In one of Jesus’ briefest and least quoted parables, the Master commends to his listeners a very fortunate man. Jesus explains to us with striking brevity one of this man’s virtues:

He is capable of making good and even reverential use of those features of God’s economy that come from the past.

The same thing might be said of many human and beings, no doubt. Yet this man stands out from the crowd, as it were, because of a second quality that he exercises together with the first:

He finds it possible to recognize and embrace the new thing that is by God’s grace becoming possible.

You will recognize these words, from the thirteen chapter of the gospel of Matthew:

(Jesus) said to them, ‘Therefore every teacher of the law who has been instructed about the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.’ (Matthew 13:52 NIV)

We come together this week to discuss institutional sustainability and organizational change. Together, the challenge they present can be threatening and ominous, not least because we engage this challenge as frail human beings who struggle to make the best of things even as they now are. Change lies one horizon beyond and can seem a bridge too far.

Change is unsettling. The issues of sustainability that require us to embrace change often come in the form of pressures we would have preferred not to face.

The need to change pushes us onto a playing field whose principal sport we have not mastered. We feel clumsy, inept, and intimidated.

Issues of institutional sustainability demand that we postpone that teaching or research or writing or counseling through which we have observed God’s gifts flowing through us to others in order to focus on life-or-death matters. Frankly, many of us have not felt the breeze of God’s spirit in the movement of our lips or minds or hands in these pressing concerns as we have when employing our more accustomed gifts.

To embrace institutional change is therefore for many of us a precisely sacrificial task. We do it for others. We do it for the school we love. We do it for the students who come to us for shaping and for inspiration and for correction. We do it for still other students whose lives will be empowered by the incursion of our school’s ministry into their lives …. if our organizations still exist and thrive in their day, yet unseen.

Everything about change—even more, everything about leading change—is both unsettling and urgent. That at least is how many of us feel as we face the topics that await our corporate and individual attention this week.

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Where are we to find orientation for the task? With what set of the heart are we to enter the challenge of leading change? Are we to be heavy of heart, grieving the inevitable losses? Or paralyzed with fear in the face of the unknown? Or infused with enthusiasm as we contemplate our envisaged utopia?

None of these states of mind is likely, in my view, either to glorify our Heavenly Father or to forge results that will bless his people.

Rather, I believe we find the promise of help in this cameo appearance in the gospels, this one-sentence description of a ‘teacher of the law’ that falls so unexpectedly from Jesus lips.

Let us hear it again, though not for the last time:

(Jesus) said to them, ‘Therefore every teacher of the law who has been instructed about the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.’ (Matthew 13:52 NIV)

I want to highlight two attitudes—I am tempted almost to call them rules of engagement—that will manifest themselves in our lives and in the culture of our organizations if we listen closely to Jesus’ short parable as we engage institutional sustainability and organizational change.

The first of these attitudes consists of a profound respect for tradition.

The Bible and traditional cultures of our day unite in giving a certain benefit of the doubt to the tradition. Indeed the Bible’s wisdom literature instructs us that the person who does not seek out the wisdom that accumulates in the tradition and understanding of one’s fathers and mothers is a fool.

It seems to me that the Bible and traditional cultures of our day spend a substantial amount of their visual effort on looking back. In contrast, modern Western culture seems culpably intoxicated with looking forward or, perhaps, of not looking at all.

Speaking for the culture of which I am a native son, it seems to me that we are hell-bent on throwing ourselves into forgetfulness and therefore into folly. We are fascinated with what is new and with what is now to the exclusion of that moral patience which issues in reverence for our elders and a profound respect for tradition and legacy, even when these come to us in forms that are cracked and stained.

Sadly, our educational sector is not immune to such charges. I am occasionally dismayed to hear institutions and practices with their own distinguished history held in disdain and contempt by educational reformers who have not taken the time to understand why these have come to be, what the value of their legacy is, and even whether some considerable portion of that inheritance might still serve to our nourishment.

As we face issues of sustainability and the requirement of change, we do well to exercise the humility that allow us to query the traditions we inherit critically but with respect, always suspecting that there is more magic still in them than is immediately apparent.

We will then be like Jesus’ ‘teacher of the Law’, stewards of a valuable and even enchanting store room full of useful old tools and delightful surprises we never knew were in there.

The second of the attitudes that seems necessary if we are to engage change as Christians is courage for the unknown future.

There are several things I do not intend to say about such courage, about this future, and about our faithfulness in it.

First, I do not intend to say that we have a divine guarantee regarding the continued existence of the ministries we serve and that therefore we should be of good cheer and unshaken courage. In fact, as Christians we understand that all institutions are expendable. God does not need them. He rules the future and will see his sovereign and creative will realized in that future as he sees fit. We must not over-reverence the forms that have served us up to the present day.

Second, I do not intend to suggest that we have special insight into the future and should be courageous because we somehow know that the threats to our existence are not so serious after all. With few exceptions, we face change without such special knowledge. I take this ignorance to be the result of God’s knowing that it would not be a good thing for us to have such insight. Our inability to predict the future in detail is a product of our Lord’s mercy rather than his stinginess.

However, we—above all men and women—should find it possible to face the future with courage for one deeply theological reason: our faithful Lord will there be with us when the future comes.

Here I want to direct our attention to one of those biblical statements that is more a distilled restatement of widely disseminated theological truth than a novel revelation of new light.

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. (Hebrews 13:8 NIV)

Students of the letter to the Hebrews struggle to explain just why this statement pops out when it does in the context of that ‘letter’s’ homily. It seems to me that it is so fundamental and protean a truth that its applicability is virtually unconstrained. It is a word that rings true and rings effectively in many circumstances.

For our purposes, I find it the sole reason why people like you and me—in an historical moment that brings deconstructive energies pounding down upon the institutions we love—should act with courage rather than with fear.

The Lord who moved capable if trembling hands to build the seminaries and universities that formed us will be present and active as we build the future with our own. This is a motive for confidence, especially in a moment that calls us to change, to re-engineering, to re-design, even to reconstruction.

The context of Jesus’ little parable in Matthew 13 is, after all, the kingdom of God. I continue to believe that the task of shaping disciples via the seminary is as close to the inbreaking of Christ’s rule, his reign, his government, his kingdom, as one can get. So I can only suppose that, if we face the future with courage and a reverence for the past, we shall find in our storehouses ‘new treasures’ that shall lighten our burdens, direct our paths, and cause our crops to grow.

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Sisters and brothers, our calling in becoming like the most fortunate house-owner of Jesus’ parable is not to be antiquarians. Nor is it to become utopians.

• The antiquarian’s god is Stasis.
• His creed is ‘We must always have this!’
• His slavery consists in being bound to only what he has known.
• His besetting sin is distrust of God’s economy.

• The utopian’s god is named Relevance.
• His creed is ‘Everything is different now and I am the one who knows it!’
• His slavery consists in being bound to his own small moment.
• His besetting sin is distrust of the power of Christ’s gospel to run with its own strength.

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Wisdom, it seems to me, nearly always call us to find a path of discernment between two loud and facile alternatives.

Who are we to become as theological educators facing troubling issues of sustainability and the challenge of leading change?

We ought not to become antiquarians, closing our eyes to changing circumstances, lusting for a past or clinging to a present that will never come back to us as we have known it.

We ought not to become utopians, casting aside legacy, tradition, and well-weathered forms in naïve pursuit of a perfection that will never be available to us.

Rather, we should be like the scribe, instructed in the way of heaven’s kingdom, who brings out of his storehouse old, sturdy treasures as well as delightful novelties and inventions.

We can do this if we trust that Jesus, our Emanuel, is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Claro está, la reforma no inició con Lutero; fue un proceso que empezó a gestarse siglos atrás por distintos movimientos conformados por hombres y mujeres disconformes con las influencias que dejó el emperador Constantino. Este hombre se había convertido al cristianismo y en el año 313 promulgó un edicto de tolerancia religiosa hacia los cristianos. Dichas acciones pronosticaban el cese de casi 300 años de persecución y el advenimiento a tiempos de paz; pero en realidad era el presagio de nuevas artimañas que amenazaban con destruir la identidad de la Iglesia. Como reacción a esta alianza: “Iglesia e imperio”, se empezó a notar cambios que en nada contribuían a fortalecer las bases del cristianismo, mientras la iglesia se marchitaba por la aridez de su trato.

