Finishing Well, Part 3: The Trailhead

May 10, 2012

Megan Hackman

You know you’re graduating seminary when:

1. Someone’s looking for a word to describe nasty tea they just spit out. Appropriate words would be lukewarm or tepid and all you can think is like Revelation.
2. A prospective student is looking for a specific kind of church—church plant, charismatic-friendly, and with opportunities for discipleship—and you not only know which church he’ll love, but you know who to connect him with. Low and behold, they’re old college buddies.
3. You’re supposed to be journaling reflections about a missions class, but the content quickly becomes the thesis for your exegesis paper in Isaiah 56.

All these things actually happened in one day. So I guess it is time to settle into the idea that my husband and I are graduating seminary in just a few days, which means we probably should already have applied to a ton of jobs and know what we are doing next. But we haven’t, and we don’t know. Well, we don’t know exactly.

See this journey that we are on originated for me in a rejection from a choice college that then became a pursuit of Spanish and a passion for Spain. Then we went on to pursue missions which led to seminary (see Part 1 and Part 2 if those appear as the tremendous jumps they are). We are fueled with a passionate desire to see people love Jesus and to live as followers of Jesus their whole life. We believe this means living as individual members of the body of Christ, the Church. We are passionate about serving the Body as a whole and its individual members. So really, that could lead us anywhere on this planet.

But that doesn’t necessarily make the job search any easier. So we are thankful for alumni who have gone before us and are married couples serving the church together. We have begun to meet with them in hopes of gaining a language and a vision for living out this passion in a way that can be articulated in job interviews. We plan to apply to EPC churches all over the United States to serve as pastors. We keep our hearts and ears open for unconventional opportunities to serve that might not yet be known to us.

We had an experience in April that led us to both this step-by-step pursuit as well as this open-handedness. We were in our favorite getaway of New England, the Adirondacks of New York. We had planned to climb a nice, short mountain. We knew how long it was (.5 miles), we knew what skill level was involved (a nice junior hike, said the book), and we knew it would have a “nice” view from the top (said a friend). And it was all those things, and it was nice. We prayed and read Scripture and enjoyed the view:

Then we ventured to the next trailhead. We knew the name. We didn’t bother to look at the trail guide, so we didn’t know how long it was (way more than .5) or the skill required (steep gradients, as it turns out). We didn’t even know if the summit would be worth it all. But oh my, was it ever:

It was a hard hike. I dealt with significant fear involving ice slides, encroaching darkness, and physical pain. But Jesus met me in the fear and taught me a lot about the fears I have about the next steps of life. I was overwhelmed with God’s abundant creation glory at the top of the mountain. This was no “sit and enjoy the view” kind of mountaintop. It was a “come-to-Jesus, awe-struck, laugh and cry at the same time” kind of view.

So should I anticipate Plan A, the Owls Head mountains of life with predictable, relative ease and nice views? Maybe. Those are really nice sometimes! But I long for the come-to-Jesus, awe-struck, laugh and cry, Cascade-style ventures.

So to find the “End of the Story” at this point, we are in the application process, preparing for ordination, and finishing our final 2 classes. We have our eyes peeled for those trailheads. We anticipate meeting God both in the struggle of climbing the mountain and in the glory to come on the top.

Megan Hackman and her husband, Larry, are M.Div. students at Gordon-Conwell's Hamilton campus.

Tags: Author: Megan Hackman , equipping leaders for the church and society , spiritually vital , student blogger , student life , thoughtfully evangelical

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Finishing Well Part 2: Discovering Myself

May 03, 2012

Megan Hackman

So I once felt like I had misheard God (for more on that, see Part 1). Seminary, then, has in large part been about learning to hear God correctly. One of my very favorite things that I have learned in seminary began in Old Testament Survey and then carried on through Exegesis of Exodus—our God hears, remembers, sees, knows, and acts by coming and speaking to his people (see Exodus 2:24- on). We serve a living God!

Being a part of the Pierce Center has helped me be aware of how God is speaking. I have learned how to sit with a group of people and listen and pray with the Holy Spirit through the Word. I have learned that I need Sabbath rest on a weekly basis in order to tune out the distractions of work, study, and relationships for a few hours so that I can enter with a greater awareness into God’s presence in order to hear from him (Hebrews 4:11-16). That discipline has helped me to be more alert throughout the week to the places where God is transforming me more into his likeness (2 Corinthians 3:16-18). It has helped me to consider it joy when I face trials, because I expect and anticipate God to be working in me through them (James 1:2-4).

