Year 8 at IWU (2004-2005)

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
7. 2003-2004 The Sabbatical

1. I started blogging on September 16, 2004. I did it quietly, because I was only looking for an outlet to express what I was thinking. Part of the attraction of teaching for me is that I like to transmit. I like to talk about what I'm thinking. Blogging was a natural outlet.

The problem with social media is of course that everyone can see what you're saying. When there are people in front of me or when I'm in a personal conversation, I customize what I say to the situation. If I'm talking to a Trump supporter, I talk a certain way. If I'm talking to a "Never Trumper," I talk a different way.

Prior to blogging, I suspect most anyone thought that I agreed with them on everything they said. I don't like conflict. I try to keep the peace. I blend in.

Social media created a new dynamic to my life that I had never experienced before. Suddenly my thoughts were out in the open for everyone to see. Scholars could see my silly thoughts and my practical thoughts (although top scholars usually weren't on social media). Liberals could see my conservative thoughts, and conservatives could see my liberal thoughts.

World War III erupted. I rarely if ever go looking for the conflict. I just want to express thoughts. Yes, sometimes those are critical thoughts. But my friends on opposite ends of all sorts of spectra come to those thoughts ready for a fight.

This has led to a process of sanctification. "A soft answer turns away anger" has often been a key verse (Prov. 15:1).

2. Facebook especially accentuated this issue when I joined in 2005. But I started blogging in the fall of 2004 as the election approached. I was concerned about the Iraq War and some of the trajectories of the Bush administration.

Not many people paid attention to my blogging at first. As I look back over the blogging of that year, I see a little dabbling in politics. I can see I was very cautious.

You can also see how I began to use my blog as a catalyst for writing. It is motivating for me personally to have an audience when I'm writing. It doesn't have to be many people, just a few. It keeps me going. I wrote most of my books with Wesleyan Publishing House, as well as my philosophy textbook, through blogging.

It is possible that blogging stunted my scholarly writing. Jimmy Dunn poked a little fun at James McGrath and I for blogging in those days. You could easily argue that energy I spent on blogging could have instead fed the book on the afterlife I haven't finished. You could argue that other books like the publication of my edited dissertation in 2008 would have happened sooner. And of course there are many students who might have wondered why I had time to blog when they had not received their papers back.

It is what it is. Some topics that year included:

• Debates over the TNIV's use of "brothers and sisters." This debate would dethrone the NIV and spur on the rise of the ESV. Although the ESV is a good translation in many respects, the fact that it was birthed in resistance to the inclusion of women has never sat well with me. I do not promote it as a version for Wesleyans.
• I wrote what I consider one of my key position statements, on inerrancy in the Wesleyan Church.
• I did my first "real time" blogging through Passion Week.
• I wrote quite a bit on sin, even a booklet I never published: "A Short Account of Biblical Salvation." This was prompted by the "Saving Grace" conference at HQ. Wesleyan HQ has a theological symposium every other year and in those days was having a meeting of Wesleyan educators the alternate year. Bounds presented a paper on various positions by church traditions on sin and sanctification, and Mel Dieter gave some of his reminiscences as well.
• I opened kenschenck.com in June 2005.
• I blogged on Israel and women in ministry. More on those below.

3. As I've said before, I taught a lot in those days. I usually taught 6 classes in the fall and 6 classes in the spring, May term, and I was frequently teaching online for Asbury at the same time. Here are some of the classes that year. I'm trying especially to mention people whom I know are reading these. :-)

• In the fall of 2004 I taught an evening philosophy in Burns Hall before it was renovated. It was a horrible classroom and the only time I ever taught in there. However, it did have fun students in it like Megan (McGuire) Parton and Spencer Lloyd. Those were the days before wireless, when holding attention was a premium, so there were lots of breaks and group activities.
• I taught Latin again that fall. The class had students in it like Tiffany (Good) Meador, John Harmon, Barton Price, Blake Chastain, and Aaron Shepherd. It looks like Scott Hendricks joined in second semester.
• Second year Greek continued with 1 John in the fall and Philippians in the spring. Students included Jonathan Dodrill, Blake Chastain, Barton Price, Kara (Snyder) Kensinger, Debbie Wooters, Kevin Wright, and David Paul Jones. Looks like Randy Dewing joined us in the spring.
• New Testament in the fall included the likes of Kami (Clark) Mauldin, while the spring included Scott Hendricks, Sandy (Horst) Shaw, and Chelsea Ponce.
• In the fall for Prison Epistles, I see Tiffany (Good) Meador (who did it as an honors class), Barton Price, Jarred Bauer. 
• I also taught Romans in the fall, with people in the class like Matt Beck, Kyle Parton, J Fry, Steve Johnson, Devin Rose, Kara Kensinger, Nathan Lail. Philip Gormong, and Kevin Wright.
• I taught Corinthians and Thessalonians in spring 2005, with students like Ian Swyers, Aaron Gross, and Daniel Freemyer.