De la sencillez del culto y de la comunión del partir el pan dentro de las casas, se trasladó a la construcción de edificios cada vez más lujosos y ostentosos, así como los vestidos y las mansiones de los líderes eclesiásticos, los cuales se aprovechan del pueblo que se hallaba sumido en la pobreza espiritual y material. Y aquella iglesia perseguida por siglos, llamada a servir al pueblo, se volvió perseguidora de aquellos que no comulgaban con sus ideales.

No obstante, a través de la historia, Dios mantuvo su remanente que subyacían con los despertares teológicos, los cuales cuestionaban el rumbo que había tomado la iglesia. Claro está, esto implicó el señalamiento, la expulsión y hasta el martirio de algunos. Este fue el caso de Juan Huss, quien nació cien años antes que Lutero y murió quemado en la hoguera, anhelando ver una reforma en sus días. Razón tenía el filósofo humanista, Erasmos de Rotterdam, a pesar de mantenerse al margen de las ideas reformadoras y de la posición papista, no se reservó su indignación por criticar los abusos que se estaban dando en el seno de la iglesia.

La Reforma Protestante representó la suma de todos esos sueños y esfuerzos que marcaron un camino que permitió “desempolvar y abrir la Biblia”, para hacer una relectura en medio de un contexto de decadencia moral, ética y espiritual, para reclamar la gracia, la fe, la justicia y la libertad, verdades básicas, presentes en las escrituras, no obstante, desconocidas en las manos de un pueblo ignorante a causa de sus mismos líderes.

A más de 493 años, es urgente seguir reflexionando con un ojo puesto en la historia; pero con el otro en nuestro presente y preguntarnos ¿Qué tanto de ese “espíritu de Reforma” consistente, vivimos hoy en día?

No es un misterio que atravesamos tiempos singulares dentro de nuestro contexto latino. Prueba de ello lo notamos con la proliferación de diferentes corrientes que se han infiltrado, algunas con sigilo y otras abiertamente en nuestras congregaciones y muchas veces lo ignoramos. Es una vergüenza y un escándalo, escuchar por diferentes medios de comunicación, de líderes de distintas religiones que aprovechan su envestiduras de poder para abusar de sus gremios y no solamente de forma emocional o espiritual, sino también sexual; lamentablemente quienes sufren son las personas más vulnerables como los niños o las niñas. Lo triste son las exiguas denuncias no realizadas por el temor a ser señalados o para evitarse un juicio por parte de los “seudo ungidos”.

Hay una clara comercialización de un Dios que se ve en la estrechez de someterse a nuestros mandatos y pactos de siembra y cosecha, pues debemos “exigirle” que nos libre de la pobreza y de todos los males, siempre y cuando hagamos nuestra transacción financiera. De todo este discurso, los más beneficiados sin duda alguna, son todos aquellos que están lucrando con la fe y se llenan los bolsillos a costa de la confianza del pueblo; pero poco a poco empezamos a notar la disconformidad y el desencanto.

La exaltación y casi endiosamiento, de algunas personas que dicen tener la exclusiva para hablar y ordenar en “nombre de Dios”. Las famosas estrategias que promueven el manejo de la iglesia como si se tratara de micro o mega empresas y a sus miembros como si se tratara de productos comerciales. La edificación de templos cada vez más lujosos e imponentes, que son presentados con orgullo como “estatus del respaldo divino”.
Creo firmemente que Dios bendice y es hermoso reconocer cuando el pueblo progresa de múltiples maneras; pero cuando se promociona una provisión mediática y exagerada, producto de la manipulación, el engaño, el abuso y falsas promesas, se está torciendo las verdades de la Palabra y en vez de honrar a Dios, nos estamos ganamos su repudio.

De todo este analfabetismo bíblico y olvido significativo de la herencia de la Reforma, tenemos un camino y este es orar, estudiar con seriedad la Biblia y levantar nuestra voz para denunciar. Para ello debemos aprovechar aquellos espacios que se nos abren para hacer un llamado claro y directo en nombre del Señor.

No es casualidad que este mismo mes, mes de la reforma, del 16 al 25 de octubre del 2010, La Alianza Evangélica Mundial (EWA, por sus siglas en inglés), está realizando una fuerte convocatoria a más de 4000 líderes cristianos, que representan diferentes denominaciones de más de 200 países. Ellos se reunirán en el tercer congreso mundial, llamado: “Congreso Lausana III: Cuidad del Cabo 2010”. En Sudáfrica, con el fin de conversar sobre los retos y las oportunidades que la iglesia enfrenta. Doug Birdsall, director ejecutivo de Lausana III, reafirmó:

Los problemas que enfrentamos hoy, tales como VIH/SIDA y el punto de vista hostil a nivel mundial hacia el Cristianismo, son muy diferentes de aquellos problemas enfrentados en 1974. Oramos por Lausana III: Cuidad del Cabo 2010, ayude a unir a la iglesia en una nueva manera, con ideas nuevas acerca de la evangelización para un tiempo nuevo.

Efectivamente nuestra oración debe estar dirigida al reto global que tiene la iglesia; pero al mismo tiempo pidamos para que el mismo Espíritu que contagió a los hombres y mujeres propulsoras de la Reforma, vuelva a tocar a los presentes en este congreso; líderes que Dios ha levantado en sus comunidades y denominaciones, para iluminar como antorchas encendidas a la iglesia. Pero que al regreso de sus naciones, estos mismos sepan contagiar al pueblo, para así juntos trazar el camino en búsqueda de la defensa de la misión y la evangelización, cimentados en el Reino de Dios y desde una perspectiva integral, para seguir impulsando los valores que la Reforma legó a la amada del Señor. Su Iglesia.

Its critics are many, articulate, and sometimes scathing. Let me enumerate three principal criticisms to which seminary staff and leadership must respond if they are to remain viable.

First, the seminary’s critics allege that the seminary has uncritically adopted a university model that privileges academic pursuits over training for ministry. Second, the seminary’s traditional focus on biblical studies, systematic theology, and ministry skills such as counseling and preaching comes under criticism as irrelevant to modern ministry and incapable of training adept servants for the modern or post-modern church and world. Third, seminarians are told that their institution has become inaccessible to most trainees for Christian service and—not an entirely separate concern—slave to an economic model that is no longer viable.

If these allegations are sustainable, then it appears that the seminary—and its younger brother, the Bible institute or Bible college—is doomed either to decline or collapse.

In the lines that follow, I will outline my own understanding of the dilemma that appears to threaten the future of the seminary enterprise.

What is a seminary?

I believe it is important at the outset to define what a seminary is, not least because the institution’s fiercest critics sometimes seem unaware of the breathtaking pace of change among seminaries worldwide.

It may be helpful to recall that the word ‘seminary’ is derived from the Latin seminarium, which means ‘plantation’ or ‘nursery’. The term refers to the function of the seminary vis-à-vis the church: it is meant to cultivate fragile and flawed human beings and to grow them up towards useful maturity. If we are to take the image in its full detail, we ought to suspect that the seminary spends little or no time in pollination, nor does it aspire to produce a full-grown tree. Rather, it plays a key role in the maturation and growth towards full functionality of plants—men and women—who have been conceived elsewhere and will only reach final form somewhere else.

So what does a seminary need in order to be called a seminary? Much more importantly, what components must it possess in order to fulfill its honorable purpose, regardless of what we decide to call it?

I believe that a seminary requires four such components:

First of all, it needs a brain trust.

Like the university with which it is joined at the hip, the seminary is a collection of scholars who are given leave to think about things that are important to its sponsor and to teach their students from the crucible of this thinking process. Over against the traditional seminary, it may or may not be necessary for these thinkers to live and work together in the traditional way. Modern technologies may have created interesting options in this regard.

Nevertheless, these thinkers, scholars, and trainers will need to be in contact with each other in the way that one of the Bible’s principle collections of wisdom calls iron sharpening iron.

Second, the seminary needs a library function.

I have chosen to use the more ambiguous term library function rather than library because the latter term has become too static to describe the reality to which it refers. The move from Gutenberg’s technology to a diverse information economy has overtaken all predictions. It has produced an educational environment in which digitized electronic capabilities are generating delivery of information in ways we could not have imagined ten years ago and will hardly recall ten years hence.

