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.

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.

The Hard Work of Hospitality

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

We first take away their cell phones. We take away their cell phones and then we take away their access to Facebook, followed by their access to email and the internet, and finally (gasp) we take away their IPods. We call it a Technology Sabbath. All of their forms of media are gone in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. You can almost see the scratch marks on their laptops and IPods as we pull them all away for thirty long days.

After this, we put them through one month of hard situations in which they, as a group, are required to crawl together over various obstacles. Some of these obstacles are solid and real, even terrifyingly real. They find themselves high above the treetops on a high ropes course and dangling on the side of a mountain on a rope climb. Some of the obstacles are less concrete but every bit as real as they are confronted with theologically rich questions they cannot answer easily. Finally, they are required as a group to confront the discomfort and dissonances of a cross-cultural setting in South America.

For many summers now, I have had the opportunity to observe cohorts of approximately thirty young adults each year being challenged by a Lilly-funded youth program we host at the Ockenga Institute called Compass. They move from living in a wilderness setting, to the classroom, and finally to a missions context. It has been a laboratory of community of sorts for us as we have had the privilege of standing back, year after year, and observing intentional community in the making, where complete strangers are transformed into a lifelong community of brothers and sisters, all in the confines of one month. How long does it take for the awkward glances of a nervous stranger to become heartfelt straight-ahead, eye-to-eye acknowledgements of a fellow believer in Jesus Christ? We have found it has not taken long when these fellow believers are required to face hard times together.

And it does not take long for these young people to express authentic forms of hospitality toward one another. We see it everywhere, from the simple words of encouragement extended to a sister who is trying to make it up the last 20 feet of the side of a mountain, to their small group conversations as they tell each other their stories, to the youth sitting up all night next to a fallen comrade who was a stranger only a few weeks prior, caring for her as she barfs up foreign food in a foreign land, to the worship they share that, at moments, are deeply moving and instructive to their souls as brothers and sisters in Christ.

The lesson learned in simple ways is that extending hospitality to one another in our churches is not always easy. It is not easy for these youth on a one-month excursion into community building, and it certainly is not easy for us in our churches. But too often we have relegated our expressions of hospitality to its entertainment value. Isn’t this, in fact, what we point to in our culture when we talk of the ‘hospitality industry?’ We point to entertainment in all its forms. Hospitality and entertainment have become synonyms in our cultural consciousness.

Unfortunately they have become synonyms in our church lexicon as well. Too often we have built our lives together around entertainment. At worst, our times together serve as distractions; we use them like watching a good movie or a baseball game on television where the entertainment value of the experience itself becomes an end in itself. Too often hospitality is relegated to self-selected venues where we invite those we feel most comfortable with to share a common experience of mutual gratification. Often times not much is required of us outside of the effort it takes to make a salad or, in the case of a typical men’s ministry, pancakes. We like to keep things light and conversational. In fact, this is how we measure success and failure for ourselves; the degree to which we individually leave feeling at least mildly satisfied.

There is nothing wrong with any of these forms of entertainment in themselves. However, the danger that entertainment brings to the topic of hospitality is when the entertainment value of our lives together takes over. The various enticements of the forms of entertainment at our disposal can easily serve as a distraction to the hard work required of expressing true hospitality to one another.

Look and listen closely to the stories around you in your churches. You will see and hear hard choices being made everywhere: An unemployed brother over there just trying to keep his credit rating from exploding; the teenager over here making decisions surrounding new temptations that could impact the rest of her life; the couple over there whose marriage secretly isn’t going all that well; the single sister over here who is so lonely she can hardly keep herself together; and the elderly woman over there who has got to make a decision on when to pull the plug on a life partner. If all that our hospitality involves is simply about entertaining ourselves, none of these stories will be heard let alone responded to.

The Christian Virtue of Patience (but I digress)

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

I caught myself banging on the side of my computer yesterday. Can you believe it? It’s a MacBook Pro. Only two years old, which, in dog years now, is like driving around in my dad’s old 1964 Buick Electra, the dark blue one with the big fenders and the automatic windows (but I digress).

Perhaps it was the sound of the banging that jolted me back into the Middle Ages when seven deadly sins and the great seven heavenly virtues ruled the day. Patience. That’s what I need more of. (Patience…and a better memory. Upon further research, patience is not one of the original virtues, but for our sake here, let’s say it is one of the great eight heavenly virtues…but I digress).

