Journey to the Emerald City

SEEING THE SIGHTS IN SEATTLE

It's always enjoyable visiting the Northwest, and this time was certainly no exception. The flights in on Tuesday were a little bumpy, but the excellent service by Alaska Airlines certainly made up for it. In the afternoon, I was treated to a behind-the-scenes tour at one of the mission agencies here in the Puget Sound region, and got to see how state-of-the-art technology and know-how is being harnessed to the work of serving God by serving the poor around the world.

Next morning, there was some time available to see a bit of the city. "Lonely Planet", the outfit which publishes guides for tourists the world over, also maintains a website with advice on top sites for different locations. Picking several, I set out to see some sights that hadn't yet made the agenda on previous visits, plus one that I just wanted to see again.

The first stop involved a drive over to the Ballard section of town, to the Hiram M. Crittenden locks, or rather the salmon ladder next to the locks. Wanting a bit, I made a stop at Nellie's, a lean-to coffee bar adjoining the Lockspot Cafe. There Jeanette (pronounced the French way, zhen-ETTE) and Todd made up a delicious steaming cup of hot, bold coffee, plus a thick slice of toast with butter and cinnamon. Just the ticket on a morning when the temp was in the mod-40's and I had to go back to the car for my jacket.

Access to the locks, which were built by the US Army Corps of Engineers, is via the Carl S. English, Jr., Garden, a lovely collection of paths and trees and perfectly-maintained plants. There are two locks, one large and the other much smaller, and it was fun to watch them both in operation. The system connects the access to Puget Sound with Lake Union and ultimately Lake Washington to the east. During my visit, which was also in the company of a school group that appeared to be from the Far East, we watched a large scowl or barge pass through the larger lock, and several fishing and pleasure boats make their way through the smaller. The whole process took maybe 40 minutes, and was a delight to watch. The salmon ladder was also fascinating; it is toward the end of the salmon migration season, but a few were still making their way into the system and past the observation windows. King, Sockeye, Coho -- and soon, the Steelhead will be coming through.

From there, the next stop was in the Fremont section of town -- Seattle's answer to Greenwich Village, with a little Haight-Ashbury or Adams-Morgan thrown in -- driving past the statue of Lenin (brought to Seattle after the collapse of the USSR), to see the strange bit of public sculpture titled, "Waiting for the Interurban", a collection of bystanders waiting by an empty platform. The figures get dressed up for different occasions; when I was there, one of them was wearing a birthday hat and was surrounded by balloons. The figures are still "waiting" as the whole collection is a protest for the commuter train which was to be built, and for which the neighborhood is still waiting. I have been told that the dog in the collection bears the face of the politician who delayed and ultimately blocked the project -- a fact which was not revealed until the unveiling of the statue.

From there it was down to the heart of town, near Pioneer Square, for the National Park Service's Klondike Gold Rush Museum. On the way, I stopped at the Waterfall Park, built by UPS on the site of their first-ever office, where the famous brown-van delivery service was born. The Klondike Museum is free, and a real gem, with lots of interesting facts and stories about the great rush to the Yukon in 1897-1898, in which Seattle played an important part. Some 100,000 persons set out for the Klondike, of which about 40,000 made it there; some 20,000 prospected for gold, and just a few hundred realized any appreciable wealth, or about 0.33%. After the Northwest Mounted Police (today known as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or Mounties), fearing widespread starvation, ordered that each "stampeder" had to bring supplies for a year, Seattle merchants helpfully drew up lists of supplies and helped to provision, at a cost of around $350 per person -- about $10,000 in today's dollars. The movie was also great; it's well worth an hour or so.

After stopping for a delicious sandwich of jerked turkey at Rex's Deli, I went to the Seattle Art Museum, a world-class collection in a gorgeous modern building expanded and refurbished about 2007. The visitor is greeted in the entrance atrium by a white car -- one of nine, mostly suspended from the ceiling at various angles and stretching across the museum -- before going upstairs to the excellent collection of paintings, porcelains, religious art, and most notably African, East Asian, and Native art from the Northwest, British Columbia, and Alaska. The $17 ticket was well worth the price.

