Pastors' Roundtable Reading List

Wondering what to read next? Looking for a book for your reading group?  Try one of these titles*, read and discussed by the Pastors Roundtable Group led by Dr. Ken Swetland and Dr. David Horn at the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary Hamilton campus:

The Pastor by Eugene Peterson
Ten Myths About Calvinism by Kenneth Stewart
Allah by Miroslav Volf
Worship and the Reality of God by John Jefferson Davis
Nearing Home by Billy Graham
The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos
Technopoly by Neil Postman
Evangelical Theology by Karl Barth
Defiant Joy: The Remarkable Life & Impact of G.K. Chesterton by Kevin Belmonte

*Book titles with a hyperlink are available at Gordon-Conwell's online bookstore, in partnership with Christian Book Distributors (CBD). Every time you place an order through the online bookstore, Gordon-Conwell will receive a percentage of the sales.  Within the last two years, Gordon-Conwell has received over $20,000.  These proceeds support the Seminary's educational services for students.

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

Can you believe this?: In fifth grade Sunday School I had to learn them all: Genesis...

Exodus…Leviticus…Numbers…Deuteronomy…through those pesky minor prophets, Micah…Nahum…Habakkuk…and on through the New Testament books…all the way to Revelation. Not only did we have to learn the books of the Bible, we were also tested on a list of the kings of Israel and Judah and, of course, the prophets. Our hero at the time was our classmate, Peggy Corneil, who could recite all three lists backwards and forwards. Amazing mind, that Peggy!

By present standards, this kind of curriculum would be considered wholly inadequate. The measuring line by which we measure such things as Sunday School curriculum and small group materials is the degree to which it is considered “practical.” This is the gold standard question: “To what extent is there a life application attached to whatever we teach?”

Pastors and others in ministry know this all too well. The pervasive value behind whatever goes on in the church is its perceived practicality. Every time a sermon is preached, a bible study is taught, or a small group is administered, the pastor stands against the proverbial door and the congregation measures his or her growth against the standards of this one core value.

And, what goes on in seminaries is no exception. The current market, in fact, places traditional theological education up against para-church organizations whose central mission is cultural relevancy and a commitment to practical daily living. A whole cottage industry of manuals and CD/DVDs and three ring notebooks are geared toward ways in which biblical principles are linked to a myriad of life contexts, be it family life, or leadership situations, or relational complexities.

Seminary curriculum is increasingly expected to meet this litmus test of practicality. Did I hear an alum/pastor right a couple of years ago when she stated that her seminary failed her because we did not offer an entire course on developing church capital campaigns? Apparently, she was in the middle of funding a new building, and she felt inadequate with the pressures that were being placed on her by her church. Gordon-Conwell just did not measure up to her expectations.

There is much to be said about relating biblical and theological truths to daily living. A dynamic life of faith is nothing, if not connected to the warp and wolf of our lives. But, perhaps we need to rethink what we mean by “practical.” All of those lists of the books of the Bible, kings, and prophets certainly didn’t connect easily, in my fifth grade mind, to a life being played out at Garfield grade school. At the end of the day, I could not readily make out a life application related to my little world.

Those lists were not practical in that immediate application sort-of-way. But, I have been feasting off of the knowledge of that fifth grade class for over forty-five years, all the way through my seminary education and into ministry in the church and the seminary. To be honest, I am sure I would miss a few of those kings and prophets right now, but the residue of those lists still cling to me. The larger backdrop of my life has been measured unconsciously against my fifth grade education.

And so it is with the seminary education you received at Gordon-Conwell. The seminary is just not going to be able to anticipate every practical ministry contingency you or I confront, including fund raising building strategies. The curriculum just couldn’t hold all of them. But, the aim is to be practical when measured against years, and not necessarily days.

Do Animals Have Souls?

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

Dedicated readers of this blog (and might the plural, let alone the “dedicated”, be rather optimistic?) will note that the question in the title is a follow-up to a previous post involving the question of human “souls” – and more importantly, the question of how words work. This present piece springs from close observation of my dog at work and play…or more precisely, at rest and play, with the occasional duty of barking at people who pass by the house, and enthusiastically greeting those who enter it.

