by Matthew Pinson | Mar 30, 2014
I remember with fondness conversations I had with Dr. L. C. Johnson, the founding president of Welch College, before his death. He stressed to me the importance of educating all kinds of students, with all kinds of callings—those called into full-time ministry and those called to be salt and light in the other professions.
Ministry Education
Yet Dr. Johnson stressed to me that he believed that, at its center, the college was commissioned to provide education for ministers, missionaries, and other church leaders. Without a force of well-educated young people called to serve God in full-time church vocations, our churches would not survive. Thus the college had to provide these laborers.
This is still the case, and as our community of faith grows and we launch out into deeper and more difficult waters in this new cultural matrix, we need more vocational Christian ministers than ever before. We must dedicate ourselves anew to educating preachers of the Word who will take a firm stand for God and truth in an age when divine truth is hard to find, shepherds who will lovingly lead their flocks and feed them the good Word of God, evangelists who will speak words of reconciliation to those who are “without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world.”
We must commit ourselves to producing cross-cultural missionaries who will take the Gospel of God into dangerous and exotic places like Afghanistan and the Ivory Coast, or into places closer to home like the Nashville jails or urban Chicago.
Adapting Ministry Education to New Contexts
This will mean adapting our ministry education to new contexts. It will mean, for example, providing online ministry education for mid-career adults who have responded to God’s call to ministry yet in this current economic environment cannot pull up stakes and move their families to Nashville to attend college. This is why we have started offering fully online associate’s and bachelor’s degrees in Christian Ministry.
It will also mean moving into the arena of graduate theological education, beginning with an M.A. in theology and ministry and eventually moving into the establishment of a full-fledged Free Will Baptist theological seminary.
We remain committed to a full-orbed education that brings together an emphasis on Christian ministry education with a commitment to providing education across the disciplines and career fields. In this way our students will be enabled to respond to God as stewards of the gifts and callings He has given them, and be the leaders in the church and the world He has called them to be.
Beauty and Excellence
One thing Dr. L. C. Johnson said to me that will always stay with me was that he founded the college with a vision of cultural excellence. Perhaps this was why everything he touched gleamed with beauty and excellence and refinement.
This commitment to excellence was evident not only in his demand for gracious and considerate behavior for others—what is commonly called etiquette—but also in his appreciation of the arts. Our mission at Welch College must continue to be imbued with this sense of beauty and excellence and high cultural ideals.
People cannot be most productive in their vocation unless they are surrounded by beauty. Thus, we must commit ourselves to fostering a climate for the creation of beauty—from our teaching in the classroom, to chapel, to an ongoing emphasis on the arts—musical, dramatic, and visual—to beauty and elegance in the way we do our jobs, to the professional and personal etiquette we teach and model before our students.
A Historical Tension
Among Free Will Baptists there has always been a tension between anti-intellectualism and a Christian concern for the life of the mind. This tension existed among us as early as the middle seventeenth century. Two examples among our English General Baptist forebears are instructive: The London preacher Edward Barber reacted to being kept out of the schools of the Church of England by denouncing all humane learning. Yet the Lincolnshire farmer and tailor Thomas Grantham became an accomplished linguist, theologian, preacher, and writer through a sustained study of the Bible in the original languages, classical literature, and the Christian Fathers.
When Benjamin Laker, Paul Palmer’s father-in-law, moved to this side of the Atlantic in the late 1600s, he greatly valued his books on theology and other subjects, including Christianismus Primitivus, Grantham’s theological magnum opus. This same concern for education exhibited itself with the small band of worshippers Laker left behind after his death, who appealed to their brothers and sisters in England for either a preacher or for books—and this despite the fact that they and their posterity were kept out of institutions of higher education until late in the eighteenth century.
Zeal with Knowledge
This is the kind of tradition that has been perpetuated by Welch College throughout its history, and we remain devoted to this vision of Christian education. As Dr. Johnson said in a sermon, “Education is not to tame zeal, but to channel it.” We must renew our commitment to opposing that kind of zeal that is “not according to knowledge.”