As I have listened I have learned a lot about myself and a lot about God. I have learned that God has made me as a human being in his image (Genesis 1:27). Therefore, God values who I am and the way in which he has made me in particular (Psalm 139). Through the Dynamics of the Spiritual Life class, I began to discover who that woman is and begin to see how my design works out in what I do. My final paper worked out the memories, experiences, jobs, core lies, victories, and goals that lead me to say, I exist to glorify God by inviting discovery.

So even as I now work on digging deeply into Isaiah 56 for an exegesis course and talk with college students for an evangelism class, I continue to live out my calling to invite others into the discovery of Christ, of their own design, of how God speaks and remembers and acts in the world, of Scripture, of friendship. As we look to what is next for us, I carry with me this rich academic and spiritual exploration that the last three years have been. I anticipate that whether we go overseas or serve in a more local setting, regardless of task, that God has made me to be someone who looks to dig into the soil of this world, with the power of the Spirit to seek and to nurture the work that he is doing, and with the hope to see the harvest brought in for his glory.

Megan Hackman and her husband, Larry, are M.Div. students at Gordon-Conwell's Hamilton campus.

Tags: Author: Megan Hackman , equipping leaders for the church and society , student blogger

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What if Christians were not afraid to look foolish from time to time?

April 10, 2012

Something happened the other day that made me wonder if I take advantage of the opportunities God gives me to live a more expressive life for him.

The day did not begin well. The sun obviously was trying to make a point, because it must have risen half an hour too soon. Maybe it wanted to knock off early that evening. Whatever, I woke up with a sore throat and a generally bleak disposition. Life was definitely not the bed of roses it should be. The kids were feeling the effects, too, because getting them out of bed was no walk in the park. Someone had replaced my normally charming little girl with a creature that Tolkien would dream up when he was writing the particularly scary passages of The Two Towers. Only with more teeth.

I had about a chapter and a half of Theology to get through that morning. No quiet time with the Bible and me and God today! After shoving the kids out the car door at school, I headed to the study room at the library. When I no longer cared if it was “transcendence” or “immanence,” I closed the book, grabbed my gym bag and headed off for my favorite part of the day: the workout. I didn’t have to read, write, or do arithmetic, just pedal.

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Tags: equipping leaders for the church and society , guest post , student blogger , thoughtfully evangelical

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Learning from Our Church Fathers: Part 4

March 16, 2012

Dr. Donald Fairbairn

Why should evangelicals care about the early church, about the first several centuries after the end of the New Testament? Another reason why we should take that period seriously is that the church fathers had a very different way of reading the Bible from the way we are taught to read it, and we may have something to learn from their interpretation.

Modern Bible study methods focus on “reading out” the message of each passage by focusing on the context to that passage—the history, the culture, the language. Such study methods implore us to avoid “reading in” any pre-conceived ideas that might corrupt the message of that text. In contrast, the church fathers read every passage of Scripture in light of the major thrust of Scripture, the single story they believe the Bible is telling. And that story, according to the vast majority of the church fathers, is the story of Christ. So they see the whole Bible—down to every last passage of the Old Testament—as a story about Christ. To state the contrast simply, we read from the narrow to the broad—from the meaning of each individual passage to the whole message of the Bible. They read from the broad to the narrow—reading each passage in light of what they think the whole Bible is about.

In light of this difference, we might accuse the church fathers of reading their own ideas into the texts—and we would be right in this accusation (at least in some cases). But before we are too quick to criticize, we should recognize that our narrow-to-broad method of Bible study emerged among modern scholars who did not believe the Bible was a unified book. They saw—and still do see—the Bible as a series of rather disparate stories that are not necessarily consistent with each other. So those scholars do not consider the big story of the Bible to be relevant to the question of what each individual passage means. Only the historical, cultural, and literary context of that passage is relevant to that passage’s interpretation.

When we look at the matter this way, we recognize that we evangelicals share the early church’s assumption and disagree with the modern liberal assumption. Unlike our colleagues in the liberal academy, we believe that the Holy Spirit inspired the Bible, that it tells a single story, that it is a unity. It is thus ironic that we sometimes use a method of biblical interpretation unwittingly borrowed from scholars who do not believe the Bible is a unity, a method that focuses narrowly on the background to each passage, without as much attention to the broader context of the whole Bible.