Now, with respect to humans, I argued that while we cannot expect to isolate an entity called “the soul” somewhere in a Platonic heaven, the word “soul” does mighty good work addressing the interior dimension of our existence. Right from the start, then, we recognize that since humans don’t “have” souls in the same sense that they have bus tokens or a mole on their cheek, we would assume that animals don’t have them, either. This is a crucial point, since without it we can find ourselves split in two by a putative decision tree:

Do animals have souls?

No> Wantonly ridicule, kill and eat them

Yes> Refuse to make any use of them whatsoever, and set up animal focus groups with a view towards creating greater inter-species cooperation.

It doesn’t work that way.

The question about animals “having souls” is really a question as to whether they have an “interior dimension of their existence” that warrants the use of the word “soul”. And here the evidence is a bit mixed. The crucial element in determining the presence and nature of such an interior dimension is, generally speaking, speaking. I use “generally speaking” not only for the delight of having “speaking” appear twice in a sentence, but also because we can assume the presence of the interior dimension of a person who is unable to communicate with words. But generally we know what is in a person’s “soul” because they tell us about it.

Animals do not do this, Doctor Doolittle aside. They can’t tell us whether Eli Manning is an “elite” quarterback, or whether a beautiful sunset can reasonably be termed “sublime”. If the proverbial roomful of monkeys ever did bang out Shakespeare’s works on their monkey-friendly word-processors, it would only be by accident, not intent.

Even as I write this, I can sense the growing wrath of animal lovers. So I hasten to add that even if animals don’t communicate with language which reveals an interior dimension of life perfectly analogous with that of humans, they surely communicate in all sorts of other ways. Pain, fear, anger – a growl or a whine or a nip can get that dimension of their “inner” experience across quite clearly. And while dogged materialists will strive to tell us canines can’t really be sad, as a dog-owner and recent viewer of Benji the Hunted, I feel comfortable in affirming that they can…at least in some sense.

And it is with precisely such equivocation that I want to conclude this brief exploration of the animal soul. We can know quite a bit about what humans are like on the inside. We simply can’t know what is going on with animals with the same level of precision. So using the language of “soul” is probably not the most helpful thing to do. But that hardly establishes an unbridgeable chasm between the animals and us. The Scripture is quite clear that whatever unique qualities humans bring to the table, we are all of us, human and animal alike, part of God’s creation, distinct from the creator himself (Revelation 4, where humans are mixed in with the beasts in the persons of the “living creatures”, is a particularly vivid illustration of this fact). The Scripture also warrants using animals in labor and for food, so I eat my cheeseburgers with a clean conscience.

And if my dog ever questions me about that, I’ll just point out to her that she eats the hamburger, too.

What About Christmas Next Year?

By Roy Ciampa, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

What have we Christians done with Christmas? What might we do with it if we seriously wanted to honor the Christ whose birth we celebrate? My family and I just enjoyed a very nice Christmas together, but I confess that I would like my Christmas to be different next year.

Jim Wallis and Scott McKnight have reminded us that “Last year, Americans spent $450 billion on Christmas. Clean water for the whole world, including every poor person on the planet, would cost about $20 billion. Let’s just call that what it is: A material blasphemy of the Christmas season.” A CNN report from just the other day mentioned that they expect $46,000,000,000.00 (it stands out more with the zeros, I think, than to just write 46 billion dollars) worth of gifts to be returned after this year’s Christmas. That is, we will have spent more than twice as much money on unwanted gifts for each other than it would cost to provide clean water for everyone on the planet.

The Christmas we celebrate (and that so many seem concerned to “defend”) is the celebration of God sending his Son so that we might have life. Not so that we might have the most outlandish celebration of materialism possible… The time to start thinking about next Christmas is not next November, but right now. Of course we will buy presents for our children. But what if we decided that next Christmas we would celebrate Christ’s coming for us by giving much more money to those in need around the world, and to projects that would have a lasting impact, than we would give to friends and family who will still be more prosperous than most people around the world even if they receive much less under the tree, but are given the opportunity to join in with us.

