Last week, while in Colorado, I was offered and accepted a job which involves working long term in Europe with German Christians. I will graduate with my Master of Divinity in 34 days. And in January, I will be embarking on a 10-city trip through Germany, meeting with mentors and visiting old friends, in preparation for my ministry there. Life is good. And, along with Tony Bennett, I’m convinced that the Best is Yet to Come.
As graduation nears, my primary preoccupation has been completing the overhaul of the missions fellowship I lead at Trinity. When I became the leader, I got together with past presidents and, after brainstorming about the group’s problems with them, decided to tweak the setup. So we renamed the group (now “The International Missions Fellowship”) and moved some things around. God has opened doors for us and we have gone from being a student led fellowship of 5 or 6 to a faculty-sponsored fellowship with exciting, well-attended weekly meetings and major events on national radio. On Thursday, over 100,000 people will hear a nationwide broadcast, on Moody Radio, of a panel discussion I organized for our missions fellowship (4:08 CST). Please pray that I will be able to solidify this new arrangement and that the relationship we have with Moody Radio, which has expressed interest in broadcasting our next two events, will be shored up before I leave.
I graduate on December the 18th, and I am surprised at my own excitement about the event! After graduation, I will spend a few weeks at home with family, and then plan to head to Germany, where I will be trying to hammer out the details of my work there, build partnerships, and also film a support DVD. People going on overseas assignment very often have big plans but few ways of assessing their abilities to put those plans into action. By way of this trip, I hope to sit down with some of my mentors and co-workers, revisit my plans with them, and then film their answers to the question: “Can Ben, with God’s help, pull this off?” If you have interest in the ministry at all, please let me know and I’ll send you a copy of the DVD, which will explain my plans, present the interviews with mentors, and give my answers to the “top ten questions” I get about work in Europe.
As mentioned above, I spent all last week in Monument, Colorado, in training and being briefed on the ins and outs of the organization I will be working with. It was an intense time, with 12 hour days and plenty of things to chew on. But I am confident I have found a respected and reputable group with whom to associate myself and look forward to partnering with them and with churches all over Germany in my ministry.
I have now come to that phase in my preparation during which I raise both prayer and financial support. It is an exciting time for me and I hope you will be in prayer for me and for the conversations and partnerships I will build during this season. If you yourself are interested, or you know of a church or an individual who might be interested, in helping support my work in Germany by partnering with me in prayer and finances, please pass this newsletter on to them and their name on to me. I would love to meet to share my story, especially if with those who have a particular interest in Europe.
Well, life gets busy. You all probably know that better than me. But I hope this winter will be an enjoyable one for you, and that we are able to stay in touch via things like this newsletter. Thanks so much for reading! Let me hear from you. And remember to let every moment of your life be a moment of God’s story.
(Photo from a lecture I organized for our missions fellowship)
Last week, for the first time in years, I spent the 4th of July in the United States. It was a great day to be here, to listen to the 1812 Overture, and to reflect on my nationality. Of course, as irony would have it, I spent the day working. This is America, after all. But in spite of inconveniences like that one, my summer has been enjoyable, and, between you and me, I get the feeling that it constitutes the relative calm which precedes what may be a rather terrific storm.
For the first 3 weeks following my final exams, I was unemployed. That is to say, I needed a job desperately and didn’t have one. And that had never happened before. I hope it will never happen again, but the time was very thought-provoking and forced me to think about the horrible experience it must be for people who have families and mortgages to think about. During those weeks, I considered history’s solutions to the problem of unemployment: slavery (to pay the debt I owe), communism (to offer me a job), the welfare state (to pay me from another man’s work), and adultescense (to live off my parents, a luxury few have). None of those sounded especially enticing, and about the time I had been thoroughly sobered by thinking about it all, God provided me with a job.
I am normally rather pessimistic about one’s ability to see, in the short-term, “what God has been doing”, and avoid talking that way (to a fault). But given the options I had a short while ago, it is apparent to me that, at the very least, God spared me a lot of grief and depression by orchestrating my job hunt as he did. The thought of working from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. five days a week (the only job I could find) had begun to sound promising, and in retrospect I’m glad he closed that door.
