Spring 2012: My First Seminary Class

As it's been a while since I've taken the time to update my blog, I thought I'd write a flurry of posts to give you a sense of what we've been up to on campus and what I've been up to personally as well. Happy reading!

This past January, I was given the opportunity to take my first-ever seminary class through Fuller Theological Seminary. One of my favorite things about working for InterVarsity is that IV really cares about developing its staff and encourages us to further our education and training. Back in October or so, my boss let me know about an upcoming opportunity to take a week-long intensive class at Fuller's extension center in Colorado Springs, CO. She told me the class was "The Theology of C.S. Lewis." As soon as I read that title, I was pretty much in.

I'm sure I'm not alone here; C.S. Lewis has been formative for so many Christians in the past three or four generations. I remember first reading Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters in high school and feeling like Lewis was dusting off my old images and conceptions of God, the Bible, the Incarnation, Sin, and what it meant to be a follower of Jesus. His stories and analogies have lingered in my imagination for almost ten years. As I've poured deeper into his fiction (The Space Trilogy, 'Til We Have Faces, Narnia) and other theological writings (favorites include The Four Loves and The Problem of Pain), I've continued to be blessed by his incredible ability to communicate ideas and captivate the reader with vivid images and compelling prose outlining his understanding of the Triune God and His activity in the world. With all of this in mind, I signed up for the class.

A few weeks later, I received the syllabus for the class which included about 1200 pages of reading, a reading notebook to be kept as we went along (roughly 1 page for each chapter of reading), a final exam, and a research paper. Whew. On top of that, the class was happening a mere week before classes started up again for the Spring Semester, meaning that I was almost guaranteed to find it challenging to squeeze in all the time needed to do justice to the final exam and research paper. I swallowed hard and decided to stick it out, praying that God would provide the time needed to complete the classwork.

The new year came and I flew out to Colorado to begin the week-long intensive. I did not really know what to expect from the classroom time but God blessed me (and my classmates) with several good gifts during the week:

• God provided a place for four of my classmates and I to stay for free! A couple in the community opened up their home to us (the wife was in the class as well) and even allowed us to drive their cars and gave us quite the introduction to Colorado Springs. This was such an incredible gift as we were able to rest well and be blessed so abundantly by their kind hospitality!
• The weather was beautiful the entire time we were in Colorado which definitely highlighted the incredible beauty of waking up everyday to a mountain landscape. As a smalltown boy from the Midwest, I haven't exactly seen a lot of mountains in my life. The scenery itself was worth the cost of the trip.
• The four classmates I mentioned were InterVarsity staff which proved to be quite a life-giving little community while we were away from home. My boss and I came in from Saint Louis and there was a girl from Washington D.C., as well as a guy from Maine. As we were stressing out together, God made us into friends. I love these people and still feel connected to them after only spending a week together. Praise God for supportive community!

Long story short, we survived the class together and felt genuinely blessed by God to be there. The lectures (though long at times) were wonderful as the Professor opened up Lewis' theology in ways that I had never seen before. I saw the rich beauty of Lewis' trinitarian theology that illuminates so much of his writing. I was reminded of some of the historical context and details of Lewis' life that informed his understanding of his role as a writer and thinker in the mid-20th century. I was once again swept away by Aslan and the High Countries and the Weight of Glory and reminded of the sheer Joy (or Longing) that both delights and frustrates us in this life. I'll leave you with one of my favorite Lewis quotes:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
The Four Loves

NSO 2011: Week One by the Numbers

9 out of 11 Core Leaders pose with me at our Pre-Fall Retreat

Here are some important numbers from the past week:  350+, 160, 101, 12, 2, 17.  I guess some context would help...