Our Orthodox Tradition
A major strength of Welch College is that we remain firmly rooted in the Great Tradition of Christian orthodoxy our forebears have bequeathed to us with an unblemished inheritance of Christian faith and practice. The mediator of this tradition has been our churches that make up the National Association of Free Will Baptists. They have insured that we remain on a steady course of Christian orthodoxy and the faith and practice that our fathers and mothers believed—and we believe—most closely reflect the witness of Holy Scripture. Welch College must be a wise steward of that heritage of Christian confession—ensuring by rigorous Christian scholarship and spiritual vigilance that our inheritance remains intact in a new context of religious relativism.
Because of the debt of gratitude we owe to our churches, we must commit ourselves to serving them. Our college must not only be interested in what the denomination can do for it. We must be concerned about what we can do for our denomination. We must strive to instill in our students loyalty to our denomination and our confession of faith.
by Matthew Pinson | Mar 27, 2014
I want to share with my readers over the next few blog posts some thoughts about my vision as president for Welch College, and I want to start with some reflections on our tradition of faith and learning at Welch.
Stewardship of Our Tradition
I am convinced that anything great we accomplish at Welch College will depend on our stewardship of our tradition. Winston Churchill was surely right when he said, “The further backward you look, the further forward you can see.” We must face the future armed with the best of our heritage and with an understanding of our times that will enable us to contextualize our tradition to meet the needs of a new and complex era.
However, in our attempt to do this, we must not be caught up in contentment with the status quo. We must reach back within our tradition to recover a sense of identity that will enable us to be the Christian community of faith and learning that God has called us to be for our time.
Goethe said,
“What you have as heritage, take now as task,
for thus you will make it your own.”
I think Goethe’s wisdom is instructive for our college today. Only by intentionally working at an identity that maintains continuity with the past can we hope to have an identity that will give us meaning and purpose for the future.
Of course, this means that we cannot be satisfied just to rely on our recent memory—in our own lifetimes—and rely on the comfortable and the familiar. We must reach further back into our memory as a college and as a people of faith and recover principles and attitudes that motivated our forefathers to greatness for our Lord—what Timothy George has called “renewal through retrieval.”
Building on a Foundation
As president of Welch College, I am one who is building on a foundation that was laid by men and women who have given their lives in the work of God. They are too numerous to mention. Among the most influential of these have been the four presidents of the college: L. C. Johnson, L. R. Ennis, Charles A. Thigpen, and C. Thomas Malone. My aim is to be a faithful steward of the legacy these men have left to me.
We owe so much to President L. C. Johnson, the founding president of our college. His life and work has been an inspiration to us all, and it changed the course of history for Free Will Baptists. Dr. Johnson had the uncanny ability to bring together faith, reason, and life in an unusual way that profoundly marked the lives of countless people.
He founded this college at a time, during World War II and immediately following the Great Depression, when higher education was among the least of things on the minds of Free Will Baptists. Those were heady times for L. C. Johnson and that small band of teachers and students that surrounded him seventy-one years ago. A sense of anticipation was in the air. They were not afraid to take risks. With God strengthening them, they could do all things.
I can only imagine what must have been going through the mind of this twenty-eight-year-old pastor from South Georgia who had been chosen to lead this new Free Will Baptist college. Before he died, Dr. Johnson told me some things about those early years that will always remain with me, things I think should help us confirm our course for the future. Early on, he said, he opposed the narrowness of some in our churches who were pushing for a simple Bible institute model. He believed that we needed a broad-based liberal arts curriculum.
Educating the Whole Person
The best way to equip men and women to serve Christ and His church was to educate them in the Scriptures as well as the ancient tradition of liberal arts that stretches back to the Middle Ages and beyond. But just as strenuously, he insisted that all truth was God’s truth, and that these arts and sciences must be taught from the vantage point of a Christian worldview.
In those early years, most of the students were studying to be ministers and missionaries, though many went on to distinguish themselves in a host of other fields. Yet Dr. Johnson insisted on educating the whole person, body, mind, and spirit, from the vantage point of a Christian worldview. This was, he believed, the best way to produce Christian leaders in the churches who could transform their world with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
This is something that we need to emphasize more than ever at Welch College, especially given the fact that for half a century our college has been educating students in a variety of fields to serve Christ, His church, and His world. This is reflected in our Institutional Purpose statement, which states our commitment to “preparing men and women for church-related ministries or for careers that are not church related but are appropriate for Christians who live to serve Christ. In both cases the college is fulfilling the traditional Protestant vision of the sacredness of Divine vocation.”
