continued from last week
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1. In the spring of 1993, I took a trip to Durham, England to spy out the land and interview with St. John's College. I think by then Dunn had more or less sealed the deal. As long as I wasn't a serial killer or someone outside British Christian allowances (which were quite broad frankly), I would be a Residential Tutor there.
This was my first trip outside the United States on my own. I had been to the Philippines with my parents to visit my sister in 1976 or 77, who was a missionary at that time. I had been on a missions trip to Bolivia in 1988 with a singing team from Asbury. But this was me by my lonesome.
My high school humanities teacher, Mr. Stock, had told us in the twelfth grade that some of us would later travel to Europe and remember that class. We would remember flying butresses, the art, the architecture, the history. At that time, I had no imagination that I might ever visit Europe. Now, it's hard to imagine what I was thinking then.
Living in England and Germany for some three years would broaden my perspective. Perhaps I will mention when I talk about Africa my thoughts on how visiting another country doesn't necessarily broaden a person. Two people visit a foreign country. One person sees him or herself more clearly than they had before. The other is more entrenched in their biases than before, inoculated against a broader view of the world. [1]
My mind was blown once again. Over and over again, it seemed, the boxes my view of the world was in exploded. When I would return, so much of American thinking -- particularly those of my own circles -- seemed so small. Just as I was glad I was raised in a more diverse south Florida rather than Indiana, I was glad to live overseas long enough to see so many things about America in perspective.
I took it as a compliment those years in England when I was repeatedly told that I didn't seem like the stereotype they had of Americans -- loud and relatively closeminded, while thinking I knew everything about everything.
2. On that first visit, I met with the Principal of St. Johns -- David Day at that time. I remember him being a little delicate on the faith question, which I found amusing. In my world, faith boundaries were everything -- far more important than scholarship, to be frank. Yet St. John's was an evangelical Anglican college (British style) with an Anglican/Methodist theological college associated with it at that time (Cranmer Hall). The Christian faith boundaries were fairly broad, but they existed.
Cranmer Hall was a unique partnership between the Anglican Church and the British Methodist church. It was an honor 20 years later when Jimmy Dunn included me on an email including several important Methodist influencers like Richard Hays, urging us to use whatever influence we might have to stop the British Methodists from stopping the use of Cranmer Hall to train Methodist ministers. Unfortunately, the Wesley Study Centre there was closed in 2014.
Although I didn't realize it at the time, the partnership between the Anglicans and the Methodists had only begun about five years earlier in 1988. I would get to teach a little at Cranmer my second year in England after Bruce Longenecker left, as I recall.
I also met with Margaret Masson, who had only been Senior Tutor for a year at that time. She would go on to work as Senior Tutor at St. Chad's in 2004 and then become Principal of St. Chad's in 2016. Chad's was the only other college at Durham that had its own theological training school. More on the structure of Durham in a moment.
I found all the staff at John's and Cranmer superb. The word that comes to mind is respect. They modeled a respect for everyone, a posture of listening.
It was fertile soil for young people to grow in. Other than this boundary of mutual respect, the young plants weren't constrained in how they might grow. I knew both fervently Christian students alongside fervent atheists there. All of them spreading their wings.
3. The difference in what an evangelical college in Durham was and what an evangelical college was in America was striking. In America, Christian colleges were generally bounded sets, characterized especially by their boundaries. At Durham, St. John's was a centered set. The leadership was meant to be Christian. Every opportunity was given for worship. But it was an influence rather than a coercive model.
Neil Evans was the Chaplain, then an Anglican minister (he would later convert to Catholicism). He would become my best friend at Durham. His was the first face I met on my visit. Every morning and evening he held prayer in the small medieval chapel across the Bailey.
Later, when College Wesleyan asked me to facilitate a "Cathedral Service" venue, it was my brief encounter with the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) here that would serve me well. I wish I could say I was disiplined in my attendance. I had not yet had the pets and children that forced me to become a morning person yet. In those days, I would generally roll out for morning tea around 10am.
On Tuesday nights, there was a worship service with the Eucharist every week. I became a regular cantor for the service, singing the appropriate bits of the communion service. Hopefully I'll remember in a later post to talk about the singing and acting I did at John's.