The day finished off beautifully with pizza at the Wallingford Pizzeria, which my son John has acclaimed the "best in Seattle", and perhaps even better than the family's favorite deep-dish pizza house in Chicago. (I'm not sure I agree, though the pizza was super-good.) We had one with goat cheese, spinach, and some anchovies standing in for the salami (which I can't eat), washed down with excellent local suds. Father-son bonding lingered over a long coffee chat as the evening grew dark.

All in all, a fabulous day. Seattle continues to amaze and satisfy.


Seattle (Queen Anne), 19 October 2012

MUSINGS FROM A TRAVELLING WORSHIPER

My, this has been an eventful summer.

One of the silver linings of my absence from the church this summer, was the opportunity to visit a number of churches: five churches, six weeks in all. For the interested, this is a short sketch of the experiences.

A surprising aspect of those weeks was a craving for the consolatory features of liturgy, that "traditional" (what a misused word!) aspect of the ancient worship of the Church.

Accordingly, the first week I visited the main Russian Orthodox church in Washington, St. Nicholas on Massachusetts Ave., kitty-corner to the much larger, but less ecclesiastically elevated, St. Sophia Greek Orthodox Church. (St. Sophia looks like a cathedral church. St. Nicholas is one.) This was not my first visit to St. Nicholas, where there is liturgy on steroids: the Old Church Slavonic liturgy of the Church, rooted in Byzantium and tracing its roots to the misty, pre-Irenaean roots of Christian worship. Though I could not commune -- and as a Protestant, I always have to adjust to the different ethos of congregants' coming and going throughout the service -- it was soothing and refreshing to my troubled spirit. At the end, I joined the line for the blessed bread and diluted wine distributed to the congregation (not the Eucharist, which is reserved for those baptized in the Orthodox communion). While I prefer for congregational participation, it was a true tonic on a day when standing (for about 2 hours -- seats are for the elderly and infirm only) and attending was about all I could manage. It was all that was needed. Though we may sniff at what some call the "superstitious" or "idolatrous" aspects of Eastern Christian piety, what is more important is that grace abounds in all God's houses where the Lord is honored, and He met me there.

The next week, still hungering for liturgical worship (and not wanting to drive as far), I attended a Lutheran church across the river in Charles County. The pastor, a large and friendly man with large and strong hands that made me think of a butcher's, welcomed me before the service as he made his way through the congregation. (I was sitting at the back, hiding out openly like so many who have visited my parishes over the years.) "Nice to see you again," said the man whose church I had never visited before -- making me wonder how many times I've done the same thing. But he was very friendly and I liked him immediately; and he delivered himself of a good, Scripturally-rooted sermon on Ephesians 5:21 ff. (The one thing I didn't like was his concession to contemporary prejudice with his statement that he didn't know whether it was more dangerous to read that passage, or to preach on it. Otherwise, he did a great job.) The service music, though simple, was plentiful, rather like a Pennsylvania Dutch lunch. The very Lutheran emphasis on grace and relatively weak protreptic made my Wesleyan sensibilities yearn for him to tell us to do something -- yet I left refreshed and ready for the week. And reminded that, for all that, it isn't "about me". It's about Christ.