This migration of information availability out of privileged nodes and towards universal access has important implications for the library function as seminaries, universities, and virtually all other consumers of information. It is revolutionizing the way seminaries operate. Perhaps some will be surprised to learn how aggressively—occasionally with amazing naiveté—seminaries are pursuing digital delivery channels rather than resisting them. Many are leveraging new technologies to reconfiguring where and even whether the student has to go in order to participate in seminary education.

A library function is critical to the seminary precisely because the Christian church and the world it serves desperately need leaders who are part of what I am fond of calling the Great Conversation. The Great Conversation represents the discussion by wise men and women throughout the ages of topics that are both enduring and ephemeral. One might say that this conversation is available to us from the time that writing was invented, although Christians will understandably want to focus on the biblical period and the biblical literature as the locus of their most important conversations. Since the image of God in human beings is not limited to Christians, people who are believing, literate, and discerning will want to be part of that conversation in many of its forms, places, voices, and topics. A library function brings those voices into the reach of emerging Christian leaders.

No seminary can be a plantation or nursery without it because to do so would cut the young plants off from the nourishment that is not particular to their small place and time.

Third, the seminary needs a curriculum.

By this, I mean a path through certain fundamental disciplines that runs roughly from A to Z. It has a starting point and a finish line. This does not mean that a seminary graduate has learned all that he needs to know. Rather, I assume that there exists a recognized set of disciplines to which the people of God have every right to expect that their leaders have submitted themselves.

In many traditional western seminaries, arrival at the ‘Z’ of this path has been marked after three years of full-time study by a degree called the Master of Divinity (M.Div.). One can imagine other paths and other markers.

Now there is a reason why I insist on this point. It is the allure of relevance. Like many appealing prospects, relevance all too easily incites idolatry. Like all idols, it appoints itself as the god.

Let me illustrate with a second allusion to Proverbs:

All fools consider themselves knowledgeable. They are ‘in their own eyes’ too wise to have deep need of knowledge and wisdom. They presume to know what they need to know and to suffer no deficiency with regard to things they do not know.

At a young age and—more importantly—with little experience, they presume to have established what counts for life and work and what does not. They know what is relevant and they scoff—this is their defining weakness—at those who do not.

Those who are becoming wise know better. They are always a minority, alas. In biblical terms, they submit themselves to a process, to a people, and to a tradition that is more important, more intelligent, and better versed in things that matter than they are. They seek wisdom—a biblical notion that insists upon effectiveness—rather than relevance.

Much of this wisdom is embedded in the product of tradition that we call a curriculum.

Seminary curricula must change continually. Yet they should change slowly.

The seminary curriculum needs to train the emerging Christian leader in those things that are most likely to be true yesterday, today, and forever. Curriculum builders need to develop a self-aware and self-denying patience with the tradition which they have inherited and to modify it independently of self-referential allegiance to pedagogical and ideological trends. Trends are often fads in disguise, leaving their proponents and their followers too quickly stranded on sand bars when they thought they were running with the tide.

Now it is undeniable that most training of Christian leaders takes place in the hurly-burly of life with little or no reference to a curriculum. This is how it should be.

The seminary, however, is not the institution that effects the training of most Christian leaders. It is rather the plantation or seedbed for the kind of Christian leader who has been appraised by the church as most likely to tend influentially to its flock and to shape its future.

Finally, a seminary requires wise mentors.

Education for service requires information exchange. Students must become good stewards of a faith that requires control of a certain range of facts.

Yet if seminary education requires the training of minds, it ought not be mistaken for the training of minds alone. It is rather the shaping of human beings whose whole self is regenerated, reoriented and empowered by the cross of Christ and the power that raised Him from the dead. This regeneration, reorientation, and empowerment do not happen apart from human agency. The process requires wise mentors whose lives evidence vision, integrity, and competence. Such individuals are worthy of imitation because they live out the Pauline ethical triad of faith, hope, and love. What is more, they pass these virtues along to their disciples by dint of shared life and service.

It is not clear to me that technology can create a seminary education free of such human contact between wise mentors and submitted disciples. Even plants seem to grow better when they are spoken to. When Martin Buber famously described the potency of an I-Thou relationship, he unwittingly established a sine qua non of seminary education.

A seminary becomes a seminarium when its brain trust, library function, and curriculum come together in the life of a student who is shaped by a wise mentor.

Now the challenge and opportunity of our time require that we bracket concerns about the shape of the seminary in order to give due attention to these four functions. It may be that we work in a kairos in which a variety of configurations—both traditional and innovative—will allow us to loose (TO BE CONTINUED)

Yet thanks to a Buffett disciple who’s simultaneously joined the board of the Christian non-profit organization I direct and become a friend-for-life, the invitation to do just that came into my hands. Out of respect for my host, I joined the airport queues of the faithful making hajj in Omaha.

I shall not soon forget what I saw in that city, heretofore known to me chiefly as the source of mail-order steaks.

I beg your patience as I interact with the 2010 shareholders meeting of Berkshire Hathaway as an exercise in biblical theology. It is the only thing I know how to do, so I do it. Useful commentary from other angles is abundant and hardly requires an amateurish contribution from me.

Placing Charlie Munger’s acerbic wit and self-appreciated humor to one side, let me focus on the Warren Thing.

The Sage of Omaha defies all expectation for a man who is routinely listed among the world’s wealthiest human beings. Buffett lives where he has always lived. I’m told you can nose your rental care into his driveway without being accosted by security officers with bulging blue blazers. The man is famous for his loyalty to the two sisters who run Piccolo Pete’s, the kind of unremarkable eating establishment to which Omaha’s famous sage returns time again.

Yet this could be a kind of theater—though I suspect it is not—for a man who can fly off on a whim to any chalet he wishes to make his own.

What truly impresses me is the man’s humility as evidenced in the annual ritual of interacting for a day with unscreened questioners whose approach to the coveted (and spot-lighted) microphone seems more than occasionally to be an exercise in self-promotion.

Buffett is unfailingly patient with such folk. He seems not only to sense empathy but even a kind of sympathy for those who dare to stand and deliver in a stadium that is clearly Warren’s Space.

Memorably, he commented to one self-deprecating, would-be entrepreneur who wondered how to build a business that would one day be acquired by Berkshire Hathaway that ‘You’ll do fine, because you know your limitations.’

Over and over, Bufffett and Munger—capacious intellects though they are—acknowledge how little they actually know and how the discipline that got them this far consisted chiefly of ‘avoiding a subclass of stupidities’.

To these eyes and these ears a kind of secular sainthood lurks here. Not an overly pious kind of saintliness, mind you. To the contrary, the famous duo seems a relatively salty lot.

Yet my Day in Omaha put me repeatedly in mind of the division of humankind that biblical wisdom effects: there are the wise and there are the fools.

The difference? The fool is wise in his own eyes. He ceases to learn because he styles himself to have understood already.

The wise assumes always the posture of the learner. No matter how side his mastery ranges, he knows himself to be a novice. So he listens when the fool speaks. He ponders when the fool discourses. He never stops taking in reality and assuming the posture of its servant.

A tantalizing subtext meanders its way through the course that biblical wisdom sets for itself. The subdominant note delivers this message: never think you know in advance from what agents and from what corners truth, reality, and wisdom will next emerge.

I just got a dose of the same from two guys sitting at a card table in Omaha.

I do not know whether these two men, in their way, praise their Maker. This I know: they have helped me to praise mine. And, perhaps, in the mix, to take a step or two away from a ‘subclass of stupidities’.

A strong rain hurled its refreshing liquid onto the roof of my guesthouse room last night, as it did upon the roofs of your homes and hostels. After a day rich with conversation, good food, music, prayers, comedy, parody, story, and laughter, it sounded like a symphony.

As the storm performed its music, I thought about the staff, faculty, administrators, and students whom it has been my pleasure to meet in Nagaland in two theological seminaries over the past few days. But mostly my thoughts turned to you: to those who today become graduates of Clark Theological College, as well as to the families and churches who have loved and supported you on the long journey that has, today, brought us together to celebrate your graduation.

These words are my graduation gift to you. They are all that I have to give you. They come from my heart.

That short, shared song we sing as Christians when we receive a new blessing turns our eyes and our hearts toward heaven in gratitude. I suspect you know it well:

Praise God from whom all blessings flow!
Praise Him, all creatures here below!
Praise Him, above, you heavenly hosts!
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost!