Since the nineteen sixties, Leroy Forlines, Robert Picirilli, and others have been reiterating this grand dream of L. C. Johnson’s—the convergence of theological studies with a vision of the liberal arts and career preparation that is biblical-theological in focus. We must continue in this generation to make this dream a reality.
A Holistic Approach to Christian Higher Education
At Welch College we are resisting the call from so many in the Bible College movement to drive a wedge between theology and ministry on the one hand and the liberal arts and professions on the other. This approach sees the only justification for adding a field of study as being its usefulness for full-time church ministry—e.g., “We will offer a major in communications to prepare people to work at Christian radio stations.” We remain committed to the goal of producing Christian professionals who will be salt and light in the secular professions, taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.
At the same time, we must resist the call from others in the Christian higher education arena to relegating Bible and theology and ministry and church leadership to a single department, thus hermetically sealing it off from the rest of the campus. We want to continue to see theology as the “queen of the sciences.” Our desire is to produce graduates who have a solid grasp on the implications of biblical teaching for the Christian life, for the church, and for all of life.
I believe this holistic approach to Christian higher education will help us maintain our historic commitments while at the same time reaching out to more students. One of our greatest challenges is to reach out to the 90% of Free Will Baptist students who do not attend Free Will Baptist colleges. We must strive to give those called to non-church-related careers a keen sense of their divine calling and their unique place in fulfilling Christ’s Great Commission to His saints. By keeping the above aims in the center of our view, we can move forward in fulfilling this goal.
by Matthew Pinson | Mar 20, 2014
Two Groups
Now I want to stretch this passage a little to apply to two groups of readers. Some of you might be exactly like the rich young ruler, and you’ve never made any sort of real decision to follow Christ. You may have had some emotional experiences in the past. You may be good-hearted and honest and really think Christ has the answer, but you’ve never really been willing to give up what’s dearest to you to follow Christ.
But there are others of you who are certain you are a Christ-follower. You’re experiencing sanctification, growth in holiness. You’ve set yourself apart, consecrated yourself, for God’s pure and holy use. But you’re holding out on God. There are things in your life you’re just not willing to give up to follow him wherever he might lead you.
For both of you, right now is the most important time you’ll ever have to decide to follow Christ fully, to follow Christ with your whole heart, not half-heartedly. Jesus is calling on you to deny yourself, to bear his cross, to follow him wherever he leads you and never look back, never have any reservations, never have any regrets.
No Reserves
Many of my readers will remember the story of William Borden. In 1904 Borden graduated from high school. He was heir to the Borden family fortune, and received a trip around the world as a graduation present from his parents. His travels confirmed in him a desire to be a missionary. His friends and family were incredulous at his desire to throw himself away on the mission field. In response, Borden wrote two words in the back of his Bible: “No reserves.”
Borden was a spiritual leader on the campus of Yale University, where he chose to attend college, and he gained the respect of his fellow students for his singular devotion to give himself wholly to the service of Christ. While at Yale, one of his journal entries read: “Say ‘no’ to self and ‘yes’ to Jesus every time.” Borden started a small morning prayer group at Yale that resulted in a spiritual awakening on campus. One thousand of Yale’s 1,300 students were meeting in such prayer groups by the time Borden was a senior.
No Retreats
Borden sensed a calling to minister to the Muslim Kansu people of China. When he graduated from Yale, he turned down several high-paying job offers, and was derided by many people for his commitment to take the gospel to the ends of the earth. Never discouraged from his mission, he wrote two more words in his Bible: “No retreats.”
No Regrets
After graduating from Princeton Theological Seminary, Borden set out for Egypt. There he began to study Arabic so that he could preach the gospel to the Muslims to whom he was hoping to minister. But his efforts were to be short-lived. While in Egypt, he contracted spinal meningitis. Within a month, 25-year-old William Borden was dead. When his Bible was recovered, it was seen that he had written two more words in it. Underneath the words “No reserves” and “No retreats,” he had written: “No regrets.”
Questions We All Must Ask
All of us, no matter where we are in our spiritual pilgrimage, must ask ourselves this question: Will we be like the rich young ruler? Will we go away sorrowfully because we’re simply not willing to give up riches and status and anything that stands between us and service to God?
