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.

Praying for the Work of Bible Translation around the World

By Roy Ciampa, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

Where would our churches be today were it not for the fact that we (speakers of “major” languages like English, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, etc.) have easily accessible translations of the Bible into our own language(s)? I have so many different translations on my book shelves it isn’t funny. And yet there are so many groups around the world that do not yet have one whole Bible (or even the Old or New Testament) translated into their language.

Among my heroes are those who dedicate their lives to changing that situation. It has been my privilege to meet many such Bible translators and get to know a number of them. Many have gone to live in a village and do their best to learn its culture and language in order to be able to help some of its members produce a translation of the Scriptures into their language for the very first time. Such women and men have experienced isolation from their own culture and extended family and have undergone dramatic cultural adaptation. And they have loved people that live in places that most of us have never heard of and where we would not be willing to take our families.

The lengths to which they are willing to go to follow through on their commitment to getting the Scriptures into the languages of people who have never heard the Bible read in their own language before is inspiring to me and I consider it an extreme privilege to rub shoulders with such people.

So the last few weeks have been pretty special for me. During the last two weeks of May we had the first residency of the Bible translation track of the Gordon-Conwell Doctor of Ministry program. I had the privilege of spending two weeks with my co-mentor, Dr. Bryan Harmelink, and a group of gifted and experienced D.Min. students (almost all of whom work with one or another of the agencies of the Forum of Bible Agencies International) who brought a rich set of experiences in and knowledge about Bible translation around the world.

Right after the D.Min. residency concluded I headed out on a seventeen-day trip to Spain and Portugal. In Spain I attended a conference on translation and cognition and then the Nida School for Translation Studies, both of which were attended by a combination of Bible translators and academics specializing in the field of translation studies. In Portugal I also met with (among others) old and new friends who have been engaged in the work of Bible translation. The day after I returned to the States I had office hours with a couple of Gordon-Conwell students who are experienced Bible translators (with Wycliffe Bible Translators).

So it’s no surprise that Bible translation is on my mind these days and the importance of having access to the Scriptures in our mother tongue for our spiritual health, the spread of the gospel and the vitality of the church.

Those carrying out the work of Bible translation around the world deserve not only our admiration, but also our support, financially and in prayer. It is very challenging work that requires much time and many resources. If we took a moment each time we opened our own favorite Bible (or try to decide which one to use today!) to think about and pray for those working around the world so that others would also have greater access to the Word of God, what might the impact be? We need to be praying that those translations would not only be completed, but would also be eagerly used in the most effective and culturally appropriate ways so that as many people as possible come to know and experience the love, truth, and grace of God in Christ and become engaged in making Christ and his grace known to others.

And if only more people in our own communities were experiencing the transforming power of the Word of God through their own engagement of Scripture! What impact might that have on our own society?

Reading in the Company of Others

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

What are you reading? Look down there on your nightstand, or is it the little table next to your desk in the office? Or, perhaps I should ask, ‘are you reading…anything?’

I confess, in the midst of some of the frantic moments of my day-to-day life, these questions conjure up huge mountains of guilt for me. There are times when all I want to do is crawl into a small dark corner, sit on a soft barker lounge, and escape into the drama of a flat screen television. You know the scene: the diet coke and chips are on my right side, the clicker is on my left side and then… clear as day, I hear those aggravating, sniffling words from my dear old friend, Charles Spurgeon,

The man who never reads will never be read; he who never quotes will never be quoted. He who will not use the thoughts of other men’s brains, proves that he has no brains of his own. Brethren, what is true of ministers is true of all of people. YOU need to read. (#542 Spurgeon Sermon “Paul-His Cloak and His Books” in the Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit 9 (1863): 668-669).

Sometimes I just hate Spurgeon.

Don’t get me wrong. Sometimes a date with a barker lounge chair, a diet coke, and a clicker is the right thing to do. Unfortunately, put the three together and they can become a habit, and habits sometimes become preoccupations, and preoccupations sometimes become lifestyles.

