Ministry for Life: Four Pillars, One Purpose
Not long after I had entrusted my life to Jesus Christ at a Vacation Bible School at the age of 8 and was baptized into Christ by my pastor Bill Pinson at the age of 9, my family moved from Wichita Falls, Texas, where I was born and lived for the first 12 years of my life, to Meridian, Texas, a country community some 45 miles northeast of Waco.
In Meridian, I became very involved at the First Baptist Church, where my father, a banker, served as a deacon. In addition to being there “every time the church doors were open,” as they used to say, I began to serve as the church’s custodian when I was 14 (and I sometimes directed the music, when the church was in a pinch). I learned a great deal from my pastor, Richard Creech, and from the church’s youth ministers, including Mark Wright and Jeff Lethco. It was also there where I first began to sense a stirring and a calling to ministry as I worshipped, studied, and served.
During the summer before my freshman year in high school, I attended a Super Summer Youth Camp at Baylor University sponsored by the Baptist General Convention of Texas. During that camp, I dedicated my life to special or vocational service, as it was then commonly called. While it was unclear to me what God might be calling me to do and how I might be gifted, it was crystal clear he was calling me into some kind of ministry. While far from a Damascus Road encounter with the Risen Jesus, I have been led to my own Straight Streets and have had my own Ananiases along the way (see Acts 9:11-12).
My call to ministry would grow in intensity, though not necessarily in clarity, as my family moved from Meridian to Waco during the summer before my junior year in high school. Worship and participation in youth group activities at First Baptist Church, Waco, and at First Baptist Church, Woodway, enabled me to learn, to worship, and to share regularly. I was even asked to preach on a few occasions when there were youth-led services. I am most grateful that our preaching faculty do not have access to those sermons. Underdeveloped and poorly preached, they undoubtedly were, but most people, including my peers, were gracious and encouraging to me.
Upon graduation from Midway High School (Go Panthers!), I attended Baylor. While studying Greek and sociology, I was actively engaged in ministry both on and off campus. On campus, I attended and participated in a Bible study led by Louie Giglio, known as Choice; off campus, I served as a Sunday School teacher, pastoral intern, youth minister, and college and career minister at churches in and around Waco as well as in northwest Houston during the summer.
After graduating from Baylor, I headed to a seminary in Fort Worth. While still uncertain regarding what God had gifted and was grasping me to do, I was convinced that a call to ministry was a call to prepare for ministry. I knew, therefore, that seminary was the next faithful step for me. So, I stuffed my small car with some clothes and books and moved from Jerusalem on the Brazos to Cowtown USA, which I grew to love and still do, TCU notwithstanding. Just joking (sort of).
The seminary I attended was massive. Following commencement, I, like most all other MDiv graduates, was left to fin for myself regarding placement. For me, an added challenge was that I did not know what direction to go, and frankly, the range of options only compounded my indecision and even confusion. Having been smitten in seminary by Pauline Studies under the influence of Prof. E. Earle Ellis, however, in the autumn of 1992, my wife, Carolyn, and I made our way to Glasgow, Scotland, with not a little apprehension, some trepidation, and six bags stuffed full of stuff so that I might pursue a PhD at the University of Glasgow under the direction of Dr. John M.G. Barclay.
While pursuing a PhD in New Testament Studies, I also began to serve as the pastor of Uddingston Baptist Church. Uddingston is a village located 7 miles southeast of Glasgow’s city center. Carolyn and I would live in that community in the church’s manse or parsonage, named “Shalom,” until we returned to Texas at the end of 1994 so that I might take up an appointment teaching at Dallas Baptist University in the spring of 1995.
Upon reflection, my calling was beginning to take shape. I was to serve as a scholar pastor, as a teacher of and for the church. Furthermore, after serving for three years on faculty at Gardner-Webb University’s School of Divinity in Boiling Springs, NC, I also became convinced that the LORD was calling and leading me to be a theological educator. For 25 years now, 22-plus years at Truett, I have sought to lean into and live out that calling.
Baylor University began in 1845 in Independence, Texas. The most recognizable architectural remains from Baylor in Independence are four reconstructed stone pillars from the female college building, which was constructed in 1857. As I reflect upon my own story, I can see readily the four pillars named in the Ministry for Life initiative we announced late last year and are launching today. Many others, both present here and watching online this morning, could do similarly. Many more to besides could reflect thoughtfully and theologically on their call to ministry and upon their educational preparation for the same.
The Ministry for Life initiative and program, which is integral to and constitutive of who we are as a seminary, is being made possible financially by the Lilly Endowment and is being made viable and operational by our partners in mission and ministry. I would like to thank personally and publicly both Lilly for funding the grant and our various partners for accepting our invitation to join us in the implementation of the grant.
I would also like to recognize here a few Truett colleagues who did the lion’s share of the work in writing and submitting the grant, including Drs. Angela Reed and Jack Bodenhamer, who will serve as co-principal investigators for the grant; Beth Ann Hargis, who worked with Polymath, a creative agency, to present the grant to Lilly both beautifully and persuasively and who will continue to help us to communicate and celebrate the grant and its impact; and Brittany Myers, for serving as the manager of the grant application. I should also mention by name Dr. Michael Mauriello, who helped in writing the grant, which was 113 pages in length when submitted, and Evan Taddia, who was helpful in getting the grant’s finances sorted out.