It is a good song, for it provides a channel for our very best instinct, which is praise. It is a noble song, for it has survived the pressures of time and particular cultural preferences to emerge as a song that is sung widely by Christians around the world.

It asks us to join in that one thing that we hold in common with all God’s good creation: praise of our Maker, our Provider, and our Redeemer. It assists us in glimpsing, here and now, eternity and its unending theme.

Yet we do not sing this doxology—this word of praise—only with dry eyes, robust voice, and uplifted hands. We sing it, sometimes, with eyes wet with tears, with voices that can barely speak let alone sing, with our knees bent in brokenness.

Let me see if I can explain my meaning:

I remember the first time I noticed that the biblical book of Psalms bears as its Hebrew title the word תהלים, which means praises. By the time I began to pay attention to this title, I had already become aware that the one-hundred fifty psalms contain not only boisterous hymns of praise with which the whole Israelite community voiced its praise in the Temple. The same book offers quiet reflections, whispered prayers that expressed the deepest need, and shrieks of agony thrown towards heaven by men and women whose sorrow must have seemed beyond repair.

I knew this diversity well. I simply had never understood that the book, in God’s wisdom, brings all of these experiences and sentiments under a single heading: they are praises.

I wondered how this could be. Time does not allow a lengthy answer during this morning celebration. Yet at the least I suggest to you that the wisdom of the Psalms brings together the totality of human experience and invites us to live that experience out loud in the presence of the living God.

It asks us to do when our hearts are full of praise to him. It asks us to do the same when our hearts are broken. It asks us to live before him in this way when we can scarcely believe that he exists. It invites us to come here to this praise-ful place when we are angry with what he has done to us or what he has allowed to happen to us.

Indeed, the genius of the Psalms lies in its insistence that all of life is best lived out in conversation with the listening and present Lord. In this aspect of its life, I do not believe the book of Psalms stands over against the whole of biblical revelation. Rather I think it represents that broad counsel of God in miniature.

And so, on this moment when you, dear graduands, pass from one chapter of your story to the next, I want to employ these privileged moments to encourage you, in my own voice, to do what the Psalms so powerfully do when they group the expression of all human experience under one heading: תהלים, praises. I exhort you to praise your Maker at all times and in all circumstances.

May I do so, perhaps a bit imposingly, by speaking to you of four things you must do as graduates of Clark Theological College?

You must laugh!

How freely the CTC family laughs!

You laugh at a visiting foreigner who does not know how to wear his Ao Naga shawl! You laugh as your female students parody dances that are well known to you. You laugh at a bull, or a deer, or whatever that animal was last night that had four legs clad in tennis shoes protruding from below its stomach.

You laugh so beautifully!

As you go out in your lives of service, you must laugh often, you must laugh well, you must laugh alone and you must laugh together!

The Psalms invited the ancient Israelites to laugh in celebration before the Lord.

When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy; then it was said among the nations, “The LORD has done great things for them.” The LORD has done great things for us, and we rejoiced. (Psalms 126:1–3 NRSV

Yet you must guard your hearts, dear sisters and brothers, against some kinds of laughter.

First, you must protect yourselves from the laughter of Sarah. You know how when informed by the Angel of the Lord that she would bear a miracle child in her old age, Sarah laughed the laughter of unbelief. I believe she laughed in this way because she could not imagine that her good God could be this good. The promise that came to her was extreme to the point of appearing ridiculous. So she laughed and her son Isaac forever bore the phrase ‘he laughs’ as his name (יצחק = ‘he laughs’).

Now the Lord was good to even this laughing, doubting Sarah. Eventually we read of this woman’s laughter turned from doubt to sight, from bitterness to joyful gratitude.

Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him. Now Sarah said, “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.” And she said, “Who would ever have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.” (Genesis 21:5–7 NRSV)

The Lord is good to us, too, in this way. Yet it is better to avoid Sarah-laughter.

More importantly, I beg you to protect your souls from the laughter of derision. This is indeed a deadly and death-dealing laughter. It is the false joy of contempt. It laughs at the expense of another.

The world is too full of the laughter of derision. It laughs at the innocence of holy people. Pretending to be the voice of the realists, it makes sport of hope, that most precious human quality. It laughs cynically and mockingly at the possibility of authentic love.

At all times the laughter of derision lowers our expectations and damages our community. It is an imposter, posing as both happiness and knowledge of how things really. Yet it is a deep sadness, it is a lie. The foul odours of Hell itself cling to such contempt.

May this laughter never fall from your lips.

Its antidote comes in Paul’s instructions about laughing together:

Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. (Romans 12:15 NRSV)

This is your laughter, dear graduands. This is the music you will carry with you from CTC out into the streets, churches, and homes of your service.

So I give you this command: You must laugh!

You must weep!

It may seem odd on such a happy morning that I should give you this strange admonition.

Yet it is a certain thing that you will weep in the course of your lives and your Christian service. You will experience loss, sorrow, and anger. You will feel the seductive temptation of bitterness. You will need to decide what you will do with your pain.

If you are wise, you will weep before the Lord. This will be one of your tehillim, one of your prayers, one of your strange praises.

Some will tell you to be strong. They will tell you that Christian leaders do not weep, that time heals all things, that God has a purpose even in your suffering. There will always be a grain of truth in the words of such well-wishers. Yet that truth will fall short of the biblical summons to pour out your heart before your Maker.

The Psalms invite us in our agony to speak to our Lord by means of two piercing, tear-drenched questions:

The first of these is Why?

The second of these is How long?

You can choose not to pray these prayers. But you will be damaged if you take that way of false strength.

In your weeping, you will find that your best friends, your life-long friends, the very warriors whom God has placed around you to watch your back, are those who will weep with you and speak their words only scarcely.

Again, the apostle Paul crowns the truth of the psalms when he offers this now familiar pastoral counsel:

Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. (Romans 12:15 NRSV)

Brothers and sisters, this world—you know this as well as I—is too full of tears. Yet the Lord records every drop of innocent blood—it cries out to him from the soil into which it has been poured. He will one day wipe away every tear from our eyes.

In the meantime, your task is not to stop the suffering from crying and it is not to hold back your own tears by strength of will. To the contrary, your praise is to pour your suffering out before God as the Psalms have taught us to do. You will of course take the hands of some who weep and turn their faces towards Zion.

Our Lord knows well how to …

… to provide for those who mourn in Zion— to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit. (Isaiah 61:3 NRSV)

Yet this is his work more than it is ours.

You—we!—must learn to weep. It is your strange praise.

You must sing!

Oh, I hardly need to mention this one, for how you sing! I have heard you sing!

Yet I know that it is possible for one to forget how to sing.

Do you see these mountains? They are unspeakably beautiful mountains. I am enjoying them for the first time. I have no words for their majesty.

You have lived among them for many years, some of you for your entire lives.

Have you ever gone through a day … or a week … or a month … without seeing their beauty? Perhaps you have.

You can forget the beauty that surrounds you as it becomes normal, then ordinary, then unnoticed.

So, too, you can forget to sing. Perhaps you have.

You can forget the beauty that surrounds you as it becomes normal, then ordinary, then unnoticed.

So, too, you can forget to sing, even you, dear graduands, can forget how to sing.

But I do not believe you will do so.

The Psalms will call you back!

You will call yourselves to notice, to remember, and to sing with gratitude:

Bless the LORD, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the LORD, O my soul, and do not forget all his benefits— (Psalms 103:1–2 NRSV)

But let all who take refuge in you rejoice; let them ever sing for joy. Spread your protection over them, so that those who love your name may exult in you. (Psalms 5:11 NRSV)

Then, in the course of your days full of light and darkness, joy and sadness, you will find the apostle once more refreshing the example of the psalms:

Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery; but be filled with the Spirit, as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Ephesians 5:18–20 NRSV)

I hope, though I do not know whether my hope will be realized, that I will one day return to hear you sing again!

But more than this, I wish for your days to be filled with song.

My friends, you must sing!

You must learn!

Of all my four imperatives, this is the only one I fear you may not follow. And so, in my very temporary paternal role this morning, I save it for last.

Dear graduands, you are not really finishing your studies today. You are just getting started on a life-long journey of learning and service.

One of our church fathers summed up all of Solomon’s wisdom, all of the seeking, questing of the Psalm and Proverbs, all the prophet’s longing to understand when he taught us that our praise is to think God’s thoughts after him. Just imagine that: to think God’s thoughts after him!