But these Christian elements were meant to attract students to faith and deepen those who already had it. You were not forced to be a Christian to attend, nor were you forced to adopt a Christian ethic -- outside of the baseline of mutual respect and all that it entails.
4. The structure of an old school British university is quite different from that of an American one. In the US, if a university has colleges, they are purely by discipline: "College of Arts and Sciences." In the old days, places like Oxford and Cambridge were made up of somewhat independent colleges each with its own faculty.
At the University of Durham, there are now centralized departments like the Department of Theology. John's and Chad's are the only ones that still have their own faculties but only for ministry. Students in John's get their classes from the university at large now. In fact, the more advanced ministry students even in John's took classes with the Department of Theology.
5. I suppose I'll talk about my travel to and from England later. As I recall, I flew in on this occasion to Manchester, thinking it was closer on the map. I often did this sort of thing -- overconfident that I could figure things out without asking. Then finding out I didn't know what I was doing.
Yes, Manchester was closer on the map. But it wasn't faster by train. To get from Manchester to Durham you stopped at every little place in between. And Manchester was not a particularly attractive place from the train view. I would never fly in there again. Meanwhile, there's a three hour train from Kings Cross to Durham that only makes about five stops.
I was to fly out of Gatwick. Seems rather a rather strange route now. I suppose we must have booked it through a travel agent. I think my dad had given me traveler's checks to cash if necessary.
I spent the night in Islington at a Salvation Army place that the Wesleyan Church often used for missionary transit. I believe the London Honors students from Houghton still stay there when they are in England in the spring, although I don't think it's Salvation Army any more. Angie and I would stay there after we were married too.
On Saturday, I walked London from the Tower to Buckingham Palace. I had some guide to England that I had bought at some bookstore. By chance I happened upon Aldersgate Street on my way past St. Paul's. I believe I briefly hit the British Museum. In typical Ken fashion, I was wearing the dress shoes I had brought for my interview. They were ruined by the end of the day.
6. In the morning, Sunday, I was quite convinced I had figured out the Tube. Once again, not asking instructions, I made my way to Kings Cross and studied the Underground map. Which line did I take to get to Gatwick? I had not seen it on the map in my guidebook.
Finally, I found an arrow at the bottom of the map with an arrow pointing toward Gatwick. Ah ha, I said to myself, I take the Victoria line to the end.
Nope.
I got to the last stop on the line, disembarked somewhat puzzled, asked the man at the booth how to get to Gatwick. Then he looked at me somewhat puzzled and said, "You need to take an above ground train, the Gatwick Express. It leaves from Victoria station.
That made me a little nervous, but I wasn't too worried yet. I was a strange mixture of overactive looking and looking without leaping. I don't know how these fit together. As my friend Micah once said, "Ken, sometimes you look. Sometimes you leap. But you never do them at the same time."
I took the tube back to Victoria, found the Gatwick Express. But by the time I got to the gate, they had just closed it. There was my plane, right there. It was still a half hour before departure. But rules were rules. I missed the flight.
7. I called Dad, as I usually did in such circumstances. I can't remember if he had given me an emergency credit card. Seems unlikely. But I was able to use whatever emergency means he gave me to stay at a Bed & Breakfast. Being the sort of person that wanted to try the culture where I was, I had steak and kidney pie that night for the first and last time.
Yuck.
[1] A family friend and her husband did a bus tour through England while I was in Durham. I met them at the chippy near the bus park when their bus stopped at Durham. He had no interest in seeing another castle or cathedral, but he did complain that they didn't have any ketchup for his "fries."
"It's all true," I said to myself. Americans are imbeciles.
When my sister was a missionary, some visited her. As I recall, the expectations of the visitors were unreasonable for Manila. They had no sense that the appropriate move was to eat the normal food and sleep under the normal conditions of the country. Don't bother visiting the mission field otherwise.
I heard the same complaint from nationals in Sierra Leone when I was there. The missionary doctors, one person said, lived with their higher standard of living separate from the people they worked with and ministered too. I'm sure that wasn't universally true, but I can believe it was true too often.
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