At the present, there are two jobs vying for my time. The first and primary one is at a local Walgreens, just a mile down the road from my house. I can be found there regularly, helping customers and advising them to buy “The W brand, the brand America trusts.” The job allows for lots of chitchat with customers, a perfect complement to all the studying I do. And the second position involves proof-reading and editing a book being completed by my professor, Dr. Craig Ott, on the subject of church planting. He was one of the major reasons I wanted to come to Trinity, and it is a great honor for me to be helping him on this project now 3 years after coming.
In my spare time, I am completing applications for two ministry organizations and trying to finish my own first book, Haunted by Paradise. And as of late I have been fascinated with and playing a lot of jazz guitar. Pianist Scott Swingle and I hope to do some fun stuff in August, with me on vocals, so I’ll pass that along when we have it. I can’t wait.
This Fall, my last semester, will be light but full of fun stuff like my independent study, with Trinity historian John Woodbridge, on the topic of “the History of the German Church since 1800.” We’ve got neat things planned for Trinity’s missions fellowship too. I’ll be leading the group for one more semester and look forward to some great events. There should be more on that next time.
As I close, with all these opportunities and privileges on my mind, please pray that, in this last semester, my heart will catch up to my head so that I will be able to offer myself to any team or ministry as someone not only trained in but transformed by Scripture. The stories I heard all last semester about ministry failure and spiritual drift are not lost on me, so I would “covet” any prayer in that regard.
I hope you all have a great summer. Please contact me by email or phone if you have even the slightest interest in catching up. And as you’re soaking up the sun or enjoying a summer book, make sure to let every moment of your life be a moment of God’s story.
A few weeks ago I joined the "quarter century" club, and the thought of being 25 has been every bit as sobering as friends promised me it would be.I have had a great semester, and relished the chance to do a bit of birthday celebrating with friends, but as I'm coming to find, both my birthday and my courses are giving me a moment of pause. Or maybe I should say, moments of pause.
Each semester at Trinity has had a slightly different ethos.And the ethos owes a lot to the classes I take.Last fall, for example, was "the culture semester".All my mental energy seemed to be focused on thinking about the way the gospel relates to society. So I was not surprised when this semester began to have a theme.But it has been overwhelming, nevertheless, because the theme has been "disaster".
I took a course on “Conflict Mediation” recently and was blown away to hear the instructor talk about the dismal situations she encounters and the simply unbelievable ways God breaks people and reconciles them through her ministry. My counseling class has forced me to listen (just listen), for long periods of time, to people as they explain their struggles.An all-day workshop on forgiveness just about did me in emotionally. And books like "Facing Messy Stuff in the Church", which would benefit every Christian, are enough to make any person seriously ask themselves, "Are you sure you want to be in ministry?"
He was probably right who said, "If we were ever able to truly grasp the full extent of pain and brokenness in the world, we would probably just collapse and die."But he was also right who said, “If we have placed our hope in Christ for this life only, we should be pitied more than anyone.”
Sometimes I wish the onslaught of stories and heartaches would let up a bit, but it's already clear to me that this has been an important semester. My professors have been terrific at helping me dissect painful case studies and understand them in the light of the gospel.Watching them do so doesn’t make the problems seem less confounding, but it does mean I will be able to walk with people through those problems in a scripturally-informed way.And that is why I’m here in the first place.
In other news, I'm in the application process with a few organizations that I might work for following graduation, each in an overseas setting.So please pray that I'll have discernment as I decide which one fits me the best.And God has put a little creative streak in me as of late (writing and composing), which has been enjoyable, but I'm still searching for the time to make use of it.
Summer is on the horizon, and I hope to spend it doing an internship with a national Christian radio station (K-LOVE), but they have not told me yet whether that is going to pan out.So please keep me in your prayers regarding these things: the tough issues in my courses, the application for work, and my plans for the summer.Thanks so much for reading!Stay in touch.And let every moment of your life be a moment of God's story.
