An interview with James Emery White, part 3
April 11th, 2006
This is the last post in a series of my interview with James Emery White, the newly elected president of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.
Where does Christian high education fit into the mixture between the church and the culture, and what should Christian higher education look like?
We should serve and exist at the pleasure of the church. Without making this too crass, the church is our customer. So we should be completely taken with trying to serve the church in the 21st century at her point of greatest need, in light of education and preparation.
For Gordon-Conwell, and for Union as well, I think the challenge is multifold. One, we’re obviously trying to prepare men and women for lives of significance and impact. We’re trying to help them spiritually and intellectually and vocationally, but it’s not simple educational preparation. We’re also trying to help them have a sense of God’s calling and a biblical worldview and a Christian mind so they really can function as salt and light. We’re trying to unleash a lot of radical revolutionaries. We want people who look at a graduate of Union or Gordon-Conwell as someone enormously qualified to do that very thing.
For example, with my own pilgrimage, the only thing I could imagine of greater significance and importance in leading a local church would be if God gave me the opportunity to influence thousands of leaders in local churches. And that was what captivated me.
I also believe that schools like Union and Gordon-Conwell need to be the thought leaders for the evangelical world. We really need to recapture that sense of leading, else what most churches will take advantage of is going to be all process but no content. I am all for the mega-church movement. I was a mega-church pastor, still am at this point. I believe in that. I believe in it biblically. I believe that’s how God chose to birth the church at Pentecost — 3,000 people in one day — that’s a mega church. Let’s not forget that. That’s how the Holy Spirit pleased to birth the church, was through a mega-church. So this anti-mega-church rhetoric is not even biblical. The mega-church is a wonderful God thing, but the mega-church desperately needs what schools like Union and Gordon-Conwell will bring to bear, else, again, it will be all process and no content – or it would run that risk. I don’t mean that condescending way towards mega-churches. Many of their leaders are very biblically and theologically educated, but it runs the risk of that. What will happen is, if the next generation bypasses the Unions and the Gordon-Conwells, then all they will have are the church leadership conferences and church growth conferences. And again, that runs the risk of process without content. We need the process, but we need the content.
I also think schools there is a desperate need among Christians to have a sense of “Who do we turn to with these issues? Who do I turn to who is investing themself in helping us think about euthanasia, stem cell research, or cloning? Who do I turn to when I just put down ‘The Da Vinci Code’ and my head is swimming with questions about what it purports to say about the life of Jesus, or the Council of Nicea?” Pastors are asking the same thing. “Who do I turn to?”
That was part of what birthed the ministry of Serious Times and the website, but also that’s where seminaries and Christian colleges and universities and their faculty and staff are to be leading the way. But we’re often not. We’re often playing catch-up. Instead of sometimes being on the cutting edge of what’s happening in culture and speaking to it and leading the way, it’s almost as if we’re fighting against the church trying to engage the culture itself. Sometimes it’s more like we’re throwing water on fires burning in the church wanting to engage the culture than we are helping the church to know where to direct it’s force, and that concerns me. In other words, sometimes schools are very good at knowing what they are against, but they don’t know what they’re for. We’re called to be a maker of culture, not a despiser of culture.
Who are some of the writers who have been most influential on your thinking?
C.S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer. In terms of spiritual formation, Francis de Sales has been important to me in my spiritual life. G.K. Chesterton. Heroes of the faith for me have been people like William Wilberforce and Billy Graham. There are many people I hold in extraordinarily high regard. I think the ministry of Charles Colson right now is significant for our era. And I’m not just saying this just in setting, but I hold David Dockery in extraordinarily high regard. I’ve known him longer than many, and he’s the real deal.
[…] Is the mega-church biblical?
Mark Bustrum picked up on something in my interview with James Emery White that I’m surprised nobody else has commented about yet. Here’s […]
I’m not sure if the mega church in the sense that it is a big building with cool lights and “Star Bucks” coffee is biblical however, the local church should always be growing. If building that kind of a building is what helps facilitate the spritual growth of Christians, then so be it. But if that building impedes the spiritual growth of Christians, then something needs to change. I guess another question is “At what point is it appropriate to conceive of ‘extra-biblical’ methods of discipleship?” I mean there was no such thing as “Star Bucks” back then, but there was a such thing as a meal which was a major part of “church.”