Year 5 at IWU (2001-2002)

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

1. 9-11. This was the year of 9-11. I was teaching New Testament Survey upstairs (northeast room over the then east entrance) in Noggle in a 7:50 class when it happened. [1]

When I came down from class, Cindy was in Russ Gunsalus' office and informed me that both of the towers were down. I had hardly paid any attention to them on our way back from Boston a couple years back. I was much more interested in the Empire State Building and considered them ugly.

If I remember correctly, I pulled up NPR on my computer and listened non-stop for days to come. I remember the shift from focusing most on matters in this country to paying greater attention to the world situation. Whereas I used to listen to "Bob and Tom in the Morning" on my way up to Notre Dame, now in the spring of 2002 I would listen to NPR. For years thereafter I listened to NPR.

I am paranoid by nature. So I am not completely unsympathetic to our mayor at the time, who had barricades put around the Marion courthouse. In retrospect it seems quite silly, but it was a shock. No foreign power had attacked the US with any real success since Pearl Harbor. I had felt completely invincible. So where else were these terrorists hiding? Were there cells all over the place, even in Marion, Indiana, just waiting to jump out at us?

They weren't. The mania that looks at all Muslims as terrorists is simply mistaken on the highest of levels. This sentiment persists in our culture today, although now the climate has subtly shifted the unfounded paranoia to illegal immigrants. It's as if we have somehow forgotten the "evil Muslims" in favor of the "evil illegals." We humans are so easily manipulated by our fears and prejudices.

I had little sense of Afghanistan at all prior to that day. It was fascinating to learn of individuals who had the entire Quran memorized but couldn't read. I would use that as an example of the nature of oral cultures and how the illiteracy of biblical times is no indication of their intelligence.

2. In the fall of 2001 I tried out something new with Greek. My proposal was to teach all the categories of Greek the first semester, teaching how to use Greek tools, and then to teach all the forms to memorize the second semester. There were a number of things going on here. First, there was my sense that most Greek students spend all their energies memorizing charts and can barely remember the functions, which are what is really important. Then they forget all the forms over the summer anyway. At one point I mused that most Greek students lose 95% on their investment--not a good deal.

Then there was my sense that most ministers who use Greek end up using the "cheat" tools anyway. Sometime around here I went to a free Logos software seminar in Chicago and received this software on a special offer. For the next fifteen years in Noggle and the Seminary, we would occasionally ask ourselves whether to require students to buy Logos as part of the overall curriculum so they would have research tools for word studies and such. We always decided not to, and, as materials have become freely available, it has seemed less and less likely a suggestion.

2001 was before blueletterbible or interlinearbible.org. So I had the students buy a hard copy of Freiberg's Analytical Concordance. In the first semester, we used its code to tell us what the form was, while the course focused on what the tenses, cases, etc meant. The goal was to teach first what most students would actually remember after they had forgotten all the forms.

I started a Greek textbook, Purgatory Made Easy, which was to go along with the class. Jerry Pattengale even negotiated a contract with Triangle for it, which I never found the margin to sign, so it faded away. I've taught Greek at least three more times that way, and set up the seminary's Greek and Hebrew for ministry classes that way, so that students could get the bulk of Greek categories in one course.

Last year I taught Greek that way and more or less finished the textbook, but I have been unable to find a publisher for it. No surprise there. There's little market now for such a book. And of course the college has shut down Triangle, for good or ill. The college has long since stopped mailing out textbooks too to adult students.

I felt guilty for not leaving that layer of students with a solid Greek textbook. I bought Alicia (Rasley) Myers a copy of Machen so that she would have a reference tool going forward. She would go on to do her master's at Duke and her PhD in New Testament at Baylor. She taught at United Seminary for a short bit and is now at Campbell in North Carolina.

David Schreiner was also in that group. He would go on to get a PhD in Old Testament at Asbury Seminary.

3. I think I taught Paul's Later Epistles for the first time in the fall of 2001, just as I had taught Paul's Earlier Epistles for the first time the previous spring. We would break these courses up into more focused Bible classes during the period when IWU was at its peak. We were on the rise at this point. I see that the residential campus was at 2200 at this time, with 5000 adult learners either online or at a satellite campus. In spinning out worse case scenarios, there are some at IWU who are sketching out what it might look like to reduce to those sorts of numbers again in the demographic trench of 2026 that is coming.

STM also was starting its worship major at this time. In my preparation to move I came across a document in the fall of 2000 proposing a worship major, drafted by Keith Drury. I believe the major started this year with him teaching the key courses. His book, The Wonder of Worship, came out this year (2002).

Over the years, I have seen some academics ignore his book because it is so practical, especially for Wesleyans where they are at. I saw that happen at the seminary. We started using it because it was so practical for a Wesleyan minister. Then it was taken off the required list as being too popular. This is the personality of the academy. Rather than give students both the sugar and the vegetables, we just give them the vegetables. Then we are surprised when they don't sign up.

At its peak, IWU and the Division gave students both sugar and vegetables, and they came in droves.

4. In the spring I taught Intertestamental Literature for the first time (I think). That class had Mandy Drury and Dave Schreiner in it, not to mention my partners in Deep Thought FNL humor Dan Stellar and David Wingfield. Mandy has told me several times that this was the class that most prepared her for Princeton. The forces that have ended the teaching of Latin at IWU have also ended the teaching of this course.

