The Great Reversal

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

What a strange, perplexing moment it was. It was that moment a few years ago, before both my parents passed away, when I realized that my brothers and I were taking on a parental role for our mom and dad. Wordsworth and Coleridge called the phenomenon “return to childhood.” Caught by the inevitable vulnerabilities of their own mortality, my parents needed the almost identical care and control that they gave us in the first years of our lives, all the way down to those uncomfortable moments when we had to take away their keys from driving, and help them with their basic bodily care and functions, and when we took over the management of the basic decisions in their living.

It doesn’t take much to find these dramatic changes everywhere we look. We find it in the natural world every day at dusk and dawn, when the moon takes over the mastery of the sky from the sun, and visa versa. Or, how about on a socio-political level: Parse what must have been some uncomfortable moments in the 18^th and early 19^th centuries when we, as Americans, and our native motherland, England, had to gradually adjust our thinking about our mutual roles in the world. Who is the world power now? The great reversals in life!

Several of us, I think, saw the beginnings of yet another “great reversal” a couple of weeks ago at Cape Town. I had the privilege, along with several others from Gordon-Conwell, to participate at the Lausanne Congress: About 5,000 individuals coming from 198 nations from the world, all in one great room; what an amazing experience! One of the conversations on the second day involved a panel of African Anglican bishops and the newly created Anglican archbishop of the United States. In great humility, Archbishop Duncan, from Pittsburgh, thanked the African Anglican bishops for taking the lead in formulating the new Anglican structures for the West. What an amazing thing to behold these past years, as Christians from the West have come under the authority and direction of the Majority World church.

My sense is that what has been happening in the Anglican church in the past ten or so years is at the forefront of what we will see throughout the global missions movement in the future. Unreached people group?: We are used to talking about nations and indigenous tribes in Africa and parts of Asia in these terms. But, what about Denmark and Germany and France and parts of the United States even as being identified as unreached peoples groups? Already we see the equilibrium of the global missions movement shifting as we find missionaries from the Church in China and Korea and parts of Africa at our very doorsteps, spreading the Gospel to us Westerners. Thanks be to God; the Great Reversal has begun!

Miracle Baby: the Wonder of the Incarnation

By John Jefferson Davis
Professor of Systematic Theology and Christian Ethics

My wife Robin and I just returned recently from Washington, DC and a visit to get acquainted with our new grandson, Isaiah John Tobin, born November 14, 2009, weighing 7 lbs. 14 oz. ( and, coincidentally, Isaiah 7:14: “…. God with us”). Holding my new grandson as a proud grandfather (my third grandchild), I was so thankful to God for the birth of this beautiful new healthy child, and reflected on the amazing process of human embryonic development in the womb and live birth – things that we can easily take for granted because they seem so “normal”. The Old Testament Isaiah spoke about the birth of a “miracle baby” (Is.7:14), but there is something well-nigh miraculous about the formation and birth of any human baby, when seen in the light of modern science and embryology.

In his fascinating book The Hidden Face of God: Science Reveals the Ultimate Truth, Gerald Schroeder reminds us that a normal adult human body contains 75 trillion cells, and all 75 trillion were grown from and encoded genetically in a single fertilized egg cell in our mother’s womb. One cell divides to become two … four … eight …. sixteen … thirty-two …. sixty-four … and so on, all the way to 75 trillion cells – and these cells must appear at the right time, in the right order, in the right spatial configuration, so that brain cells do not appear in our toes or fingernail cells in our liver, and so on. There are 3.5 billion base pairs to specify the human genome in each cell, and this genetic “script” is packed into a space in the cell nucleus that measures only 1/1000 of an inch in diameter – an amazing feat of divinely designed “nanotechnology.”

Each time one of our cells divides, the amount of genetic information that has to be copied without error is like a person xeroxing ten 400 page books per minute for ten hours - and this from the time of conception until we die. As one biologist observed, the process of human embryological development staggers the imagination: the human embryo is like a machine that can not only build itself, but has the “intelligence” to be able to make a copy of itself as well.

At this Christmas season, when we again remember the “Word made flesh” (John 1:14), we can again in all humility reflect on the miracle of the Incarnation: the Author of the genetic code became a zygote, then an embryo, and finally, a 75 trillion-celled human being – himself living through, for our benefit, the amazing process that he himself had designed. Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift: Joy to the world … the Incarnate Lord has come!

Friendship of a Pastor

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

It is quite amazing the things you realize at a funeral. There we all were, almost three hundred friends and family members, all of us there to honor my father who had just passed away a couple of days earlier. They came from all over the Midwest. The older folks, representing his five full-time and several interim pastorates sitting in the front rows to hear better, were the most conspicuous.

We laid my father to rest, and in doing so, we were really laying to rest sixty years of faithful ministry. It was my task to eulogize him for the family. As I looked out over the mourners that day, and particularly those tired souls in the front rows, I couldn’t help but think of the kinds of relationships that were being represented there before me.

