When you come to a confessional college, you agree to its confession. If you are truthful, you are free to publish anything you want. If you want to publish something outside the confession, you either must have lied in your interview or you have developed outside the confession. In that case you no longer belong.

This is a difficult concept for many faculty, in part because they are still thinking like modernists. They are still thinking of truth as something that we are all more or less objectively pursuing and therefore that I should be allowed to pursue it wherever it leads. But Indiana Wesleyan is owned by the Wesleyan Church. It has every right to insist that faculty fit within the parameters of its worldview. It is not a hard task master, but it is the master.

Personally, I believe the Wesleyan tradition is intrinsically a big tent tradition. That is to say, being Wesleyan involves an openness to those who have different ideologies and even some ethical differences. Wesley said, "If your heart is as my heart, then put your hand in mine." We are a revivalist tradition with pietist elements. The heart is central, unlike say the Christian Reformed Church where the head seems central.

At Wheaton, ideology is the grounding principle. At a Wesleyan college, a personal faith should be central. Then a living faith that plays itself out in how one lives and loves is the second most important priority. [3] What we believe is important, but it is the third order of business both biblically and for Wesleyans. This fact gives a different flavor to a Wesleyan college than, say, a Calvin College where you have to belong to the CRC to be on faculty.

So a better Wesleyan model sees the Wesleyan Church as the host of the university. Within that umbrella, a wide variety of other Christian traditions can be represented. The key is that they respect the host and that the host's perspectives be privileged.

For these reasons, I firmly believe that there could be Roman Catholic faculty at a place like IWU. Do they have a personal, living faith in Christ? Are they willing to live by the ethics of the IWU community? Are they orthodox and willing to respect the more distinctive Wesleyan perspectives of the host? Then they are potentially mission fit.

8. I heard a rumor that the DA was tanked while the president was on vacation and that he wasn't really happy when he returned. It seemed like a good idea. It would not have been a degree aimed for a person to become a college professor. It would be a degree that would give pastors a deeper expertise to draw on as pastors. It seemed like the perfect degree for IWU and the Religion Division, because it was oriented toward the church and it was practical.

And Barnes considered the Religion Division the most likely place out of which to start a doctorate. We would of course later launch the seminary out of it, and we would launch it again with those values. We are church-oriented and we train for the real world of ministry more than the academy.

9. This post has become rather long so I'll spare the details of my Fulbright. We lived in a little village south of Tübingen named Bühl. The first night we could hardly walk to the pub in the village. Our last night we walked to the next village.

Stefanie went to the gymnasium in Tübingen (high school). Angie's father went with us for most of the time and often would ride the bus with her. Stacy went to a school in Bühl. Tom went to a pre-school in Bühl. Some great stories. My parents came over during the stay and we traveled a little (they had come over in 1995 as well to visit me).

We had a week's vacation in Mougins, France. We went to Milan, Florence, and Venice. We attended a German-speaking Methodist Church.

I was supposed to be working on a book on the afterlife in Judaism--"Four Jewish Views of the Afterlife." I still hope to publish it but a lot came out in those years about the afterlife. It's been long enough that perhaps there is room for another one.

But in reality I spent most of my time finishing up A Brief Guide to Philo. I had the great idea of creating a "go-to" book for students who need to study Philo as part of their research but who were not looking to be experts on him. I'm quite proud of the book. It embodies a certain practicality that is unusual among academic works. It has been translated into Russian and Korean.

I've always sensed that real Philo scholars have an uneasy feeling about it. I'm not quite a Philo scholar, although I've always enjoyed the Philo Group at SBL. It doesn't go far enough for the expert, and several more advanced alternatives have come out since. But it may very well be my most widely known work in scholarly circles.

10. I presented two papers to the graduate colloquium at Tübingen. One was "From Sirach to the Sadducees" and the other was "From Enoch to the Scrolls." I gave what I'm sure was a hilarious paper in German at the Methodist seminary in Reutlingen: "Leben nach dem Tod" (life after death). For example, I used the word "Weltraum" to speak of the "realm" of the dead, but I guess it refers to outer space.

I did most of my work at the Theologicum at the university. It is my favorite theological library in the world--and the books weren't checked out. In those days I would occasionally drive to Notre Dame to use the Hesburgh library, but the books of interest were often checked out. Everything seemed available in Tübingen, especially the English books. :-)

11. I returned to teach Hebrews in May term and I believe we even tried a July term. My sabbatical put us off the Bible schedule so I did Hebrews in May. In that class were students like Kurt Beard, Daniel Freemyer, Tiffany (Good) Meador, Ben Hawk, Greg Jones, Ian Swyers, Clint Ussher, and even Gwen Jackson.

In July I saw a contest with Westminster John Knox for $10,000. Submit a book for the Presidential Award. It was due in a week. So in a week I wrote Who Decides What the Bible Means? I don't think it fits well with most any group's thinking. It's too Catholic for Protestants and too Protestant for Catholics. I received a response from the president of WJK along the lines of, "very interesting. good luck."

Keith Drury, as you would expect, was playing around with self-publishing in those days--ahead of the crowd as usual. He put me on to Lulu Publishing, an early company in this area. CreateSpace would then become the standard, now taken over by Kindle Direct (both Amazon). So this became my first self-published work in 2006.

Incidentally, I sent a copy to Abingdon and they sat on it for over a year, it seems. Then in 2007 Joel Green's Seized by Truth came out from Abindgon. He shapes the issues in a different way than I do, drawing heavily on Gadamer. But it sure seemed like there were a lot of parallels. I wondered if his book was a corrective to my proposal, but I have never asked him.

12. On May 29, 2004, Dr. Glenn Martin died of cancer. He was a force to be reckoned with, serving as chair of the Division of Social Science from 1972-2001. His Reformed epistemology was always at odds with the Wesleyan pragmatism of the Religion Division, but he was indeed a great man. He shaped generations of young men around the world. He gave them an ideological purpose in life that gave their lives a direction, often to young men whose lives might otherwise have gone astray.

[1] I've always admired Barnes' lateral rather than structural thinking. It seems to me that most academics think in boxes--symmetry of structures with a heavy emphasis on process. Follow the chain of command. This works well in a war and when you have an infinite amount of time.

It also stifles innovation and doesn't allow for the quick moves that are sometimes necessary in changing times. It's not a particularly good business model these days, it seems to me. Barnes thought like a starfish rather than a spider. The adult programs would have never gone anywhere if they had been structurally located under the residential faculty, so he put them somewhere else. I have wondered if they should have later been unified, but that's another train of thought.

The group that was dreaming up the DA was more like a never-ending task force whose purpose was to dream up new innovations at IWU. It wasn't on the org chart. It had people from all levels of the university whose main characteristic was that they were innovators. That means you had people in the room whose bosses weren't in the room. I hear that the president didn't talk much. He spoke up either to nix or to further an idea. But I wasn't there. :-)

[2] It reminds me of something Keith Drury once told me in his doorway. (I often appeared in his doorway. "Coach" has mentored so many of us. He would often patiently read stuff I was writing and try to steer me in positive directions.) He wondered if the legalism with which some holiness folk grew up usually finds an alternative way to express itself. It could be in insisting on a certain dress code or it could express itself in an anti-legalism where one resists all rules. There's a tendency to mock our parents for their stiffness, but then we simply become stiff on issues from our own time.

[3] This is why we always find out whether a prospective faculty goes to church. Some faculty at IWU have resisted this sort of element in things like rank promotion--or even having faith on a rank promotion rubric. But there is something very Wesleyan about these concerns.