Baylor’s Office of the Vice Provost for Research and Office of Advancement also assisted at various points along the way in preparing and submitting the grant. It not only takes a village to raise a child, but it also takes a village to conceive, compose, submit, and execute a grant of such scale, size, and substance. It is a monumental task, and our seminary is truly grateful. Before long, Truett will hire three full-time staff members with grant monies to coordinate and facilitate the grant.
The lunch following this convocation service will provide an opportunity for Drs. Reed, Bodenhamer, and Mauriello to share additional details regarding the grant and to introduce our grant partners. For my part, for the remainder of this address, I would like to name the pillars upon which the grant is based. Additionally, I would like to reflect briefly upon each of the pillars as well as upon the name of the initiative and how it came about in the first place.
During that dreadful stretch of history, which we now call COVID, I grew increasingly concerned about the well-being of ministers, including several of our graduates and friends. Beyond physical health concerns, I was unsettled by the pervasiveness of mental health challenges among ministers and by the polarization that was sweeping our nation and was coming home to roost in churches. I was also reading and observing that ministers were burning out and were leaving ministry with increased regularity. They were pivoting as the pandemic required, but often in ways I wished they would not. All too many were throwing in the proverbial towel and leaving ministry altogether. If what I was witnessing and what others were experiencing was a vicious cycle, I begin to wonder aloud what a virtuous cycle of ministry might look like. It was at that point in time that the idea of ministry for life began to take shape. Lilly’s announcement that they would be extending their Pathways for Tomorrow Initiative by funding large-scale collaboration grants of up to $10 million provided just the opportunity for which we were looking to give this fledgling idea life and legs.
The phrase “ministry for life,” as we are employing it, is a double entendre. First and foremost, it refers to ministry that is life-giving. Time and again in the New Testament, and especially in the Gospel of John, 1 John, and Revelation, Jesus is identified as the source of life, and those who believe and live in him are given life abundant and everlasting. As Dan DeHann puts it in The God You Can Know, “Jesus did not come to make bad people good, he came to make dead people live.” And, as St. Francis so aptly put it in his prayer, “It is dying that we are born to eternal life.”
In the text that Dr. Mauriello read earlier from Galatians 2, the Apostle Paul declares that he had been crucified with Christ. He was there when they crucified the Lord of glory (see 1 Corinthians 2:8). But Paul does not stop there. Having been plunged into a watery baptismal grave, where he was buried with Christ and united with him into a death like his (Romans 6:4-5), Paul maintains that it is no longer he who lives, but it is Christ who lives within him. As he puts it in Philippians, “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21).
Paul continues in Galatians 2:20b-21, “Now the life I live in the flesh, I live by faith in (and/or by the faithfulness of) the Son of God, the one who loved me and gave himself for me.” “I do not nullify the grace of God,” Paul declares, “for if righteousness may be gained through the law, then Christ died needlessly.” But righteousness does not, and Christ did not. Whatever else our respective ministries are to be, they are to be life-giving, for our Lord is alive, and “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
By “ministry for life,” we are not only suggesting that ministry should be life-giving, but we also expressing our hope that one’s ministry will be long-lasting. Life in ministry is to be both transformative and durative. Over the Christmas break, perhaps you, like me, were both surprised and saddened to learn that a very well-known Christian author and speaker, himself married for 55 years, confessed to being engaged in an affair with a married woman for 8 years. I have no stones to throw, even as I confess afresh that I am, and we all are, “children of dust and feeble as frail.”
Yet, having first heard this news during a conference for evangelical seminary presidents and deans, we began to wonder with one another how we can live well, lead well, and finish well. How can we join Paul in buffeting our bodies and enslaving them lest we, having preached to others, might not be disqualified from ministry?
Truett Seminary is committed to gospel-centered ministry “that stands the test of time and stands when time is spent.” What enables, enhances, and empowers such ministry? The Ministry for Life program, which at the end of a five-year grant period will, by God’s grace, become a permanent center at Truett, is built upon four foundational, interrelated pillars.
- First of all, this initiative is focused upon shaping or cultivating cultures of call. This call is a call to follow Jesus as Lord and Savior, to be sure, but it is also a commitment to foster contexts both within churches and at camps and conferences where women and men at various stages of life are asked to consider if the Lord might be guiding, gifting, and grasping them for the work and witness of gospel, vocational ministry.
I am sometimes asked by well-meaning ministers and supporters why Truett does not graduate more students than it does. This question is typically driven not so much by criticism but by the observation and even the frustration that the demand for Truett graduates outstrips the supply of Truett graduates. After noting that we are training and graduating more students than at any other point in our tender 31-year history, that this term we will surpass 2,000 graduates who are currently serving in 46 states and 22 countries, and that our placement rate perennially lands around 95%, I ask them to join me in praying that the Lord of the harvest will send more workers into his harvest (Matthew 9:38).
