Regent College

Without a doubt, our times at Regent College’s Summer Schools have been some of our best times as a married couple.  We loved the diversity of course offerings, the multi-ethnic and multi-national faculty and student population, the afternoons in the park or on the beach, the deep conversations and the new friendships. Over a series of summers, we not only ticked away at graduate credits, we learned so much about God, ourselves, the world, the Scriptures, and our place at the intersection of them all.

My personal course highlights included: History of Science and Belief (now called, by the looks of it, Science and Christianity: Retrospect and Prospect, and being offered this summer), with Mark Noll and David Livingstone (absolutely transformed my view of how we engage science);  The Triune God of Grace (or some such title), with James Houston and James Torrance; and The Spirit, the Kingdom, and the People of God, with N.T. Wright, Gordon Fee and David Hansen.

If you can make it to Vancouver this summer for a week or two, you will not regret diving into the Summer School program.  If you wonder what sort of stuff the Regent summers are made of, here’s a sampling of some talks you can enjoy.

Sadly, I can’t make it to Summer School this year. But if I was, here’s a few courses I’d be interested in taking:

Spring Session:

1. Christopher Wright, God’s Word, God’s World, and God’s Mission: Reading the Whole Bible for Mission, May 9–13

2. James M. Houston, Living Elders in a Dying Church, May 23–27

3. Iain Provan, Living with Beastly Empires: The Book of Daniel, May 30–June 10

4. Loren Wilkinson and Mary Ruth Wilkinson, Gardening the City of God, June 5–17

Summer Session:

1. Alister McGrath, Truth, Beauty, and Imagination: Christian Apologetics in a Postmodern Context, June 27–July 1

2. Paul Williams and Paul Oslington, Christianity and the Political Economy of Capitalism, June 27–July 8

3. David Downing, The Fiction of C.S. Lewis, July 25–29

I highly recommend Regent College, period. From our ministry and theology to the very books we read with our children–dare I say, our very direction in life–has been shaped by the relationships built, the understandings gained, and the worldviews challenged at this great school.  And it all started in the summers. Hope you can make it to Summer School this year.

You are invited to Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship’s

Partnership Thank-You
Grande Prairie Evening

Wednesday, April 6th
7:00 PM 

Grande Prairie Church of Christ
(Highland Park), Fellowship Hall
9602 92nd Ave
Grande Prairie, AB

At a recent student retreat, I had the privilege of speaking and leading in Scripture study.

As you know, I’m leaving Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship at the end of April. I am thrilled to come back to Grande Prairie and formally say “Thank-you” to the community who sent me into the work of IVCF in the first place, and has partnered with us in the work ever since.  Please join us in the Fellowship Hall of the Grande Prairie Church of Christ (Highland Park) for a time of coffee and fellowship.  I will share some reflections on the work, and update you on our next kingdom venture.

Can you come? We’d love to see you there.  You can RSVP by emailing me here (though drop-ins last minute are welcome!). For more information, please don’t hesitate to email me or call me at 403.998.8525.

I look forward to seeing you in early April.

Thank-You & Welcome
_________________

Calgary Evening

Bow Valley Christian Church
5300 53 Avenue Northwest
Calgary, AB

Thursday, February 24th
7:00 PM

Hosted by: Tom Greentree
Introducing: Jon Lim

As you know, I (Tom) will be leaving IVCF in April. I want to invite you to come out for an evening so we can thank you personally for your partnership over the years we have worked in Calgary.  I’d also like to introduce you to my friend and colleague, Jon Lim, who will be taking up the post of Campus Ministry Director in my place. Jon comes with over ten years of IVCF ministry experience, and I’m thrilled he’s coming to Calgary to continue leading the work here. That’s why we are calling this evening “Thank You and Welcome,” because it’s designed to do both of those things: to thank you, and to welcome Jon.

There will be an opportunity to hear my reflections on the past six years of student ministry, as well as Jon’s heart for the student ministry as it moves forward.  Susie Colby, Inter-Varsity’s Western Field Director for Campus Ministry, will be also be sharing in our evening together.

Can you come? We’d love to see you there.  You can RSVP by emailing me here. For more information, please don’t hesitate to email me or call me at 403.998.8525.

Hope to see you on February 24th!

Tom Greentree
PS. For my friends in Grande Prairie, look for an invitation to a “Thank You” evening in early April.

Professor John Stackhouse, Regent College

John Stackhouse of Regent College has a great blog I recommend you check out (and subscribe to).  His recent post on “Conversion Narratives” about Gender includes his contribution to a new book on exactly that: how people have moved from a patriarchal understanding of gender to an egalitarian one.  I’ve also read his Finally Feminist and found it helpful.

Due to his wide reach, people from all over the globe read and contribute comments to his blog posts. As such, it has become a locus of meaningful, evangelical conversation that I know we need.  John is an excellent moderator and catalyst to the ongoing dialogue.

Thanks, John, for all the hard work you put into this blog.

What do I mean? Say a young adult comes to a ministry leader with some questions (let’s call them Jim and John).  Jim (the young adult) asks a series of questions and by the time he has finished his first cup of coffee, John (the ministry leader) thinks “Oh, I’ve heard this before, dozens of times. I know exactly what he needs” and then proceeds to wax eloquent on what Jim should do or think.  John leaves the coffee assuming he has heard Jim and helped him.  Jim exits stage left more confused than ever.

