Discerning My Call to Ministry by Living with a Family

When people first learn that I've chosen to live with a family while I attend seminary instead of living in seminary housing, most people think I'm crazy. Why would I choose to share my space with a toddler, a newborn, and two adults I'm not related to? It's a fair question, and I'd like to use this post as an opportunity to explain how God has used my living situation to help prepare me for ministry. 

But first let me give you a rundown of what a typical day is like in the McKinley-DePoe house.

It's 8am and I am running late. I gather my Hebrew textbooks, pencils, water bottle, phone, keys and toss them in my bag. As I stumble down the stairs trying to remember anything I forgot I hear, "RE-BE-KH!" Landon, my 20 month old housemate, is awake and excited that I will be joining him for breakfast. 

As I head in to the kitchen I see that Josh, his dad already made the coffee. PTL. Sustenance. I pour myself a cup, and assemble the rest of my breakfast. While I try to remember how to make cereal, Landon starts singing to me, using a whisk as a microphone. Josh, who attended seminary awhile back, asks me how my Hebrew studying is coming along. He reminds me that I'm going to do fine on my test. I finish my breakfast, giving pieces of toast to Landon, because seriously who can refuse a happy kid at 8:15 in the morning? By 8:30 I'm out the door, but not before Landon waves goodbye to me from the top of the steps. 

I then go to Hebrew, eat lunch, study, then go to work. I finish up around 5:15 and head home. 

Since today is Tuesday, Megan's (Landon's mom) parents are spending the day with us. Her parents remind me of my own grandparents and it's always a treat to have them over. We, (Me, Landon, Josh, Megan, Grandma, Grandpa, and Baby Brooke) have dinner together. Grandma tells me about her adventures with Landon playing tennis, and seeing the fire truck. Megan fills me in on Brooke's day (at almost 3 weeks old, it's mostly filled with eating, sleeping, and pooping.) I tell everyone about the new Hebrew paradigm I'm studying. 

From 6-7:30 I finish up preparing my Hebrew lessons for the next day. At 7:30 I put my books away because it's time for my favorite part of the day, holding Brooke. I like to call her my little Hebrew study break because holding her is the best stress relief. Until she realizes that I'm not mom, and therefore can't feed her. At which point I hand her back to Mom, and go finish studying before bed. 

I hope you can see from the above illustration that living with a family gives me stability and normalcy in an otherwise unstable (my schedule changes every 12 weeks) and abnormal (I spend my days reading Barth) life. As a single young woman, I have a whole new respect for marriage and family life. Watching Megan and Josh sacrifice for their children everyday calls me on to be more selfless in my work and relationships. If Megan can endure 20 hours of labor and delivery, I can get up 10 minutes earlier to unload the dishwasher. 

But, perhaps most importantly, living with a family during seminary has given me the space to discern my call to ministry. Let me explain what I mean by that. Seminary can be an incredibly lonely  place. As you start to live your life in a fishbowl, you are away from your family, your church, and your support systems. Loneliness, mixed with few safe places to be yourself, causes many people to either put off asking God what he wants to do with your call to ministry, or not asking God what he wants to do with your  ministry because you just want to finish. In living with this family, God has given me the support I need to ask him the tough questions about my vocation and future family life. While I don't have the answers to the big questions, I do know who I'm having breakfast with tomorrow morning, and that, right now, is more than enough. 

Is Christian Slavery an Oxymoron?

At the beginning of Term 2, my church history professor asked us what our fears for the course were. I said that I was scared to learn something that would challenge my assumptions, and shake my faith.

Every term God has used church history to teach me something that keeps me up at night. In Term 2, I learned that Luther was not a Marxist. This challenged me to re-think Protestantism as a biblically sanctioned way to create a new social order. I've concluded that being a Protestant does not make me a theological badass; God desires unity more than he does "right" denominations.

In Term 3, the issue that's keeping me up at night is slavery, particularly Christian slavery. As a white, Northern, middle class woman, I could not wrap my brain around Christian slavery. Until I read "The Divine Sanction of Social Order: Religious Foundations of the Southern Slaveholders' World View" by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese. This article taught me how slavery fits into a Southern Christian worldview, as well as the holes in the Northern abolitionist intellectial tradition I've inherited.

What follows are the tenants of a Southern Christian worldview as told by Fox-Genovese and Genovese. Hopefully you will see that Christian slavery is more complicated than Northerners were right, and Southerners were idiots.

1. Slavery was part of a social order that allowed morally frail human beings to live together safely in a manor pleasing to God. (Genovese 218). Southern Christian slaveowners really believed that being a slaveowner was a way for them to live out their faith, because they really believed that their slaves were morally frail. They did not see slavery as a way of denying their slaves personhood, but as an act of Christian charity- a way for the strong to lead the meek for the good of society.