I had been itching to do something like this for years.My friend Raj and I started talking about GCM (the Global Christian Movement), a missions group here at Trinity, and what we might do with the organization, which has always struggled to find a place on the campus.After speaking with a former leader about the lessons he’d learned, we decided to make it really small and really big.The “really small” are the five people who show up for our prayer group on Mondays.The “really big” are the tens of thousands of people, nationwide, who heard one of our programs on Moody Radio stations this week…For those of you who receive my newsletter by email, I attached a copy of two flyers for (more sensitive) evening events which we hosted and a link to the recording that aired three times on the Moody Radio Network.
To make a long story short, working with GCM has occupied a lot of my time this year, and it has been an amazing creative outlet.Throughout the newsletter, I’ve attached flyers for different speakers we’ve hosted.Overall, we’re excited about how it is raising awareness for missions.Several senior pastors have attended our evening events, a professor will be recommending flyers for GCM as a part of an upcoming sermon on missions, and even students who don’t intend on going overseas have thanked us for reminding them of all that is happening.In case you wonder how we remind them, we have discovered the bathroom.Flyers adorn every stall and urinal in campus.
GCM has been important to my semester because it allows me to use gifts not really applicable elsewhere in my program.Why’s that important?Trinity has been a great experience so far, and I will use the lessons I learn here for the rest of my life.But as good friends get increasingly busy with their ministries , and as I tire of the routine which has been so constant for nearly three years now, I feel I’m entering the semi-burnt-out state that makes otherwise amazing opportunities seem slightly less amazing than they might.With my sights set on departure for full-time ministry overseas in the near future, I can’t help but wonder whether this isn’t a kind of “lame duck” season in my life.I know that it isn’t, but I would love your prayers for that situation anyway!
Other than that fatigue, the semester is anything but a loss.In Systematics III, we are discussing pneumatology (what does Scripture say about the Holy Spirit?), ecclesiology (what does Scripture say about the church?) and eschatology (what does Scripture say about the end of the world?)For my class “Advancing Indigenous Churches”, my partner and I did a 25 page paper assessing the health of a local church called “The Orchard”.Among other semester projects, I’m designing a worship service (for “History of Worship”) and preparing a 50 minute presentation on the Hebrew text of Jonah 4:5 (for Hebrew Exegesis).And I keep busy working as Dr. Ott’s research assistant.
This time next year I’ll be graduating, but the toughest semester of my whole program may be this Spring.I will have a full load, including two canon courses (the highest level course for my program).One of them will be with our Research Professor of New Testament, D.A. Carson, one of the world’s leading scholars on the subject (click here).It will be a tremendous opportunity to grow and to be challenged.
All of these opportunities and successes come with problems.A few days ago, I sat down with Dr. John Woodbridge, a professor of Church History at Trinity, to talk about how Christian leaders fall.Where do they go wrong and what are the warning signs?This is a man who has known many of the figures we read and hear about in Christian circles and literature.He said:
1)They forget that God is responsible for their success, and use that success to critique and belittle others.
2)They let their prayer and devotional lives dry up, and run on vapors, while trying to deceive people to think otherwise.
3)They fall into sexual impurity of one kind or another.
I can see how each of the three could bring me down.If you are looking for ways to pray for me, or for any Christian in ministry, let me suggest these three.
In spite of my better judgment, I am still pursuing several personal projects.There’s an article directly below this one that you might enjoy reading.I think it’s helpful.A major publishing house approached me about submitting a proposal for my little book(s), so I will be spending much of Christmas completing the manuscript for the first one, entitled Paradise Reloaded¸ and preparing the proposal.Lastly, with the few cents I have saved, I hope to buy a bit of new recording equipment, so hopefully the songs will start flowing next semester!
Please keep me in your prayers and in your correspondence.I love the three and four line updates that many of you take time to send, and they help me know how to pray for you.Thanks for reading my letter!Have a great Thanksgiving. And let every moment of your life be a moment of God’s story.