Or will we be like Peter, who said down in verse 28 of this chapter, “We have left all and followed you.” Jesus’s reply to Peter when he said that was that everything the disciples left behind to follow him would be restored “a hundredfold now in this time . . . and in the age to come.”
Will we be like William Borden, and follow God—“No reserves. No retreats. No regrets”?
Will we leave it all behind to follow Christ wherever he leads us? “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?”
Are we willing to leave it all behind?
The Things We Leave Behind
Michael Card sings a song about this very decision the disciples made to leave what was most important to them behind to follow Christ. Meditate on the message in these lyrics:
There sits Simon, so foolishly wise.
Proudly he’s tending his nets.
Then Jesus calls, and the boats drift away,
And all that he owns he forgets.
More than the nets he abandoned that day,
He found that his pride was soon drifting away.
It’s hard to imagine the freedom we find
From the things we leave behind.
Matthew was mindful of taking the tax,
Pressing the people to pay.
Hearing the call, he responded in faith,
And followed the Light and the Way.
Leaving the people so puzzled he found,
The greed in his heart was no longer around.
And it’s hard to imagine the freedom we find
From the things we leave behind.
Every heart needs to be set free
From possessions that hold it so tight;
For freedom’s not found in the things that we own,
It’s the power to do what is right.
With Jesus our only possession,
The giving becomes our delight.
We can’t imagine the freedom we find
From the things we leave behind.
We show a love for the world in our lives
By worshiping goods we possess
Jesus says, lay all your treasures aside,
And love God above all the rest.
Because when we say “no” to the things of the world
We open our hearts to the love of the Lord,
And it’s hard to imagine the freedom we find
From the things we leave behind.
Oh, it’s hard to imagine the freedom we find
From the things we leave behind.
Let us pray for the grace to scorn the things of this world—the riches and status and values of this present evil age that are vying for our allegiance. Let us take a hard look at our lives, at what is deeply important to us, and let us resolve to leave it behind, deny ourselves, take up our crosses, and follow Jesus, without reservation, never looking back. No reserves. No retreats. No regrets.
by Matthew Pinson | Mar 18, 2014
The Second Table
Jesus talks to the man about the second table of the law, the second table of the Ten Commandments. That second table talks about our duties to other human beings. And Matthew’s account gives Jesus’s summary of the second table of the law—“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” What Jesus was doing here was setting it up so that the young man could realize that his deeper heart attitude was not fulfilling the second table of the law, which is about self-denial and putting others first.
Keeping the Law
So how did the young man respond? Well, he doesn’t get it. He proudly boasts of his law-keeping: “Teacher, all these things I have kept from my youth.” Not only is this arrogant, but it also shows just how clueless he is about his own heart and life. He was fooling himself! He was deceiving himself! He was looking at the law in a shallow, surface way, one-dimensionally.
Jesus knew the young man’s heart, and he was challenging him to think deeply about how much he had really obeyed God’s law. Listen to how Jesus responds: He looks the man right in the face, and verse 21 says he “loved him.” I love the way Mark says that here: “Then Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him.”
Unmasking Self-Deception
Jesus loved this man just as he loves you and me, but in loving him he confronts him with the emptiness of his own spiritual pride and his own self-confidence. This doesn’t seem loving. But it’s the ultimate love. And Jesus lovingly unmasks the young man’s self-deception and says to him,
There’s one more thing you need to do.
Sell all you have, give it to the poor.
Take up your cross, and follow me!
The Law’s Deeper Meaning
Jesus’s whole point is that the young man doesn’t really understand the deeper meaning of the second table of the law. He doesn’t get it. He’s looking only on the surface. But Jesus is forcing him to look deeper. Do you really love your neighbor as yourself? Then give up all you have for your neighbors, and take up your cross and follow me!
Jesus’s point here is not that everyone has to give all his material possessions away to be a Christ-follower. He’s speaking directly to the young man’s most profound need. You see, the young man was really breaking both tables of the law. By not being willing to give up all he had for the poor, he was breaking the second table of the law, summed up by the command, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” But by not denying himself, taking up his cross, and following Jesus, he was breaking the first table of the law, summed by the command, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.”