The family of one of the couples in our church small group decided that for Christmas this year they would send World Vision enough money to pay for a home for orphaned children ($5,100), and they kindly invited the rest of us to join in with them. World Vision has a whole set of similar gift options that are “too big for a box and a bow,” things that cost between $300 and $39,000. Other organizations provide similar opportunities to make our giving about much more than, as Wallis put it, “a material blasphemy of the Christmas season.” Wouldn’t it be something if within a few years from now Christmas celebrations in American had begun to shift in their emphasis to such a degree that the new orientation was as ubiquitous as the latest Apple product? I realize such a change would have a huge impact on the US economy, but surely we could find a way to deal with that…

Luke 8:8-11 tells us that the first to get the news on that first Christmas morning were some shepherds out in their fields. The news was given to them rather than to Caesar Augustus or to Quirinius, governor of Syria (both of whom are mentioned in the first verse of the chapter) to remind us that the news of this savior is not news just for the top 1%, or even the top 20 or 80 percent, but “good news that will cause great joy for all the people”:

And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. (Luke 2:8-11, NIV)

Reading and Other Matters

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

Ever have one of those books you were embarrassed to say you hadn’t read but were afraid to admit it? You know, the kind of book you feel you would be caught with your pants down if someone asked you to weigh in on it for some reason: “You mean, you haven’t read such-and-such?”

So it is with Neil Postman’s Technology. I just finished it and feel guilty about having not read it a long time ago. I could not put it down. Now I can say to you, my readers, “What do you think of Postman’s view on the pervasive role of technology in American culture?” “What, you haven’t read it? You really need to do so.”

With this grand confession behind me, I actually don’t have a large quantity to say about the book itself except to say that, at its core, Postman reminds us of that most profound truth that the things that influence us the most in our day-to-day lives are the most subtle and evasive. We think we control our lives by sheer force of our own awareness of these influences. But like all things cultural, we are as much servants as kings of our own domains.

So embedded are our perceptions, in fact, in the “taken for granted” nature of the cultures surrounding us that we are rarely conscious of how these cultural phenomena affect us and the others around us. Like an iceberg in the North Atlantic sea, we may well be able to see and understand a small part of how our influences work and affect our lives, but it is the vast underworld beneath the waterline that is most telling. It is this underworld of culture that James Hunter says, in his book, To Change the World, that is most deceptively strong because culture is “most powerful…when it is perceived as self-evident.”

Such, says Postman, is the case especially with the technologies that fill our lives. We are often unconscious victims of the very tools we think we control. And by tools, he is not just speaking of the mechanical and electronic devices that fill our lives--computers, toasters, mp3 devices, and the like. Language, as we now use it, is a technological tool. How about polling? Think about how our values are being controlled now by the mere fact that we can almost instantaneously determine that 47% versus 53% now believe such and such is right. And, we now live in a world where we can know the most minute details of the most mundane set of facts immediately, all at our googled fingertips.

Our world is too much with us and we don’t even know it. I wonder how these technologies shape us ever so subtly? What is that Christian virtue of ‘patience’ you ask, for example? At one time, patience was that human enterprise that stretched out between spring-time when my grandfather farmer put his potato seedlings in and the fall when he pulled the potatoes out of the ground. For me, patience has been reduced to a milla-second as I pound on the side of my computer because it isn’t fast enough. Patience completely redefined and I don’t even know it!

Speaking of patience, I have got to end. I need to download my next book on my iPad.

December Faculty Forum

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

It’s always a dangerous thing to think when you are preaching. You start wondering why the guy in the fourth pew is staring out the window, or whether you have sufficient time to include the illustration about illuminated medieval manuscript, and suddenly you have no idea what you are actually saying at that moment. What’s even worse is the ensuing awareness of your dissociation: how is it that I’m talking and at the same time I’m aware I’m talking? How many “I”’s can there be?

I was reminded of this as I looked out my window at the bare branches of the winter trees outside my office. A few years ago I was preaching in a hall with large windows in the back, looking out on the same bleak tree-scape that greets me this morning. And as I was (at least supposed to be) teaching, I was struck by how human those particular trees were looking that day.

I had been set up for such arboreal anthropomorphizing for a long while. If the Wizard of Oz’ witch and winged monkeys set the standard for childhood terror, the malicious apple-flinging trees of the same film weren’t far behind. On the positive side of the ledger, I have always thought Tolkien’s Ents are just about the best thing Middle-Earth has to offer, hoom, hoom. I am one of the few people who thought the Two Towers film could have been vastly improved with a few more hours of Entmoot-musings from Treebead and his companions. I grew up on an acre of land that was almost entirely covered with tall pines, and spent much of my youth wandering through the woods down the road.