You must not let the fire of learning die when you exit the gates of Clark Theological Seminary. You have learned so much here, yet you know so very little.

Do not despise your learning. It is a gift that not many have received. It is a tool that not many carry in their hands. It is a window through which only a few are privileged to peer.

The studies you have concluded here are no small thing. They represent an enormous privilege. You may never again in your life have the opportunity for uninterrupted study.

You must take your biblical theology, your ministry studies, your Hebrew and your Greek, your counseling skills, and your church history. You must integrate them into the rhythms of your private spiritual disciplines and the texture of your service to church and society. You must polish and treasure them as you would a gift carefully prepared for your beloved.

Yet at the same time you must assume the humble posture of a learner.

May I remind you that the Greek of the gospels uses the very word μανθάνων to designate Jesus disciples? In the most straight-forward way, a disciple is a learner.

A fool, by stark contrast, is that man or woman who is wise in his own eyes, who thinks she understands enough already not to be bothered with further, deeper questions.

You, dear graduands, will be wise, not foolish; disciples, not dullards; learners, not those who rest upon books once read and certificates that grow dull on the walls of your flat or your office.

You must learn! You must think God’s thoughts after him! You must treasure the life of the mind, even as you penetrate deeper into that love of God and neighbor that demands the very best of your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

You … must … never … stop … learning. You must not!

A final word

It is time for me to finish talking and time for you to receive your certificates and awards. You have earned them well.

I must confess, dear graduands, that I have mis-stated my case. I have exhorted you in terms of four imperatives, four exhortations, four commands.

This is not false. Yet the deeper truth is that God’s grace is sufficient for the tasks and the challenges you face.

Those things we take in hand as duties we discover in time to be gifts: your laughter, your tears, your song, your learning … these will be God’s gifts to you, delivered in the time and the moment when they are required.

May God bless you as you receive these good things from your Maker and then turn to place them in service to your neighbor.

iTunes, as is parroted in the way that becomes truisms with their undeniable kernel of truth, has changed the way we listen to music. And talk and sermons.

So does this battered survivor’s heart find itself caressed this afternoon by the alleged randomness of iTunes as it works its way via its own inscrutable logic through my embarrassingly bulging iTunes library.

Old friend Mark Mitchell, pastor and pulpiteer of the Bay Area’s incomparable Central Peninsula Church, holds fast for the benefit of both heart and mind on the eighth chapter of the enigmatic biblical book we call Ecclesiastes. Mark delivered this soul food long ago, on a morning when a then President Bush was contemplating going to war with Iraq. Today I live—we live—in a different world. Yet bread well broken continues to nourish the hungriness within. And without.

I did not choose Mark’s life-mongering words today. They came to me, an unsolicited gift, courtesy of iTunes’ serendipity. Just in time.

Where else is such sweetness, such life, to be found?

And then another old friend, the irrefutably odd Dr. Kelly Liebengood comes on, drooling the words to his obtuse but charming ‘Deep With You‘.

In all of this, a heart is elevated, a mind set fire.

Is iTunes random?

Is anything random?

Perhaps, in a matter of speaking.

In a world governed by Holy Love, not at all.

Why history? Because First Son’s strong but uneven education at the British School of Costa Rica brought him into contact with the curmudgeonly but brilliant and engaged ‘Mr Wolf’, an historian with a stubborn and inelegant fixation on making history relevant for high school students in what others of his ilk might have dismissed as an intellectual and cultural backwater.

I do not know where First Son will end up in this world. Perseverance, an adventurous streak, and the United States Army conspire to widen the menu of options. Wherever he goes, thanks to the unsung Mr Wolf, Christopher will think and act with historical intelligence. Given that he’ll be carrying a weapon, this might save a life or—the world being the messy thing that it is—take the more appropriate one.

Leave it to the nearly unrivaled Atlantic Monthly to pepper its January/February 2010 issue with an evocative piece entitled ‘What Makes a Great Teacher?’

Those of us who find our pulses quickened when a mind opens or a spirit soars but who ascribe these desiderata to serendipity, charisma, or inspiration may find author Amanda Ripley’s conclusions surprising.

In a culture that both celebrates and wallows in mediocrity, Ripley’s reporting of conclusions developed by Teach for America lie somewhere between unexpected and stunning. Serendipity, charisma, and inspiration lie at some remove from the criteria that recent research identifies as the essentials of great teaching and—more importantly—empowered learning.

Mr Wolf—to whom this family o’ mine owes no small debt of gratitude—likely intuited years ago what TfA’s research now places before us as measured conclusions:

Great teachers set big goals for their students.
Great teachers avidly recruit students and their families into the process.
Great teachers maintain focus, ensuring that everything they do contributes to student learning.
Great teachers plan exhaustively and purposefully by working backward from the desired outcome.
Great teachers refuse to surrender to the combined menace of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.

Great teachers, if one may be permitted a few supplementary addenda of his own, are devout learners.

They are cantankerous in the face of forced homogenization.

They are the sworn enemies of canonized limitations.

They long to see their pupils live large.

They are not easily halted in their intrepid, vigorous adventure.

They are, like Mr Wolf, often, gratefully, and eagerly to be praised.

Marks pens his essay a defense of ‘dry’ theology against that contemporary hubris that insists we honor Relevance above all other gods.

Living with the penetrating, unsettling interrogatives of Scripture strikes me as an almost sufficient abbreviation of Christian faith and practice. If the elevation of the subject is our generation’s besetting sin, then the ‘satanic’ (as in ‘questioning’, ‘probing’, ‘skeptical’, even ‘accusing’) voice of Scripture may be the salvation we most desperately require.

Not that portion of Scripture that we find reducible to articulation in the too often caricatured bumper sticker or painted artfully into Tim Tebo’s eye black, but that comprehensive encounter with Scripture that requires us to submit to Leviticus’ apparent tedium, Samuel’s heroics, the gospels’ unsophisticated presentation of history’s most sophisticated figure, and Paul’s agonizing against Israel’s experience in Romans 9-11.

In short, the whole body of Scripture must interrogate us.

We might imagine that inspiration and anecdote can inspire us sufficiently to escape that sucking swamp that has us, up to the thighs, in its grasp.

That would be a tragic underestimation of our condition.

Only by embracing Scriptures comprehensive, unending, humiliating, empowering interrogation can we have any hope of escaping ourselves, of finding salvation from ourselves, of breaking free from the hubris that enslaves us while we piously quote our favorite parts.

A concert is a lovely thing.

Whether the Hong Kong Philharmonic touching just last week such disparate notes as those composed by the early classical Haydn and the late Romantic Berlioz or U2 rocking Chicago’s Lincoln Park or a band of street musicians in Cuba turning lunch three-dimensional by adding sound to the day’s taste and sights or the sheer joie d’vivre of a South African children’s choir causing our jaws to drop and making us feel momentarily a little younger—a bit more like them—a concert is about the pleasing and productive synthesis of otherwise individual and cacophonous sounds.

And speaking of cacophony, you can have solo or cacophony at the drop of a hat. A concert, though, requires that its participants subjugate aspects of their own ambition and ability to a larger, greater, more beautiful project.

There’s the rub. And there’s the magic.

A good concert—like the proverbial news from afar or the fruit of the grape—gladdens the heart. A very good concert draws us closer to transcendent truth, even to our Creator himself. A superb concert causes us to feel, to think, to imagine—indeed to become—something that our mere individuality could scarcely ever produce.

The very best of concerts is tribute. It is worship. It draws our attention beyond the artists to the One who alone is capable of creating a world where such nobility and beauty—where such sounds—are possible.

A concert is a sub-species of community, a momentary hint at things that can in larger and less artificial contexts endure, sometimes even endure forever. Both concerts and community border on the sacramental. That is, they draw us into a reality that points beyond itself to higher, richer, less conditioned, even unfallen and unblemished purposes and realities. Concert and community both assure us that these present limitations are ephemeral and that there is a reality worth waiting for, worth pursuing, worth self-denying renunciation of individuality for the sake of larger, shared truth.

Concerts and community are, at their best, doxological. They issue in praise.

Now what ought we to think, in the light of such things, of that more prosaic atmosphere of the seminary, the theological college, the university in which we work out our calling and vocation? Is there anything concert-like, any unrealized potential of deeper community that is available to us just over the horizon? Any there new tonalities waiting to be sounded?

