Seminary wasn’t exactly a joy ride for me. Since I didn’t think a pressure cooker experience like getting a masters from Dallas Theological Seminary was the best way to start a marriage, I had always prayed that the Lord wouldn’t show me the woman I was to marry until after I graduated from DTS. And that’s exactly what happened. I met Patti just a? few months after my graduation.
Patti was definitely worth the wait. But not being married in seminary meant I spent four years working on my masters degree with very little income. And that meant four years of stress and poverty.
Of course, years of stress and poverty are not necessarily a bad thing for a young disciple of Jesus. And the material I was focused on – the Bible! – was exhilarating. I had the privilege of studying the Word of God under some of the leading evangelical scholars of the time.
My fourth year was filled with both anticipation and dread: anticipation at finally graduating and dread at doing a master’s thesis. A master’s thesis was the culmination of our theological training. It was proof that we could do the scholarly heavy lifting that is supposed to under gird all of our ministry, discipleship, and preaching.
Unfortunately, I chose a topic that wasn’t exactly “Politically Correct.” Here’s how it happened.
Background
I grew up in a large? commuter church, one of the few mega churches in America at that time: Church of the Open Door in downtown Los Angeles, California. It was a fantastic Christian experience. The Bible teaching, the children and youth ministries, the missions program, among many other things, were excellent.
But COD, as we called our church, lacked one thing: any sense of community outside of its four walls. I remember only one occasion when I saw someone from COD spontaneously during the week.
But when I was a young adult, our young adult pastor, Mark Neuenschwander, persuaded several young people in our church to purchase homes on the same block in an old section of Pasadena. And voil?, they had a Christian community!
I was in seminary at the time, so I couldn’t participate. But I thought the idea was super cool and decided to do my thesis on it.?
My Thesis
For my thesis, I chose to compare Marks’ Pasadena Christian community with the descriptions of Christian community in the early church that we find in Acts 2:44-47 and 4:32-35. There were three reasons why this was somewhat controversial.
- These passages make it look like the early church was practicing communism.
- These passages have sometimes been used by extreme cults to justify their existence. (And in the 60’s and 70’s, the hippie movement, with their communes, drugs and free sex, just added fuel to the flames.)
- There’s a debate as to whether these passages are normative for the church – describing practices all churches should follow – or simply descriptive – just telling us what happened at a particular point in church history.
To summarize very briefly, in my thesis, I demonstrated that the early church was not practicing communism, that these passages should be taken as normative and not just descriptive (I’ll explain why in my next post), and that Mark’s little community of believers in Pasadena, California, compared favorably with Acts 2 and 4.
It’s Impact on Me
“Herb, whatever you do, don’t teach this in your ministry. You’ll split your church.”
Dr. Duane Litfin was a brilliant man. He later would go on to become President of Wheaton College. Dr. Litfin was also my thesis adviser. The above quote was his response after he read my thesis! I guess that’s the reason he gave me an A- instead of an A.
For the most part, over the past forty years, I’ve kept my mouth shut on the subject of Christian community. But I have to say, that thesis has highlighted for me the dearth of community in our culture and left me with a genuine hunger for daily, spontaneous interactions with believers that are observable to non-believers.
It’s also the reason I’ve stressed using teams of men to serve widows and single parents over months and years to meet “every pressing need.” What we’re doing with men’s team ministry is compensating for a lack of genuine community in our culture and in our churches and demonstrating that meeting pressing needs is an important goal for all churches.
While men’s team ministry isn’t the perfect solution, it’s definitely an improvement over what we’ve done for their widowed and single parents in the past.
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.
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Learn how to form teams of men for every widow, single mom
and fatherless child in your church at NewCommandment.org.
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4 thoughts on “How My Master’s Thesis Changed My Life and Ministry”
I received this excellent comment in an email from Jim McLachlan and he gave me permission to publish it:
“Good post!
Communism, especially the way it has been practiced, has not been successful. However, Capitalism and the seeming ?freedom? it has engendered, has been hurtful to the mission and scope of relationships in the body of Christ.
We were meant to be involved in one another’s lives on a daily basis for the sake of God?s perfect plan and will for our lives. Sadly, we have become isolated (though not all) and have compartmentalized our relationships with each other and the world. We have become economic units striving to be independent and self-secure.
The early church did have aspects of what could be termed as ?classical? Communism but it wasn?t. Nonetheless, we could take a clue from it and see.
Finally, I believe America is a lost cause. The vast majority of Christians are more involved finding their own way than helping others find theirs (a self indictment). I wonder what we will know about how we did church when we are with Jesus on the other side.”
Great to hear from you, Rich. Here is a link to download my thesis: newcommandment.org/Herb’s Thesis.doc
Herb, Don’t know if you remember me: from Boulder (the old Tango days). I would LOVE to read your thesis. Would this be possible? Just what the doctor ordered!