Belgian forget-me-nots

It has been exactly one year (and half a day) since I arrived in Belgium.

That seems completely impossible.

In two weeks I will have taught for an entire year (school year, that is).

I think I’ve grown more in this last year than I have in my whole adulthood over the course of several years, which is saying a lot, because there was much growing to do during itineration.

It was largely thanks to my itineration speaking experiences that when I stood up to teach on my very first day on September 19, 2016, I felt almost completely comfortable and fairly confident. I was astonished at how natural it felt. I talked a lot during itineration about how teaching theology was something God had given me to do that suited who I am intimately, but experiencing exactly that very thing was still incredible and delightful. But I’ve also learned so very much.

I’ve learned how to be authoritative and assertive without feeling uncomfortable about it and also without shutting down the inquisitive nature of many of my students. I’ve learned (am learning) how to keep control of a classroom, how to balance friendliness and firmness without harshness, how to decide when to follow tangents and when not to. I’ve learned to be comfortable with ambiguity and with not knowing things. I’ve learned (sort of) to be fine with dealing with controversial theological topics. In short, I am learning how to be comfortable with leadership in ways I’ve never been before.

Both my students and I are getting quite a lot out of my classes. One of the students, whom I’ve had in two different classes, told me yesterday that it seemed he’d gotten more out of my classes than a single year seemed to warrant. The same is true for me. Both in preparing my lectures and giving them, I’ve been learning new things, old things in new ways, deeper backgrounds and wider perspectives on all my subjects than I’ve had before. Teaching is amazing.

Buttercup field

Up until now I’ve often wondered why I had to wait until I was in my 30s before I could finally get into missions. Now I know that it’s because I needed the time to develop my theological and psychological depth. I have much more depth to give my students now than I would have in my 20s. Long years spent in preparation are not wasted.

All of the above I attribute to God’s wisdom, providence, and kindness. People don’t go into missions to please themselves but to please God and to use what they have to grow His Kingdom, but of course God, being the kind and wise and intelligent Person that He is, uses missions to grow the very people doing it. That’s part of being the Body of Christ. Not only do you contribute to the growth of others, but your growth is also contributed to. I like the way God works.

There are very few front porches. Many houses are flush with the pavement or have a couple of steps up to the door and nothing else.

Most houses are made of brick, and people still lay it by hand.

Narrow rural roads

Streets are extremely narrow. Many a normal street is barely as wide as a typical Montanan alley.

I have seen very few potholes in my frequent biking, not like the ones you get in Missoula. Cobblestones, however, are brutal to bike over.

Cars are new and well-maintained. You almost never see old clunkers, or even cars more than five or ten years old.

Cars are also extremely small. You see a few vans, station wagons, and pickup trucks, but they are very much the exception. The average car is much smaller than the average car in the U.S. I did see a Subaru Forester once and stared at it in a bit of befuddlement. It’s such a Missoula sort of car.

Horse meat. In the grocery store. I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m going to. I have eaten duck, kangaroo, quail, and various new kinds of fish here.

There are no deer! I bike past fields and along rural farm roads which, in Montana, would have deer or antelope or something bouncing across them all the time, but there are none. The closest I get are burros in fields. Yes, actual burros.

Burros and/or donkeys in a field

On the other hand, the birds never stop singing. Apparently no one told Belgian birds that they’re supposed to fly south for the winter.

No two toilets flush the same way. Most have some variation on two different buttons, one to use a small amount of water and one to use a larger amount, but some of them have a Start button and a Stop button, and some have a lever thing you pull up on, and some of them have the buttons on the wall instead of on the toilet.

Speaking of toilets, there are very few automatic toilets or sinks.

Speaking of toilets, you have to pay to use them in public. Usually 35-50 cents.

Nearly every set of stairs I have encountered is some variation on a spiral.

You often have to bring or buy your own kitchen appliances like stovetops and things when you move into a new place you’ve rented. All I had to buy was a refrigerator.

Speaking of refrigerators, they’re tiny.

There are still plants growing in the fields. Until November or even the beginning of December there were still flowers blooming. So weird.

Everywhere you look, there’s a marvelous castle or old church. Belgium has more castles per square kilometer than any other country in Europe.

Buildings crammed together in Brussels.

Belgium has more everything per square foot than anywhere in Montana. By this I mean that everything is extremely close together. Villages are only a mile or two from each other. There’s a farmhouse on every hill. Houses are often tall and narrow and squished up against each other (even in villages). Major towns and cities are ten or fifteen miles from each other. There are no wide open spaces.

