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

One of my excursions, to see the Flower Carpet Brussels creates for three days once every two years. Click on the photo to see more pictures.

One thing I never thought about before was how much lecture preparation is necessary. Since this is my first time teaching these classes (Introduction to Theology and Christology/Soteriology), I have to start from the beginning and write lectures for 12 weeks of 3-hour classes. After reading textbooks for most of June and July and writing lectures for most of August and September, I have about 8 weeks of each class prepared—and I’m already done teaching the second week! And as soon as I’m done writing those, I have to start on next semester’s lectures. As I knew it would, my being a tourist has reduced quite a bit in favor of my being a teacher.

I have to say, it’s a rather magnificent job to have, getting to read and analyze theology books and write a couple hundred pages on theological subjects, with the goal of teaching them to people who may be complete neophytes to theology. But sometimes I have to force myself to do it and to focus on doing it. I could use your prayers for focus specifically.

My desk, where I do most of my studying and lecture-writing

The best part, after my two whole weeks of experience, is definitely the teaching. I rather adore it. When I was itinerating, I loved the part where I got to get up and tell people all about what God was doing in my life and calling and European missions. That love has transferred to the process of teaching, which is really quite similar. I stand in front of people and tell them wonderful things about God.

After my second day, as I was biking home from school, I realized to myself that the act of teaching doesn’t feel like a job, even a job that I enjoy (I loved library cataloging, but it was still a job). It feels like doing something I love. It causes the same emotional sensations in me that doing things I do just because I love them does, such as reading or bicycling or taking interesting photographs. It might perhaps be almost like the feeling I get when I write fiction (though nothing is quite like that in the world). And to think that once upon a time I declared to myself my intention of never becoming a teacher (that was a very long time ago).

My 7:30am bike commute to CTS.

I have two classes of a dozen students each (large class sizes, for CTS), and each one has a couple of Americans, a couple of Nigerians, a couple of Belgians, a couple of Dutch, and one English student (each), with the odd Italian and Pakistani and Ghanian thrown in for good measure. Most are college age, but a couple are a little older and have already been in full-time ministry. Some of them have amazingly good brains. Some of them know absolutely nothing and ask the most interesting (and difficult) questions (“Is God still faithful to Israel?” “If God is King of Kings, how is Jesus King of Kings?” “If there is natural revelation, what about people who see the existence of God through nature but never hear the gospel?”).

One of the classes told me they would never have imagined I hadn’t already been teaching for ages. I think this is because, for one, I’ve spent my whole life contemplating the topics I am teaching on (when I was about 9 years old, for instance, I would probably have told you that Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection for our benefit were only logical, given the nature of God—though not necessarily in those words); and for another, I’ve just spent two years doing public speaking almost every single week, which has helped me feel comfortable and natural being in front of people and speaking to them. Thank you, two years of itineration!

And, yes, I have cried in three out of four class periods. Once was when I was talking about the importance of John the Baptist to the life of Christ and read Isaiah 40, where Matthew and Mark get their prophecies which John fulfilled. (Go read it. Go, right now. And think about John the Baptist declaring this about Jesus before His baptism.) The second time was when I was talking about Jesus’ servanthood as revealed in the Last Supper and read Isaiah 53. (Go….you get the point.) The third time was today, in my Intro to Theology class, where I’ve been talking about the attributes of God (holiness, love, justice, and so forth), and in my section about faithfulness I told them about my own experience of God’s faithfulness. I don’t think I could not cry while discussing such wonderful subjects. But I warned them all ahead of time that it was entirely likely I would. And who knows, maybe now whenever they read the beginning of Mark and read about John the Baptist, they will remember about Isaiah 40 and remember that it is so lovely that their theology teacher cried about it in class. (I don’t think I’ve ever had a theology teacher cry in class, which makes me wonder what’s wrong with them.)

Most of my students have been mostly paying attention, which is perhaps as much as a teacher can ask for. (And of course those who don’t seem like they’re paying attention very well might be.) There’s often discussion and questions asked, and a couple of times students have kept talking about things we talked about in class as they put their things together and leave, which means they’re interested. Quite delicious, I must say.

I can’t wait to teach again on Monday.

Footnotes:
*I also got to watch the building next to my new apartment get completely torn down, observe a crane pull the demolition backhoe out of a hole it fell into (almost falling into my kitchen as it did so), and usher men through my apartment to look at the hole they accidentally drilled into my guest bedroom. That’s enough for a whole blog post itself.

My new friend Sigmund, chomping away at the building next door. This picture is taken from my bathroom window.

New Testament Greek is particularly vivid, I find. This is going to be a bit weird, but I’m going to put my exact, word-for-word translation here, not smoothed out into reasonable English. Your brain may stumble on it, because Greek word order is very different from English. The way the writer organized things in the sentences puts emphasis on different things. It may make you see something you hadn’t seen before, or be reminded of something you hadn’t thought of in a long time. It might just make you go, “Huh?” (Bear in mind that this is by no means a definitive translation. It’s just me wallowing in Greek.)

“For that very reason [what very reason? read the end of chapter 11] therefore also we, so great having surrounding us a cloud of witnesses, every weight/hindrance putting off/getting rid of and the easily entangling sin, by/with endurance we should run the set/lying before us race/athletic contest, looking with undivided attention at the one [who is] of the faith a founder/originator and perfecter Jesus, who against/for the sake of the set/lying before him joy endured a cross of shame/disgrace despising/disregarding [either endured a cross of shame, despising it, or endured a cross, despising the shame], and on the right hand of the throne of God he has sat down. For consider attentively the one [who] so much having endured from the sinners against himself denial/hostility, so that not you may be weary/discouraged in your souls, being exhausted/giving up/losing heart.”

