Seminary - Practical Ministry 6

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35. I studied Hebrew with Lawson Stone my second year at Asbury. [1] He had arrived the same year I came as a student. I very much enjoyed him as a professor. He was fresh out of Yale, vibrant, and clearly a genius.

In those days he seemed excited about new ideas, very open-minded. I've already mentioned that he did a special seminar on Isaiah 1-12 in Hebrew. I think Dave Smith may have been in there too. He wanted to use the tools of EB in Hebrew.

I've always wondered if it was hard to teach in the shadow of your mentor, in this case Dennis Kinlaw. Kinlaw was a colossus of a man, a spiritual giant. He was also an Old Testament scholar. Steve Deneff often mentions him from the pulpit of College Wesleyan as someone who had a big spiritual impact on him as well.

Asbury College was blessed to have a great revival among its students in 1970. It was a normal chapel, but people started going to the altar. And they kept going. And they kept praying. And they stayed and they stayed. And people drove in from all over to join. It lasted for almost 8 days without interruption.

In a way, Asbury College, now University, lived under the shadow of that event for years. Other campuses did too. Even last year at IWU there was a chapel that a professor hoped would spark a spiritual revival. He got permission from the president for students to be excused if they stayed after it was over. I think many did stay for the better part of the day.

So you are always looking for it to happen again. Is this chapel going to start another revival? Wait, two students are staying after chapel to pray. Is this going to be the start of a new revival? I wonder if it is hard to move forward when you are always hoping to revisit the past.

I'm pretty sure that Lawson was open to some critical ideas in 1988 that Kinlaw would not have been. Kinlaw may have been a spiritual giant, but in my mind he was not as great of an Old Testament scholar. My first year as teaching fellow (summer 1990 I think) he did the faculty retreat for the seminary, and I distinctly remember him imploring the faculty to be careful with his baby. In my mind the baby was perhaps the best it had ever been.

These sorts of dynamics are very typical as an old guard passes things on to the new guard. I remember a large church pastor in Florida once reading a quote about how bad the youth of the day had become (Larry Freeman). [2] The quote was about how the younger generation was going to pot and how the world was getting worse and worse. Then he came to the punchline--the quote was from Plato in the 300s BC. Freeman's point--not always true because sometimes the world is spiraling into the abyss--is that the older generation often thinks the younger generation is going to pot.

We used Seow for Hebrew. When I was a teaching fellow, Stone also taught Akkadian and Aramaic. I took the Akkadian class, in part to help Lawson get the numbers. I went to the first day of Aramaic, but I felt like my Hebrew wasn't quite good enough for me not to get really confused. It remains a regret, although a good decision probably at the time.

36. I did take some practical courses at Asbury. Obviously the biblical courses are the ones that most resonated and stayed with me. They were the ones that got at the heart of my search to know the truth and what God required of me.

When I was called to ministry in college, my attention was initially more drawn to theology. My honors project engaged the Bible for sure but it was focused on theological questions. When I started out, I assumed I knew what the Bible taught. The undiscovered country was theology.

In seminary, the world of the Bible opened up to me. With shifts in my understanding, I had to go to ground zero in the Bible. In my circles, the Bible is the foundation. So while my interests at Central had heavily been theological, at Asbury they were now primarily biblical.

One piece of the puzzle was that I didn't want someone to be able to throw me into a faith crisis. I wanted to know everything. I wanted to know all the counter-arguments too. I wanted to face the beast of doubt and be prepared for anything someone might throw at me.

37. I took "Pastor as Leader." Aside from the professor introducing us to Ong, the main thing I remember is that he was big on "systems theory." I'm still not entirely sure what the big deal about systems theory is other than it views the church like a machine with inputs and outputs. No offence to the professor, but I'm pretty sure that the leadership courses that Keith Drury taught at IWU and that Bob Whitesel taught at Wesley Seminary were probably more helpful in general for doing the work of the ministry.

I won't give the name of my "Pastor as Teacher" professor. It is a deep irony to me that most of the Christian education teachers I have known throughout the years have been pretty boring. Keith Drury is one exception. I did learn some helpful things in the class though. I was reminded of the moral development theory of Kohlberg. I had learned it first with Hal Robbins at Central. I learned about the Kolb learning cycle. Knowing that people do not all learn the same way is a key insight if you are going to be a good teacher.

I had Don Boyd for "Pastor as Liturgist." Boyd had been a Wesleyan Methodist District Superintendent in the Allegheny District of Pennsylvania. During the merger of the Wesleyan Methodists with the Pilgrims, they had pulled out and become their own group. Some New York Pilgrims had done the same.

Boyd was DS during all that mess. My sense is that both the Pilgrims and the Wesleyan Methodists who didn't go with the merger both thought the other side was too liberal. And also that it was moving toward the one world religion of the end times.