Ben
Just for fun:
(I recently went downtown to see Tommy Emmanuel in concert. Here are some a-m-a-z-i-n-g clips of him playing that I found on youtube)
There’s trouble in this seminary.And there’s trouble in my church.The trouble is the same, though the two issues seem entirely unrelated, and if you are in the readership of the Graduate Scrawl then the problem stands to do more damage to you than anyone.Let me tell you what that problem is, how I realized it, and how it can be fixed.
A while back, I had a casual conversation with one of Trinity’s staff.And I asked him what theological education should be, at least from his standpoint as an administrator, aside from the obvious need for orthodox theology.He said it should be: available, affordable, and relevant.I think these are pretty reasonable things to hope for.But maybe you’ve noticed that we don’t always live up to those ideals.I dug a bit deeper and found out why.
Affordable
After calling about ten of Chicago’s big name evangelical churches, almost all non-denominational, I did not find a nickel going from those churches to fund seminary education.A staff member at one of them, a church pastored by a Trinity grad, said, “oh, oooohhhhh….seminary education….we are all for it………….but, uh……….no……we don’t’ fund any particular seminary.”They want you to do that.
This table from the ATS (Association of Theological Schools) shows that it’s not only a Chicagoland problem and that it’s not just non-denominational churches.The numbers represent the percentage of costs at all ATS seminaries which are paid for by churches and other religious organizations, both denominational and non-denominational.
2002-2003
2003-2004
2004-2005
2005-2006
2006-2007
Percent of Total Revenue
10.9
8.2
8.9
7.9
6.5
For the average ATS member school, as of 2007, revenue from Interdenominational/Non-denominational churches covered 3.6% of expenses.So, to put it bluntly, not many churches think it is their responsibility to fund theological education.They are only concerned about their own staff.Even churches which have their own “ministry training” (and I talked to those folks) still require pastors to have seminary training.And one of two things happens as a result: 1) Students attend seminary and accrue so much debt that they can’t get straight into ministry as hoped for (especially missions). Or 2) they take the advice of well-meaning Christian leaders, aware of problems caused by debt, and decide that devoting time to serious theological study isn’t all that important.Either way, theological education is not affordable.
But churches are only part of the problem.
Available
The population of the U.S. has tripled since 1960.People with purely worldly motivation have noticed and are trying to get rich off all the growth. Contrast that feverish activity for what is happening in theological education.Our capacity to train people is flat-lined.We can’t train more people today than we could ten years ago.And schools are not exactly popping up everywhere.
Seminaries train people to “promote understanding of God in order to deepen our community with God and others”.And in the grand scheme of things, I think this is much more important than the services offered by the mega-chains.So you might think development would be a hot issue.But it’s not.And in case you’re wondering, no one in seminary education seems to be losing sleep over that situation.The result is that there are not many schools out there, and normal folks with families and work commitments can’t get to good theological education because the nearest school is hours away.
I talked to the head of admissions at another evangelical seminary, which happened to be heavily endowed.He told me their endowment allowed for x number of students yearly to attend at a low cost.So I asked him when their next planned enrollment increase was and what steps they were taking to get there.He said he didn’t understand and asked me to explain.
To add to the problem, a bizarre mindset has taken over seminary education. I call it theological mercantilism, because it is the belief (betrayed by marketing strategies) that there are only so many people to teach in the world, and that high enrollment is primarily the result of a battle won against other schools.So new schools never crop up.The old ones just try to defend their turf.
The resulting problem of all this is well known.Theological education is not really available.So you uproot yourself and your ministry and you come up here or go down there for years on end.To their credit, American seminaries are trying to solve the problem.They shuttle professors around for crazy weekend seminars and offer 10 hour intensive sessions so that those commuters from Detroit have an easier time getting to campus (I know one).But these are just quick fixes to a much bigger problem.And they have led to the last issue.
