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
1. I did a quick sweep of what class records I still have to look for students I had this year. Please chime in if I miss you!
- In New Testament Survey, I see I had Aaron Duvall, Clint and Jamie Ussher, Joy Arroyo, Carl Rudy, Chris and Rachael Demarse.
- Fall of 2002 in Paul's Earlier Epistles, I see Josh Bowlin, Brian Cooper, Paul Kind, DJ Murvine, Mark Schmerse, Marc Ulrich, and others.
- In the spring of 2003 for Paul's Later Epistles I see Kurt Beard, Blake Chastain, Seth Harshman, Alicia (Rasley) Myers, Devin Rose, Dave Schreiner, Ali Walls, Dave Wingfield, Debbie Wooters, Kevin Wright, and others.
- In my philosophy classes that year I see names like Mike Cline, Matt Beck, Tiffany (Good) Meador, Patrick Cooper. Kari and Josh Jackson, Jamie Ussher, Barton Price, Jonathan Parsons (who went on to PhD in philosophy), Kim Veenkant, George Wooten, Blake Chastain, Brent Dongell, Scott Ferguson, J Fry, Kara Kensinger, Tom Seat, and more.
Chris and I would take playful jabs at each other in our classes. He would ridicule my heresy, and I had an imaginary "Bounds mitre" I put on when students wanted to know the right answer to a question, and I needed to speak for the church. I think this sort of back and forth made studying in Noggle fun. It showed that we were all friends, indeed a family the students were part of.
I don't know when the Friday lunches developed. Most everyone who wasn't teaching at the lunch hour on Fridays would go over to Baldwin together. We would laugh and have an uproarious time. More than once students would say, "We try to imagine what you all are talking about." Some imagined we were having deep conversations but... NOT! We were just being friends.
And so developed a key question in hiring in those years--the lunch test. Is a candidate someone we would like to hang out with and go out to lunch with? There are of course some dangers to that question because it can inadvertently promote homogeneity. But it certainly promoted a sense of family that was part of the secret sauce.
3. Chris Bounds introduced us all to Tom Oden and to the consensus of the church. (Although I did hear Oden give his testimony at Asbury College around 1990. He was so above my head that I couldn't even understand his testimony.) I would come to draw on the concept of the consensus fidei heavily because it allowed me space to let the Bible say what it seemed to say while affirming orthodoxy as the end goal God had in mind.
Bounds is sneakily brilliant. I say sneakily because he doesn't tell you how much he's read or how much he knows. He has no interest in acclaim or notoriety. When you are saying heretical things, he calmly might shake his head up and down and say, "Yes, yes, that would be one of the worst heresies there is." He has an irenic spirit, although he certainly can get into the "Bounds bounce" when he is talking about heresy in a lecture.
I once remarked that he was the greatest theologian the Wesleyan Church had--and of course he is United Methodist. :-) We are now seeing a slew of great Wesleyan theologians in our schools--Jonathan Case, Josh McNall, Jonathan Morgan, John Drury, Jerome Van Kuiken, and more. I'll even get a shout out to Tom McCall, that traitor at Trinity. :-)
The Wesleyan Church would draw on Chris a lot for that decade, especially for a brief revival of the doctrine of sanctification. It seemed to me that, for a brief moment, even the general superintendents were open to letting the doctrine drift away. You might remember Keith Drury's famous presentation in 1995 entitled, "The Holiness Movement Is Dead." For a short period of time, Chris stood at the center of a revival of the doctrine. He was even asked to present on it at the General Conference of the Wesleyan Church in 2004--the shorter, longer, and middle ways.
Chris was a model Noggle professor. He was a brilliant scholar to be sure. But he was a pastor whose first love was the church. He was a mentor. He was sanctified. He was practical.
We lost him to Asbury University in 2016. I think there are lessons to be learned around his departure, but I will leave it at that. I said he'd be back at IWU in three years. Well, you can't be right on everything. :-) Currently, STM is blessed to have Jonathan Morgan, who was voted most popular professor in STM this year by students. So STM is in good theological hands.