Most buildings are made out of brick, especially houses and apartments. People still lay brick by hand, with a trowel.

People kiss each other. All. The. Time. You haven’t seen somebody since yesterday? You kiss him on the cheek. You just met a new acquaintance? You kiss her on the cheek. Actually you kiss the air near their cheek. Once, in my first month here, I was at a French friend’s house for dinner, and someone I was unacquainted with was coming late from work. He came in and, since I was sitting closest to the door, came straight to me and stuck his face out at me. I had a momentary recoil of horror (What are you doing?), and he had a momentary recoil of rejection (What a rude person!), and everyone at the table burst out laughing and kindly explained to me that he was French and expected a greeting kiss on/near the cheek, the way an American would shake hands, and explained to him that I was American and new and wasn’t used to strange men sticking their faces in my personal space. We also ended up laughing at each other/ourselves.

At Missionary Training and Renewal, I met several different people who had some connection to the school I will be teaching at in Belgium, Continental Theological Seminary, so I got several different perspectives on it. One woman on the Europe leadership team had worked there for years some time ago and told me a lot of the practical things I wanted to know, like what the physical structure of the school is like (it is in an old chateau which was constructed out of the horse stables belonging to an ancient castle…). I had a lot of questions answered that people are always asking and I have no idea about since I have never been there. (Alas, I have no pictures that I have permission to use. But you can go here and see pictures for yourself.)

With Paul and Angela Trementozzi (on left) and Joseph Dimitrov (on right).

On the very last day, at the commissioning service, I got to meet two presidents of CTS. The last president, Roland Dudley, is now teaching at Trinity Bible College, my own alma mater, and I got to be introduced to him in passing there. The current president, Dr. Joseph Dimitrov, was also there. Dr. Dimitrov is Bulgarian and is the first non-American president of CTS. I’ve talked to him on Skype once, but I actually met him properly, and he prayed for me during the prayer service at the end.

But my first meeting was with Terry Hoggard, CTS’s Director of Development, and it answered my most important question: What on earth do you want me for? I have caught myself wondering, What have I got that someone else can’t provide for you? Am I really going to do something indispensable? Am I worth people supporting me when they could be supporting orphans in Africa?

Without knowing any of that, Terry told me about CTS’s goals for the future, and those goals are something I can contribute meaningfully to. The European model of theological education is totally academic and intellectual. Now, I adore the academic and intellectual, as anyone who knows me knows. But, he said, they need to learn how to integrate the intellectual with the spiritual. European students don’t expect their spiritual life to be enlivened by their theological education. The CTS leadership is making a concerted effort to move in the direction of community and spiritual life. Forty students were filled with the Spirit there last year! That’s nearly half the student body.

Davidson Hall at Trinity Bible College, my first dorm, now being refurbished for an academic building. Picture by Alyse Erbele.

Ever since I was at Trinity Bible College (I graduated in 2003), I have longed to help students make that connection. When you go to Bible college, you’re often warned to take extra great careful care for your spiritual life, because being in theological classes all the time can kill it. (Never mind that if you don’t take extra great careful care for your spiritual life, anything will kill it.) But I found the exact opposite to be the case. My spiritual life was enlivened and expanded by being at Bible college and in theology and missiology and Greek classes. When I learned something about, say, God’s purposes behind the sacrificial structure established in the Pentateuch in an Old Testament class, or about how Francis of Assisi became a Christian in a Christian history class, or about particular strategies for reaching a particular people group in a missions class, or about the significance behind Paul’s use of a participle in a particular passage in a Greek class…my mind expanded and with it my heart and my excitement about what God does and my enjoyment of who He is. Oh, I loved it.

That’s the teacher I want to be, not just one who says, “This is what a participle is,” but one who shows why the participle is important to the structure of Paul’s sentence and the overall goal of what he is trying to teach about God and the church. Or not just one who teaches the dates that Francis of Assisi lived and the structures he established in the Catholic Church, but one who can show how his life was transformed, how God used him to transform aspects of the Church of his era, how similar that is to what God did through John Wesley, how similar that is to what God wants to and can do in the Church in Europe…

CTS needs me. Isn’t that crazy? I need CTS, because I don’t have much teaching experience, and being there will give it to me. But they need me, too, because I have a perspective they are deeply wanting, and the very thing I have wanted to contribute to any school I am in is the very thing they want from me. Why, yes, I am actually worth people supporting. Because I’m called by God, for one thing, and because I’m going to go do something rather special He’s laid out for me.