Monday, March 31, 2008

on being a bridge person

I consider myself a bridge person. You may ask, “From what to what?”

One of my primary concerns over the years has been to be a bridge between the church and the academy. I spent almost 20 years in higher education; at the same time I was also working in churches -- on staff at four churches during those years, plus volunteer work, as well as working with Young Life. My concern is that the church needs to get its questions to the academy, and the church needs to help the academy to understand that its ultimate value is in finding answers to how the gospel is lived, incarnated, and comes alongside to help the world that God wants to reach.

Being in the church has helped raise those issues for me. I’ve worked in adult ed, youth ministry, and children’s education, and each one has its own value. I think the academy is hugely valuable in finding answers and digging deeply into things, and that the church desperately needs those resources. I’m reminded that in the world of dentistry, for example, there are people who work on people’s teeth every day, and there are also people in the academy who are constantly researching better materials and procedures and techniques, and that the academy doesn’t operate outside of asking how this is ultimately going to shape the world of dental practice. And I would like to see more of that between the church and the academy. So I attempt to bridge the gulf between those. Washington Seminary, where I am the chancellor, is embedded in a church and is also embedding itself in the world of academic discussion. So we are attempting to have a seminary that embodies both of those worlds as well and serves as a bridge.

I also see myself as a bridge between the conservative side of Christianity and the liberal. I think everyone has a general concern to ask, “What does love look like? And what does it mean to be the body of Christ?” There are varying degrees as to how we achieve that. During several school terms I have taught both at Northwest University, which is an Assemblies of God school and to the conservative side, and at Seattle University, which is more to the liberal side. I teach pretty much the same kinds of things -- largely about the Trinity and the life of relationship, and what it means to know others personally and not merely as objects. And I find that people are very open to the idea of relational thinking as a core to where it is that we’re all going, whether from the right or from the left. Both the liberal and the conservative have seemed to be void of trinitarian thinking, so there is a need for someone to come in and see the possibilities of going back to the affirmations of the early church and how those thoughts shape the way that we do ministry in the modern world, and the way we talk about who God is -- that God is a relational community of Father, Son, Spirit that continues in the world in a relational manner that we are invited to share. So again, to be a bridge in theological thinking by providing trinitarian thinking is another dimension of who I am as a bridge person, the way I want to be involved in bridge activities and to see the divergent components within our current contemporary institutions somehow be brought together by persons who embody being bridges.

Monday, March 24, 2008

reflections on the new conspirators conference

The New Conspirators Conference, hosted earlier this month by Tom and Christine Sine of Mustard Seed Associates, was a great success in asking questions about whether or not the future has a church and if so, what some of its distinctive missions might be. Reflecting on who I am and what Washington Seminary is about, I think the word missional is a significant word with which we connect. We are not merely attractional, hoping that people come to us, but are preparing students to go out into the world. I still have a sense that there is value in offering options like Under the Green Roof that attract people to come, but the whole idea of raising up students to go out and serve the community is a significant opportunity that I think expresses what we are about. I believe that God is missional, and so my theology is missional -- that God always goes where people are -- and so should the seminary, which is partly why we’re connected with the church.

Secondly, the idea of mosaic, the idea that we have multi cultures within our church, is certainly true at Washington Cathedral, which has an Esperanza service. Washington Seminary is hoping in the future to offer Spanish-speaking students the opportunity to complete a Spanish only degree. More and more Spanish language resources are becoming available, including books, but also other resources (Logos Bible software is now available in a Spanish edition), so we are hoping to be a place that increasingly embraces other cultures and other language streams, and so that is part of the future, and is very much a part of the mosaic of who we want Washington Seminary to be.

The monastic component, intentionally practicing prayer and spirituality while living in a busy world, is also something we are about in that at some level, the learning mode, where people spend time listening and reading, and then come for a conversation as the mentored part of what it is we do I think lives somewhat within the monastic tradition, and one could say that the mentors, in a sense, are the abbots, those who are the overseers, the spiritual companions along the way, so I have a great interest in the monastic tradition as something that nurtures the life of Washington Seminary.

