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.

Yes, the cross is an exceedingly strange religious symbol.

Embarrassing, even. An instrument of humiliation and torture, after all. We celebrate a guy getting tortured two thousand years ago. Yay for us.

Seriously, have you ever stopped to consider how truly bizarre that must be for someone who hasn’t grown up with it?

We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Greeks.

Think about that. For Jews in the first century and for many other nations conquered by the Romans, a cross was a symbol of cruelty and subjugation. It must have been exceedingly offensive to have Christians celebrating it. For others, it must have been just plain dumb, like this woman who commented on this article. People are in the same place now, of considering Christian symbols offensive or of simply not having any basis of understanding about them.

I taught Christology and Soteriology, the study of Christ and the study of salvation, last semester at Continental Theological Seminary and in my preparation and teaching came to appreciate even more than ever before the bizarre and terrible and wonderful fact of the brutal murder of the Person we worship.

I was reading the Pentateuch at the time, those delightful and jolly books of Leviticus and Numbers, and I was also studying Hebrews, and in the combination of those two parts of the Bible, the concept of sacrifice and atonement in Leviticus suddenly came alive.

Leviticus is all about sin, human brokenness, human impurity, and how we who once walked freely with God in the world He created for us now have to perform all kinds of rituals of purity and atonement for sin in order even to approach the outskirts of His presence.

There is so much blood in Leviticus. Do we ever stop to think about how important blood is? The life of a living thing is in its blood. Blood carries oxygen, it carries DNA, it fights infection, it brings nutrients to a growing embryo; when it is shed, a person dies; when a donor gives her blood away, another person is given life. Shed blood is the price for sin, and it is the great and undeserved gift of God to cover sin.

“For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood by reason of the life that makes the atonement.”
Leviticus 17:11

Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.
Hebrews 9:22

Instead of sacrificing their own blood for their sins, God provided for people to sacrifice the blood of a pure animal. That in itself was undeserved grace. But those animal sacrifices and all the purification rituals of Leviticus only worked for the moment in which they took place. A person could go away from the sacrifice of an expensive animal and promptly encounter something or do something that would make him impure and unworthy again, and he’d have to do it all over again. He was never permanently cleansed, and even when he was cleansed, he still was not pure enough to approach the very presence of God. There was no single sacrifice that would be enough, no blood pure enough and powerful enough.

Humans caused the problem, the sin that separated them from God, and so needed to atone for it, but no sacrifice performed by a human could ever be good enough.

Until a Person came who was both human and God. Human to fulfill humanity’s need to atone and Deity to be the one good enough to do it.

But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption.
Hebrews 9:11-12

For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. Nor was it to offer himself repeatedly, as the high priest enters the holy places every year with blood not his own, for then he would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.
Hebrews 9:24-26

We don’t celebrate the murder of some random guy who preached good things two thousand years ago. We celebrate the willing self-sacrifice of a hero, the life-giving donation of pure blood, the sacrifice that covers all sin once for all and brings us not only to the outskirts of God’s throne room but into the very presence of God Himself, no longer separated and soiled by sin but cleaned by the purity of that blood.

So,

We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
1 Corinthians 1:23-24

Not all the blood of beasts
On Jewish altars slain
Could give the guilty conscience peace
Or wash away the stain.

But Christ, the heavenly Lamb,
Takes all our sins away;
A sacrifice of nobler name
And richer blood than they.

My faith would lay her hand
On that dear head, of Thine
While like a penitent I stand
And there confess my sin.

My soul looks back to see
The burden Thou didst bear
When hanging on the cursed tree
And knows her guilt was there.

Believing, we rejoice
To see the curse remove;
We bless the Lamb with cheerful voice
And sing His bleeding love.

By Isaac Watts, 1674-1748

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.