I think the answer to this question must surely be ‘Yes’.

If I may be allowed to press the metaphor of the concert with reference to the topic that has been assigned to me—Theological Schools in Concert—I would speak of music that my ears have heard and still further harmonies that I long to hear. But before I do that, I would like to take the imagery I have been handed in a kind of preliminary direction. I’d like to touch on confidence and motive.

Good musicians create their art out of a proper sense of their own smallness beside the tradition of which they are interpreters. But they also perform best when they perform with confidence. It seems to me that in recent years the confidence of theological educators like ourselves has been often unsettled, occasionally shaken, and sometimes even shattered. I would like briefly to address this matter.

I believe that our theological schools will find ourselves postured to create community in concert …

• to the degree that biblical/theological convictions persuade us that the task is greater than any one of us.
• to the degree that we embrace the ‘shared meaning’ of community with confidence in our calling.
• to the degree that a theocentric, Trinitarian impulse moves us inexorably away from self-aggrandizement and towards community.

Critical self-awareness and the capacity to reflect upon our deficiencies is, of course, a virtue of maturity. Theologians and theological institutions are under attack in our hyper-pragmatic moment with a sustained ferocity to which perhaps few instruments in the history of Christian disciple-making have been subjected. It is good that we have quite often displayed the capacity—though sometimes under duress—to pause and reflect upon where we might have gone astray.

Yet I must confess that a constant drumbeat of criticism about theological education and its alleged irrelevance and the ensuing unsettling of confidence in the thing that we do has begun to produce in me a certain existential nausea. It will fall to another speaker perhaps at another time to encourage us to recover our nerve as theological educators but let us do so. My topic is best approached by confident practitioners.

I would also want to ground the kind of community I’ve been asked to address in God himself. Theological colleges need without doubt to act in concert because the survival of our enterprise is in question. But it would be a mistake to begin here. Rather, we will best seek what some my friend Phill Butler has called ‘kingdom collaboration’ because it is the right thing to do, because it is how our Creator and Redeemer is and acts. Even if we could survive in pristine isolation the one from the other, as Trinitarian believers and as gospel people we would not do so for we know that something far better is on offer: that community which imitates the Triune and revels in the deep satisfaction of what the Apostle Paul calls ἡ κοινωνία εἰς τὸν εὐαγγέλιον (‘fellowship in the gospel’) .

As I look across a room full of peer learners at table fellowship in the context of Overseas Council’s Institutes for Excellence in Christian Leadership Development, I can scarcely contain my enthusiasm for the gorgeous vision of community that I observe. My own experience placed me in Central America at a time of remarkable spiritual effervescence. We discovered in the early years of Costa Rica’s ESEPA Seminary that theological education naturally exercised a profoundly ecumenical influence upon that country’s then-fragmented evangelical community. Christian leaders of all stripes of Pentecostal commitment—and a few with none—found it possible to gather peacefully around the Scriptures and the leadership-training consequences of their study. They went on to discover robust community as they did so.

If churches do so, it is only natural that theological schools should pursue concerted initiatives, sharing resources and harvesting every opportunity for mutual encouragement, long before the pragmatic effects of doing so come into play simply because this is the way Trinitarian communities with reconciliation at the genesis of their being behave. Even more to the point, such fellowship in the gospel, does not represent a circling of the wagons against undeniable threats to our viability so much as it does the penetration of gospel dynamics into the warp and woof of our interconnected institutional lives.

Imagine the formative testimony that such kingdom collaboration can sew into the fabric of emerging leaders as they observe and participate in inter-institutional community from the very beginning of their theological studies.

Some might object that collaboration is distracting and should only be practiced—and then with clinical precision—when the clearest of outcomes can be anticipated. Such prudence has its place. Yet I believe, like all guidelines that come to us from the corporate boardroom, this one must be pressed through the biblical sieve. It must be forced to cede any pretensions to self-evident, doctrinal status. If it is to be a Christian word of caution, it will confess that community obeys its own logic and repays dividends of a beautifully unanticipated kind because the Lord—as the Psalmist reminds us when speaking of brethren who dwell together—‘places there his blessing, even life forevermore.’

Theological educators who have battled their way to the clarity that they serve a tradition greater than any single institution and theological educators who are confident in our shared vocation will seek inter-institutional community as one of the high privileges inherent in the thing we have been called to do. We will feel ourselves to be pulled towards it rather than pushed or driven.

Now by way of this prelude I have already alluded to beautiful music—of concerts, if you will—that I have already heard. The activities of the organization I direct and those of the association that has convened us in this triennial conference have been used by God to create community among theological leaders and institutions that just fifteen years ago labored mostly in isolation. I can testify personally to the invigorating and orienting potency of this young community and the impulse and instincts that sustain it. We quickly grow to take good things for granted.

I have watched with pleasure as theological educators have moved from being strangers to colleagues to brothers-and-sisters to friends. I believe some of the fruit of this communitarian reality will endure forever.

But I long for what the biblical tradition likes to call a new song. I am not satisfied with the old Abrahamic tunes, the psalms of Zion, or the exuberant choruses of redemption’s earliest articulation. Quite frankly, I want to see more community among what my given topic names as ‘theological schools’. I believe the music has barely begun, that idea of some glorious new song has already been sketched out on napkin around this week’s tables. We are in the first wave of concerts, really just getting warmed up.

It seems to me that the best contribution I can make to addressing the topic of Making Community Together, Theological Schools in Concert is to dream a bit and to do so out loud. In his very fine work entitled Deep Change, Robert Quinn writes of leadership as ‘building the bridge as you walk upon it’ and ‘dancing naked before reality’. I assure you that bridges and—in particular—nakedness will remain completely in the realm of the metaphorical for the duration of my talk. Yet, with your permission, I’d like to practice a bit of the unfettered imagination to which Quinn refers.

Most of all, I want to share with you some concerts my soul is longing to hear. Like Simeon of Luke’s gospel, there are some communities yet to exist that—were they appear before my eyes—might well move me to the nunc dimittis: ‘Now, o Lord, let thy servant depart in peace’.
Here are a few of them:

A concert of distributed theological education

Take any one hundred theological schools in the majority world and count the number of them that are attempting to produce theological education in some distributed form. My unscientific survey suggests that you will count more than ninety and probably upwards of ninety-five. The sad reality is that nearly all of them are expensive, mediocre, marginally effective, and distracting. Those most dedicated to producing them tend to be working outside their own strengths and, in consequence, doing fewer of the things that they do well.

This is wasteful to the point of scandal. It is decidedly unmusical.

I imagine a situation where, instead of this amateurish though well-intentioned cacophony, each major language group is blessed with two or three community efforts at distributed theological education. Participating theological schools become stake-holders in the project, though not whole owners. They give up a bit of name recognition—though not that much—in order to participate in a project that models community. That’s the soft outcome. The hard outcome looks like this: the resulting projects are of high quality and well funded. They extend the core strengths of the participating schools to numbers of students that dwarf the combined sums touched by the schools’ conventional delivery systems.

Instead of telling professors who have dedicated their lives to the shaping of human persons in the classroom and mentoring spaces that they must stop doing the archaic, obsolete thing to which God has called them in order to start doing something new, these gifted and committed women and men are provided the opportunity to touch five, ten, or one hundred times the lives they’ve grown accustomed to influencing.
The technology and the institutionality exists and the funding, I am convinced, is available. All that is lacking is the will to play a symphony rather than a solo.

A concert of formal-nonformal education

I believe that the reckless, graceless polarization of Christian leadership development into belligerents whose tasks and loyalties we can abbreviate as ‘formal’ and ‘nonformal’ is nothing short of diabolical. It smells of sulfur. It ascends directly from the pit to which all evil shall one day, thankfully, be consigned.

It would be difficult to exaggerate how damaging this false dichotomy has become. I regularly interact with potential funders who have bought into one or the other of these rather artificial models and been persuaded by the militant rhetoric of the visitor who warmed the chair I now sit in that only formal education is the real thing or that only nonformal training is truly ‘relevant’.

I have listened as the rhetoric of otherwise gentle people has become flavored with the prejudice that disdains the calling of brothers and sisters who are just as committed to making disciples but have taken in hand a tool that doesn’t meet with the approval of this or that speaker.