So, how do I get out from this corner of guilt that I have painted myself into? Recently, I have begun to approach reading in a new way, new way for me, that is. Actually, my guess is that this approach has been around for a long time and I have just been looking the other way.

For years, I have viewed reading strictly as a solitary enterprise. That is, take the television and clicker away and you would have seen me on that same barker lounge, with the same diet coke, only this time reading alone. What I chose to read was a private affair. How I engaged with the ideas in the book was a private affair. How I used what I learned was a private affair. Everything was private.

All this has changed recently. I am beginning to view reading more communally, that is, as an act of community. For the past two years I have found myself in a monthly reading group and have found the experience liberating for a variety of reasons. First, do you see the rut that follows me wherever I go? Left to my own inclinations, I tend to read the same types of things over and over again. What is it for you? For me it is biographies and historical novels and survival literature. Being a card-carrying member of the group has changed all of this. What we read is a group decision. I have been forced to read things I otherwise would not have read. Go figure, I just read two great books on worship that would have, otherwise, been on the bottom of my reading list.

Further, the book group has allowed me the opportunity to think through what I have read in the company of others. Imagine this; my first reading of a book is not always right! Sometimes in mildly annoying ways, these men have forced me to think differently and creatively. Our reading together has challenged me in ways that would not have been the case if I were reading in solitude. Typically we have walked away from our times together intentionally asking ourselves how the residue of what we have read will stick with us for the long haul. How might the book we just read change us even in small but concrete ways?

Maybe it has something to do with the air in the room that us common readers of books share. Once ideas are floating out there, outside of our individual heads, they somehow become more objective and concrete. We find that none of us are in sole possession of them; they exist separate from us. Like a good tennis match, watching these ideas being batted around from one side of the room to the other has made reading an entirely new sport. I like that.

The Graced Wenham Swamp

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of canoeing on (and briefly in) the Ipswich River. I have caught glimpses of the river as I have driven about the North Shore, but that is a very different thing from snaking through its length – it is a bit like looking at faucets and sinks with no sense of the pipes behind the walls.

The highlight of the trip was spending the night in the midst of the Great Wenham Swamp, an entity I had known up to this point only as a Great White Space with intermittent green brushstrokes on the town map. Here, just a few miles from GCTS, I felt I was in the New England equivalent of the Atchafalaya Basin or the Everglades – no alligators or poisonous snakes (though the mosquitoes did their level best to fill the “threatening animals” category), but plenty of water, plenty of wildness…and most importantly, plenty of birds.

I had been a low-level birdwatcher in the days before the flood of work and family commitments swallowed up the discretionary time necessary for standing around in the woods and waiting for things to turn up. My sightings were mostly happenstansical. I sat by the pond at the end of the road of our house in Duxbury and looked up to see inches away a Cedar Waxwing, with its sublime coloring and its punk-rock-sunglasses eyeband. I almost literally stumbled upon a brilliant blue Indigo Bunting on a path just off Route 20 in Waltham. I was astounded by the size of the wings and the bright red head of a Pileated Woodpecker I spotted while wandering in the woods at a church picnic in Townsend. A friend at work gave me a copy of Birds of North America and I was hooked, (or netted, as the case may be).

But that was long ago. I am now restricted to what flutters into our suburban neighborhood – the usual assortment of sparrows and crows, with the occasional cardinal or goldfinch to brighten things up. Even here, of course, strange and wonderful things can pop up – a pair of wood ducks alighted on our neighbors’ tree one morning a few weeks ago. I didn’t know they were wood ducks right away, but a google search of “ducks in trees white bands on head” kept turning up “wood duck” in response, and I had the diagnosis confirmed by Rick, a friend of mine who actually knows what he is doing in the ornithological realm.

He was in fact there with me in the Great Wenham Swamp. He showed me a few of the wood ducks flying past our little island hideaway, along with a Baltimore Oriole; my delight at the brilliance of its plumage (viewed through high quality binoculars) was matched only by my delight at the fact that it looked exactly like the picture of the oriole that adorns the Hamilton- Wenham Little Leaguers’ caps. While Rick describes himself as only a moderate birder, he was able to identify birds by calls and flight with remarkable ease.