On the third week, Nick and I were planning to do some sightseeing in Washington, so we visited a church that was -- sort of -- on the way. We attended a tiny Anglican (not Episcopal, note) chapel in lower Anne Arundel County, a historical building where the 1928 Book of Common Prayer is still honored and used. We were there for the early prayer service, and together made up 40% of the congregation of 5 persons, one of whom was the organist. (We were told that the later service would be much better-attended, as there was a baptism scheduled for that morning.) The beautiful Cranmerian prayers of the '28 Prayer Book and the readings (from KJV? Geneva Bible?) were lovely. The pastor, a friendly man with long grey-white locks who looked like he stepped out of the late 18th century, delivered an ex tempore meditation on forgiveness that spoke to my mind, if it didn't quite touch my heart. Nick seemed to enjoy the service; and at the end, everyone (all 4 of them, including the rector) welcomed us warmly and said they were glad we came (clearly indicating the small number of worshipers, and clearly very sincere!). Two take-aways from this experience: one, that it doesn't matter how small the congregation is, it's important to give it one's all, as the clergyman clearly did. Second, the witness of presence, even with small, even tiny, numbers, is powerful. They were there for us on a Sunday we needed them to be -- even though we may never visit there again. They make a witness for the Word of God in Scripture and heart-felt worship. A gentle rebuke to our worship of numbers in Methodism -- and much of the Protestant tradition.

By the next week, I was ready to take a chance on hitting something contemporary -- strange reaction, isn't it? given my usual preference for contemporary worship, but it just felt wrong in a context of heart-pain -- I looked up some of the area non-UM but Wesleyan-tradition congregations. That's how I found New Life Church, a congregation of precisely The Wesleyan Church in the La Plata area (whose campus is cheek-by-jowl with that of South Potomac Church on US-301). This parish (if one can call it that) has overlapping services in three buildings on the same campus. My first week, I went to the service in the main building -- where I was greeted warmly at the door, and invited to sample the snacks (cheese! grapes! cookies! coffee! orange juice! -- and you can take it into the worship space!). The service was well-done contemporary with a good band -- loud enough that anemic congregational singing wouldn't matter but not overpowering. The simple (Wesleyan!) decor featured a large, rugged cross, and a warm, carpeted feel. The pastor delivered a very, very basic (intentionally so) message on the first of three "ABC's" of repentance and salvation -- "admit" -- and was very engaging. I liked him immediately (though if the preaching is always at or near this level, I'd grow restless in a few weeks), and was blessed by the call to trust in Christ in all things, including dealing with our sins, our need, our struggles. There was a very Methodist call to DO something about one's faith, and clear signs that this congregation is on the move through its outreach-- and plans to plant a second campus in Waldorf, just to the north. I decided to visit this congregation again, and attend a different service, thinking it might be more traditional.

On my next visiting opportunity, two weeks later, I did just that. But the "Kneeling Point" service, rather than being traditional, was just a different demographic (older), led by what seemed clearly to be the "B team" in terms of both preaching and music. There was something charming and nice in this: perhaps it is a built-in laboratory for those who need to grow and develop their worship-leading talents.

On the whole, I'm really impressed with New Life, as someplace which is focusing on the essential basics in a good way, and on the move, and is open to do what is needed to reach people. If I lived closer than 45 minutes away, I'd look for ways just to drop in more frequently.

My last week of visiting before retirement took me quite local -- again, to a place where I knew I'd find the comfort of liturgy, this time in the Western rather than Eastern mode. I went to St Francis de Sales, just over in Benedict across the Patuxent from Calvert County. Again, a good homily: not riveting, but very thoughtful, with some nuggets that will be helpful to me in some work that I'm doing. I take it the parish is very, very traditional: they offer the mass ("extraordinary office") in Latin twice weekly in addition to their English-language offerings, and Communion was in one kind. (Did the sixteenth century really never happen?) But the feeling was of a warm and loving parish, and snatches of the service music have continued to echo in my head all week at unguarded moments, and blessed me. I also got a Catholic newspaper to read -- man, they don't like the current administration or the direction of the DNC! But again, not the rants that one too often hears from the reactionary (mainly Protestant) right, but thoughtful, and historically-nuanced, critique. While I don't ever see myself becoming a Roman Catholic, there is much in Roman piety to commend itself -- as many Protestants have found, including in such (unlikely?) places as Cursillo/Walk to Emmaus.