• 350+ = the number of cold drinks handed out to freshmen by SLU InterVarsity leaders in less than 2 hours
• 160 = the number of new people who filled out a contact card indicating their interest in InterVarsity
• 101 = the number of those folks who are interested in being in a Bible study this semester
• 12 = the number interested in investigating Christianity
• 2 = the number of GIGs (Groups Investigating God - a Bible study designed for someone just checking out Christianity for the first time) that have already been started in the first week of school
• 17 = the number of freshmen we crammed into an apartment living room for Brunch Bunch, our first freshmen-only event this morning

If those numbers seem large to you, let me be the first to say that we have been blown away by this freshmen class.  I don't think we have ever collected more than 100 contact cards or had a Brunch Bunch larger than 12 or 13 people.  As you can probably guess, it's been a week full of many small panics and an overarching feeling of tired joy.

Today (Sunday), the Core Team and I took a mini-Sabbath retreat together at Forest Park here in Saint Louis.  We are spending our bi-weekly gatherings this semester in Luke 9-10 and today's time was spent in the story of Jesus Feeding the 5000 (Luke 9:10-17).  As I was lying out in the grass on Art Hill this afternoon, I could not help but see the parallel between this story and our stories from the past week.  The apostles have done much in their traveling - preaching the Kingdom,  casting out demons, healing the sick - yet they are reminded once again how much they need Jesus.  In fact, Luke tells us that after all 5,000 (plus women and children) had been fed and were satisfied, "the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over" (v. 17).  With every step of stooping down to pick up leftovers, the Twelve (each with their own basket) are reminded of Jesus' ability to provide.

As the twelve of us (eleven leaders plus me) have labored together this past week in prayer and hospitality, we have been tempted to rely on our own strength, charisma, and talents.  There have been a few different times this week when, like the Twelve, I wondered (literally) "How will we feed this many people?"  Today, however, we too were reminded of our need to stay close to the One Who Provides.  Much has been done and much is left to do, but we serve a God of wells that will not run dry, a God who can satisfy our thirst.

Here are a few more pictures from the first week of NSO (New Student Outreach):

Core Team setting up our Freshmen Water Bottle Giveaway

Welcoming Freshmen!

Heading to the Soccer Game!

Tolkien & To-Do Lists, Or Why Missionaries Need Beauty

"Lift your eyes and look to the heavens: Who created all these? He who brings out the starry host one by one, and calls them each by name. Because of his great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing."

- Isaiah 40:26

“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
- JRR Tolkien, Return of the King

A little after 12:30pm today, I received a voicemail from a good friend. In his message, he told me he was just around the corner from the restaurant at which we had agreed to meet. But, there was a problem. I was not at the restaurant. I was nowhere near the restaurant. In fact, I had already eaten and was on my way to a coffeeshop to get some work done. I completely forgot that we had made plans to eat lunch together. What a jerk, right?

If you have seen me much in person and are very observant, you may have noticed that I tend to write notes on my hand. I have a terrible memory, especially when it comes to scheduling, as proven by my poor hungry friend (I was supposed to buy lunch too - doubly bad!). When we made plans, I did not have a pen on me. My hand remained a clean slate and my lunch hour unscheduled. One thing led to another, a host of other concerns and priorities consumed my mind, and I was given another opportunity to apologize for my disorganization.

I tell you this not purely for self-disclosure but also in the knowledge that I am not alone. We live in a culture of perpetual motion. We have no shortage of meetings that occupy our time, stimuli that occupy our minds, and worries that occupy our hearts. We spend long hours working at our jobs, only to return home and find more work awaiting us most days. We exist in bigger, broader networks of people than did our grandparents, each relationship clamoring for our time and attention. We are beset by more information than generations past, including more than 3,000 commercial advertisements each day for the average college student.

Surrounded by all this swirling chaos, it is sometimes easy to feel overwhelmed. No wonder we often wrestle to find time to be still and wrestle further with what to do when we do find a quiet moment. As the school year draws near, I find myself with growing to-do lists and shrinking hours in which to do the multitude of tasks it takes to begin a college ministry each year. I worry we will not finish planning in time to welcome the first round of freshmen to campus. No matter how many years we somehow manage to get everything done in time, I still worry.