4. That winter and spring I was desperately trying to finish my New Testament Survey book. I remember Nathan Birky catching me on my way back from lunch or chapel about the name. He didn't think "Snapshots of the New Testament" was good enough. Did I have a better idea, one that made a strong spiritual statement?
As we walked by the prayer chapel I said, "How about 'Jesus is Lord'?" This was probably the very first Christian creed, possibly confessed by Christians right before they were baptized (Rom. 10:9). He liked it, and so it would be. Jesus Is Lord came out in September.
I had some spectacular writing days that winter between Christmas and New Year's at Hilton Head. My family and Angie's parents were with us. I would slip off to the Barnes and Noble to have coffee and write. It's one of my favorite writing memories, in the cozy inside warmth of winter.
5. The spring of 2003 was the first World Changer ceremony. Barnes and board chair Lyle Reed had got the idea from a book by the late Rob Briner, Roaring Lambs. The idea was to recognize Christians in the secular realm who were changing the world for the better. (Ministers could not be chosen). These were meant to be models of what we were training our students to become like.
With each new inductee, a bronze statue was put in the rotunda in the library. Over the years, students and faculty have been more happy about some choices than others. I'll leave it at that.
6. On Spring Break 2003 (March 1-5) several of the Religion faculty went with Wilbur and Ardelia Williams to Greece/Turkey (she had just retired in 2002). Meanwhile, on March 20, 2003, President Bush unleashed "shock and awe" on Baghdad, just a couple weeks after we had returned.
To say I was paranoid on those flights is an understatement. Just this week, at the STM farewell for me, Steve Horst recounted the story of me standing in the aisle on the plane much of the flight, scanning the passengers for possible terrorists. We all knew the war could come any day. Powell had already made his case for weapons of mass destruction to the UN security council in February.
On that flight also was Cheri Horst, Bud and Carol Bence, Steve and Lori Deneff, and more. In those days Wilbur made sure that every faculty person in the Religion Division made it to the Holy Land... on his dime! On this occasion, he paid for my entire trip to biblical sites in Greece and Turkey. For that I am ever grateful.
Unlike his Holy Land tours, Greece required a Greek tour guide. This was a little annoying. We were a Christian group interested in biblical sites, not a group wanting to know about Greek history in general. Abson Joseph and Steve Horst's current tours are much better.
So they took us to Delphi. Of course I loved Delphi. There is a great Greek restaurant there. But it's not exactly a biblical site. I remember Steve Deneff being struck by the similarity in structure between the pagan temple there and the Jerusalem tabernacle. I remember David Thompson at Asbury mentioning this fact as well, once upon a time.
It leads to an important paradigm shift, I think. When God commanded the tabernacle and temple to follow a certain form, he was largely drawing on a temple structure that already existed. God meets people where they are at. God incarnates revelation. He starts with where we are and goes from there. God contextualizes revelation.
7. Steve Deneff came to College Wesleyan Church in 2001. He is of course a spectacularly wise and godly man. I love him to death.
Of course it used to be pretty clear that some of us faculty were quite annoying to him from time to time. Imagine all the emails you might get from a college community. You use a physics illustration, you get a corrective email from a physics professor. You say something about psychology or physiology, you get an email from some professor. I think I only emailed him once, in his first year--something about Pharisees.
In response, he would mock us from the pulpit from time to time. "I'm going to get emails about this." :-) I'm looking forward to Wes Oden at Houghton. :-)
The year between Joe Seaborn and Steve (2000-2001), we had an embarrassment of riches in the preaching of Steve Lennox and Bud Bence. In the fall of 2000, we had both Tom and Sophie baptized as infants at College Wesleyan, something not uncommon among millennial Wesleyans. Bud preached the sermon and Keith Drury did the baptism.