Imagine, the Christian virtue of patience is now being defined by the length of time that it takes for me to blink my eyes. My entire psychological makeup—to say nothing of my sense of spirituality—now hangs on the thin mili-second thread that strings together my past to my present to my future. My understanding of God and His omnipresence is being redefined. My ability to trust patiently in Him is being reworked.

And then I thought about my grandfather, the potato farmer from Minnesota. What did patience look like to him during the early part of last century? How did he live up to his moral obligations to God and his friends and family during those lean years during the 1930-1940’s? For Enoch Bjork, patience was like a long-legged farm dog stretching out before a fire on a cold winter night. Once the dog got down on the floor it seemed like it took an entire day for him to untangle himself and throw his long appendages into all corners of the room.

For my grandfather, patience was measured by the seasons. In his mind, it started in spring when he put in his corn and it was tested all the way to the fall when he—hopefully—saw some fruit from his labor. The winter in between stretched out as a long, cold interlude that never seemed to end.

I wonder what it was like before clocks when Middle Age man lacked the capacity to look down at his wrist, at any given moment, to measure with precision how his day was passing. Imagine how he ordered his day—as it moved from past moment to present to future—without this basic technology that allowed time to pass before his very eyes. More to the point, I wonder what it meant for him to be patient without an instrument to measure patience.

Neil Postman has it right in his book, Technopoly, when he says that all technologies possess inherent ideological biases. They are not neutral tools but they shape us in ways we cannot begin to imagine. Just imagine, the presence of a simple piece of technology like the watch has altered our ability to be patient. Just imagine, I am banging on my computer because time is no longer fast enough. Just imagine (but I digress).

The Whole World Is(n’t?) Watching

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

It looks as though we may need to update the old Zen koan: “If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?” The new version might go, “If I eat a sandwich but don’t write about it on Twitter, will I still be hungry?”

Now at this point I feel compelled to insert the customary, “Technology has lots of wonderful uses…” and the contractually obligatory, “like allowing people to read Every Thought Captive!” And technology does in fact have lots of wonderful uses. Encryption programs can allow dissidents to report on the atrocities committed by repressive governments with minimized fear of reprisal. On a less dramatic level, you can paste photos of your recent trip to Ethiopia on Facebook without having to email a bunch of people directly (let alone make actual prints and mail them, as we used to do in the late Bronze age).

But the Twitter-ization of communication in the last few years clearly represents the other side of technology’s two-edged sword. Life, I suppose, is always some mix of grandeur and triviality, but the difference now is that your trivia can reach a world-wide audience within seconds. Whether everyone is out there is anxiously awaiting your news (“im typing a thing for evry thot cptiv right now, how cool is that, then im snacking, prb a sweet ‘n’ salty nut bar, ill keep you posted!”) is of course another question altogether. Maybe the whole world isn’t watching.

But there is always the chance that it might be, and that is the problem I want to focus on. One of the most powerful forces that shapes our behavior is simply who we think is watching us. We try to get good grades to please our parents, we tailor our jokes to please our peers, we cut our lawns to please our neighbors. This is all natural enough, but the world-wideness of the Web adds a new dimension to the problem. I can begin to derive significance for my humdrum little life from the assumption that the Global Community is clicking like crazy to read about my latest thoughts about politics, religion, and what color shoes I’m thinking of wearing tomorrow. We speak of “death by a thousand cuts”; we might tweak that to, “life by a thousand tweets”. I came, I blogged, I conquered. I am read, therefore I am.

Most human enterprises end up slogging towards the swamps of idolatry, and the new communication tools look like taking that same sad path. The internet can serve as a surrogate sheltering sky, aglow with galaxies of fellow bloggers and tweeters; a Zodiac of sympathetic stars happy to guide our ways. But like all makeshift deities, it promises much more than it can deliver.

Because at the end of the day, we all live pretty ordinary lives, and continually blogging about them is not going to change that. What makes the difference is recognizing that your ordinary life is in fact lived out in the presence of a very extraordinary God, who knows every hair on your head and loves you limitless concern. With his eyes on you, you don’t need to worry about who else is watching.