I will sometimes go on to say that Truett is not in the calling business but we are in the equipping business and that our mission is “to equip God-called people for gospel ministry in and alongside Christ’s Church by the power of the Holy Spirit.” While it is altogether true that it is God who calls and that Scripture is replete with examples of such, it is no less true that our school can work with denominational, ecclesial, and organizational partners to help to create environments and opportunities for people to respond positively to God’s call upon their lives.
In response to the cliché, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink,” someone once quipped, “No, but you can give it salt.” In Ministry for Life, one of the questions we are asking and seeking to answer is this: how can we help to create spiritual environments that create such a thirst and to offer opportunities for people to respond positively to a call to ministry?
- Relatedly, and secondly, Ministry for Life is also focused upon educating the called. I often state that a call to ministry is a call to prepare for ministry. Given my role, some might regard this to be self-serving statement. While not void of self-interest, I will continue to contend that theological education is a bridge between call and competence. I am also wont to say that we need more, not fewer, theologically educated ministers whether they are educated at Truett or not. If we are going in good conscience to take, when applied to ministry not medicine, the Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm,” then we must become more fully formed into Christ’s image and likeness and more fully informed about and grounded in the faith delivered once and for all to the saints (Jude 3).
Whatever else Truett is, we are an institution of higher education. We do school. So, both during and beyond the Ministry for Life initiative, we will work with our faculty, staff, and partners to strengthen our existing degrees, certificate programs, and educational pathways and to begin new ones. While it is true that Truett has limited bandwidth due to our comparatively modest size and that we cannot become all things to all people lest we become nothing to anyone, it is also true that the founders and framers of our University intended to bequeath to posterity a school “fully susceptible to enlargement and development to meet the needs of all the ages to come.” While we do not want to get too far out on too many branches, neither do we want to sit on self-fashioned laurels patting ourselves on the back.
- What does it profit a person if they are well-trained for ministry but do not have meaningful or suitable opportunities to engage in ministry? This is the question we are seeking to address by making placing the educated the third pillar of Ministry for Life. Shaping cultures of call, educating the called, and placing the educated.
I am especially proud of our Office of Ministry Connections, which was begun in the fall of 2015 by Matt Homeyer, continued by Jack Bodenhamer, and now directed by Kenneth McNeil. They do good work and much work on behalf of Truett students, alumni, faculty, staff, and friends. They have helped to open literally thousands of doors for people pursuing their calling and seeking ministry positions.
Yet, as Paul said to the Thessalonians, we want to do so more and more (1 Thessalonians 4:1, 10). Through Ministry for Life, Truett intends to partner further with congregations, denominations, and organizations to place more well-trained ministers in meaningful, impactful ministry positions near and far, including increased numbers of paid residency opportunities, for the good and growth of the gospel.
- Before I run out of time and of steam, please allow me to note the fourth and final pillar of Ministry for Life, namely, supporting the placed. Shaping or cultivating cultures of call, educating the called, placing the educated, and supporting the placed. Happy, healthy ministries do not just happen any more than happy, healthy marriages do. Ministry is often exhausting and exacting; it can be isolating and even soul-destroying. But it need not be. Through the forming of additional ministry huddles, through further spiritual formation and direction for working ministers, through coaching and counseling, and through opportunities for continuing education and the like, the Ministry for Life initiative will partner with the Truett Church Network and a number of others outside of our Seminary to offer encouragement and resources to as many ministers as possible so that they will be able to fight the good fight, to finish the race, to keep the faith (2 Timothy 4:7).
Truett family and friends, the reason that ministry matters and that the Ministry for Life initiative matters is because people matter, and the life-giving, life-transforming gospel matters. As I was finalizing this convocation address, the oft-repeated refrain in the poem “Only One Life, ‘Twill Soon Be Past” by the English cricketer turned Anglican missionary to China, C.T. Studd, came to mind: “Only one life ‘twill soon be past; only what’s done for Christ will last.” May this truth continually shape the trajectory of our lives and ministries.
Between Christmas and New Year’s, Carolyn and I went to one of our favorite Texas cities, Fort Worth, to go to a special exhibit at the Kimbell Art Museum and to enjoy a meal together and a night away from our home, which had become a beehive of activity during Advent and Christmas. On our way home from Fort Worth, as we were driving down I-35 South, I asked Carolyn if she would like to take a drive through Southwestern Seminary’s campus. She said she would, for she had not been there since she had graduated with her MA in New Testament Studies. For my part, I have seldom been back on campus since graduating 35 years ago.
We are glad we took that detour if for no other reason than that as we drove away, we were able to say and to sing with Stephen Curtis Chapman:
As I look back on the road I travel
I see so many times He’s carried me through
And if there’s one thing that I’ve learned in my life
My Redeemer is faithful and true
My Redeemer is faithful and true
Everything He has said he will do
And every morning His mercies are new
My Redeemer is faithful and true.
What Dietrich Bonhoeffer said regarding grace may also be applied, it seems to me, to those who have been called by God for gospel work and witness: “It is costly because it costs us our lives. It is grace because it is for us the only true life.” Ministry is to be for life. May we be faithful and fruitful all the days of our lives to the one who is the source of life. Amen.