In the middle of the late July administrative storm, I find myself looking for safe harbor, a place to be reminded that the fate of the world is not contingent upon whether we give out water bottles or watermelon when freshmen take their campus tour. When this happens, I often find solace in small, unexpected places - in the line of a poem or the page-turn of a novel or the lyric of a song. I find it in Art, in Beauty. Beauty reminds me simultaneously of both my tiny view of the world around me and God's Good Story surging forward always and ever around me. It whispers to me that even my laptop cannot hold the mysteries, the intricacies, the glorious complexity of the flowers outside my window. I wonder sometimes if this is why a busy king like David took the time to write songs when he had a people to govern, battles to fight, and a kingdom to run. Maybe the Psalms are a collection of David's "Life-is-crazy-right-now" journal entries. Beauty reminds me that while I may be overwhelmed by the first weeks of September here in the last weeks of July, God is not. He knows the name of every freshmen coming to campus. He was working in their hearts long before they met us and he will continue long after they graduate.

As the pace of life quickens, I am reminded of my need for Beauty. I am beginning to understand that it is the Artist who sets our eyes to the sky and the Preacher our feet to the ground. We need both in our lives. In my job, I seem to listen more to the voices of the Preachers than the Artists. There is always more to do - more meetings to plan, more phone calls to make, more students to meet - and these are all excellent activities, certainly worthy of our time as missionaries. But, like Martha in Luke 10, I tend to do for Jesus to the detriment of being with Jesus. Beauty calls me out of my Martha-esque, task-driven, graceless understanding of my job and sets me eyes and heart on the Good Story that makes the job worth doing. It softly sings a melody underneath the vibration of my cell phone and the bustle of the coffeeshop: Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again. I stop, even for a moment, and try to remember the tune.

Missionary Summer Living

It's officially over 100 degrees right now in Saint Louis. I'm not normally a shorts-wearer but today is one of those days where you just have to make an exception. But despite the heat, I do love Saint Louis in the summer. It's a great summer city. There are lots of free things to do, plenty of green space, and several walkable neighborhoods that make summer not only fun but fast. It's hard to believe, but the summer is already more than half over for SLU students. In exactly seven weeks, they will begin the first classes of the 2011-2012 school year, my fourth year on staff with InterVarsity (wow!). Several friends have been asking what the typical summer looks like for an InterVarsity staff. Here are a few things that I've been up to so far this summer:

Training/Traveling
I've had the pleasure this summer of spending a few days here and there with some close friends who also happen to be some of the most gifted college ministers I know. Back in early June, I spent four days in Pella, IA with other second- and third-year staff from the Central Region (Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas). We are all part of a new staff training curriculum for which we receive a couple of transferable seminary credits (bonus!). In late June, I spent another four days in Madison, WI (InterVarsity HQ and a beautiful city!) with staff from all over the country (see above picture). Each of us had been selected to serve as Regional Trainers in Chapter Building and were receiving training in training, as it was. One of the new responsibilities I'll have this upcoming year will be to facilitate training in my region for staff of established chapters as they think about how to achieve lasting growth (numerically and spiritually) in their chapters over the long haul. It was a blast and I'm excited to see what God does in our region as have these conversations.

Fund-raising
As you know, one of the primary responsibilities of any InterVarsity staff is to put together a team of people who financially support and prayerfully intercede for the ministry. I have to give God praise because it feels like there has been a lot of momentum in this area for me this summer. I am currently around 75% of the way toward raising the $54,000 needed to encourage and empower student missionaries this year at SLU. I've gotten to meet with several new and returning supporters and friends this summer who have been so encouraging for my soul after a long year of ministry. Thanks so much for your continued support - honestly, I would have thrown in the towel a long time ago if you weren't constantly praying for and encouraging me.

Preaching
One of the fun opportunities that seems to come my way every summer is preaching at local churches. I actually love getting the chance to preach anytime that I can. Ever since I've been a Christian, I've felt most connected to Jesus through the reading of his Word. Preaching gives me the chance to immerse myself in a single passage of Scripture for at least a week and I love it! This Sunday, I'll be preaching on Joshua 22 at Rooftop Community Church in Saint Louis. I'll also be preaching on the evening of August 7th at Third Baptist Church in my hometown of Marion, IL.