It struck me then, as it has struck me before, how the experience of birdwatching reflects so closely the experience of God’s grace .(It also is an experience of grace, of course, if you appreciate birds). You can put yourself in a position to see certain birds if you choose the right time of day and the right setting, and if you keep your eyes and ears open…but you can’t make them come. They come when they want. In the same way, the gift of God’s grace will come and go as he pleases. But by patient attendance on his Word and consistent fellowship with his people, we can be in a position where the likelihood of finding his grace increases exponentially. But it is never under our control -- which is just as well. Wood ducks will very occasionally pop up on suburban streets; and the grace of God will sometimes appear where you least expect it.

When in doubt . . .

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

The name of the program of which I am the director is Graduate Programs in Counseling, and the degree my students obtain is called a Master of Arts in Christian Counseling. Christian counseling versus counseling: My students are very interested in the difference between these two. They ask about working with Christians versus people who do not claim Christ. How do they counsel these people? Sometimes they say they want to be in a church setting, and plan to work with Christians. In my experience, happily, if a counseling center has a reputation for helping people, they will come, even unbelievers, to the church. So, I tell my students that they need to be prepared to work with whomever God brings to them. It is a divine appointment.

I work with Christians. I work with non-Christians. I work with people who are questioning. I work with people who are settled in their beliefs. But they are all human beings, made in the image of God. They all human beings, subject to the Fall. Everyone who walks in my office is a unique creation, made by God in his own image, and fallen into sin. So Christians and non-Christians have many things in common. When someone comes to me for help, I have much from which to draw to help them. I can use what I have learned from the fields of psychology, biology, and medicine because God in his providence calls his Image Bearers to learn from his creation, and gives them the tools they need to do so. It is easy to see how I can apply secular psychology, under the authority of Scripture, to both Christians and non-Christians. But it is also true that I can apply the principles of Scripture to both non-Christians and Christians.

“When in doubt, follow the directions of the manufacturer.” When I buy a new article of clothing, I look at the tag to see how to best care for it to ensure a long life and good wear. This principle applies to human life as well. “When in doubt, follow the directions of the Maker.” God has given us his Word to reveal his salvific plan in history and to give us wisdom in how we should live the life which is his gift to us. The principles of how to live revealed to us in Scripture, as we seek to live them out, will lead us to become the people God intended us to be. It has been my assumption that this means if we follow these principles it will lead us into, among other things, healthier places. And these principles apply to the unbeliever as well as the believer.

“Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you” (Philippians 4:8–9; ESV). One of the basic premises of cognitive behavioral therapy is that to change behavior one must change one’s thoughts which affect one’s emotions which motivates behavior. This applies to both believers and unbelievers.

So when my students ask me how I work with people who are not Christians I point this out. I always use the principles that God has provided us on how to live. With non-Christians I don’t couch them in Christianese or quote chapter and verse. But the principles apply to them as well as to the believers who come to see me. Sometimes, it takes a while for science to catch up with the principles of Scripture but eventually, if the researchers are honest, it does. For example God’s plan and pattern is for men and women to marry, then live together and have sex. It has become ubiquitous in our society for men and women to go in the opposite sequence: have sex, they move in together, and then (maybe) they get married. Science has caught up with God’s plan and found that cohabitation has lots of negative consequences for relationships (see my earlier blog on this topic at http://connect.gordonconwell.edu/members/blog_view.asp?id=190052&post=33380&hhSearchTerms=marriage#comment9604). So if I am providing premarital counseling for a couple and learn they are living together, I will challenge them in this area. If they are Christians I will use both science and Scripture to make my case, if they are not I still have much I can say to them about what is the best way to live to ensure a long and healthy marriage. When I think about counseling, whether Christians or non-Christians, I remember what CS Lewis said:

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the all in the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.[1]

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^[1] C. S. Lewis (1949). The weight of glory.