Relevant
Most congregants only know one person who has ever been to a seminary, and depending on how they find their minister’s work in the church, they may have a good or bad opinion of the place.For many, it’s where young people go and get overly sophisticated and lose touch with average folks and issues.And of course this is most evident when they start prescribing to you, while you are still in school, the amount of time (in years) that it will take to finally set you straight after all the damage the institute has done to you.
Some of their comments are exaggerations, and some are well-founded.Just as important to me as an individual seminarian’s lack of connection to society is the average congregant’s lack of touch with what a little theological training can do to their outlook on life.One of our professors was recently shipped off to a blue-collar church for the weekend to speak on that most eclectic of topics, open theism.Apparently the crowd could scarce understand why this might be important to them.Until the professor explained it lucidly.He was bombarded afterwards by questions and comments from normal folks who had never been so close to one of those well-trained and balanced seminary people, whose usefulness and even existence they had always called into question.But with the current status quo, these things are rare. A pastor I spoke to, one of a denominational stripe, told me that getting the church to support seminaries is “a tough sell”.Out of sight is out of mind.
The church has lost contact with the seminary and the seminaries are not often corrected by the churches (both are hurting from it).And I think all of this deserves more than an angry sermon, so I have designed what I think is a solution to the problem.
Part II: Solution
At the cost of one salary (or maybe a part-time salary), a church could obtain access for all its congregants to around 25 seminary level courses, of every conceivable stripe and discipline, inside the church itself (compare with the $18,000,000 it would cost to pay for 500 MDiv’s at Trinity).It would be available (where they are) affordable (part of the church budget) and relevant (church plays a corrective role as it is housed there).“How now?” you ask.
Imagine five churches.Five churches hypothetical churches.Let’s call them Town Church of Lincolnshire, South Suburban, JesusChurch of Lake Forest, Savior Anglican, and Intersection Community Church.Each of the five churches supplies the funds needed to pay one salary for a seminary grad (who happens to have a bent towards teaching).This leaves us with 5 seminary grads, each with slightly different interests/concentrations.Each one teaches 5 courses.This leaves us with 25 courses.Teacher one teaches one course on Monday at church 1, another on Tuesday at church 2, etc. and all do likewise.
Now, I know only a handful of people will be interested in each topic.A handful for missions studies, a handful for theology of prayer, a handful for Greek.So traditionally this kind and quality of education has been impossible.But 5 handfuls (for 5 churches) gives you enough for a class of 20 or 30.In this kind of system, people find themselves getting more interested in deepening their understanding of Scripture and life, pastors find hundreds of hours of education going into their people on a regular basis, and the church finds itself teaching people all that He has commanded us by sharing resources amongst ourselves.Larger churches would hopefully try this kind of model, but over time it could trickle down to very rural areas to serve them as well, so that theological education would everywhere be affordable, available, and relevant.
On a more positive, and mercantilist, note, this type of seminary planting might help placement numbers here at a place like Trinity by providing dozens of churches seeking qualified teachers. And it might give people here who want to teach a good first job and resume-builder.In fact, they might love teaching theology in the local church so much that they end up staying there.Either way, existing seminaries could make use of the situation and build themselves up as research centers for more serious academic studies, which is obviously what many of the professors want them to be anyway……(insert sermon here).
If there is enough interest, I may post an article on my blog to “tease this out” a bit more.There are still things to cover like accreditation (whether we need it and if so how to do it) ecumenicalism (hiring staff to serve multiple church confessions) and further development (building in a nest egg in the yearly expense for the development of a library after 5 years, etc).
But hopefully this has been food for thought.And hopefully thought, more than bickering and name-calling, will be employed more in the future to solve these kinds of difficult problems.If you do end up doing something like this in your church(s), write to me and let me know how it is going.And, while you’re at it, give me directions to come take a class.