This week, it will be a new adventure. I trust, anyway. But in all of these settings, one thing stands out -- something I, as a pilgrim, certainly needed:

"The Lord is in His holy temple. Let all the earth keep silence before him."

Amen.


Prince Frederick, Maryland (Providence)

RUSSIA REFLECTIONS

In late June - early July, I enjoyed the opportunity once again of leading a team of Volunteers in Mission / Russia Initiative connection folks, to Russia. As always, it was a great blessing. It was also a greater challenge than some previous trips. Part of that was due to the more complicated logistics of this venture, which had five purposes: (1) a visit by Trinity and Bel Air churches to Millennium UMC in Orel, our sister congregation there; (2) an exploratory visit by persons connected with the Board of Child Care, looking at possible new partnerships with ministries with children and youth on the Central Black Soil District and in St. Petersburg; (3) a visit by the pastor and members of Bethany UMC (Ellicott City) with their sister church at Latnaya near Voronezh; (4) exploration of a new relationship between Grace UMC (Gaithersburg) and a church on the CBS district; (5) repair / refurbishment work and visit with a youth camp at Camp Kristall, the Eurasia UMC’s camp near the town of Ramon’, in the vicinity of Voronezh.

The visit with the Orel church: Pastor Lev Mikhailov and his congregation, was delightful as always. They are wonderful at welcoming hospitality, and we were able to dine and share in their homes and spend time together worshiping, touring, and talking about our relationship together. We do detect some discouragement and fatigue, due to the changed and less open cultural environment in which they do ministry. Our commitment to them this year is to hold them in prayer and be more energetic in communications. We love them dearly as brothers and sisters in Christ, and want to help them to flourish.

At Kristall, we see slow but steady progress. The main dining building (stolovaya) now has functioning bathrooms, and we also helped with exterior refurbishment and sprucing up, and work on two of the smaller huts (domiki). Our group returned very enthusiastic, to the point that we are looking at possibly having two teams next year: one in the spring to do advance work and focus on the water supply (the Trinity - Bel Air focus) and another to complete that work and focus on the kitchen (the Baltimore-Washington Conference emphasis). Our team came back pumped about Kristall, and has already been meeting to begin working on next year.

Julie Wernz and Rev. David Simpson of the Board of Child Care’s board found some promising connections for supporting and resourcing the work with orphans and children/teens with special challenges. They will be developing this, but returned with their interest strongly sparked. Pastor Rauza Landorf (Grace UMC, St. Petersburg) gets a heroine’s award for leaving the hospital in order to meet with our folks while they were there.

More is yet to come. God is doing amazing things; and though the path has become stonier in some ways than before, the light beckons on like never before. Our love and prayers are with the Eurasian church, especially during this year of leadership transitions at both the DS level (CBS District) and episcopal level (Eurasia Area).


(Sheep Springs, New Mexico; 26 July 2012)

The Anti-Seminary

Seattle: beautiful in the spring. Ignore all the stuff about the rainy season being ten months long -- that's propaganda designed to keep away the sun-worshipers from two states down. (As they say here, "Don't californicate Seattle.") Trees budding, flowers blooming, all of life an amazing, rich, west-of-the-Cascades green.

Something else bursts with new life, here, too: the theology program at Seattle Pacific Seminary, a branch of Seattle Pacific University. Evangelical, Wesleyan, socially-active and culturally-aware, it may be one of the best hopes for renewal of Methodism in the Pacific Northwest, with ripple effects nationwide. (And I write that as a loyal Dukie.)

Founded in 1891 as Seattle Seminary, SPU started with 34 students and two faculty members: Alexander Beers (whose Christian name still graces the oldest building on campus) and his wife, Adelaide. Free Methodist by association -- a large FM church and the local FM annual conference headquarters buildings are both located across the street from campus -- the original mission of the school was to train missionaries for overseas service. That commitment to Christian faith and learning -- embraced in Charles Wesley's famous dictim, "Let us unite the two so long divided, knowledge and vital piety" -- remains at the core of SPU's DNA and mission. That commitment was deepened further by the leadership of its recently-retired latest president, Dr. Philip W. Eaton, who determined that the School of Theology should be at the center of the intellectual life of the university, and who was the institutional patron and champion of the expansion of the SoT into the new Seattle Pacific Seminary, under the deanship of Dr. Douglas Strong.

