Restoring Old Things

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

You could shake all of the contents of the entire series of books into its corners with room to spare: children, fauns, dwarfs, friendly giants, the White Witch, even the great lion. I’m telling you, it is huge!

I refinish furniture for relaxation when I’m not working at the seminary. A few years ago, I began to refinish an old walnut wardrobe that could accommodate all of Narnia… literally. When I started the project, I found it too cold to work in my shop that winter, so I had all the parts—base, cap, sides, back, inner chambers, hardware—scattered throughout the rest of my basement. Did I mention that the wardrobe is huge? It is so gigantic, in fact, that I wasn’t able to get it through the door when completed. I had to re-construct it in the room where it ended up.

The wardrobe almost got the best of me. Alone for hours, up to my elbows in skin-blistering stripper, filthy dirty, the thought actually crossed my mind: Why am I doing this? I could be upstairs reading Narnia rather than down here finding it a new home.

I won’t bore you with the results of such ruminations (brought on by stripper fumes no doubt), except to say that, like perhaps many of you with your methods of relaxation, part of my satisfaction in restoring furniture I attribute to my tendency toward distraction.

To restore furniture—to be a really good furniture refinisher—you have to be a really good daydreamer. You have to let your mind wander back to see the piece of furniture for what it was at one time, the glory days of the piece when it wore its newness so naturally. I wonder about the original creator of the wardrobe. What tools did he use; what obstacles did he have to overcome; what purposes drove him to make such a fine piece?

To see the piece for what it was at one time is key in seeing the piece of furniture for what it could be again. What potential is there in an old beat up wardrobe? Look at it again. Scrape off the blistered old finish, glue back the free edges of veneer, replace the broken hardware and you will see its past, and in seeing its past, you will give it a whole new life.

What I am speaking about, of course, is the act of re-creating something, an act that begs reflection on our human, divinely ordained mandate in Genesis 2. The reader can do this for him or herself while I reflect one more time on my re-created wardrobe. Even when refinished, that old piece bears the marks of its past. I have yet to restore a piece of furniture to its original condition. The beauty of my wardrobe is in the newly applied stain that only partially covers the conspicuous missing chips of veneer. It’s newly found beauty is partially in comparing its past with its new present.

So, why do I bring up my wardrobe? I bring it up because the very same act of re-creation goes on with pastors in their own churches. Without ignoring the wonderful things God is doing with the church planting processes throughout the country, most of us—most of our graduates who leave us—are dealing with old furniture when we consider the churches and other places of ministry we serve. Who of us doesn’t live with years of old varnish and bleached stain when we enter our sanctuaries on Sundays, interact with our leadership, administrate our threadbare programs, or counsel weak and battered members within our church?

What should our expectations be as we seek, through the Spirit, to restore old churches back to usefulness? One of the things we see with some of our students who leave us after their years of study here are well-intended church re-creators who put their newly acquired tools to the task of reshaping old ministry contexts. Their desires to polish these old churches back to new luster are very good. In their tool chest, they may often pull out a newly sharpened church model that, on the surface, would seem to be just the thing to bring new life to these old places.

Then why don’t these old churches polish up? Too often, I am afraid, they—we—who dream about new life in our churches—new programs, new leadership, new potential— seek to change these antiques after our own image without seeing them for what they are, wonderful old places with rich histories of God’s faithfulness. They may have gone astray. They often are filled with old, entrenched leadership. They don’t move very fast. Dump them on the table and you will find tired old programs rolling aimlessly around the edges. We want to change all this and the sooner the better.

But, to be a good daydreamer of these old churches, is there not something to be said for first accepting them for what they are in all their uniqueness, in the context of their rich histories, and with appreciation for what has brought them to their present condition? It seems to me, to be a good restorer of old churches begins first with letting our minds wander back to their glory days. How did they start? Why did they start? In what context were they placed? How has that context changed? What kind of leaders have led these unique churches in the past and how do they represent leadership needs in the present? What kinds of programs worked earlier? Is there a relationship between these kinds of programs and what could be offered, in new ways, in the present?

I wouldn’t trade my house full of old furniture for all the furniture stores full of new furniture in the world. I love old things. I love to re-create old things. To be a re-creator of churches, I think, too, requires that we love, we truly love, old things.

Something about the Sea

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

I have never lived far from the ocean. Even if the busyness of life keeps me from heading to the sea, it is a comfort to know that it is out there close in its grey infinitude. You don’t need to press your ear against a sea shell to hear its voice beckoning. The sound of the waves goes well beyond earshot.

What is the ocean’s allure? Personal history of course plays a part. If half my childhood summers were wasted in the slough of despond that is 1970’s television (“Joker, joker…and a triple!”; “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!”), the rest were spent on the beaches of Duxbury, MA. There was plenty of opportunity to think as you walked to Duxbury Beach from the mainland, across what was said to be the longest wooden bridge in America; or as you walked down its six miles of sand. From the prospect of high waves to ride in youth to the reality of broken romances in adolescence, the ocean was the backdrop for much of my life. All of this clings to your mind as determinedly as the sea salt once stuck to your skin.