My great-great-great-great grandfather Laban Stafford died in 1811 in North Carolina. He left his slaves to his sons. I know because I have a copy of the will. Another family member, my great-great grandfather William Henry Stevens, worked as a straw boss on a plantation in Northern Mississippi until the outbreak of the Civil War. In light of all that, I confess it seems strange to me how little I have been made to think about the past during the course of my life. Germans school kids have to watch endless movies about the atrocities their predecessors committed in the holocaust, but I don't remember ever having to watch any such film about my people and their mistakes. So, over the years, it has been something I have done on my own. My good friend Yemi, from Nigeria, and I have even discussed how different our relationship might have been had we met 200 years ago.
I visited my friend Josh recently and had a chance to think this all over a bit more. Josh studies law at Ole Miss, and the drive to Oxford, MS, takes you through a beautiful countryside full of pine trees and red clay hills. It was eery to be driving there after dark, with only my headlights interrupting the night, and to imagine what it would be like to suddenly find myself a hundred years earlier at that same spot, at the sight of some midnight Ku Klux Klan rally, or two hundred years earlier, at the sight of some hunt for an escaped slave, maybe even led by my great-great grandfather. A new CD played in my car the whole way, and it repeated the song “O Freedom” over and over as I traveled.
There’ll be singing, there’ll be singing There’ll be singing over me And before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave And go home to my LORD and be free
I can’t help but be conflicted at the ways the concept of “what God wants” has been twisted both for and against people’s freedom. On the one hand, this famous slave song captures the belief of slaves across the country that God would vindicate their suffering and actualize their hopes. The former slave and influential statesman Frederick Douglass made a huge contrast between “the Christianity of this land and the peaceful Christianity of Christ”. On the other hand, how many church-goers and church leaders honestly thought that putting people in bondage to them was a part of “what God wants”? And how many of them just used it as an excuse?
While this chapter was coming together, I had a hard time avoiding the question: Have I become just another slavery preacher, updated for the 21st century, using some kind of pseudo-religious reasoning to smooth talk you into giving up your rights and dignity? I wrote it off for a while thinking it was just in my head or that the analogy was too drastic to fit. Then, while I was doing my research, I read a book by a man named Friedrich Nietzsche, and in that book he made the dramatic statement:
A predominant characteristic of Christianity is its hate of freedom.
This was a jab in the face to me. But I now realize it may be what some people have been feeling all along. The decision to do and want "whatever God wants" sounds good on one level, but on other levels it seems very restricting. You might go as far as to say we become a little bit less human by trying to be 'happy' humans. "What is left of us when we give away all our freedom to someone else?", Nietzsche seems to ask.
So I stopped to think about it all for a while. And I realized something that you probably realized a long time ago. Life is a referendum on the type of freedom a person wants to have. We exchange one for another. Wars can usually be explained by looking at how people prefer safe streets over free elections or how they prefer the unity of their nation over the freedom to divide into independent countries. And for that matter, we are all enslaved to something. We willingly and gladly enslave ourselves to our spouse, our kids, and to the causes that we feel are important. The only thing that matters when you realize this is to know which freedoms you want the most. And so the chapter got all the more interesting for me based on those realizations.
The Anti-christ
Nietzsche called his book "the Antichrist" because he was trying to imply his way of doing things was the polar opposite of Jesus' way. But you realize he was actually doing more than that when you hear what meant by "freedom." Usually we think about freedoms as things that the government grants us the right to do or "innate" rights that we have because we are human. Nietzsche was talking more about a permission that we give ourselves. For example, in the book I was reading, he asks himself the question "what is good?" He answers it by saying:
Everything which increases the feeling of power in an individual…
Nietzsche and I have different answers. And he is dead, so you can't watch him live out his principles. But the philosophy is alive and well today, and it's not hard to see it in practice.
My great-great grandfathers probably understood this "liberating" feeling of freedom every time they yelled at slaves for talking out of turn. And sixteen year olds feel this kind of freedom when they cuss their parents out or key the car of some guy at school that they can't stand. They give themselves the permission to do whatever makes them feel in charge and actualized. But insofar as slave owners and sixteen year old kids think they are really on to something by taking this path, I think it is a letdown. I have experienced the life. Nietzsche only emancipates us into a lonely, self-centered world where we are all dictators. That world will not make us happy forever, so it's not the one I'm looking for.