4. The fall of 2004 saw the entrance of Dr. Constance Cherry to the Division. Henry Smith also came as Executive Vice President that fall. He would become president the next year.

In the 15 years since Dr. Cherry came to IWU, she has become one of the top scholars of worship in the world. As I write this post, she is in Australia giving seminars on worship. Earlier this summer her work was featured in China. Her 2010 book, The Worship Architect, has been translated into Spanish, Korean, Chinese, and Indonesian. My biggest regret is that we were not able to create a PhD in Practical Theology that would have featured worship as one of the specializations, with her as the key mentor.

In the spring of 2005 she would teach a course on women in ministry for the first time. In some respects it is sad we had such a course--it shouldn't be needed. The three or four times she taught it, she would bring in David Smith and myself to present some exegetical work. He would do 1 Timothy 2:12-15 and I would do 1 Corinthians 14:34-35.

Here is a link to the first of several videos recording the 2009 class. In those days YouTube wouldn't let you post more than 10 minutes of video. That March was also the first time I blogged through the issue of women in ministry. I would often thereafter have a post each year defending women in ministry.

5. There were a couple other things of note the fall of 2004. In October, President Barnes had Michael Boivin and myself present a summary of our Fulbright activities the previous year to some of the board of Trustees. Boivin was quite a character, a psychology professor known for his intellect and fiestiness. He had a tendency to speak his mind to the administration (which is a dangerous quality).

One of his more interesting papers, I think co-written with Burt Webb (or perhaps Keith Drury and Burt co-wrote it) presented the hypothesis that you could create a drug that would "fake" entire sanctification by stimulating a particular part of the brain. Whether Boivin was the actual writer, this was at least an interesting topic of lunch conversation.

In any case, Boivin went first, but felt the compulsion to complement me on the fact that I had done my Fulbright in Tübingen, the site of a number of incredibly prominent theologians. Being somewhat tone deaf to the politics of confessional institutions, he did not realize that this was not really the kind of comment I wanted to be made. The great theologians of which he spoke were people in the late 1800s like Julius Wellhausen and F. C. Baur--not names particularly well liked in evangelical circles. When I finally stood up, I made it clear that the people he had in mind lived over a hundred years ago and that the university had changed quite a bit since then.

6. The fall colloquium that year was on Christianity and governance. I blogged a little on the topic. We did a colloquium on capital punishment once too. Somewhere in between these two, I wrote a paper distinguishing between the question of "What would Jesus do?" and another question, "What would God the Father do?" In it I suggested that while he was on earth Jesus gave us a model for human behavior but that God the Father was the more appropriate model for governance.

7. In June, Wilbur Williams bestowed a second blessing on me, paying my way to Israel. I had never been before. As everyone says, seeing the actual lay of the land changes your experience of the Gospels. One of my early take-aways was the fact that the scale is so small. Having grown up in Florida, I had always pictured the Sea of Galilee as something like Lake Okeechobee. Turns out it is only 12 miles across. It also came home to me how insignificant Nazareth was at that time.

Wilbur came alive once his feet hit Israel. It was quite a transformation. He was already in his 70s then, so I tended to think of him (for good or ill) in "cute old man" terms. But there he became young again. His energy level multiplied. Even the guards at the Jerusalem museum leaned their heads to hear him talk.

Ardelia went too. The next time, Charlie Alcock would follow him around with a film crew, taking footage of him speaking everywhere. Every once and a while I ask Charlie what he's going to do with that. I'd love to have a copy myself!

The flight back stopped in Rome. There we had the horrible event of having to leave Clint Ussher behind. Apparently he hadn't renewed his Australian visa--a minor thing then if you're in the US but a different thing if you're trying to get into the US. We sadly got on the plane with him left standing there.

8. My Brief Guide to Philo finally came out in February of 2005. I also see that I blog-wrote my Brief Guide to Biblical Interpretation that summer (the first edition was called A Brief Guide to Biblical Hermeneutics). I seem to remember Jerry Pattengale being involved with its publishing. It would later be printed by Wesleyan Publishing House in a slightly different form, Making Sense of God's Word. That would come out in 2009, a year after Triangle did the second edition of the Brief Guide.