I would always tell students in this class that the intertestamental period was the lens through which Jews at the time of Christ read the Old Testament. That is to say, the New Testament may draw on the Old Testament for the materials of its theology, but the form that it gave to those materials was largely a function of the currents between 200BC and Jesus. It was during this period of time that belief in resurrection became dominant. It was during this period that zeal for the Law revived and took on its New Testament form. Our sense of Satan and angels was heavily impacted. In short, we think we are just reading the Old Testament, but the NT authors were wearing intertestamental glasses.

5. Nathan Lail reminded me that he had me for philosophy the fall that 9-11 happened. I looked it up and others in that class included Jason Berry, John and Danielle Freed, Tom Cochran, Jonathan Dodrill, Kristen Haines, Tim Nettleton, Daniel Schwartz, Joe and Jeff Locke. It met in the large room on the far west side of Noggle.

From either Joe or Jeff Locke I learned the expression "Motion brings emotion." I was teaching Aristotle's sense that habit can form virtue--fake it till you make it. I've sometimes gotten theological push back on this notion because we don't believe you can become truly good in your own power. Fine. But it is nevertheless true that virtuous behavior can be formed by habitual actions. It becomes muscle memory. "Motion brings emotion." Act lovingly toward your spouse long enough and the feelings of love will follow (cf. Fireproof).

6. In summer 2002 my family would move to our current house near the hospital. We had redone my attic on Harmon into a room for Stefanie and Stacy, but it was just too cramped and too cold/hot. I would rent out the Harmon street house to David Wingfield and friends as they finished up. David ran FNL in those days. Dan Stellar was on a trajectory to make movies. They did a couple video shorts with me. One was called "Schencko" (after Psycho). Then Dan did one with my son Thomas called "Turbocaf," with him bouncing up and down with the tape sped up.

7. In the spring of 2002, Jim Lo, Keith Drury, Burt Webb, and I ran/jogged/walked the Indianapolis marathon. For me it was on a whim. I had not trained. Jim Lo ran the whole thing and then came back and walked with us. I jogged eight miles then walked the rest.

Burt was a biologist who would end up becoming a Dean at Northwest Nazarene and is now president at the University of Pikeville in Kentucky. IWU has produced a lot of college presidents over the years. It is a testament to the winning DNA of those years. IWU in those days was like a leader incubator, and once you got the bug, it would become increasingly difficult not to express it in some form of academic leadership. Yet there can't be too many cooks in the same kitchen, so people end up having to go elsewhere to let the genie out of the bottle.

We had some great discussions over lunch. At that time, if I remember correctly, Burt wondered if Adam and Eve were the first humanoids into which God put a soul. Of course the genome has since thrown wrinkles into that hypothesis. At some point in those years we started having Monday Reading Group. Each Monday we would go through a book of some interest. On the soul, for example, we would read Joel Green's book in 2008. In 2012, we went through the Catholic Catechism and created notes on it from a Wesleyan perspective.

8. In the summer of 2002, I began doing a little adjuncting for Asbury online. I was not a particularly good online teacher in those days. I would like to think I have improved. I have sometimes found that a person who is dynamic in the live classroom is often not naturally gifted online. On the other hand, I have known teachers who are phenomenal online and yet pretty average in the live classroom. I link this phenomenon to the fact that online has typically required strong administrative skills, while personality sometimes carries the day face-to-face.

So it is with some sheepishness that I remember that Kyle Ray took Matthew IBS with me in 2004 online with Asbury. Sorry Kyle! A great insight here for me is to "Leverage your strengths; manage your weaknesses." [2] With the advent of Zoom and other conferencing softwares, I have often since modified my online classes to a hybrid of face-to-face and asynchronous.

9. In our current hyper-administrative form of doing university (the rise of managerial academic culture), young academics are often dumbfounded at how little paperwork we comparatively did in the early 2000s. I remember how hard Cynthia Tweedel worked to get us to do assessment. It was a thankless job. I still get emails from the seminary occasionally asking for things like master course outlines from the founding of the seminary. There were no such things in 2009. There was simply the course description and the course outcomes. And frankly standardizing these and having the outcomes on file was a development that largely took place during my first decade at IWU.

So in those days rank promotion was largely a reward for faithfulness. Were you decent in the classroom? Were you serving your department faithfully? Scholarship was great and over those years Barnes was slowly trying to tighten those screws.

But in my first five years scholarship was value added. When I first met Keith Reeves at SBL (Wesleyan at Azusa) after I started working at IWU, he was quite surprised for someone from IWU (or the Wesleyan Church) to be at SBL. And I even presented! This was all fairly tangential to my identity as a professor at that time. I felt like I did my scholarship on the side. A visiting scholar around 2005 even asked me, after visiting the campus, why I did it.

Things have long since changed. You will now find multiple IWU faculty at SBL each year with multiple presentations. In any case, I was approved for Associate Professor without any problems.

[1] Interesting story here of how we can infect earlier memories with later ones. For the last few years, I have thought I was teaching Inductive Bible Study to a class that included my first cousin once removed, Mark Shepherd. But in researching this, I realized I taught him in 2007, probably in that room. Kevin Wright then made the final correction--it was a New Testament Survey class that he was actually in.

The upstairs of Noggle at this time wrapped around the east and north sides of the building. Psychology had its offices in the southeast part of this corridor. Then the hall wrapped around the north to where Michael Boivin's office was (and I think later Tim Steenburgh's). There was a far removed classroom then at the end of the north hall to the west. I only taught in it once, I think.

Karen Hoffman remembers passing me going up those back stairs (I think) going to that classroom. I think I might have been joking but I said to her in passing something like "I hope I can figure out where my classroom is." She was horrified that I wouldn't know where I was going at that point of the semester. I've been told that my humor is an acquired taste.

[2] Now Discover Your Strengths.