It is a cacophony. In its sounds can be heard, subtly, the cackle of our enemy.

I long, instead, to hear a concert.

Imagine what it would be like if formal and non-formal practitioners alike were to embrace the reality of life-long learning. Suppose we all were to become convinced that a disciple of Jesus Christ really is, as the gospels tell us, a learner, a μανθάνων. Suppose we were to celebrate the fact that formal and nonformal inputs will course through a Christian leader’s life in the most fluid fashion almost from cradle to grave. Imagine that we took seriously that linguistic tradition by which in some of our cultures a graduation ceremony is called a commencement a mere beginning.

Then suppose we who are ‘formalists’ locked arms—or at least had coffee!—with our nonformal training peers. Imagine what a robust collaborative impulse among the groups would mean for our generation and the one or two that will follow us.

I can almost hear the music of it.

A concert of variegated excellence

There’s a melody in the air—at least I think Ι hear it—the libretto of which speaks of ‘nodes of excellence’. It sounds just a bit like an intricate Bach fugue.

Imagine, if you will, that we could identify the seven or eight critical areas of training need that our global church confronts. My list would include ‘biblical interpretation and proclamation’, ‘kingdom collaboration’, ‘peace making’, ‘faith and culture’ (or ‘faith and science’), ‘organizational and change leadership’, ‘compassionate ministry’ (or ‘children at risk’), ‘teaching and learning’, ‘business as mission’, and one or two others.

I do not pretend that these are the most universal or the most deeply felt lacunae. But my list would begin with them. They are the items I would bring to the conversation. Then suppose we worked in concert to establish a center of research and training in each of these areas in each region of the world (define these things as you will) at the highest appropriate level. Your school might be the regional node of excellence for ‘kingdom collaboration’ or ‘teaching and learning’ or ‘biblical interpretation and proclamation’.

Funding becomes available that opens the door to a selected individual from each of a range of other theological schools in your region to come to your school to complete the course of study for which your institution has achieved recognition as the regional node of excellence.

The members of this cadre of graduates then return to their own locales and their own theological schools to become the catalysts that interpenetrate their respective communities with the values and the competencies in which they have been immersed in their node of excellence experience. From time to time a local daughter program is birthed, calibrated to the appropriate level.

Like all concerts, this one would require that certain schools give up certain competitive pretensions,that a regional community of theological schools seek to identity and also to cultivate complementary strengths while eschewing the temptation to compete for prestige.

It would be musical. I can almost hear it.

A concert of academy-church collaboration

I am aware that the distance which too often opens up between church and theological school is a topic that is fraught. What is more, rhetoric about closing the gap is often sentimental and sometimes, particularly for educators, an exercise in self-flagellation.

Indeed I bear some scars on this count. As a churchman and an educator, I learned the hard way during sixteen years in Costa Rica that the intransigence that nourishes this divorce is not always on the side of the theological school. Denominational leaders and jealous pastors are, in their own way, capable of acting like Abaddon, destroyer.

However, I do have an artistic conviction of sorts on this score, one that emerges idiosyncratically from personal experience. It may not be as easily generalized as I imagine. But you’re a kind group, so let me see whether this sings.

I believe every lecturer in every theological college should be pasturing a church or participating in some equivalent task.

‘Oh’, some of you might say, ‘how embarrassing! Doesn’t he realize that this is already the reality of many or even most of us whose vineyard is located in the majority world?’

Indeed I do.

Yet too often, especially for those of us who have been trained in well-funded universities in the West but who work in the majority world, this is seen as a concession to economic and institutional realities. The model that still suggests itself as ideal is the model of specialization and of the serene life of the academy, undisturbed by parishioners who don’t know text from context, who consume a person’s time like the birds in my Indiana garden consume the mealworms I put out for them, and who insist upon bringing their gritty problems, week after week, into the pastor’s study.

Indeed I have tasted the pleasures of the academy’s serenity. They are sweet. They can be immensely productive. Some few people are certainly wired by their Creator to thrive in that place and nowhere else.
But I want to suggest that there might be appreciable benefit in seeing the purely academic life as an oddity rather than an ideal. This may not be true of all of us, but experience has taught me that it is true of most: our interaction with our students is qualitatively different when our command of a body of knowledge in our area of specialization is surrounded by regular immersion in pastoral duties or, better put, in the very tasks for which we are training our students. I think every theological educator should embrace this bivocational task.

Would a whole-scale adoption of this model have costs? Yes it would.

We would teach fewer classes. We might write fewer articles and books. Our lives might be marginally more perturbed by the ebb and flow of local church life.

Yet we might, as well, be better in the classroom and even, in the quiet of our study times as well. I think this would be the experience of most of us.

The benefits would accumulate. Many under-served churches would be led by experienced, thoughtful, part-time pastors. The theological school would in some cases see its employees benefit from a modest but additional income stream. Our students would observe that the inescapable bivocationality of their lives is something that we, too, embrace. Some would stop regretting it. Our students might quickly slip into addressing us no longer as ‘Professor’ or ‘Doctor’ but as ‘Pastor’.

It would be the highest of compliments. It would be music, in a manner of speaking, to the ears.

Conclusion

These are some modest and hardly revolutionary thoughts about Making Community Together, Theological Schools in Concert. They are idiosyncratic because they are merely mine. My purpose will be served if they are in some small way provocative in a redemptive rather than an annoying direction.

Frankly, I could not have articulated these thoughts—I could not have owned them—when I was up to my armpits in the rigors of leading a theological college in Costa Rica. They come to me only now, in this moment when my responsibilities require me to survey evangelical theological education from a distance, attentive as I can be to the broader sweep of things, attuned—I should hope—to both the virtues and the deficiencies of our wider status quo.

Community as a human achievement is short-lived and often vain. Received as a gift, community is precious, generative, and doxological. May it be so with us, with ICETE, and in the small corners of the vineyard where each of us sweats, groans, rejoices, weeps, and sings to the Triune, who listens to our song and occasionally breaks into the smile of a master who recognizes that song as his own.

Was it not you who cut Rahab in pieces,
who pierced the dragon?
Was it not you who dried up the sea,
the waters of the great deep;
who made the depths of the sea a way
for the redeemed to cross over?
So the ransomed of the LORD shall return,
and come to Zion with singing;
everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;
they shall obtain joy and gladness,
and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

The Bible appropriates ancient pagan myths of theomachy (war between the gods, sometimes cited to explain how humans came to exist) in the service of its story of loving creation by the word and at the hands of a single Creator whom Israel names as YHWH. Bending villainous, polytheistic material to their life-fomenting purposes, the biblical authors celebrate YHWH as the divine conqueror of chaos, the maker of that order which is both beautiful and nourishing.

So does the quintessential creation account—whether in the opening lines of Genesis or in that prophetic invigoration of the disheartened captive that comes to us in Isaiah—become food for the soul of those who have known chaos and feared to find themselves lost in it. Indeed it is chaos rather than non-existence that most threatened the ancients. ‘Truth be told, it is still this way.

Which brings me to my rather humble story of YHWH, who dries up the threatening deep and cuts the ancient sea monster Rahab into bits on behalf of his little redeemed ones. It is unimpressive tale, yet it places me where I belong—among YHWH’s ge’uliym, his redeemed ones—by those small brushstrokes that are commonly the ones that appear on my corner of the modest little canvas where my unremarkable life takes its shape.

In 1984, a giant of a man named Wilton Nelson died in his beloved Costa Rica. He was a scholar and a missionary’s missionary. When my family and I arrived in Costa Rica in 1988, the ESEPA Seminary I served happily for sixteen years was only in its third year. It was undeniably a work in progress, still as much hope and heart’s cry as established institution.

It seemed almost as though people had returned from Wilton’s burial service—most evangelicals could still tell one where don Wilton had been buried—to found ESEPA without pausing to shower and change out of their buryin’ clothes. Though I never knew Wilton, his legacy was everywhere at ESEPA. ‘What would Wilton do?’ in the light of WWJD bracelets seems a quaint question. Yet it was often articulated at critical moments in this project of service called ESEPA that seemed to bear the imprint of Wilton’s soul, as though a kind of Father Abraham still walked our halls and inhabited our planning sessions. Wilton had served, as I was to do for a decade and a half, with the entrepreneurial Latin America Mission.