Bud's message was striking to me (as always). Wesleyans can baptize infants because we do not believe that baptism saves a person. In my view, infant baptism says, "You are in the church unless and until you walk away." Believers baptism says "You're outside the church until you get a brain." It makes our children outsiders, foreigners in the church until they get old enough to join the club.
8. In the Greece trip we went to Corinth. I was very excited about this. But at the key moment, I forgot about the inscription funded by Erastus (cf. Rom. 16:23), down by the theater. Of course we spent some time in Athens. I remember Nick Deneff taking some food off some vendor's cart there, thinking it was a free sample like at Sam's Club or something. He didn't realize you had to pay. :-)
My first book came out in July 2003, Understanding the Book of Hebrews. I spent a good deal of time on the cruise across the Aegean working on the index. Man, that was a lot harder in those days!! Now we just do a search on the print ready PDF.
9. In 2003, the new Jackson library was finished, and the library moved from Goodman to Jackson. Goodman is currently where the Honors College and School of Teacher Education are located. I remember talk about the committees that designed the new library. Keith Drury, if I remember correctly, thought that the McConn coffee shop should be in the library and that there should be a decisive shift toward online resources. These ideas obviously encountered resistance.
So McConn, the true center of campus, was put in the student center. I wonder what would have happened if it was in the library! Would the library then be the center of campus?
Fifteen years later it is still not clear to me that we will eventually go entirely to e-books. In fact there was a major misfire in this regard in the early 2010s, when CAPS tried to move to e-books. It turns out that the typical adult IWU student didn't want them. It seems that I made double royalties on my NT Survey one year because they ended up having to send the paper books after billing the e-books. I mean, I took the money, even though I felt sorry for the students. :-)
10. In the fall of 2002, David Wright took over the graduate program in religion. From this point on, it would be a little more detached from Noggle because it was now housed in a new unit called the College of Graduate Studies. David would save the program by putting it online. I remember the first planning meeting upstairs in what is now Maxwell.
His approach was to reformulate the degree around "low hanging fruit." So with Bounds in town, "Theology of Holiness" seemed a good choice. Steve Lennox wrote a Biblical Interpretation course. These were all eight week courses. A cohort model was used, and I adjuncted for the program in Marion, Indy, and Fort Wayne.
I believe it was somewhere around this time that Dr. Wright hired Bob Whitesel, the only fully dedicated faculty member in the Grad Ministry program.
11. It was during this 2002-2003 year that College Wesleyan started what it called the "Cathedral Service." For some reason I feel like Judy (Huffman) Crossman asked me, although I think she was still Dean in CAS at that time. They asked Bud first but he declined. I have her down as Dean from 2000-2004. Then she went to work as the pastoral care pastor at CWC from 2005-2015. For a short time, she actually had her office with us in the Religion suite, even though she was in psychology at the time.
It was a liturgical service, based on the Book of Common Prayer. It was a small but dedicated crowd, and we would "pipe in" the sermon from the main sanctuary live on screen. We did communion every week.
On Easter Sunday, April 20, 2003, I was giving communion when it became evident that something was happening with my face. Keith and Sharon Drury wondered if I was having a stroke, although my brain seemed normal for me. :-) I had noticed a certain numbness in my mouth the evening before driving Stefanie to Kokomo, as I remember.After the service, we drove to Kokomo to have an Easter meal and do our usual egg hunt with Angie's parents. I dropped the family off in their beautiful Easter clothes and then drove to the emergency room. Although I don't remember anyone in my family ever having it, I discovered that I have the gene for Bell's Palsy. A nice steroid shot and some strong antivirals, and I was back for Easter. A few months later my face would return to my normal.
12. In my sixth year as professor, I had the privilege to apply for sabbatical. Given our love for Europe, we decided to try for Tübingen, Germany, where I had spent two months during my doctorate. I applied for a Fulbright.
It seems to me the key for a Fulbright is to have a sponsor of sorts at the university where you want to go work. I had worked with Hermann Lichtenberger when I was there before in 1995, so I reached out to him with a project to work on. I was very grateful to be awarded the grant.