I know Friedrich Nietzsche is a big name in philosophy and that he wrote really intriguing books, but as I got down deeper into his work, I found his ideas petty and unoriginal. His main accomplishment was bringing the mindset of pedophiles and wife-beaters to the university classroom and making them seem cool and risqué instead of cruel and demented. That's why every Nazi soldier went into battle with a copy of one of his books.
I experience the types of "freedoms" Nietzsche talked about all the time. They're not foreign and revolutionary. They are my natural inclination. They are everyone's natural inclincation. That's why we have laws to discourage people from acting that way and prisons to lock them up when they don't. And whether you end up on death row or in the executive boardroom by living for this "whatever I want" mantra, I don't think it will make you happy. Or that you will actually be free in any sense that you are not free now.
The Anti-Nietzsche
Following the "opposite" way, the one I have been suggesting so far, is very different. So I agree with Nietzsche on that point. Instead of "being your own man" you put someone else in the driver's seat. And there's another difference. Instead of simply changing the way he thought, I think in Jesus' life, living perfectly for what God wants changed who he was and what he could do. Instead of "freedom" as some shift of internal perspective, I think Jesus experienced freedoms that were more like "abilities", and that those abilities grew out of his commitment to do and want what God wants.
That's the conclusion I came to one afternoon in Nowheresville, Illinois, when I stopped at a diner and read through the story of his life. I took notes about the things that happened in Jesus' life and the responses he had to those events; the "freedoms" or "abilities" seem latent in the way he was able to react. You can judge for yourself, but it sounded to me like the freedoms he lived out are the same ones everybody today is crying to have but which, for whatever reason, they all fail to get. So, while we are on the topic, maybe you would enjoy hearing a bit more about them.
(The videos below don't necessarily relate to the paragraphs they follow, but hopefully will give you a glimpse into the summer!)
The problem with waiting too long to write a newsletter is that summarizing everything just gets harder with time. I had several “first day of the rest of your life” moments in Leipzig. And I had some pretty frustrating times too. But it was worth all the effort, and I am thankful to have so many of you who ask about the experience and who prayed for me while I was there. Let me try to mention the things worth hearing about that have happened since I wrote last time.
(Interview with My Hostess: Part 1)
Preaching was without a doubt the highlight of my time in Leipzig. I have really developed a love for it, even though it is overwhelming each time, and finally being able to preach in German was the thrill of the summer. I preached three separate times, and each was interesting. In one service, my sermon was prefaced by a congregant’s epileptic seizure (with foaming at the mouth) and a long, angry speech by another congregant about how the church should “sing more songs he knows”. Following the man’s speech, my friend Reinhard leaned over to me and said, “Ben, I wish you God’s wisdom for your sermon” and smiled.
(Interview Part II: The English Translation)
I was really affirmed by the congregations each time, despite those kinds of distractions. One of the pastors told me over lunch that preaching was obviously my gift and that I should keep it central to my ministry. He said he hoped that I would come back through his area and preach at his church again sometime. I hope to do so.
(An Afternoon with Theo, Sabine's grandson)
As far as the more general work in Leipzig, I took part in essentially every ministry of the church: kids Sunday School, middle school group, youth group, elders meetings, pastor get-togethers, weekly small groups, even mother and baby mornings. I led worship for a church-wide breakfast (in German, in harmony!) and organized kids ministry activities for an ecumenical “Park Service” that we had. Each experience was stretching, especially since I was working with so many age groups at the same time (I once taught 4 different age groups in one week). For my part, it takes some gear-shifting to transition from 8 year olds in Sunday school to folks in their mid-fifties in small groups.