At this point, I should come clean: our elder son, John, is a third-year student and is about to walk at commencement in the first graduating class of Master of Divinity candidates. (The first students in the Master of Arts in Theology program, a two-year curriculum, graduated last year.) And Doug Strong is a man whom I admire professionally and count as a good friend personally. So I may be just a touch biased. But still and all, I know quality when I see it, and the potential and budding of great things -- and all that is here.

It has just been my privilege to attend two days of sessions in the third meeting of the Advisory Council for SPS, one of two East Coasters to serve on that body. We celebrated the accreditation of the program by the Association of Theological Schools (ATS), and its acceptance by the United Methodist Church's University Senate, which means that UM students can officially study here in preparation for service in the ministry of the UMC. All good news.

Still, the really good news is not in the recognition SPS is receiving -- important as that is -- but in what's actually happening here. Committed to the "three A's": the Academy, the Abbey, and the Apostolate -- or classic study, spiritual formation, and hands-on ministry in the world -- SPS also has cutting-edge programs in Reconciliation and Intercultural Competence and Asian-American Ministry, rounding out a strong academic palette. In a time when many of the pastors of dynamic and influential independent churches are not seminary trained -- in the East, we ask about how to make seminary relevant and in the West, they ask if it can be relevant -- SPS is deliberately positioning itself as the "anti-Seminary", an institution with a difference that will prepare students for service in the ever-shifting landscape of today's world. At the same time, there is an insistence on community, spiritual depth, and integrity of service in the form of outreach to the poor or otherwise at-risk that turns the classroom inside-out and deepens students' appreciation for, and commitment to, the life of ministry.

But even that is not the best news about SPS. You will find that in its students. Even discounting the one who grew up under my roof, the level of passion and commitment, and the personal stories of these scholars -- who range in age from their early 20's to their 50's -- are extraordinarily inspiring. It has been my privilege as an AC member to hear several of them offer their testimonies; and if the future leadership of Methodism in the region looks anything at all like them, we are in good hands, indeed. Add to that the personal nurturing and formation they receive from a faculty who literally gives themselves away in discipling as well as in academic preparation, and it's a powerful mix. One can feel the Holy Spirit moving in this place.

There are 13 official United Methodist seminaries. Some of them (Duke in North Carolina, and Wesley in the District of Columbia, to name two) "get it" when it comes to serving well the church which brought them into being and continues to rely on their leadership. Others don't get it so well, or not at all -- yet we pour hundreds of thousands of dollars as a denomination each year into what amounts to divinity welfare for some of these schools. Asbury in Kentucky is not one of the 13, yet trains more UM pastors than any other institution. Meanwhile, the University Senate has been pruning its list of "approved" schools, narrowing the reservation for those UM braves, young or old, responding to a call of God to become leaders and elders in the UM tribe. The UM bishops' "A Call to Action" is premised on the sad, sorry, sick state of our denomination -- which is particularly acute in the Western Jurisdiction and highly evident in the Pacific Northwest. Yet here is a small, upstart institution, belonging to a denomination once described by Leonard Sweet as belonging to "the Methodist farm system" or minor leagues, which is responding vigorously to the very needs articulated by the UM bishops and which are acutely felt by the PCUSA and other mainline denominations, as well.

It is a great cause for rejoicing for Methodists of all stripes, and truly all Christians, that this little seminary is taking root and growing. And perhaps it could only happen in Seattle, with its creatively rebellious roots, charmingly iconoclastic outlook and out-of-the-box thinking.