And emerging, which is of course a broad term, has something to do with the church not holding to traditional modes, but asking authentic questions about how we engage culture in significant ways that are postmodern. Dwight Friesen, my good friend, spoke to what it was that we are doing at Washington Seminary as innovative, which is one of the words that I think is significant about who we are: we are trying to innovate and do things differently. Another word I heard at the conference about our seminary was from Mark Scandrette, who introduced Washington Seminary as alternative, which I think is also a helpful adjective, to say we’re not just trying to do it the same as we’ve always done it, but we’re trying to think how we can be more person-centered, how we can have more diversity within the programs, by allowing each person to have a sense that they are important rather than the program being of primary importance, so we want to be person-centered rather than program-centered.

And so, the conference I think as a whole for me was an enriching conversation in examining Washington Seminary in the light of those things that were the three clear goals of the conference. We want to communicate creative models of what New Conspirators are trying to address. We are certainly trying to engage in new modes of communication, and even when we look at biblical hermeneutics, it’s about learning how that affects our communication in all parts of life. We want to connect leaders from all four streams; connection is certainly something that Washington Seminary is about as a network organization which connects through personal conversations, through connecting with books and programs, all of those different ways that our students might be out and connected to others, we want to be about all of those things. And lastly, we want to create new ways to advance God’s new order in our world. Creative is one of those other adjectives that I really want to embrace, that we are attempting to be creative in new ways, new modes, new personal connections that really honor and respect the dignity of each person within God’s broader mission.

So this was a great conference to reflect on all those things and to discover that Washington Seminary is not mostly stuck in just one of these models, but that we are really caught up in some way in furthering all of them. All of these speak to us, and hopefully we will speak for them and to them and with them in the future.

Monday, March 3, 2008

about washington seminary

I am excited to be the Chancellor of a seminary in Redmond, WA, called Washington Seminary. This is a seminary that’s attempting to think and function differently from traditional forms of education because of a couple of things. One is we live in a very busy world where it’s difficult for people to fit theological education into their busy lives, and so we offer flexible education. Students listen to recorded lectures from Regent College and to short tutorials that I record, and they read several books and articles to give a broad perspective of reading around the subjects of the course.

We offer four masters degrees: Master of Theological Arts, Master of Ministry, Master of Marketplace Ministry, and Master of Christian Counseling. These really play out some of my delights in life, to think about how the arts play out theology in ways that mere books and mere words cannot. The nature of ministry – I’ve been involved on staff in four churches in my life, and so I’m very concerned with the life of the church as it goes forth to live out the missional life of God in the world.

Regarding marketplace ministry, I have worked as the manager of a bakery espresso, and I’ve worked as a custodian and, well, quite a number of jobs out there in the “real world,” meaning not the world that is just Christian, and I have a great desire to discover how to help people to think about working in those areas as ministry, not merely as the support for what one does with ministry in the church, but that our jobs are our ministry. I am a Christian counselor as well, and I think I have some different ways of thinking about Christian counseling than what most of the literature that I read in Christian counseling is working from, so that is another area of great interest to me. So these four degrees shape the masters programs.

On Wednesday evenings we also offer Under the Green Roof, where I get to play out art and scripture. We’ve gone through the book of Genesis and are now going through the book of John. Every week we discuss a different kind of art form as it plays out a different chapter or two from the Bible and then have conversations with those who come as a way of really learning to live, and shaping the culture of Washington Seminary as something that is both deeply rooted in the biblical traditions but also has wings to fly in what it means to speak artistically in a world where the artist seems to have become the truth bearer of the day. Musicians, movie makers -- all those are where people are looking for their truth statements, I think, and so believing we need to be involved in that, we are studying art, talking about art, as a way of living the missional life of God. It’s amazing. People can even talk about the art when they go back to work the next day in a way that they might have a hard time talking about scripture or principles or anything like that. And we offer weekend seminaries where we bring in people like Tom and Christine Sine for extended periods of time, and quarterly Conversations, which are idea jam sessions based on the idea of a jam session in jazz where a variety of people come together and don’t preplan, but begin by setting a theme and playing out of that theme.

We are developing other ideas as well, but that just gives you a little bit of insight that my concerns as a relational theologian are not merely academic, but that they are really concerned about bridging between the life of the academy and the church, believing that the questions of the church really need to inform the questions of the academy, and that the vast amounts of information that the academy has need to be translated and brought into the life of the church to enrich its future and to live within the purposes of God and to see the people of God equipped to articulate and act out of the very life of God.