Leroy's Plan

In 1974, shortly after Nancy and I came to FUMCR with our two daughters in tow, I offered my first course to the adult membership, on prayer. It went well enough to encourage the staff to ask for more from me, and I kept offering Bible and theology courses there and elsewhere. Since that time, my life has been constantly enriched by teaching some of the liveliest, most inquiring, and most caring laymen and laywomen any minister could hope to meet anywhere.

And the work goes on, this time in a new format, a column that focuses on how we can relate faith and theology to the important issues with which every Christian struggles, sooner or later, in everyday life. The first few columns will deal with issues that I think warrant our thinking about, together. After these, the next columns will address topics that you also identify as you take the time to contact me. My hope is that the columns, your e-mail reactions, and my personal responses back, will generate the kind of spirited conversation that I have grown used to by working with so many of you in face-to-face situations.

In all of my teaching, both at Perkins School of Theology and in local congregations, what I have tried most to do is to offer a way of studying and thinking hard about what faith is, as faith is illumined by the scriptures, the Christian tradition as a whole, human experience, and reasoned inquiry. The single most important question that I keep asking myself is: how can we best bring the insights and the power of our faith to bear upon the decisions that we as Christians regularly must make about living as God wants us to live in the world? Over the years, it has been a constant source of gratification to encounter increasing numbers of people willing to ask this same question, who are as impatient as I am with ill-considered, superficial, or overly dogmatic answers to it.

At this stage of my ministry and life, one thing about the Christian faith is especially clear to me: God's work in the world is more encompassing, and sometimes more mysterious, than our finite understanding of things can often express adequately. Words, symbols, creeds, and doctrines are but finite and imperfect means of representing what is infinite and perfect. Together, they are like clouded glass through which we can see the things of God only dimly (1Cor.13:12). Until we see God face to face, however, they are all we have. As such, they deserve to be handled respectfully and tenderly, and with compassion toward everyone who seeks God's truth with their help. For surely it is better to see only partially than not to see at all.

In the columns to come, the work that I will be striving to accomplish bears a strong resemblance to the work of washing windows. Its aim is to keep the glass upon which we are so dependent for seeing God's truth as clear and as polished as my finite abilities and imperfect understanding will allow. A lot of what I will be doing to this end will take the form of wiping away grit and grime that constantly accumulates from the gusts of poorly conceived, badly thought out, and downright false teachings that break over our lives like dangerous tropical storms. Along with the spiritual ammonia, I also plan to bring the corrective lenses of the scriptures and the history of Christian thought to our attempts to see things more clearly as Christians, acknowledging at every step of the way that in this life our knowledge of God's world, and all that God is doing in it, is less something we possess, and more something for which we hope.

Years ago, a former student of mine wrote me a note of appreciation, closing it with a phrase I have never forgotten: Thinking Christianly, Don. Grammatically, I suppose, Don's parting words do not constitute a shining example of English usage at its best. Theologically, though, Don has it right. Loving God with all our mind is not primarily a matter of having and entertaining a lot of thoughts, even well-formed and convincing thoughts. It has to do more with engaging in a never-ending process of thinking, a process so infused with faith in the Lordship of Jesus Christ that when we are engaged in it we really can describe ourselves as thinking Christian-ly. Please accept this column as an invitation to think "Christianly" with me.