But what I saw that day, and this, was not simply the generic human-ness of trunks and boughs. These trees, it seemed, were doing something quite specific – stretching out their bare branches to the grey skies, crying out to God for the renewal of Spring, calling out for their own annual resurrection.

In the bleak mid-winter, on the cusp of Christmas, in the bareness and brokenness of our own lives, may we go and do likewise.

“The medium is the message”

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

I am actually going to quote Wikipedia: ‘"The medium is the message" is a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan meaning that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived.’[1]

I recently visited a church in which the medium used in the presentation of “worship” led me to think about this idea. When the service began, the lights in the auditorium were turned down, and spotlights on the stage and the worship team members were turned up. There was stage smoke billowing on the platform so that the spotlights created a visual line to the musicians. Four giant screens broadcast images, first of a meditation, then of the words of the songs the musicians were playing. As the singing progressed, a camera focused on each musician so that their image was projected onto the four giant screens as they played or sang. The background of the stage was composed of white and gray cutouts that were arranged in such a way as to resemble a house of cards stacked on one another. At first I did not notice the cross. But as I looked around me, I noticed that far above on the rim of the ceiling structure that held the spotlights was a cross. At the end of the set of songs, appropriately, the audience burst into applause. My husband leaned over and whispered in my ear, “I’m waiting for Tina Turner to appear.” It was quite a performance.

I have also attended churches where everyone was encouraged to “make a joyful noise.” Some have been so committed to this that I have heard choirs sing off key, singers sing out of time with each other, and been subjected to a variety of screechy trumpets and violins, all of which have so distracted me from the worship of God that I could not focus on why I was there. Clearly, the church I just described was committed to not allowing these kinds of distractions from attendee’s worship experience. The musicians performed professionally and the quality of both instrument and voice were excellent. And yet, it did not lead me to worship.

Worship. A most central activity of my faith, and yet so difficult to define, capture, and facilitate.

I have noticed a trend in churches to have people lead worship who have no training in theology, church music, congregational singing, and sometimes even musicianship. Sometimes they are songwriters. Sometimes they are singers. It seems to have become quite rare for them to be trained worship leaders. As a consequence, the experience I described above is becoming more and more common.

One of the challenges, of course, is that many people find themselves joining a church with people from many different backgrounds, church traditions, and preferences. What one person needs to lead worship is different from what another needs. This is one of the things I see valuable about the multitude of congregations we have today. The variety of church cultures provides the possibility of each of us finding a church whose leadership provides a worship context that leads us into the presence of God. But, can we get it wrong? My reflection is not about the “worship wars.” It’s not about contemporary or traditional or blended or whatever. It is about worship and how the media we choose influences our worship.

It is a tremendous responsibility to stand in front of God’s people and lead them into his presence so that they may praise, honor, and glorify him in an act of worship. James writes “let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, knowing that as such we will incur a stricter judgment” (James 3:1). This is the verse that drove me to seminary because I realized that if others were turning to me for leadership or instruction, I needed to be responsible about being adequately prepared to honor God and be faithful with the responsibility entrusted to me in the form of these people’s lives. So too should worship leaders be cautious and careful about how they lead others in worship. The medium through which we choose to express ourselves is a part of the message. It shapes the message. It is, as quoted above, symbiotic with the message.

I want to believe that the goal of every worship leader is to direct God’s children to enter into his presence and worship him. To do this, however, is not a simple task nor a small task. It is one that carries great significance, and requires much thought and preparation. If God gives you the responsibility of leading his people in worship, I pray that you will consider James’ words and ensure that your gifts and calling are strengthened and grown rich with adequate preparation. Formulate your theology of worship and ensure that it is consonant with your theology of God and church and spiritual formation. Use your theology of worship as a foundation for how you plan and lead worship, choose setting and context and instruments and songs and psalms, and everything other aspect of the experience you give to the people God has entrusted you to lead in worship. Anything less is a disservice to God’s people and disrespectful of the worship God as due.

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^[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message