How had they perceived my father? There my father was before us, first, seen through the eyes of a wife, certainly the most intimate of the relationships being represented. And, then, there were the four grown boys, less intimate but equally loving. There were four daughters-in-law. How did daughters tethered to this man all these years out of marital pledge rather than blood kinship view this man and his life? There were plenty of nephews and nieces who largely saw him past his prime. There were only a few of his peers left who observed him in his prime—no siblings, but a few brother and sister-in-laws. And finally, with the exception of the church custodian and the ladies who served lunch that day, all of the rest sitting there saw this man through the lens of his ministry amongst them as their one time pastor.

Of this latter group, I couldn’t help thinking of one of dad’s most memorable sayings while I was growing up: “My best friends are ex-parishioners.” Certainly he never made this little adage public, but there was something in dad’s past that always made him wary of getting too close to those he served. Perhaps it was a piece of pastoral wisdom that he learned in his seminary days from the forties.

Whatever it was, in hindsight I think this self-imposed ministerial convention left my dad privately lonely. Publicly, no one would have guessed it. Dad was a big, gregarious man. Our home was a big, hospitable place. Our family life was cluttered with people from all walks of life. Dad’s life was filled with relationships, but at the end of the day, few of those relationships could easily fall under the category of friendship, narrowly defined. Most of his friends sat outside the church door, at least of the church he was currently serving. Only when he left a church would he express friendship openly to certain special people.

The wisdom of this little saying of dad’s can easily be disputed? Is it wise for pastors to nurture friendships within their own congregations? If not, are pastors, then, doomed to a life of solitude? Aside for his or her family, where else is the source of community for those who are to oversee community to come from? What was dad so fearful of? And, what advice should young pastors be given as they enter into a profession that is enormously challenging, potentially filled with conflict, and often lonely?

Fun for the Whole Family?

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

A large woman, couchbound for years, walks upstairs to the utter amazement of her family. A shy young man begins courting an inflatable doll named Bianca, and is affirmed in his relationship by a small town. A not-traditionally-beautiful little girl goes off to a beauty pageant accompanied by her bickering parents, her silent brother, her gay suicidal uncle, and her drug-abusing, foul-mouthed grandfather.

Film-goers may recognize the above as representative snippets from three films: respectively, Lasse Hallström’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993); Craig Gillespie’s Lars and the Real Girl (1997); and Jonathan Dayton’s Little Miss Sunshine (2006). The cynical among us might look at the list (and indeed the films in their entirety) and think, “Fun family entertainment, Hollywood style.”

At one level, the critique would hold. The families in these films (if we can count Lars and Bianca as a ‘family’) put the dys- in dysfunctional, and none of them constitute “family fare” in the traditional sense of the word. A few moments around the dinner table with Alan Arkin’s ‘colorful’ grandpa in Little Miss Sunshine would give the proverbial drunken sailor pause, while even the generally sweet-tempered Lars and the Real Girl centers on a man and, um, an inflatable doll. Anyone thinking to gather the young kids around for Edifying Video Night with one of these films should un-think it pretty quickly.

We could go on and level a salient cultural critique as to why these films roll the way they do. They could be seen as the quintessential products of the postmodern ethos, where traditional values are there only to be shredded, and alternative life-style choices – whether it is affairs with married women (or unmarried dolls); septuagenarian heroin ingestion; or illicit water tower climbing (one of the many memorable scenes with a young Leonardo DiCaprio in Gilbert Grape) -- are there to be tolerated, if not indeed celebrated.

They could also be seen as a perhaps welcome salination of the sickly sweet family films of a bygone era: here comes Lassie to drag Timmy out of the neighbors’ cobra pit. Mom had told him a hundred times not to go in that thing, but we know he’ll learn his lesson and they will all live happily ever after. (“Gee, Mom, you’re swell! And you too, Lassie!” “Ruff!”)

And yet…I found myself moved by all these films, and wondered what it was that touched me. They are all well directed and well acted, but that only provides a lowest common denominator for enjoyment. What distinguishes them is that, for all their visible dysfunction and edgy behavior, they really are sweet at heart. The characters may find themselves lost in a jungle of pathology, but they eventually hack their way through the brush to find one another, and with that to find some kind of peace amidst the chaos of life.

The fact that they find it in the worst possible circumstances of ordinary life makes the grace of re-discovering one’s family all the more profound. In Gilbert Grape, a dropped birthday cake can rip your heart out, but the mother’s trudge to the second floor becomes a kind of ascent of Jacob’s ladder. Try to keep a dry eye as kindly Karin berates Lars for not recognizing what they are doing for him, “Every person in this town bends over backward to make Bianca feel at home. Why do you think she has so many places to go and so much to do? Huh? Huh? Because of you! Because - all these people - love you!” As for Little Miss Sunshine, all I can say is that you may never think about Rick James’ Superfreak the same way again.

I may be wrong about the merits of these films. But it is not because there is something strange about the idea of love appearing in the strangest of places, or of something – or Someone – pulling people together when everything seems to be pulling them apart. Whatever the filmmakers’ motives may have been, the films can function for us as parables of the divine seed of the gospel that flourishes in the most unlikely soil.