I heard stories of how this scholarly historian preferred most of all to be mounted on a horse that was up to its armpits—trustworthy authorities assure me that horses have armpits, though my own experience in equestrian biology is limited—in Guanacaste province. Wilton ambled about that then remote Northwest corner of Costa Rica, teaching in little churches, evangelizing the most impoverished homesteaders’ jungle villages, combining that ‘strengthening of the things that remain’ and that soft blowing on newly lit candle-flame that one does as a ‘missionary’s missionary’.

Wilton and his wife had two sons. The slant of my own historiography is to be glimpsed in the fact that I do not recall Mrs. Nelson’s name and in the similar deficiency that I don’t know whether the couple had daughters.

One of Wilton’s sons was Pete. Pete and his wife Carol were themselves a generation ahead of me in the ranks of Costa Rica-based LAMers. We youngsters looked at Pete and Carol as the kind of missionaries who had got things done. Now retired back in the USA, Carol survives her late husband whom we lost in untimely fashion some years back. Pete and I were not close, yet that seemed an accident of busy lives invested in disparate projects. In fact, at least as I recall it today, our eyes met on the odd occasion when some circumstance in the LAM community brought us together. It was enough to register the fact that we understood each other and, to some degree, tracked with each other and our work across the considerable vocational distance that kept us moving on tracks that were, at their nearest, merely parallel ones.

I hear from Carol several times a year. It is a digital, rather remote, but not unsatisfying way for Nelson and Baer eyes to continue to meet.

Pete’s other son is John, born native to the Costa Rican soil that became my own only by adoption. John went on to Wheaton College and the Julliard School of Music and, notably, to an astonishing career as a symphony orchestra conductor. His own sojourn as the principal conductor of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra left his fingerprints all over that ensemble’s rise to the top of the second tier of American symphony orchestras. Ironically, he had come and gone before my own family’s move to that iconic community of the American Midwest, with its Brickyard, its decent folk, its unstoppable quarterback, and its orchestral jewel.

I had never met John until last night. ‘Which is where this story arguably becomes worth the telling.

First, if your readerly interest has the stamina, we must go back five years in time.

But I must warn you:

• It’s about music.

• Sometimes YHWH’s cutting up of chaotic Rahab happens in the quiet corners of the world where—to put once more Isaiah’s mark on things—he alone is lifted up.

I have attempted to pilot Overseas Council for just over years. As with most leadership tasks, I find leading this most remarkable organization to be grueling work. The travel alone comes close, upon occasion, to crushing the soul of a man, even when whittled down to only the necessary movements across a world where grace abounds in our day at least as flowingly, if one may, as at any other historical moment of its riverine course.

Four years ago, as the need for weaving margin and sanity into the pace of my travel became necessary, I returned in theory—though sadly, not in deed—to my roots. Even as I write these words, the first of two classical pieces I knew as a child—Tchaikovsky’s ‘Pathetique’ Symphony, that is to say, his Sixth—plays its deep, poignant song in my headphones, a function of the ‘random’ function of my iTunes library and in its own way testimony to Rahab meeting her demise.

Two of the first two records I knew as a child were my mother’s 33 1/3 LP of this symphony, another vinyl recording of Dvorak’s New World Symphony, and my father’s 78 rpm version of Bennie Goodman’s 1938 Carnegie Hall concert. Gene Krupa’s drumming in ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’ has never left my heart, nor Dvorak’s confident musical exposition of a new world nor Tchaikovsky’s probing at dark yet lively truth that is too real for words alone.

As I sat down to write these words here in this United Airlines Red Carpet Club, the one who dries up the sea gave me a gift—again—of music to suit. ‘Pathetique’ means far more than its English false cognate would suggest. But I get ahead of myself.

Music, almost literally, saved my soul. Back at Wheaton College, when freshman innocence had given way to the deep, almost depressive reality of the incapacity to believe, I had no way to find my way back to faith. Music held me up while a new path was made for me, no doubt by the same Lord whom Isaiah names as he who makes path through turgid seas.

Three times a week, in the watery desert of unbelief, I walked into the practice hall where 42 of us took our measure as the Wheaton College Men’s Glee Club under the towering, terrifying, and by all accounts inimitable figure of the recently deceased ‘Coach Clayton Halvorsen’. As music happened, I touched—week on week—a reality too true and beautiful to be denied. Music, a savior of sorts, held me safe until faith returned to me or until a new way was made for me to come back to faith. I cannot say which one.

So music, you see, is more than novelty, entertainment, and free downloads to me.

Again I must apologize, for I cannot tell this story without multiple digressions.

I was trying to talk about my roots. Four years ago, I decided to build some margin into my travel. I hatched a plot by which, instead of running idiotically out of a conference room in Dallas or Paris or Cairo or Hong Kong to catch the next plane to the States, I would stay the night and get some sleep. More importantly, I would research the key classical music venues in that city. If the home team was in town and on their game, I’d attend. I’d begin to collect invigorating symphony-hall experiences the way some guys—well, me in fact!—rack up major league baseball stadiums. (I’ll never forgive those damned Yankees for abandoning the old house before I could get there to see it …)

One day in 2005, I walked across the street from my digs at Hong Kong’s Salisbury YMCA to gaze upon the Hong Kong Cultural Center and tell myself that one day I’d see and hear Edo de Waart and his company embrace their Philharmonic vocation in that very place. I wondered, though, whether I really would. And, in the end, I didn’t.

One thing, however, I did do. I began to follow the career of Maestro John Nelson—he was, after all, Wilton’s son—and to collect his CDs. I participated in my double-digit way in the launch of his foundation, Soli Deo Gloria, which commissions composers of Christian conviction to write works in the ‘classical’ genre. I stalked, in the Internet sense of the term, as John expanded his space among young conductors in the majority world, mentoring here, befriending there, blowing upon the embers of faith in a sector where there is, sometimes, too little. I cried on my computer keyboard as I read of the first performance of Bach’s B Minor Mass in Costa Rica, under the baton—of course—of a man who was born there and cared enough to return. Though it sounds pretentious to me as I write these words, he seemed a man after my own heart. I learned from sister-in-law Carol of John’s wife Anita and her own vigorous participation in what from a distance seems ever so exotic and elegant though is no doubt comprised of a thousand thousand small and inglorious steps in the same direction.

Then, last month, as I pondered the pages of my late-2009 calendar and the uncharacteristically relentless travel schedule of which they warn me, I found via a canceled appointment that I’d have a day to myself in Hong Kong at the end of a long journey. I wonder, I said to myself, whether the Hong Kong Philharmonic might be playing that evening. A quick check brought delightful confirmation that they did indeed have a concert scheduled.

Then, this jaw-dropper: The guest conductor would be none other than Maestro John Nelson, leading the Philharmonic in a program of Haydn and Berlioz and fronting the formidable talents of soprano Anna Caterina Antonacci.

Emails were exchanged, facilitated by the sister-in-lawish exertions of Carol Nelson, a backstage invitation offered, enthusiasm was stoked, a ticket purchased, a ticket lost in the mail, a white guy from Pennsylvania talking his way, ticket-less, into a Hong Kong symphony hall then through a formidable screen of dubious post-concert security.

None of it for naught.

Last night, at a time when weariness might have crept into a tired journeyman’s soul, I sat instead front and center, practically under the un-batoned, conducting hand of Wilton’s son. Backstage, afterwards, I was treated to the gracious affection of new friends John and Anita Wilson.

A gift, small, dense, durable, doxological was placed into my small hands, where it is cradled with what a favorite writer calls ‘abiding astonishment’.

Somewhere, on this day, someone has a large redemption story to tell. No doubt angels sing loudly, perhaps stomp their golden feet, at the telling of it. I have only this small one.

How do these things happen? How does sound, fury, itinerary, flight delay, Asian appointment, cancellation, an excessive if under-control Protestant work ethic, a soul that would die if it were to wander far from the music of the spheres and its expression in our earthly tonalities, and the grateful memory of a missionary’s missionary who had the obstinacy to die before I could meet him issue in such things?

Was it not you who cut Rahab in pieces,
who pierced the dragon?
Was it not you who dried up the sea,
the waters of the great deep;
who made the depths of the sea a way
for the redeemed to cross over?
So the ransomed of the LORD shall return,
and come to Zion with singing;
everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;
they shall obtain joy and gladness,
and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

How, if you’ll excuse me, I have a plane to Knoxville to catch.