My grandfather Schenck and a couple of my uncles didn't merge either. One uncle told my dad at a campground on the way to Florida that he would pray for my Dad's soul if he went with the merger. We packed up and left the next morning before the other family got up. My dad would be a delegate at the merging conference at Anderson in 1968.

Boyd was teaching mostly United Methodists, and he had clearly come to love liturgy. Our final project was a worship file where other students graded us. I knew precious little about liturgy as someone who had grown up as a holiness Wesleyan. Let's just say I was annoyed to be graded down on my materials because of a United Methodist student's eyes.

I only finally let go of the file box in my move to Houghton. Some will know that I became a go-to person for a while in Marion whenever there was a desire for something a little more on the Book of Common Prayer side. In time, Constance Cherry and David Riggs on campus and Emily Vermilya at College Wesleyan became the masters in residence.

If I continue this series into my IWU days, I'll mention there that I was never a purist. Rather, I believe you can worship God from any number of styles of worship, from Hillsong to the mass. I stand-up for the legitimacy of liturgical worship over and against my background that saw it too "catholic" or full of "vain repetition." But I do not think it is the only way to worship and find the other side legitimate too.

38. I was able to take David Seamands for "Pastor as Care-Giver" before he retired. He was of course renowned. His book Healing of Memories would be deeply meaningful to me. [3] Seamands' lingo was always a little sappy to me, but the substance I found very helpful.

So he speaks of "damaged love receptors." The idea is that God is transmitting his love to you. The problem is that some of us have damaged love receptors. Our antenna are broken. God loves us. God has forgiven us, but we can't feel it.

This idea resonated with me in the extreme. My theology told me that God loved me. My theology told me that I was forgiven. But I couldn't feel anything from God most of the time.

Seamands suggested that we often need help from each other when this is the case. We need others to come alongside us as antenna repair people. This was a puzzling point for me. If I had enough faith, why wouldn't God just repair me himself? As an introvert, I didn't want to go to others for help.

In the end I would simply say, "That's just the way God has set things up." It reminds me of an old song. "God uses people, ordinary people. He uses people who are willing to do what he commands."

In my spiritual journey, there has often been a lag between my head and my feelings. When I talked to Dongell or Huffman or my mother or David Thompson, their advice and thoughts were not immediately satisfying. They had to seep in. They had to work their way into my spiritual gut.

In a way, Seamands' work marked the closing of my ten years of guilt. I was moving into a period of peace, one of the happiest periods of my life.

39. As an aside, I never took Don Joy for a class. His sex class was very popular and of course I was intrigued. But to sign up for it seemed a little desperate. :-)

Joy wrote a book called Bonding. As I recall, in it he argued that man was created androgynous, both male and female. So when God created Eve, he divided man into Adam and Eve, male and female. Marriage, then, was getting the band back together.

I heard that he had run it by the Old Testament faculty at Asbury and they had told him it didn't work exegetically. Interestingly, I was reminded of this theory while going through John Walton's The Lost World of Adam and Eve. He says something about the definition of "side" in Hebrew that sounded a little like Joy's theory, which I doubt Joy came up with himself.

40. The final practical course I took was "Servant as Proclaimer" with Don Demaray. It was a great class. The way he had it structured was great, and I found his book quite helpful.

We presented the parts of a sermon before presenting a whole sermon. I remember that, when I presented my introduction, I talked about how I had run the Lexington 5K a couple times in the spring without having run at all over the winter. I was able to do that when I was in my early twenties. The point of the introduction was that if you aren't training for your spiritual life, you will choke when the race suddenly comes upon you.

I got good marks on the intro from him. The evaluation side would always first involve positive feedback from him and the class. Then he would say, "And now the other side." I also remember him quite frequently saying at the beginning of class, "Let's pray that this will be the best class ever. Why not?" Of course I would always then think to myself. "They can't all be the best class! There have to be some less exciting ones. Otherwise we all would eventually explode!"

In typical idealistic Ken fashion, in those pre-pragmatist days, I switched my topic for the final sermon. Mistake. I was on a good trajectory. I think I tried to preach on the problem of evil. I agreed to go ahead of when I was originally scheduled, agreeing to switch with someone, and didn't have enough time to perfect it. Argh!

[1] I don't regret it, because I loved Lawson as a professor, but I missed Eugene Carpenter by a a year. He would move to Bethel in Mishawaka. I did have some interaction with him at Bethel. He tragically died on a lake a few years ago.

Carpenter taught Hebrew inductively from Genesis 1. I bought his tapes and listened to them over the summer after my first year at Asbury. Part of my familiarity with Genesis 1 in Hebrew comes from those tapes.

[2] I found him reading the quote annoying at the time, and I post this story knowing one possible response. I'll simply mention the genetic fallacy--whether something is true or not does not depend on its source.

[3] His earlier book, Healing for Damaged Emotions was also meaningful to me, although I thought the title was funny.