RELAXING :)
Ahh...yes - I have also been doing this. As I said, Saint Louis is a great city to be in during the summer, as long as you can get past the oppressive humidity. As a native Midwesterner, I've learned to manage. I've really treasured having a bit more time this summer to see family, be around friends, read some great books (see below for recommendations!), and spend time outside. I'm looking to take a vacation to the great state of North Carolina at the end of July. I've always wanted to go and see the mountains, so I'm finally going to do it this summer!

I'll keep you posted as we get closer to time for the students to return. For now, please be praying for our upcoming Leader's Retreat, happening August 24--25 in Saint Louis. Thanks and have a great week!

If you're curious, here is my summer reading list thus far:

• Unchristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity and Why It Matters by David Kinnaman with Gabe Lyons - a thought-provoking and incredibly well-researched look at faith trends in 18-29 year-olds
  
  
• Doctrine: What Christians Should Believe by Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears - a helpful, popular overview of major Christian doctrines and their Scriptural bases
  
  
• The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton - my first novel by one of my favorite thinkers, this was a strange ride all the way until the last page when everything came together beautifully
  
  
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen - a classic and one of my favorite all-time books, it was fun to see the movie for the first time immediately after finishing it again. On a related note, I have a major literary crush on Elizabeth Bennet
  
  
• A Separate Peace by John Knowles - the first "classic" novel I ever read, dating way back to freshman year of high school. The second time around, I was able to appreciate even more how perfectly Knowles captures the darker side of being a competitive teenage boy.
  
  
• The Monster in the Hollows by Andrew Peterson - Peterson is my all-time favorite songwriter and his fiction series, The Wingfeather Saga, of which this is the third installment, is way up there in my list of children's fiction. On a side note, this is the second time in a row that I've cried at least once in finishing one of his novels but I will point out that they were quite manly tears both times.
  
  
• High Fidelity by Nick Hornby - Hornby is a guilty-pleasure read for me. His work is always a bit crude but spot-on to the experience of being a neurotic male (of which I have some...okay lots of experience). For added fun, check out the John Cusack movie of the same name.
  
  
• Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card - I just started this one but I'm already impressed by Card's character development, unique literary structure, and addictive writing style. I read 60 pages last night before realizing it was past 1am.
  

Catalyst 2011: A SLU Recap

Every May, InterVarsity students from all over Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, and Missouri (we call it the Central Region) gather at Camp Windermere in Roach, MO for one of two weeks of InterVarsity's end-of-the-year conference, called Catalyst. Students hang out with old friends one more time before summer and make new friends along the way. They spend their days hearing excellent Bible teaching, worshiping in a variety of styles and languages, receiving leadership training to take back to campus next year, and eating lots and lots of camp food. I attended the very first Catalyst ever back in the Spring of my freshman year in college, back in 2006. It was a talk at that Catalyst that eventually led to me joining InterVarsity staff. Needless to say, I love Catalyst and look forward to the experience for my students every year.

This year I had a couple of fun opportunities to serve at Catalyst, besides getting to be with my students who came for the second week of the conference:

The Call
One of my favorite things about my job is getting to be a part of the journey of folks who are investigating Jesus for the first time but would not yet call themselves "Christians." At Catalyst, I had the opportunity to help lead a track designed for students in that very place. We spent four sessions together studying stories about Jesus from John and talking about our own fears, frustrations, and questions about Christianity, Scripture, and Christian people. It was insightful and, at times, challenging, to hear the concerns leveled against the Church and the Bible by these polite, well-spoken college students. They allowed myself and the other staff into their journeys and it was a joy to be with them along the way. We spent the week praying for them and encouraging them and trying to answer their questions to best of our abilities. Praise God! By the end of Catalyst, four of the students from the track made decisions to follow Jesus! It was such a treat to hear them share their testimonies in the main session after walking with them for even a couple of days. What a gift!

Leading Worship
I've devoted a whole blog post to this experience at Catalyst. Feel free to read about it here.

