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
7. 2003-2004 The Sabbatical
8. 2004-2005 The Israel Trip
9. 2006-2007 The Year of the Bernii
1. Dave Ward arrived as a homiletics professor in the fall of 2006. He is not only brilliant in general. He is a fantastic professor. I believe he was in his senior year my first year at IWU. Then he went to Asbury. Then he worked for Kingdom Building Ministries.
The Religion Division wisely nabbed him while he was working on his doctorate at Princeton. This is a strategy that colleges and seminaries have often used over the years when a promising alumnus/a might otherwise be in high demand once they finish their doctoral work. Hire them early. Sometimes these institutions will even help pay for the person's doctoral work.
Sometime in there Dave and I went through Jannach's German for Reading Knowledge, the book I had used at Asbury with Steven O'Malley. However, he was much quicker to learn German than I was. I saw this aptitude for languages in 2013 when we went to Turkey too. Dave would of course be Dean of STM from 2012-2016.
2. Meanwhile, Jim Lo left on a pilgrimage that would take him first to Bethel University and then back to IWU in 2007 as Dean of the Chapel. [1] He would finally return to teaching in STM with me in 2015.
The current chapel was built in 2009. It is a magnificent structure. I made some comment during the planning, wondering if the new chapel could be built in something like the shape of a cathedral (I had the Duke University Chapel in mind). The thought made Henry Smith chuckle. :-)
I haven't mentioned that in the years leading up to Jim's transition, he created a program for missions trips called World Impact. I always thought this was fun because in my earlier years he had been somewhat critical of short term missions trips. I think we even had a colloquium once debating whether they did more good or harm.
The critique is that, if the team is not properly prepared, they can go with no real cross-cultural awareness. One can inadvertently be offensive. How many church people on missions trips are condescending toward the people they visit? Some can have a savior complex. Some can be an excessive burden, coming with North American expectations. In a true learning experience, the visitor gains far more than those they visit.
World Impact would later be taken out of the Religion Division and eventually became the Office of Global Engagement, currently under Jim Vermilya. It has become far more than missions trips. In fact, it is much more a matter of intercultural learning than missions now.
3. Another arrival was Jolly Beyioku, who taught International Community Development for nine years. This current year God made it possible for STM to hire Sarah Farmer to teach Community Development. The program had declined significantly over the last decade, but even in one year she has significantly revived it!
I might also mention here Joy Tong, who came for one year in 2011-2012 to teach intercultural studies after Steve Pettis left. After that year, she left IWU for Purdue.
4. The classes I taught were in a fairly regular two year rotation by now, including Intertestamental Literature and Latin.
- I was not able to find my class list for first year Latin in the fall of 2006, but I enjoyed a talented group of five students who had taken Latin before they came to IWU. We did Latin 3 and 4 together. These students included Sarah (Smith) Funnell, Leah Norton, and Curt Schrock. In the fall, we read excerpts from the Aeneid in Latin.
- Prison Epistles was in the rotation in the fall of 2006. Some in that class were Aaron Cloud, Zach Coffin, Brian Episcopo, Hannah (Smith) Episcopo, Aaron Gross, Heath Jones, Ryan VanMatre, Chad Waddington
- Romans was also in the fall of 2006. Students included the likes of Jonathan Bell, Jason Farrell, Eric Key, Amber Livermore, Aaron Thompson, Zach Working
- In my fall 2006 intro to philosophy, I see Brian Scramlin and Bethany Perkins among the dozens of students.
- For Honors NT in the fall, I see Sarah (Smith) Funnell and Joel Yoshonis.
- In the spring for Corinthians and Thessalonians I see Marc Buwalda, Melissa Curran, Glenn Davis, Scott Hendricks, Lynne Payne, Brian Scramlin, Kristen (Shafer) Larrowe, Troy Young, and others.
- For second year Greek in 1 John in the fall, I see Jared Kendall, Sarah (Smith) Funnell, and Amber Livermore. For Romans in the spring we added Brian Bither.
- At some point in here, Mike Cline did an independent study on the new perspective on Paul. I had done other independent studies over the years. Tom Seat and I did an independent study on N. T. Wright. Sarah (Smith) Funnell did an independent study on Coptic in 2008. I was of no help to her, however, and she didn't need it.
5. In 2007, IWU would build Elder Hall, named after the magisterial Marj Elder, who taught at IWU for decades as an English professor. The university had also purchased Center School, where my step-daughters Stefanie and Stacy had finished up their elementary school once upon a time. BTW, the fall of 2016 was Stefanie's quinceñera.Center School is currently being used for math classes, but I sense it will be transformed at some point in the near future.