Angie's mother was quite excited to come visit us in Germany. For our fifth wedding anniversary, Angie and I went on a cruise, while her parents watched the kids. (I was actually nervous to be away from them for several days). When we returned, her parents took Stefanie and Stacy on a trip out west, along with two other cousins. Angie was still working as a youth pastor at Main Street UM and went to Epworth Forest Camp that week while they were gone, while Tom, Soph, and I stayed home.
Friday night I went to pick up Stef and Stacy from their trip. The next morning Angie's mother would die of a heart attack. June 28, 2003.
4 comments:
"We can baptize infant because we don't believe baptism saves you." I have never heard that. I rarely do infant baptism, I'm an old dog and change is difficult for me. The two times I have done it were when the parents were obviously not believers and so the idea of any commitment on their part was dubious at best.
This gives me something to chew on. Thanks again.
Of the Greek Islands nothing compares with Santorini, imho. :)
Ken, for some reason I can’t stop thinking about this post, and since you have a combox available....
When I became a pastor in 2000, I knew I Had little more than Sunday School knowledge of the Bible, and for all my background, a definite lack of faith that I would ever be, or stay “entirely” sanctified. Somehow I discovered Kieth Drury’s blog, and though that your online ministry, and though you were and still are way over my head, I have benefited greatly from what you have done.
I have found myself wondering more than once why my denomination did not have what I felt existed at IWU. Keith Druty became widely known for his 1995 address on the death of the holiness movement, something I think all Wesleyan oriented denominations are wrestling with. Carla Sunberg has just written a new book on holiness, I ordered it today (Why Holiness?) and hope it will help me.
For reasons I can’t explain myself I found myself thinking of when I was a young man and we had some pretty well known writers, who almost became minor Christian celebrities in a pre-internet world: Reuben Welch, Ann Keimel and Bob Benson. I loved them. I bought thier books and still have them on my shelves. But as I recall, none of them wrote on the doctrine of ES, at lest not in the approach of Palmer. My memory is not reliable. But I did think their work somehow made us significant somehow, that we had people of that caliber in our ranks. As a kid off of Tom’s Hollow, a dirt road in southern WV I may have been easily star struck.
I am thankful we have people today who are still trying to keep the idea and doctrines of holiness alive, to sort through the conflict between the American Holiness movement and the “back to Wesley” movement that has taken over, at least in our seminary and I suppose in our universities. I still remain conflicted internally.....
I wish, in this social media world, that big W Wesleyans could somehow band together and manage to make a presence known to keep the idea alive. We are far more international now, our General Assemblies reveal this, we are no longer a bunch of white people with a few token representatives from various places around the world. I don’t know what the change in dynamic will lead to; so far I am reasonably sure it has kept us teetotalers, and orthodox where human sexuality is concerned.
I think we need God to raise up, in every Wesleyan denomination, more poeple like Chris Bounds, whom I had had the immense privilege of sitting under for a couple of days. If such people don’t come along, to replace the Keith Drurys when they retire, where will we be? Liked a lot of old geezers I worry about the future of the movement, we (the CotN) now have all these little pockets, whose size and influence may not be as significant as a facebook group would lead you to think, who are neo-Pentecostal, neo-fundamentalist, Anglo-catholic, and so on. Unity seems a pretty far reach, at least on social media.
My struggles with deep depression and a little handful of troublemakers that alway pop up when I am depressed make me almost a hypocrite on this topic, but I still am hopeful that IWU and the Wesleyan Church will be the light they have been, though now that you are gone, and Bounds and Drury have been gone for a while, from my (admittedly ignorant) view, we have come to the end of an era—not for you personally, of course, but for the school you have been such a big part of. I hope I am wrong.
Thanks again.
I wouldn't count the doctrine out yet, nor would I count out future collaboration between the denominations. The Wesleyan millennials are on the rise!
I have deeply appreciated our friendship over the years, although we only know each other electronically!
Ken
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