Breaking the First Table
By not denying himself, taking up his cross, and following Jesus, the young man was breaking the first table of the law, summed by the command, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.”
Jesus is driving home to the young man the necessity of self-denial, cross-bearing. That’s what it takes to follow Christ.
Cheap Easy-Believism
Too many Christians in our time have adopted a mentality of what F. Leroy Forlines calls cheap easy-believism. It’s easy—just believe in Jesus, just say a prayer, and you’ll get a ticket to heaven. Your life doesn’t have to change, you don’t have to deny yourself, you don’t have to take up your cross. You don’t have to set yourself apart for God’s pure and holy and special use.
But this is not the way of Jesus. Instead, Jesus says, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?”
Not Willing to Give Up
But the rich young ruler wasn’t willing to give it all up to follow Christ. The text says he was “sad at this word.” This should make us sad, when we read these words: “But he was sad at this word, and went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.” He went away sorrowful, not willing to give up what was dear to him to follow Christ.
Christ is doing the same thing to you as he did to the rich young ruler—he’s calling you to sacrifice some of the very things that mean the most to you to follow him fully.
by Matthew Pinson | Mar 12, 2014
Over the next few blog posts, I want us to take a deep, honest look into our hearts. I want to consider a young man who came to Jesus but wasn’t willing to give up what was most important to him to follow Jesus. And I hope my readers will meditate prayerfully on this as we look at Mark 10:17-22, asking ourselves, “Am I like this young man?”
Parable Of The Rich Young Ruler
When we look at the character and background of this young man, we’ll find that he wasn’t really that different from a lot of us. Yes, we learn when we read the gospels of Matthew and Luke that he was both rich and influential. And our first reaction is, “Hey, I’m neither rich nor influential. After all, he was a rich young ruler!”
Rich and Influential
But think about that for a minute. Compared to most of the world’s populati0n throughout history, and even today, we’re all very rich. Think about it. We have goods and services and technologies that only kings could have dreamed about in a bygone age—and in third-world countries today. And even if we don’t have the money to buy what it seems like all our friends have, chances are, many of us are deeply tempted and motivated by material things.
What about the influential part? We might say, “I’m not a ruler.” But, in our culture, with the weird value it places on celebrity and popularity, many of us are tempted by status or popularity. So the background of this rich, influential young man, whose status and wealth was too important to part with, might not be as far away from our hearts as we might think.
Honest Seeker
What else do we notice about this young man? Well, he was an honest seeker, unlike the scribes and Pharisees. He came to Jesus, good-hearted and with positive motivations. You can see that in the way he approached Jesus: He really believed that Jesus was a good teacher and could reveal to him how to get eternal life. He seemed genuinely interested in his eternal destiny, and he had initial confidence in Jesus as a teacher and spiritual guide (v. 17). He even had a modicum of humility. Verse 17 says he knelt before Jesus. This young man was what we sometimes call a “good moral person.”
A Divided Mind
But he had a divided mind. Even though part of him respected Christ and believed Christ had the answer to how to get eternal life, another part of him really thought he knew the answer already. Part of him wanted to serve Christ. But another part of him wanted to trust in his own good works. Part of him wanted to follow Christ. But another part of him wanted to cling to the world.
This reminds me of St. Paul in Romans 7: “For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do. . . . For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice.”
This young man had a divided mind. He really wanted what Jesus had to offer, but really he thought he already had it all figured out.
No One Is Good but God
The young man asked Jesus to tell him what good thing he could do to obtain eternal life, and Jesus said something unexpected. Jesus was in the habit of saying unexpected things. And he asked the man, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God.” Jesus wanted the young man to realize that He’s not just a man. He’s God, and He alone is the way to eternal life (v. 18).
Keep the Commandments
But then he turns around and says something else unexpected: “But if you want to enter into life, keep the commandments.” Now Jesus here isn’t going against the teaching of the Bible that we’re saved by faith alone. He’s trying to bring the conversation to the point of getting the young man to see that he really has failed to keep the law.
What Jesus said is, of course, true: All those who perfectly keep the law will obtain eternal life. The problem is, no one has perfectly kept the law, except Him. So the only way we can inherit eternal life is to have his perfect law-keeping credited to us, and to have his death on the cross to shield us from the awful wrath of God against our sins.