Why? Because John hasn’t actually heard Jim — he’s heard a combination of his own experiences with a “type” who resembled Jim and a figment of his current imagination.  No one is helped, friends. No one.

Now, I know that the longer you live life, the more similar people can seem.  You’ve seen this scenario played out many times, you can recall people “just like this,” you’ve dealt with this before.  And your experience can help you.  It truly can. Thank God for the discernment and insight that comes from the years of experience.

Unless you begin to simply treat people as another manifestation of type of person and fail to treat them as the unique persons they really are, with their own sacred stories, their own experiences and culture and  dreams and calling.

Unless we stop listening, both to the Spirit and to the person in front of us.

When we fall into that trap, we need to stop ourselves and get re-oriented with the way Jesus helped people. Jesus, who knew the hearts of people, never failed to treat each person as a unique individual. Never.  Look how he spoke into their lives and to their deepest selves, how he loved and engaged the real person.

And that more than helped them.  It changed their lives.

Can the church learn anything from the business world? And if so, what?

Let me highlight one little quote to whet your appetite. You’ll have to read the whole article to get the context.

In spite of the stereotype of evangelicals as rigidly conservative, says Rice University sociologist D. Michael Lindsay, “they have long been some of the earliest adopters of technologies and strategies,” from fire-and-brimstone evangelists on the radio in the 1920s to Pat Robertson on satellite TV to megachurch-friendly PowerPoint displays replacing hymnals. Willow Creek’s embrace of business strategy “is a 21st-century version of that. They know that churches have to change with the market shifts going on around them. If they don’t, they die,” Lindsay says. “Relevance is fundamental for their message to be legitimate.”

Hmmmm . . . provoked?

In a simple phrase: “I’m sorry.”  Sorry if I’ve offended you, sorry if you heard me wrong, sorry if I look funny, sorry if I spoke too loud, sorry for saying sorry. (Oops, sorry.)

And so when it comes to evangelism, we find ourselves stuck.  Evangelism, by definition, involves communicating through our words and our actions, the good news that Jesus is alive, that Jesus is King, and that all people should come under Jesus’ good authority and live a new life in him.

We step in front of other people and actually engage them on the big questions of life, telling them about Jesus and his new kingdom life. And we risk making someone uncomfortable, or even inconveniencing someone.  How dare we?

A vibrant kingdom life is contagious, yet we often remain quiescent out of a sense that we may offend someone. We might betray a deep societal norm and be inappropriate by talking about something someone may not be comfortable with discussing.

We need to get over ourselves.  We need to get less apologetic about our apologetics, to employ a turn of phrase. We might feel like we are doing something “wrong” when we talk about Jesus to our neighbour– that’s because our deeply enculturated sense of “right and wrong” is squeezed through the door of “culturally appropriate behaviour,” which means “never offend, never make anyone uncomfortable, and say sorry the whole time you are doing it just in case you are inadvertently doing something you weren’t aware of.”

This is the gift of life we are talking about. This is the invitation of God to all of creation. This is Jesus, friends. And we are worried we might make someone feel uncomfortable?

We hear people talk about it all the time (and with Eastwood’s new movie Hereafter now out, it would be good to get a grip on what the Bible does and does not say about the “hereafter”).

Here’s a great little interview with the eminent Tom Wright on the question of heaven.  Take a moment and enjoy. He nails it (IMHO).

Spoiler Alert: He says we are not going to heaven.

So read his post and then I’ll go on with my addition to this encouragement in the realm of the church.

When you discover that one class after another has so many people in a giant room watching a tenured professor far far in the distance, perhaps you could mention the debt part to the dean and ask if the class could be on video so you could spend your money on interactions that actually changed your life. – Seth Godin, from the linked post

But is it only professors who need a push back against mediocrity? No.  I think pastors and teachers do, too.  You may not be paying a fortune to sit under the teaching of a local pastor (though many give generously), but you are there, listening, and rightfully expecting that the teacher/pastor is someone who is on top of his or her area of study.  You are right to expect that if a pastor or teacher is going to be doing some teaching on Romans or Genesis or whatever, they are up on the best of the scholarship in that area and are able to effectively communicate that in an informational and (with the Spirit’s power) transformational way. Furthermore, we should expect that if a person is being paid to be a primary teacher in a community (and hopefully even more relevantly is serving under the call of God!), then they should be, by definition, a life-long, constantly engaged learner. Sadly, this is not always true.  Even more sadly, due to the general lack of biblical knowledge and theological wherewithal, many pastors and teachers can bluff along (they are usually good talkers) in such a way that the average congregant can’t quite put their finger on what is missing.  But something is.

Am I sounding critical?  It’s just that God’s Spirit-filled community deserves to be taught by passionate, learning, gifted people. And the Bible, well, do you really want someone teaching that greatest of all books who stopped learning years before, who already decided what’s to be said before reading it, who is just coasting along on old and past conversations but has effectively forgotten the vibrancy and lost the passion for the Biblical story today?

Push back against mediocre professors, for sure. But push back against mediocre pastors and teachers, too.

But just remember: you can’t push back unless you are willing to be pushed yourself.  Because you will be.