If we do in fact share the church fathers’ assumption about the unity of Scripture, should we not take another look at the fathers’ interpretation of the Bible? When we read their interpretation, much of it seems very far-fetched, like finding Christ in minute details of the Old Testament, and I do not for a moment want to condone such exegetical excess. What I do want to commend, though, is the fathers’ attitude toward the Bible. It is a single book, given by God, telling a single story, and that story is ultimately about Christ. They believed that, and so do we. Because they believed that, they proceeded from the big picture to the details, from Christ to the individual passages, in their interpretation of Scripture. We usually do not do that. But should we?

Whether we adopt very many of the fathers’ specific interpretations of Old Testament passages or not, their focus on Christ can remind us that we too can and should make Christ the center of all our biblical interpretation. And the church fathers can also open our eyes to the possibility that there are more connections between the Old Testament and Christ than we typically see, even if there are not as many legitimate connections as they find. Thus, early church biblical interpretation has some important lessons to teach us about the Bible, lessons we might not learn without paying attention to the church fathers.

Dr. Donald Fairbairn is the Robert E. Cooley Professor of Early Christianity. His responsibilities include further developing the Robert C. Cooley Center for the Study of Early Christianity at the Charlotte campus, which explores the historical foundations of the Christian faith.

Tags: Author: Donald Fairbairn , biblically-grounded , equipping leaders for the church and society , faculty blogger , thoughtfully evangelical

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Learning from Our Church Fathers: Part 3

February 28, 2012

Dr. Donald Fairbairn

Why should evangelicals care about the early church, about the first several centuries after the end of the New Testament? Another of the reasons why studying that time period could be valuable to us has to do with the striking similarities between the first several centuries of Christian history and the age in which we live today.

In the Roman world, and later in the European world that gave birth to America as we know it, Christianity was “enfranchised” from the fourth century to about the nineteenth or early twentieth. That is to say, Christianity was given favored status within society, and the legal and political structures reflected that favoritism. (By the way, I should add here that Europe has never been the only place where Christianity flourished. But that’s a story for another time!) But it is no secret that in the past hundred years, Christianity has increasingly become disenfranchised in the Western world. The major cultural influences on American society have become more secular (even though most Americans remain Christians of some sort), and in Europe most people have actively abandoned the Christian faith. Europe and America have become “post-Christian.”

The Church has often had trouble adapting to this post-Christian environment. Our ways of presenting the Gospel typically assume a great deal of familiarity with the Christian message, our ways of doing ministry often assume that people respect “church” and will come to church to hear the gospel if we are friendly and inviting enough. Even our traditional ways of defending the Christian faith assume that people believe there is such a thing as truth and that they care about finding that truth. In many places and situations, these traditional approaches to outreach and ministry don’t work anymore, and as we recognize their ineffectiveness, we are beginning to think deeply about how we can best do ministry in a post-Christian, post-modern environment.

What we often don’t realize is that a POST-Christian environment looks very much like a PRE-Christian environment. In the Roman world of late antiquity (roughly the first three centuries of the Christian era), there were many parallels to our situation today. Most stunningly, that society was as rampantly “experience” oriented and entertainment driven as ours is. Although the philosophers cared deeply about truth, most ordinary people were pragmatic, eclectic, and blissfully inconsistent about the principles by which they lived their lives. They sought religious experiences that met their felt needs, but their religion had little impact on their entertainment choices, their moral decisions, etc. Also striking is the fact that the Roman government, while priding itself on granting religious freedom, actually reacted rather harshly to any religion in its midst that objected to an easy religious relativism or called into question the supremacy of the State over religious expressions. Sound familiar? It should.

As a result, Christians in the Roman Empire (and again, there were MANY Christians outside the Roman Empire as well) faced the monumental task of defending a religion that insisted on absolute truth in a society of relativistic, eclectic, pragmatists. They had to foster a Christian morality in a society where the average level of morals—by virtually any measure—was much lower than it is in America today. And they had to convince the Roman government that even though they claimed Christ was greater than Caesar, Christians were still the Empire’s best citizens and thus did not need to be persecuted. The Christians’ relation to the society around them was very different in the first through third centuries from what it would be in the fourth through nineteenth, but very SIMILAR to the relation between our society and the Church today. As a result, the early Church has a lot of insights to offer us as we try to minister in an increasingly post-Christian world now.

Dr. Donald Fairbairn is the Robert E. Cooley Professor of Early Christianity. His responsibilities include further developing the Robert C. Cooley Center for the Study of Early Christianity at the Charlotte campus, which explores the historical foundations of the Christian faith.

Tags: Author: Donald Fairbairn , equipping leaders for the church and society , faculty blogger

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