The town which buried the whole bottom story of its downtown buildings when they got in the way, the window to the Far East from which the Alaska Gold Rush was launched. The home of the Space Needle (now 50 years old!), where environmentalism is not merely a good idea but a matter of local creed. The birthplace of grunge rock and Microsoft, which gave us Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, and Bill Gates.

And now, the Anti-Seminary.

Alexander and Adelaide would be proud.

(Seattle, Washington)

Hell and Gone

The controversy over Rob Bell's book, Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived (HarperOne, 2011), while itself short-lived, underscores the still-explosive nature of Christianity's message and our culture's allergy to dealing seriously with the real issues of moral agency and ultimate (life / death / eternity) questions in any but a feel-good way. The very big up side is that the conversation the book has generated gets people thinking and talking about eternal issues. One hopes, fruitfully.

Two popular responses have appeared to Bell. One, Francis Chan and Preston Sprinkle's Erasing Hell: What God Said about Eternity, and the Things We've Made Up (David C. Cook, 2011), reaches back into the Old Testament and Jewish popular piety of the time to paint a satisfactory, if broad-brush, picture of the background against which Jesus taught, and uses that to uphold classic consensus Christian teaching on the subject of hell and the final judgment. If you've read or seen Chan elsewhere, the tone is the same: conversational with a smattering of theological depth and a decided edge. Short on doctrine (though his sights are squared-in on orthodox Christianity), long on protreptic. All in all, it's a decent review of Biblical teaching on the subject. The one handicap, and it's a major one: Bell's writing is way more winsome and engaging than the Chan-Sprinkle alternative. Despite efforts at tugging on the heart strings, including some personal reflections, Chan ends up saying, "What if God acts in a way that I personally find morally repugnant? Well, God's the free potter and I'm just clay. I just have to deal with it and trust." This reader put the book down grateful for their efforts, but not really satisfied.

Much better is Mark Galli's God Wins: Heaven, Hell, and Why the Good News is Better than Love Wins (Tyndale, 2011). Galli, the Senior Managing Editor of Christianity Today, does two things that Chan and Sprinkle don't quite get to. One, he deals with the question of God's nature and character apart from our experience of it, rightly taking Bell on for staying on the human-experiential plane too much. Two, he makes adequate space for the matter of mystery. Not just a sort of agnostic shrug about things we cannot understand, but a nuanced and thoughtful exploration of how God's justice fits with God's love. It allows him to make a cogent case for why universalism, even the sort of soft-core variety Bell espouses, is really terrible news and not the hopeful, liberating tidings that Bell portrays. Thoughtful Christians interested in engaging the culture should read Bell's book and at least one of the others -- if you have to choose, I'd pick Galli, for the reasons described. This is a conversation that we need to be having with the wider society, which desires to sit in judgment on God and on Scripture while excusing itself from accountability to a just and holy Divinity.

Love demands we be ready to talk about this.

Prince Frederick, 1 September 2011

Top Thirteen

This morning in the sermon at worship, I put forth a "Top Ten unBiblical Reasons for Not Being in Mission". They were:

#10: They won’t appreciate it – we might even get rejected.
#9: They have their own religion (or way of doing things).
#8: There’s enough to do here at home.
#7: They really don’t deserve it.
#6: We’re just creating dependency.
#5: This is just like socialism.
#4: This is why I pay taxes.
#3: This is why we pay missionaries (social workers, relief workers, pastors, ... etc.).
#2: I can’t be imposing my religion on other people.
And the #1 reason: I don’t want to.

To these, three others have been suggested to me today:
#11. I don't have the skills.
#12. I don't have time.
#13. I'm afraid to ..... (fill in the blank: fly, be far from home, be away from my family, be out of the country, etc.)

All good addtions!

With thanks to Karen VanDuzer.

(Western Shores, Maryland)

An Investment in God's People

"What difference does it make, homoousios (of the same substance) or homoiousios (of like substance)? "What's the difference between an idol and an icon?" "Do we believe in the perseverence of the saints -- in eternal security?"

