Ten years ago, Ode to Georgetown was my response to being surprised by grief when the only church I had ever pastored closed its doors. Last week brought the news that the theological college which I attended, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS), was to close most of its Chicagoland campus. I have been feeling a similar sadness once again.

And the memories of people come flooding back.

kantzer

My journey to TEDS started with a visit to the USA for the Urbana Student Missions Convention in 1979. It proved to be a decisive event in my life. While listening to John Stott expound Romans 1-5, I sensed God’s call to biblical preaching—and then, while listening to Billy Graham, calling us to commit our lives to mission, I held Barby’s hand for the first time! Every one among the 17,000 participants seemed to stand in response to that call. Wary of peer pressure at work, I remember Billy saying, “Some of you need to sit down”. We remained standing. I was just twenty years of age.

With that experience as a backdrop, we made our way up to Chicago. It was a Sunday afternoon. We were visiting close friends from the mission in which Barby was raised in North India (TEAM), Ralph and Nellann Seefeldt. Uncle Ralph, whom I remembered from my childhood as such a kind man, engaged me in conversation, gently pressing me on my future plans. “I am thinking about coming to the USA to do my theological training.” Uncle Ralph responded, “Oh, there is a man upstairs who stays with his wife in these apartments on weekends. They are from Trinity. Shall I give them a call? Maybe they’ll be free for a quick chat with you…”

And so it came to pass that I had a chat with ‘the man upstairs’—none other than Dr Kenneth Kantzer, the Nehemiah whom God used to shape TEDS into one of the world’s leading seminaries, as described in this piece. [NB: It is interesting to note that when John Stott started giving scholarships to PhD students (in what was to become the Langham Scholars programme), the only acceptable venue for study in North America was TEDS].

Two years later, we found ourselves in Ken and Ruth’s cell group. In the meantime, Ken pointed me in the direction of a former TEDS faculty member, Dr Murray Harris, who was now the Lecturer in New Testament at the Bible College of New Zealand, just 30 min from our home in Auckland. One afternoon, a few months later, Murray was assisting me with my application to TEDS—and to this day, 45 years later, continues to stand with us in our work with Langham.

porcella

Finance was always going to be an issue. Here the plot does some of its proverbial ‘thickening’…

Barby’s father just happened to have this friend. They were roommates at Wheaton College—Dr Brewster Porcella. Brewster just happened to be the Librarian at TEDS. Yes, you guessed it. I ended up having a job in the library throughout my time at TEDS. I had so much fun with Brewster. One day, during a morning tea break, it was he who explained to me the difference between fundamentalism and evangelicalism. And it didn’t stop with him and me. Brewster’s wife, Bonnie, worked at a medical center and she opened the way for Barby to get a job there, in an administrative role.

While I could not find a photo of Brewster, I did find this obituary online. Such a good man—even to the point of buying our (rust-bucket of a) car from us when we finished at TEDS. To this day I have my doubts about whether he actually needed it.

carson

Although the academic year started in September, I arrived early, in August 1981.

I was to discover that most of my MDiv peers were 8-10 years older than me, having already completed an undergraduate degree in Bible. My fragile little BSc in Organic and Radiochemistry, stacked as it was with mediocre Cs, was not going to help me much. So there I was, arriving early to take the ‘6 days-a-week for 6 weeks’ course, described by its survivors as “Suicide Greek” and during which time we were to master John Wenham’s Elements of New Testament Greek. I loved it, finding a greater facility with Greek than I ever did with Chemistry. “What on earth was I thinking?”, I still ask myself.

Two people made these weeks to be significant ones in my life. Let me start with the Teaching Assistant: a fellow Kiwi, Tony Plews. He’d write these cheery comments next to my mark on each daily quiz—and he has been cheering me on ever since. We’ve been colleagues through our years in theological education in New Zealand as well as in the Langham Partnership ministry—and the friendship continues on. In fact, Barby and I have a long weekend away with Tony and Judy planned for later this year.

Then there was the teacher: Dr DA Carson. After Suicide Greek, I was hooked. Once the academic year commenced I took every class with Carson that I could fit into my schedule. While the rest of the world was to experience the brilliance of this man soon enough, I was thriving on a more embryonic version. I was 21 years of age and Carson was shaping me for biblical exegesis in a similar way to how Stott had begun shaping me for biblical exposition.

