"Stand in the place where you live, now face north. Think about direction, wonder why you haven't before." -R.E.M.

Christianity

Why I Walked Away From Seminary, Pt. 2

06/05/2009 05:11 AM Filed in: Personal | Pastoral Stuff

Friday I began a series explaining why I walked away from seminary after 2 years, thousands or dollars spent, and hundreds of hours of study time. Today continues the story by examining a sliver of my time in college. You can read Part 1 at this link.

I arrived at East Texas Baptist University in the fall of 2000. I remember not being entirely sure of how this whole college thing would work out. My parents had both started college, but neither had graduated and they seemed to be perfectly happy and quite intelligent. So I didn’t actually know if I was going to finish because I kind of assumed that at some point I would start traveling and preaching or leading worship; if college got in the way of that, I’d just quit.

Needless to say, entering into college with that kind of attitude doesn’t exactly lend itself toward putting your best foot forward in your studies.

But why did I need to worry about that anyway? After all, I was majoring in religion, a subject I practically already knew frontwards and backwards. Though I never would have said it out loud, I had grown up in church and been to Sunday School more times than I could have possibly kept track of. What on earth could my professors possibly teach me about the Bible that I didn’t already know?

And then I found out that angels may have had sex with humans.

That’s right: Genesis 6 threw me for a huge loop on my very first day of class. My Old Testament professor at ETBU was walking us through the syllabus and going over a rough outline of what we would be studying for the semester when he casually mentioned the passage.

“And in a few weeks we’ll look at the flood narrative,” he said, “which starts in Genesis 6 with the unusual prelude, ‘When men began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose.’ We’ll be talking about what that means and the fact that many biblical scholars understand it to mean that angels intermarried with human women. If that is understood as true, it would be considered one of the evils that angered God to the point of destroying nearly every living thing on the earth.”

So imagine being little Mr. Know-It-All from Grand Saline, Texas. Mr. Future-Conference-Speaker. Mr. Sunday-School-Is-My-Middle-Name.

Now imagine having angel sex thrown in your face on your first day of college.

To an outsider, it would have seemed small and insignificant. An inconsequential fact mentioned merely in passing. An interesting bit of Bible trivia.

But it rocked me to the core. Because if I didn’t know about that...if something mentioned in the first five minutes of my first class while we were just looking over the syllabus was that alien to me...

...what else did I not know?

*part 3 will be posted on Monday

Tags: seminary, Christianity, Pastor, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Why I Walked Away From Seminary, Pt. 1

06/03/2009 05:32 PM Filed in: Personal | Pastoral Stuff

In May of 2006 my wife and I moved to Chicago so she could finish her bachelor degree and I could start working in earnest on getting my Master of Divinity degree. After carefully researching the best seminaries in the country, I had landed on Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. The scholarship at Trinity appeared to be first class as it was home to such great biblical minds as D.A. Carson, John S. Feinberg, Graham A. Cole, and many other professors who overused initials on the covers of the books they wrote (a sure sign of theological genius).

We moved over 1,000 miles, we took on a huge financial burden, and we threw ourselves into our work with vigor and determination. Within two years I had a supremely healthy GPA and was well on my way to graduating.

And that’s when I walked away from seminary. This is the story of why.

But to understand it, you’ll have to have a little background.

A Tale of 2 “Josh Crain”s
At the age of 16, I walked down the aisle of Main Street Baptist Church and announced to my pastor and my church family that God had called me to “the ministry.” Looking back, I realize I didn’t know exactly what that meant. In fact, I probably assumed that I was either supposed to travel and lead worship or travel and preach. My father had done those things for years, and I suppose I could see myself preaching to thousands of teenagers at “Youth Evangelism Conferences.” After all, that’s where the “real ministry” happened.

To be honest, it wasn’t that much of a stretch. Because of the opportunities my father had been blessed with, I’d already been leading worship in front of thousands of people each summer. And in a little over a year from the time I walked that aisle at 16 I would have the opportunity to lead worship with my dad and brother at YouthLink 2000, an event held on New Year’s Day of 1999 where we would stand on stage in front of 25,000 students.