The end of this especially stood out to me. We *do* become weary and discouraged in our souls. But rather than giving up, we should look attentively at Jesus [that word indicates turning your eyes away from all else, thus fixing them on something in particular], who is the founder, the originator, the forerunner, the one who went through everything first, who endured the hostility [this word indicates the verbal attacks] of sinners and the utterly degrading shame of the cross. He was there first. He has already suffered what we suffer when we grow weary and discouraged. And He won out and took His rightful place of honor, where He is always interceding for us, His brothers, His fellow-heirs.

I adore Hebrews so much.

Here’s the Greek, if you’re interested:

Τοιγαροῦν καὶ ἡμεῖς, τοσοῦτον ἔχοντες περικείμενον ἡμῖν νέφος μαρτύρων, ὄγκον ἀποθέμενοι πάντα καὶ τὴν εὐπερίστατον ἁμαρτίαν, δι’ ὑπομονῆς τρέχωμεν τὸν προκείμενον ἡμῖν ἀγῶνα, 2 ἀφορῶντες εἰς τὸν τῆς πίστεως ἀρχηγὸν καὶ τελειωτὴν Ἰησοῦν, ὃς ἀντὶ τῆς προκειμένης αὐτῷ χαρᾶς ὑπέμεινεν σταυρὸν αἰσχύνης καταφρονήσας, ἐν δεξιᾷ τε τοῦ θρόνου τοῦ θεοῦ κεκάθικεν.

3 Ἀναλογίσασθε γὰρ τὸν τοιαύτην ὑπομεμενηκότα ὑπὸ τῶν ἁμαρτωλῶν εἰς ἑαυτοὺς ἀντιλογίαν, ἵνα μὴ κάμητε ταῖς ψυχαῖς ὑμῶν ἐκλυόμενοι.

Later he and his wife and I talked about the concept of being a female intellectual. He said that many times it is used somewhat pejoratively, as if appending “female” to “intellectual” brings down the impact of “intellectual.” And it occurred to me that even when that doesn’t happen, “female intellectual” is used as the exception that proves the rule. There are intellectuals, and then every once in a while there’s a female one, an abnormality even if just as intellectual as the “real” ones. “Female” is unusual among intellectuals, and “intellectual” is unusual among females. Very few people would come right out and state such an attitude, but it’s often present, invisible and implicit.

I’m thankful to this particular pastor for treating me not as a female who wanted to take part in his theological conversation with another pastor but as a fellow lover of theology and a welcome part of his district convention experience. And I’m particularly thankful for an upbringing that taught me not to see “female” as a barrier to anything I was suited to do nor as a detriment to any profession I might enter or activity I might want to take up.

In my family growing up, boys washed dishes and girls cut wood; boys learned to sew and girls learned to fish. These things were things that needed to be done, and everyone did them, and they benefitted everybody. Everybody was expected to get good grades in science as well as in English. Captains Courageous and Tom Sawyer were not books pushed on boys and not on girls; they were on the bookshelf, and anyone could read them who wanted to. My older sister was interested in the small engines class in high school, and I was interested in taking Spanish and Russian at the same time, and both were perfectly fine choices. I grew up recognizing that my parents would be fine with any career choice I made, as long as it wasn’t selling drugs or being a mob boss or something. There was no bias that said girls shouldn’t take up certain interests or professions any more than there was a bias that said people with brown hair shouldn’t do them. You could do whatever your mind was fit for.

Add to that the conviction I had that I could do anything God called me to and gave me the talents to do, and that God called me to ministry and gave me talents for education, language, theology, analysis, contemplation. I’ve never felt out of place in my various educational and ministry settings; in fact, I felt very firmly in place, because I knew I was where God had designed me to belong. For a great part of this I owe thanks to the Assemblies of God, which welcomes women in the callings God has given them. My ministry and theological education has only affirmed me and my place in God’s mission.

and beautiful landscape

Don’t get me wrong: I love being female. I may share my personality type with far more males than females (INTJ in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), and I may share interests with more males than females (ministry, theology, science fiction, superhero movies, programming), and I would really, really prefer to have a nice theological conversation than a nice conversation about children or shoes or most anything else that’s stereotyped as belonging to women—but I love dresses and teacups and figure skating and Pride and Prejudice and—well, many things stereotypically assigned to the feminine persuasion. I love being who I am, and being female is part of who I am. Part of who I am. Not the single deciding factor in who I am.

The thing is, I’ve never felt like a “woman in ministry,” that separate and special category assigned to separate and special ministers who happen to be female, and I’ve never felt like a “female intellectual.” I am first of all me, a human being with a brain and a soul and interests and talents and weaknesses and struggles. I am not a female modified by “intellectual,” nor an intellectual modified by “female.” I am me, and I am modified by “intellectual” and “female” and “introvert” and “short” and “quirky” and “American” and everything else that coalesces to describe me. They all have varying effects on each other and on the totality of who I am. Take any one of those things away, and I wouldn’t be me. They are all valuable parts of who God has made me to be.

Before you ever start to classify someone, as, for instance, “the female intellectual” or “the woman in pastoral ministry” or “the introverted youth minister” or “the teenaged writer” or anything that may in any way cause you to discount that person, stop yourself for a moment. Recognize that that person is first of all a sovereign human being, a bearer of God’s image, a person with a calling and a soul, a personality and point of view that has something to offer which you don’t. And only then begin to examine the characteristics which make up that complete person: her gender, her nationality, her race, her interpersonal style, her talents, her weaknesses, her interests. Don’t let “female” or “intellectual” or anything else force you to make assumptions about what that person can or can’t contribute or about that person’s value in ministry or any other situation in life. This is first of all God’s child, a divine, sovereign person valuable in and of herself. Only secondly is she your pastor or your professor or the short, brown-haired missionary who wants to join your theological conversation.

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.