Because I had done well with Greek, I decided to enrol in Carson’s Advanced Greek Grammar class, with the fruit of some student assignments making their way into the first edition of his Exegetical Fallacies. My assignment was not one of them. In fact when it came time to present our research to the class, I was timetabled to go first. Yikes. Talk about panic. I was a mess. I just couldn’t get a hold of the grammatical minutae I was to be mastering. I even had the gall to go to Carson and asked if my effort could be postponed. Nah. He doesn’t think like that… “You won’t be able to delay your Sunday sermon as a pastor. Stick at it.” The red letters at the top of my returned assignment seared their way into my life: “Because you went first, B+”. It was like a dagger. To me, at the time, it felt like a D+ is what I deserved.

It was an important moment in my life. I had come to TEDS to be equipped for a calling into pastoral ministry. But I found myself falling for the vocational fallacy that I have watched afflict so many students over the years. They became so enamoured with their professors. That inspiration morphs into an aspiration and ‘hey presto’, in a matter of months, they’ve lost sight of that rather mundane-looking calling to go back home and be a pastor. Now they are fantasizing about completing a PhD in the UK.

That searing disappointment jolted me back to my calling, just as another person entered my life.

larsen

I took the Pastoral Duties class about the same time as that Advanced Greek Grammar one. It soothed my troubled soul and buttressed my spirit for the next challenge in my training. I had been so scared of the three compulsory practical ‘labs’ to be taken alongside the Homiletics/Preaching class that I had left them for my final three quarters. I was feeling a similar brand of emotion as the one accompanying me on the way to the dentist, or when the pilot tells us to ‘fasten your seatbelt’.

For me, all these classes were taken with the same man: Dr David Larsen. With his booming voice, his dramatic flourishes, his rippling jowls and his note-free oratory, he could resemble something of a cartoon character.

And now, there he sat, in the back corner, as I ventured into my first sermon. Philippians 3.1-10. I can still hear his chortle when I made some crack about Gamaliel being the Apostle Paul’s ‘Carson and Larsen’. I guess he sensed by fear and hesitancy because afterwards he ‘laid it on thick’. I’ve got the comments in a box somewhere, but I just don’t remember tham as readily as Carson’s ones! He made it clear to me that the call of God on my life was to be a preacher. Although that call has morphed more into being a trainer of preachers, it was to become, by God’s grace, the common denominator in my working life ever since.

A few weeks later I received a note in my D-1097 postal box informing me that I had won an academic prize. Wow. Immediately, Larsen’s comments came back to me. Double Wow. Two plus two equaled five and I drew the obvious conclusion, “I’ve won a preaching prize at TEDS!”. I gotta be honest, to receive the Martin E Peterson Award, given to an international student showing potential, was a disappointment.

David Larsen would write me each year, handwritten in one of those old aerogrammes that we licked to seal shut—and always, at the bottom, next to his name, was written Micah 2.13.

(The shepherd) who breaks open the way will go up before them; they will break through the gate and go out.

kane

I returned to New Zealand after Urbana, armed with a book on becoming a ‘world christian’ titled In the Gap. It had fired me up. In that first year it formed the basis of a small group at Auckland University, where a group of 6-8 students in March became a camp with almost 100 students in August. Then, in the second year, we did it all again at my home church, Mt Albert Baptist Church. In later years, I remember being able to name 25 people who passed through one of those two groups on their way to following Christ’s call to serve cross-culturally overseas. It was remarkable. God was at work in my generation. But, rather ironically and a little sheepishly, I was not among those who went—not for some decades, anyway.

However, what it did mean is that by the time I reached TEDS a few months later, missions—I would have used the plural back then, rather than the singular form I prefer now—was a very big deal for me. And so to walk, with such an expectant spring in my step, into the Introduction to Missions course in my first quarter, only to be laid out by the bland and boring content … it all seemed such a travesty. “What are they trying to do, dishing up that stuff to a room full of future pastors?” I found solace in a class on the History of Mission from the veteran missionary with his own China Inland Mission story: Dr J Herbert Kane. I loved the twinkle in his eye, like when he testified to his 50 years of marriage being marked by “bliss and blizzard”. I’ve tried to use that one on Barby, but it never seems to turn out so well… What’s more, he understood me with my Indian upbringing as a ‘missionary kid’. He took a shine to me. In a battle with cancer at the time, Kane died just a few years later. I am so grateful he lingered long enough to pass through my life.