At the age of 18 I felt like I was living a double life. There was the “Josh Crain” who attended tiny Grand Saline High School in east Texas: generally respected and mostly well-liked, but certainly not the star athlete or the most popular kid in school.

Then there was the “Josh Crain” who got to stand in front of hundreds and thousands of students and play electric guitar, sign autographs, and have a ton of cute girls from youth camps try to get his phone number. No one from high school got to see that side, and I always wondered how weirded out they would have been to see that going on in the summers.

Thankfully my parents did a great job of not letting some silly “youth camp celebrity” go to my head and I was able to get through high school as a mostly humble, if not a little self-righteous, 18 years old kid.

And what does a self-righteous 18-year-old kid who’s called to “the ministry” do when high school ends? Well, I suppose he goes to a Christian college to prepare himself to preach to thousands of teenagers at Youth Evangelism Conferences.

*part 2 will be posted on Friday

Tags: seminary, Christianity, Pastor, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Ray Boltz Loves Jesus

09/20/2008 08:29 AM Filed in: God in the News

When I was a kid growing up in a conservative Southern Baptist Church I probably heard a Ray Boltz song several times a month. As a young boy I looked on in curiosity as grown women wept and grown men teared up at the emotional messages of songs such as Thank You and Watch the Lamb. I was too young to understand why everyone seemed to be leaking when they hadn’t even scraped their knees or fallen off of the monkey bars.

As I grew older and I began to follow after the way of Jesus, the messages of Boltz’s songs began to come alive to me, too. Thank You, a song depicting a dream in which a Sunday School teacher sees the impact he made on earth after he arrives in heaven, became an inspiration. I Pledge Allegiance to the Lamb became a declaration of a desire to follow after Christ regardless of what hardships and persecutions may result from it.

Boltz had a lot working against him in his quest to leave an impression on my generation: his mullet/mustache combo, his musical style, and even the quality of his voice would never be considered stylish, chic, or sophisticated by most postmoderns. But what probably left an impression on many of us, regardless of whether or not we cared for his musical style (I didn’t), was his authenticity and his ability to explain Christianity through stories (an art form that desperately needs to be reclaimed by the Christian church).

Last week in an interview with The Washington Blade, Boltz announced that he is a practicing homosexual. He has ended his marriage of over 30 years.

The Best Service I've Been a Part Of

04/22/2008 09:50 AM Filed in: Personal | Postmodernism

Sunday evening was absolutely incredible. I've been preaching a sermon series at my church called, They Like Jesus But Not the Church, based on Dan Kimball's book of the same name. It's been a difficult series to preach because we're hitting a lot of hot button topics in our discussion of why outsiders have negative perceptions of Christians: politics, the degradation of women, anti-intellctualism, judgmentalism, etc. Well Sunday night we talked about what is potentially the most hot-button topic of all: the church's response to the homosexual community.
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Tags: theology, Homosexual Community, Christianity

Why I'm Clueless and the Genius of Michael Moore

07/09/2007 06:56 AM Filed in: Movies | Site News

I have a confession to make: I'm not sure what I think about a whole host of important political issues. Now, I know what you may be thinking: "Hey! You're a Christian! You should know exactly what the right way is to vote on everything!" Oh, if only it were that black and white. Allow me to illustrate...

Black and White

04/18/2007 09:17 AM Filed in: Theology

We’re right and you’re wrong, she’s holy and he’s not, George W. Bush is God’s president and Hilary Clinton is the devil. Sound familiarly resolute?

It is an undeniable tendency of Christians to see the world more in terms of black and white than do many people. We often pride ourselves on this fact because, after all, we of all people should know the difference between right and wrong, justice and injustice, good and evil.

Why Christian Music Stinks

02/09/2007 11:34 AM Filed in: Postmodernism | Theology

Okay, I’ll just come out and say it: I don’t like Christian music.

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Tags: Christianity, music

Unattractive Christianity

02/14/2006 05:31 AM Filed in: Christian Culture

It pains me to look at the deeds and actions of some Christians. There is no doubt that the body of Christ is facing persecution by the world; but more than anyone else attacks us we seem to attack ourselves.

Why is it so difficult for us to go and speak to our brothers and sisters in Christ that we have a problem with? Read More...

Tags: Christianity