On a more philosophical level, the sea side incarnates the tension of land and liquidity, changelessness and change. The shore may erode through the slow decades, the sea may explode in hurricane force, but the shore is still the shore and the sea is still the sea. The marriage endures through the storms. Yet the sea is always shifting: changing color, changing shape, changing depth. A friend of mine admitted that he was reluctant to move to St. Andrews in Scotland because living by the sea would be so monotonous. He happily discovered how wrong he had been. The Greeks said you can’t step into the same river twice; the same could be said of seeing the sea. For the land-loving Israelite, such shape-shifting made the sea a ready image of the chaos that always threaten to engulf the world (Daniel 7, Revelation 21:1). But even they knew that down deep it was the magnificent handiwork of the living God, and even the dread Leviathan was just a (Ps. 104:24-26).

The sea is also the great repository of memory, a magnet for musings. Dylan Thomas writes in the beginning of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”, “All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves.” It is a great gray slate waiting for you to scratch your thoughts on its surface. There is no therapy quite so satisfying as simply spinning your shredded soul into the forgetfulness of the deep. Not for nothing did God promise that he would cast our sins into the depth of the sea (Micah 7:19); there they can be drowned as dead as Pharaoh.

And so the sea’s highest call is to remind us of God: beautiful in his simplicity, ferocious in his wrath, unfathomable in the depths of his sin-swallowing grace.

Winsomeness and Discernment

By Maria Boccia, PhD
Professor of Pastoral Counseling and Psychology
Director of Graduate Programs in Counseling Charlotte campus

I was not going to write about “the women’s issue” this month. I was actually going to talk about sexuality, faith, and modern culture. However, Sunday happened and things changed.

This past Sunday, my husband and I visited one of the largest churches in our city. There was a guest preacher (it is a joke between us that whenever we visit a church, we always get a special occasion and have to go a second time to see what the church is really like!). The guest preacher was the president of a different seminary from out of town. He chose as his passage Colossians 3:18-21:

Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord Husbands, love your wives and do not be embittered against them. Children, be obedient to your parents in all things, for this is well-pleasing to the Lord. Fathers, do not exasperate your children, so that they will not lose heart. [i]

I felt the urge to leave immediately after he read the passage. However, I did not want to be disrespectful. Several other times during the sermon, I again felt the urge to leave, and again forbore. It occurred to me, that as a guest preacher and the president of a seminary, his choice of this passage was not unintentional, and I wondered if he was preaching the sermon at other churches he visited.

It was no surprise to me that he would preach the traditional subordinationist interpretation of this passage. I was surprised at how far he went to support this view. To show women that it was okay to submit to their husbands and it did not mean they were lesser creatures, he explained that this was like the Trinity: even though the three persons of the Trinity are equal in being, for the purpose of redemption, the second person submitted himself to the first. He left lots of wiggle room when he described this, but I was shocked that the president of what I have always considered an evangelical seminary would go to this place to defend his subordinationist position. The subordination of the Son (in His Deity, not just His Humanity) has been condemned as a heresy by the church since the Council of Nicea in 325.[ii] Another subordinationist, in a recent book, asserted that we should not pray to Jesus but only to the Father, since he only is supreme.[iii]

After this, the preacher went on to the other verses here. Once again, I was surprised at where he went in explaining why husbands can be bitter towards their wives (and hence why they are told not to be). He began by saying that the women present should not take offense at what he was about to say, but to hear him out. Then he said: women are manipulative and deceitful and conniving. This was why men needed to work at not being bitter towards their wives. Even as I write this, I can hardly believe it. The saddest part for me was that the women present giggled at this.

The saddest thing of all for me, however, was that this preacher said many, many good things in the course of the sermon. He was encouraging, winsome, scholarly, engaging, and humorous. There was much good to take from his sermon. In my mind, this makes the error all the more insidious and dangerous. My point is about this (which is not specific to the women’s issue): we must ever be discerning in what we receive from teachers and preachers.

Because a preacher or teacher is winsome, humorous, or appears scholarly, this does not mean that we can blindly and indiscriminately accept everything they say. We must always study to show ourselves approved, and be ready to answer anyone who questions our beliefs. We must also, like the Jews at Berea, “search the Scriptures daily to see if these things are so” (Acts 17:11). We cannot abdicate our responsibility to know God’s word and apply it to our lives to anyone else, no matter what their position or status in the church and no matter how scholarly, winsome or engaging they speak (2 Corinthians 11:14). We must each of us take the time to meditate on and study God’s Word so that when we hear someone preaching or teaching, we may discern truth from error, and accept the former and reject the latter. This can be difficult and time-consuming, but the alternative is unthinkable. Let us encourage one another to pursue God’s truth and the discipline of serious study guided by the Holy Spirit, the history of the church, and the community of believers, so we may be discerning even in the context of the most winsome teacher of error.

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^[i] New American Standard Bible : 1995 update. 1995 (Col 3:18–21). LaHabra, CA: The Lockman Foundation.

^[ii]James P. Eckman. Exploring Church History. (Wheaton: Crossway Books.2002).

^[iii]Bruce A. Ware, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Relationships, Roles and Relevance,(Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2005), 153.