Although my agitation probably had little to do with it, the boring-Missions-class situation did improve with the appointment of Dr William Taylor to the faculty, although I note that he did not last at TEDS that long! Eventually, he ended up in the Missions Commission of the World Evangelical Fellowship, where he was to be mentored by my Dad—and then to write the Foreword in the book we had written on Dad’s life, Surprised by Obedience.

One joy about being an international student—and please don’t forget the bit about being an award-winning international student :)—was that it took me into the orbit of other international students.

carson (again)

I need to come back to Dr DA Carson. Yes, he was tough. Although I didn’t quite make the grade, academically—goodness me, I remember even entertaining silly fantasies of following Tony as his Teaching Assistant—he drew out the best in me. I thrived on it. It shaped me for life. In those early years of pastoral ministry it was as if I was wearing a WWCS bracelet on my wrist—”What Would Carson Say”. Back then, I remember feeling the unhealthiness of it all and the need to break-free, to ‘contextualise without compromise’ as I would proclaim to the mirror. But now? What about now? I look back and only see the healthiness of it all and the gracious hand of God at work in bringing that bracelet onto my wrist. For me, with Carson, I overheard a hint of the apostolic ‘Follow me, as I follow Christ’…

But not only was he tough, he was tender. I’ve often found myself needing to bear witness to this tenderness over the years. As a writer/speaker, the forum in which he is most commonly known, it is a more polemical Carson which people engage—like his withering response to the ’emerging church’, or his goading in The Intolerance of Tolerance—but I have experienced the pastoral Carson. Like the time he opened a class on 2 Corinthians 10-13 in prayer, only to break down in tears as he considered the terrain ahead of him. Or how, as a young pastor bewildered by the prevalence of the charismatic movement, he posted me the unpublished manuscript—a massive pile of double-spaced, single sheeted paper—of what was to become his Showing the Spirit. It pretty much answered all my questions and I have been at peace ever since.

I have a favourite Carson quotation. I am not sure it is in print anywhere, but it got printed in my heart and I’ve been trying to imprint it in the lives of numerous pastors-in-training ever since:

If people doubt your love for them, then no skills you have, no matter how spectacular they may be, will ever seem to be enough. However, if your people know you love them, beyond any shadow of doubt, then your skills can be decidedly unspectacular and they will be enough. God will do his work through them.

I know this is a longer post, yet again—but can I add one more story? A favourite quotation followed by a favourite story? Even David Larsen would be impressed by such a final flourish…

Of course I can. It is my blog after all 🙂

So, the ‘Big Don’ comes to New Zealand one Easter to speak at some little church in little Hamilton. That in itself says something about him. My daughter, Bethany, is at a Baptist Youth Camp not too far away. I suggest to her that I kidnap her on the Sunday evening and take across to hear Carson speak. He had no idea of my little plan. After the service—and a sermon on Nehemiah 3, which is not much more than a list of names—we hovered in the foyer, waiting our turn to speak to him. When that turn came, he addressed Bethany by name. How is that even possible? I think I know why. It is similar to the reason behind John Stott’s prodigious memory. These people are pray-ers. Not just when they open a public class on 2 Corinthians 10-13, but in private as well. Don and Joy continue to receive our quarterly prayer letter—and I have every confidence, after that experience with Bethany, that they have been faithful, persevering pray-ers for us over the years.

So, the decade of my twenties—starting at TEDS and finishing at Georgetown—shaped me like no other decade has done. As happens in the purposes of God, both these communities have encountered hard times. It has been sad. Both have put me into ode-mode…! But now, under God’s good hand, Georgetown is going well and we can expect God to work out his purposes for TEDS as it moves westward to become part of Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia, Canada.

I pray that each new generation of students encounters their own Kantzers, Porcellas, Carsons, Larsens and Kanes and, in doing so, experiences the gentle, gracious orchestration of their lives by a sovereign and providential God, whom they are able to celebrate 45 years hence, as I do.

nice chatting

Paul