Such are the questions -- along with many others -- that I've enjoyed hearing and responding two over the past two weeks at our local denominational seminary.

Friday marked the last day of my classroom commitment to the Course of Study School for this year. COS is a program of The United Methodist Church, an alternative to seminary, a condensed track for those second-career pastors and assorted laborers in the Lord's vineyard who are already working, and for whatever reason (such as an ongoing day job) cannot take three years out for a regular seminary curriculum.

For me, it is two weeks of joy as I have the privilege of opening the vault and turning the lights on to the Christian past for colleagues who are already "in the trenches". Thus I hold a special place in my heart for the COS folks. This is not to take away from regular seminarians -- some of whom, like my own assistant, are also student pastors. But year after year, the COS students are like sponges, eager to learn. They are fielding the questions about the meaning of the sacraments. They are sitting in the hospital emergency rooms offering pastoral care to those families who are struggling with the theology of death and resurrection in the midst of excruciating emotional pain. They are confronting the well-intentioned dragons of parish life: those who want to fight to the death about the color of the carpet or who has a key to the organ -- as Jesus put it, tithing mint and dill and cumin while the weightier matters of justice, mercy, and faith go unattended for a broken and dying world around them.

I get to teach them. But often, I find some of my heroes among them.

Sometimes, it happens in the most obvious of ways. "Dr. Harrell, a member of my church who has been battling cancer just died. I know I'm supposed to be here ... but the funeral is set for Tuesday ...." Of course you belong with that family. At other times, it's the stories of personal vocation in motion, like the law-enforcement officer of the Rocky Mountain region who spends his vacation learning the skills and disciplines he needs to attend a small flock in his hometown. Or the second-career pastor who is pouring her heart and soul out to a dying two-point charge (one church "appointment" with two churches on it) that have already pre-rejected her because of her gender.

The Course of Study is not new. Back in my young buck days when I was a seminarian, I researched the service record of Emmett Eugene Harrell, my great-grandfather. "E.E." was a native North Carolinian, who began his service in the Virginia Conference in 1883, at a time when that conference included a piece of the Old North State. Later, when the conference boundaries were adjusted to conform to the state lines, he was already living in Virginia, and decided to stay there. He was something of a rare bird in his time: studied the theological curriculum at Vanderbilt (then just two years), and, his record said, "completed the course of study" in order to become a probationary member -- then called a member "on trial". Like going to law school and studying for the bar.

There is some talk about bringing back such a system: seminary plus course of study. The question, though, is the ongoing one about whether that would actually bring depth to our candidates for ministry, or whether it's just one more way in which we respond to problems by adding yet another hoop for people to jump through on their way into ministry ... hoops which too often beat the creativity, initiative and -- let's be honest -- spiritual spunk and chutzpah right out of them as we socialize them into the dark side of denominational and conference politics. We seem to be less tolerant of personal rough edges -- and the sharpening they can bring -- than the early Church was. It's doubtful to me that a Paul or Peter or Thomas, a Polycarp or a Cyprian or a Basil, could make it through the candidacy process today.

Meanwhile, the lectures are done for this year. There are still essay questions to grade -- well over a hundred of them -- but this annual chore pales to insignificance when I think of those students, and every year there are a few, for whom the delights of the Christian past come alive, and who light up like Christmas decorations as they get turned on to just how rich and wonderful -- and exasperating and chaotic and yeasty -- their spiritual heritage really is.

I live with the conviction that doctrine matters hugely, because ideas matter. Truth is not just an exchange commodity that is sometimes conveniently useful, but worth living and dying over. This means that theological education is one of the most important ministries of the Church -- in any of her denominational flavors -- for the future. It is not simply a gauntlet to be run. It is, as Jesus said, the "bringing out of the treasures old an new", an investment in God's people now and into the future.

Providence, Prince Frederick, Maryland