But, my own personal highlight came from spending time with the SLU students. On the third night of the second week, our Regional Director gave a talk about surrendering all of ourselves to Jesus, not just the parts we feel comfortable with. After the session, I noticed that one of the girls from SLU had been crying. I asked her if she wanted to talk and so we sat down together. She told me that she had come to Catalyst hoping to grow closer to God but felt like the opposite had happened. She told me that she had been living a very religious life of attending church regularly and praying daily. When she performed the routine, she felt good about herself and her faith. When she failed to, she despaired and wondered if God still loved her. She told me she'd been crying during the session because she knew that there were parts of herself that she was unwilling to surrender to Jesus. She wanted to follow him and become a Christian but didn't know if she could give up these parts.

We talked about God's unconditional love and the problems with living "religiously," where our performance is what earns our favor with God. We talked about Jesus' sacrifice and how freedom comes from surrendering ourselves wholly to him, not from being "good enough." After an hour or so of conversation, she decided that she was willing to make the leap and trust Jesus with her life. We prayed together and she gave her life to Jesus! She was so excited that she couldn't wait to share her story with the rest of the SLU chapter. The next night, she stood in front of fourteen new brothers and sisters and shared her painful journey to Jesus. After she finished, the students clapped and gave her a group hug. They prayed for her and praised our God for his saving work in her life. I'm guessing you can see why this was my favorite moment from Catalyst.

Praise God it's been a big year. It was difficult at lots of points but always sustained by Jesus. Thank you so much for your prayers and constant encouragement. I am so excited to continue partnering with you in reaching all of Saint Louis University with the life-changing, hope-bringing, joy-filling Gospel of Jesus. Thanks again from all of us at SLU InterVarsity!

Catalyst 2011: Worship-Leading and Me

I play guitar. I've been playing since I was about 16. I started writing lyrics around age 14 because I thought girls were attracted to songwriters. At 16, I became convinced that I could increase the attraction if I could actually play and sing the songs myself. I bought John Mayer's Room for Squares album and started writing songs like his, thinking that his charisma and appeal could be transferred by osmosis to me. This had mixed results at best.

Then this funny thing happened. I was part of the youth group at my church and, as happens to lots of Christians who happen to also be musicians, I was asked to lead worship for the youth group. As a teenage boy with a strong-though-subtle arrogant streak, I of course accepted any opportunity to be on stage holding my guitar (where all the girls could see me). I played in the praise band with some friends for a couple of years at the youth service and had a blast. I didn't know the first thing about leading people in worship but I loved playing music and serving the youth group.

Flash forward to college. I started writing more seriously and fell in love with the artistic process of communicating my story and perspective through words and music in making a connection with other people. I even put together a band and recorded an album of my songs. We started playing a lot in coffeeshops, churches, and restaurants around Saint Louis. Along the way, another funny thing happened. I became really disinterested in the idea of leading worship and even a little frustrated with "worship music" in general. C.S. Lewis once said that music in churches sounded to him like "fourth-rate poetry set to fifth-rate music" and I agreed. As my own musicianship deepened, I became annoyed by the predictable and seemingly shallow lyrics (note again the arrogance) that I was singing in church. When people would ask me to be on worship teams, I refused. I didn't connect with the music I heard in church and didn't think it was fair to lead people in singing songs I disliked and couldn't relate to. I still loved the sermons and community I found at church but mostly just tuned out during the worship.

Then, the last funny thing happened. I came on staff with InterVarsity. One of the values we have in InterVarsity is multi-ethnicity, which basically means that we believe that God's Kingdom is made up of people from across all times, places, tribes, cultures, languages, and musical styles. As I started going to staff gatherings, my "worship walls" came tumbling down. I sang incredible Latin songs with Spanish lyrics and complicated rhythms. I sang Gospel music with amazing dynamics and complex chord structures. I sang old hymns with beautiful poetry and equally rich theology. I saw worship leaders who were listening to the Spirit and actually leading people and not just leading music. My heart started to soften to the idea of worship music and to worship-leading in general. God was changing me.