(A Glimpse of Leipzig)
Toward the end of my time in Leipzig, several friends came into town from another part of Germany and led a summer “Day Camp”, the same one that I helped out with last year. My two friends, who were leading the group of youth responsible for the camp, asked me if I would go in and rewrite the small group Bible studies and teach them each night to the students who would be leading them. That was a very rewarding job, and it was great to see them put into action the next day. I sat in one group of about 8 kids on Thursday, and after the discussion, asked the group, “Now, I’m just curious. Who here could say, ‘You know, I’ve never really heard anything like this in my whole life about God wanting a relationship with me’?” Five of the eight raised their hands. It was great to be doing such pioneer work.
(A Glimpse of the Room Where We Met)
I left Leipzig and spent a week in Berlin, which I am convinced will be my home in the not too distant future. I felt incredibly well there and found the people to be among the friendliest Germans I had ever met. From Berlin, I left to go visit two of my mentors. As my time at seminary winds down, all of these plans about ministry will need to start taking shape, and several German leaders have been helpful (and patient enough) to listen, encourage, and critique my ideas. The first meeting was very helpful, and the second had to be cancelled unfortunately, as one of the men was having tests run on suspicion of cancer. Please say a prayer for him.
(Visiting a Famous Camp in the West for Ideas)
I have several prayer requests. For a while now, I have been having a hard time with the whole concept of intercessory prayer. It has not made sense to me why I need to pray, and I guess in truth I have been doubting the effectiveness of prayer. God has really helped me, even in the course of the last few days of prayer and study, to understand things a bit more clearly. But there are still very important things to work through. So please pray that this semester, even more than the previous ones, will be a season of very practical studies and reflection, and that it will be time that affects my life, affects my ministry, and affects people who, right now, have no relationship with Jesus.
Thank you so much for your prayers. I need them now as much as I have ever needed them. Please pray that I will stay on task, that my motivation for all the work will be purified, and that I will find joy in the present. Let me know what is going on in your lives and how I can pray for you too. I feel out of the loop. Hope to hear from you soon! Let every moment of your life be a moment of God’s story.
As graduation nears, my primary preoccupation has been completing the overhaul of the missions fellowship I lead at Trinity. When I became the leader, I got together with past presidents and, after brainstorming about the group’s problems with them, decided to tweak the setup. So we renamed the group (now “The International Missions Fellowship”) and moved some things around. God has opened doors for us and we have gone from being a student led fellowship of 5 or 6 to a faculty-sponsored fellowship with exciting, well-attended weekly meetings and major events on national radio. On Thursday, over 100,000 people will hear a nationwide broadcast, on Moody Radio, of a panel discussion I organized for our missions fellowship (4:08 CST). Please pray that I will be able to solidify this new arrangement and that the relationship we have with Moody Radio, which has expressed interest in broadcasting our next two events, will be shored up before I leave.
I graduate on December the 18th, and I am surprised at my own excitement about the event! After graduation, I will spend a few weeks at home with family, and then plan to head to Germany, where I will be trying to hammer out the details of my work there, build partnerships, and also film a support DVD. People going on overseas assignment very often have big plans but few ways of assessing their abilities to put those plans into action. By way of this trip, I hope to sit down with some of my mentors and co-workers, revisit my plans with them, and then film their answers to the question: “Can Ben, with God’s help, pull this off?” If you have interest in the ministry at all, please let me know and I’ll send you a copy of the DVD, which will explain my plans, present the interviews with mentors, and give my answers to the “top ten questions” I get about work in Europe.
As mentioned above, I spent all last week in Monument, Colorado, in training and being briefed on the ins and outs of the organization I will be working with. It was an intense time, with 12 hour days and plenty of things to chew on. But I am confident I have found a respected and reputable group with whom to associate myself and look forward to partnering with them and with churches all over Germany in my ministry.
I have now come to that phase in my preparation during which I raise both prayer and financial support. It is an exciting time for me and I hope you will be in prayer for me and for the conversations and partnerships I will build during this season. If you yourself are interested, or you know of a church or an individual who might be interested, in helping support my work in Germany by partnering with me in prayer and finances, please pass this newsletter on to them and their name on to me. I would love to meet to share my story, especially if with those who have a particular interest in Europe.