6. My main scholarship for the year was the publication of an article in the Catholic Biblical Quarterly: "2 Corinthians 4:13 and the πίστις Χριστοῦ Debate." I believe Kevin Wright had helped do some research for me when I worked on it.
From the late 1980s on, there was a long-standing debate about whether the expression "faith of Christ" in Galatians 2:16 and Romans 3:22 referred to faith in Jesus Christ or the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. Both readings are possible from the Greek. I personally couldn't make up my mind. I couldn't find sufficient evidence.
I found my opinion through the back door. It seems to me that the logic of 2 Corinthians 4:13 presupposes the faith of Jesus. So if there is one reference to Jesus' faith, we know it is a category for Paul and something we might expect to find elsewhere. I would end up arguing that Paul is arguing in these verses "from Hays to Dunn," the two key voices on this subject.
7. In the fall of 2006 I gave a speculative paper at SBL called "The Tale of the Shipwreck" to the Formation of Luke-Acts Section. I felt like it received crickets in response. Late in the year I wrote an article on mediators and mediation for the New Interpreter's Bible Dictionary. Finally, I gave a paper at the June Ecclesiology Conference at HQ on "The Church and the Spirit".
Now finishing my tenth year, I was eligible to apply for full professor. Again, the process was not nearly as refined as it now is. I believe it was Darlene Bressler (2008) who would help facilitate a rubric that involved four main categories: scholarship, teaching, service, and faith. I like these. I also remember her introducing the book Scholarship and Christian Faith, on faith integration. It was received positively by the faculty. We liked it in the Religion Division because it engaged more pietist traditions in addition to the more cognitive ones.
8. It was an interesting year for blogging. I got into a very hot argument with a former Martinite over predestination and eternal security. His handle was "Once a Wesleyan." You can find the collection of our back and forth here. I got pretty sarcastic in the debate. It was at this point that Keith Drury introduced me to the saying, "Don't wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty but the pig likes it."
Another rather controversial exchange had to do with the removal of Jeff Greenway from the presidency of Asbury Seminary. This controversy took place in September and October of 2006. Greenway ended up leaving Asbury, and Asbury itself was dinged by the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) for its handling of the crisis.
I ended up getting involved after a post I made in September called, "Crossroads or Cross-way at Asbury." The conflict was directly between the president and the leaders of the Board of Trustees. The faculty voted almost unanimously for Greenway to be reinstated after his initial suspension, then later for a mediator to be brought in. A significant person at Asbury began to feed me resolutions of the faculty, which I then passed on from the blog.
Most Wesleyans were not impressed with the way the leaders of the board handled the situation (with some exceptions). Ironically, Jeff Greenway was scheduled to speak at IWU's chapel the day he left. He would have been the first president of Asbury to come to IWU to speak. The Religion Division, although the first or second individual feeder of students to Asbury at that time (as many as 70 students at one time, I think), had felt taken for granted. Greenway seemed to be moving in our direction.
It was another event that opened the door wider for IWU to start its own seminary. At the time, Asbury had an incredibly strong alumni base in the Wesleyan Church. It was the place to do seminary education for decades, and I myself went there. We received push-back as it was, but you could argue that the fact Wesleyan relations with Asbury were not particularly fervent at that moment was another element in the overall equation.
Another take-away is that you almost never can keep things hidden in the internet age. Things are going to get out. President Trump has wielded Twitter like a weapon of mass destruction. I've heard that public announcements of decisions on the General Board of the Wesleyan Church are sent out real time because they know the board members will be texting them out anyway.
9. In the fall of 2006, David Smith and Russ Gunsalus called a joint meeting of the Division of Religion and Graduate Studies in Ministry. Bob Whitesel was there too. The ultimate goal, as I remember, was to let the president know that we were all united on the idea of starting a seminary.
The group drafted a set of eight values that we believed should typify the new seminary:
- It should be missional and kingdom-focused.
- It should be accessible, available online.
- It should be application focused rather than primarily theoretical
- It should be spiritually formative.
- It should be innovative... not like your father's seminary (as Henry Smith and Carl Shepherd used to say).
- It should add value--take a person at one point and take them further.
- It should have high quality teaching and learning.
- It should be global in its reach.
In the fall of 2006, Henry Smith invited Bill Miller to come from ATS to share a little about where seminary standards were headed. He told us, for example, that ATS had shifted to require only 72 hours toward an MDIV.
[1] I haven't mentioned that Steve Lennox was Dean of the Chapel for two years, from 2005-2007.
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