The past couple years, I have had the opportunity to lead worship at a few different InterVarsity conferences for staff and students and I have fallen in love with it. At our recent student conference, Catalyst 2011, I was blessed with the opportunity of putting together two different teams of staff and student worship leaders. We met and practiced and became friends over the course of the semester. We learned each other's strengths and weaknesses and built chemistry as a team of musicians. But, more importantly, we worshiped together. We let the Spirit move in our practices and got ready to do the same at the conference. It was a beautiful thing. For the first time, I felt like I could hear the Spirit speaking to me while I was leading the music. I could sense when we needed to keep repeating a chorus or when I needed to say something to the worshipers that I felt like God wanted them to know. In a sense, it wasn't that different than having coffee with one of my students. I listened to Jesus and expected him to say something that they needed to hear when they needed to hear it.

As I grow as a worship-leader, the most important thing I'm growing in is hearing from Jesus. Musicianship and arranging will come with practice. Hearing from Jesus is a gift he gives when we actually stop to listen. We hear his voice as we stop talking and worrying about what people are thinking. I'm grateful for the gift and the Giver.

Wait, What Month Is It?

Happy March everyone! It's hard to believe but it is in fact the first day of a new month. January and February have flown by and we are already almost halfway through the Spring Semester. Crazy.

A lot has happened in these first two months and I wanted to give you a brief rundown of all the good things we've seen God doing on campus at SLU:

New Bible Studies. This semester, we've seen three new ongoing Bible studies planted by students, bringing our total to six with one more in process as I write. What I love about these groups is that they are focused on specific subgroups of students within the greater SLU community (we call them "neighborhoods"). We have students leading studies in the Black Student Alliance, among the fraternity/sorority community (see picture above), on the medical campus, with international students, and in two different freshmen dorm communities. We're looking to start a couple more in another freshmen dorm and with commuter students before the year ends. Studying Scripture with InterVarsity is what made me fall in love with reading the Bible in college and I am a big believer in the power of the Spirit working through the Scriptures to bring real change and healing in the lives of students. Exciting!

New Brother and Sisters. After being on campus for the past 6 years, first as a student and now as a staff, and seeing very few if any people become followers of Jesus and join the family, it's been difficult to keep hoping that we would see a movement of the Spirit in the hearts of folks seeking after God. I am overwhelmed and humbled to tell you that we have seen three students come to faith in the last month, each of whom were led to faith by a friend from our Core Team of leaders. I wish I could better communicate the joy that comes in receiving these phone calls from students where the joy is so thick in their voice that I know exactly what they're about to tell me. Mostly I just laugh and yell like a crazy person trying to get them to calm down and tell me the story. It's the most thrilling experience I've ever had to see so much happening at once. I think I could get used to this...

New Missionaries. At SLU, our desire is to see a multi-ethnic community of missionaries raised up among the student body. We don't want people to just become followers of Jesus (though that's obviously a BIG deal!); we want to see them become missionary followers of Jesus who are willing to share the hope and healing they've found with other folks on campus. As Jesus says himself in Luke 10 - "The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field." In line with this call, my students and I are pretty passionate about helping the followers of Jesus we meet on campus realize this part of what it means to be a Christian. My Core Team of leaders is especially dedicated to seeing new InterVarsity students get connected to the community, learn how to share their story of meeting Jesus, and maybe even start a Bible study of their own one day soon! So, as we start these new studies, we're always looking for the next bunch of new folks who could one day be doing the same. Praise God - we're finding them faster than we can train them this semester! So far, we've invited two new leaders up into the Core Team and hoping to end the year with 20 leaders in our chapter. Pray with us that the Lord of the Harvest would indeed send out more workers into the field.

The Spirit is on the move and we are tired but excited at the halfway point this semester. He has been so exceedingly good to us and we give Him praise and glory for all that we've been graced to see. Pray that we would continue to search for (and find!) where the Father is at work on campus so that we can join Him in the work He has been doing since long before we arrived and will continue to do long after we're gone. Peace to you friends.