2. The Southern social order took on three forms: the family, the household, and the polity (community). All of these social orders were governed by relationships of superordination and subordination (Genovese 219-220). In other words, the white male served as the head of household (superordination) over his family, his estate, and in the community. This created a social hierarchy with white men at the top, followed by their subordinates: wives, children, white hired help, and slaves. As the head of the social hierarchy, white men had a responsibility to discipline, impose order and provide for the physical needs of everyone under him (Genovese 221). Genovese argues that white male heads of household did this effectively only when they did so in accordance with the entire body of laws and commandments in the Old and New Testaments (Genovese 221). And many slaveowners believed that they treated their slaves better than capitalists did free workers (Genovese 224).

3. All human institutions lay open to abuses and injustices (Genovese 222). Southern Christian Slaveowners believed that slavery is not inherently sinful, but human beings are; just because those who run the system are sinful, this does not make the entire system sinful.

4. The Bible sanctions slavery. (Genovese 223). Southerners were a people who read their Bibles, even if many of them read little else (Genovese 225), and the Bible clearly sanctions slavery. The question becomes what type of slavery does the Bible sanction? Abolitionists pointed out that the Bible says little about slavery in relation to race, so isn't the enslavement of Africans more a question of social stratificaiton and class power? (Genovese 224).

5. The South did not undergo the "feminization" of religion that the North did. (Genovese 226). This is a facinating arguement. I think Genovese means that women often spearhead social movements, a. la the abolitionist movement, prohibition, civil rights, and women's lib. But with Southern men participating in Christianity in equal measure to Southern women (Genovese 225), Christianity empasized less sentimentality (i.e treat others the way you want to be treated), and more a way to keep social order intact (Genovese 227).

While I don't agree with most of the Southerners justifications for slavery, I am fascinated by the way life and religion interact in producing worldviews. Part of the reason I cannot write slavery off as a problem for previous generations is because the ministry I inherit will always struggle with questions of how does our faith in Jesus Christ compell us to respond to the pressing social issues of the day? Slavery in America has taught me to appreciate the historical tension that shape the world I live in.

So, How's Seminary?: A Lenten Reflection

Having been on spring break for the past two weeks, I spent a lot of time catching up with my friends and family. It felt good to sleep, and have a social life again. Inevitably, once the small talk died down, they all asked the same question: So, how's seminary going? The best answer I can come up with is that seminary has given me a whole new appreciation for Lent.

Let me explain. In Matthew 4: 1-11, we get the story of Jesus' temptation before he begins his ministry. Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished. The tempter came and said to him, 'if you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.' But he answered, 'It is written, "One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God." 

It is significant that Jesus began his ministry with a time of prayer and fasting, just as it is significant when a person responds to their call to ministry by attending seminary. People pray and fast not just to become closer to God, but to remove all the distractions that they use to to disguise everything they hate about ourselves.

When Jesus says that man does not live by bread alone, what I think he means is that bread becomes an idol not when it satisfyies our hunger, but when it makes us forget what it's like to be hungry. That is why this Lent I decided to give up Netflix. Now I don't think watching TV is a bad thing, but this fast is teaching me that I was using Netflix to numb the lonliness that creeps in an hour before bedtime. Lonliness sucks, but I can think of no better way to learn how to completely depend on God.

Like Jesus' wilderness wanderings, seminary is a time of prayer, fasting, discernment, and temptation. Unlike other graduate programs that are physically and mentally exhausting, seminary is physically, mentally, and spiritually exhausting. Everyday you're forced to confront painful questions such as how can I continue to believe God is just if he allowed millions of Catholics and Protestants to die during the French Revolution? Or, if I translate this Greek preposition "eis" as "in" instead of "before" how does that change my understanding of justification by faith? These questions keep us all us at night, and explain why every seminarian I respect has a caffeine addiction.

Seminary is also a time of temptation. I had a professor once tell me that the kind of seminarian I choose to be will determine the type of pastor I will become. It's not as if the temptations to lie, cheat, flirt, or take the easy way out, doesn't exist everywhere, but it didn't feel like they held the same eternal consequences. Just as the season of Lent is uncomfortable because it forces you to see the real you, the greatest temptation in seminary is to try to fix the real you instead of letting God use the real you to bring about his kingdom.

But as I celebrate Lent, and prepare to head back to campus tomorrow, I was struck by a new reading of this timeless passage, i.e what a privilege it is to take this time to prepare myself for ministry. In a small way, seminary gives me the opportunity to participate in Jesus' wilderness wanderings for three whole years. I get to spend my days reading theology, translating Scripture, and trying to figure out how to make sense of the messy church history I will inherit. Yes I'm tempted, and yes it's uncomfortable to be poor and a little bit lonely, but I am confident that I will come out on the other end with a better sense of how the gifts and talents God gave me will serve his kingdom.