The phrase “extraordinary callings in ordinary places” captures a key dimension of Covenant’s mission, as we seek to educate and equip students for the pathways of God’s calling, most of which we would rightly call ordinary. They will live and work and serve mostly via the routines of jobs and family life and church involvements and community activities, spending mostly ordinary days doing mostly ordinary things in mostly ordinary places. And yet the callings which they fulfill in these contexts and in these ways are by no means ordinary; they are the sovereign ways of God through which he enables his people to accomplish his extraordinary purposes.

How easy to get this wrong, to come to think that we must seek out extraordinary positions and do extraordinary things – that we must aim to be extraordinary leaders and “movers and shakers” in order for God to get his redemptive work done.

The story of Christmas provides several glimpses of this “extraordinary callings in ordinary places” truth. For those enamored with position and title and reputation and power, the Christmas story comes as a surprise, full of unexpected and ironic twists. Click to continue »

I’ve taken a bit of a break from my regular bi-weekly schedule of blogging, for at least three reasons all of which in one way or another, as you’ll see, bear on the themes of this week’s posting.

First, I spent just over a week in Indonesia, pursuing a growing relationship with some wonderful Christians there who are developing a network of Christian schools at all levels. We at Covenant are finding great joy in identifying pathways for collaboration with these deeply committed colleagues in the Christian education enterprise. Second, Covenant had the privilege of co-hosting, with the PCA’s global mission agency, Mission to the World, the triennial PCA Global Missions Conference here in Chattanooga. Wonderful singing, strong biblical exposition, and inspiring testimonies encouraged and instructed the more than 2,000 attendees, including about 150 Covenant students, regarding God’s glorious gospel work around the world. Third, we’ve just returned from ten days with family in the Chicago area, where Kathleen and I celebrated Thanksgiving with our three sons and two daughters-in-law, and experienced the almost overwhelming thrill of meeting our first grandchild – Adelyn Grace Nielson – born on Saturday, November 20, to our oldest son Jon and his wife Jeanne.

These three experiences shared some common qualities and characteristics. Click to continue »

This blog post is adapted from my chapel message at Covenant College on October 1, 2010.

At Covenant we talk a lot about the biblical concept of calling, referring first to God’s call on us through the gospel – his call to faith and trust and worship and obedience – and second to his call on us through the gifts and passions and opportunities which he puts within us and before us – his call to particular pathways of service and obedience through which we live out, in particular ways, his gospel call.

There are wonderful benefits in thinking about life and work in terms of God’s calling and God’s callings, among them the affirmation of the genuine value of every vocation from politics to plumbing, from pharmacy to farming, from baking to banking, from art to athletics, from mechanical engineering to ministry. Recognition of God’s manifold vocational callings helps us escape the trap of the sacred/secular distinction, according to which some paths are more “holy” than others. All such callings are from God, who has created with such complexity and variety and beauty that there’s hardly any limit to the range of types of work and service which people can take up, as worship to God for the good of the world.

Calling also helps us appreciate deeply both the extraordinary activities of some people some of the time, and the ordinary, even mundane activities of most people most of the time. Whether the work is routine or unusual, through it God’s creation is developed and nurtured and celebrated, his people served and discipled, and his Kingdom advanced. Not everyone will be a William Wilberforce; in fact, we might say that William Wilberforce wasn’t William Wilberforce for most of his life, in that he spent decades in faithful, relatively unexciting, ordinary work — not really the stuff of books and films with which later generations have honored him.

In pursuing our callings, we are declaring and demonstrating the preeminence of Jesus Christ in all things, and we are bearing witness to God’s purpose in accomplishing and demonstrating his redemption of his creation. Creating art and music, building businesses, discovering cures for diseases – all these are godly pursuits, grounded in God’s creational norms and informed by common grace understanding, and they will, as tasks pursued for God’s glory, find their consummation in eternity: They have real, lasting value, and have their appropriate place as suitable trophies of God’s abundant common grace.

Likewise, deeds of compassion, mercy, and justice – caring for the sick and suffering, defending the unborn, working to free those in unjust bondage – have such real, lasting value as well. This is good and important work — Kingdom work — and it will endure for eternity as a display of God’s abundant love and wisdom and power.

In what follows, I do not intend to take back one bit of all this true reflection on calling, nor do I want to detract one bit from the worthiness of what millions of God’s people have done, across the centuries and around the world, in pursuit of their callings as acts of genuine worship to the Lord. I don’t want to trigger a single doubt about our students’ explorations, during their college years, of the pathways of God’s vocational callings for the years ahead, nor to cast doubt on the genuine goodness of the good that by God’s grace they will do throughout their lives – as doctors and teachers, accountants and farmers, fathers and mothers, neighbors and friends and church members, i.e. in all the callings which God will call and enable them to fulfill.

But in this posting, I want to remind readers of a feature of the landscape of our faith which I believe is getting slighter and slighter attention these days, even as we rightly rejoice in the callings of God. It’s a feature which can raise some discomfort among even faithful Christians, but it’s so important that, if we lose hold of it, our view of our callings can get seriously out of focus with respect to the biblical gospel.

That feature is hell, and here I want to consider how, and how much, we think about hell – and more generally how we think about the eternal destiny of every human being, even as we treasure God’s callings. Click to continue »

For this week’s blog posting, I want to share the stories of two Covenant alumnae whose lives before, during, and since college are excellent illustrations of God’s gracious and remarkable callings.

First is Tiffany Chin, who grew up in Charlotte, NC, graduated from Covenant in 2007, and went on to medical school at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Her academic honors have been many: a Maclellan Scholar while at Covenant; the Heusner Pupil Award from the Whitehead Medical Society at UNC Medical School (in recognition of her capacity to grasp the principles of science, to heal the sick, and to comfort the troubled); induction into the Eugene S. Meyer Community Service Honor Society at UNC (for students who demonstrate outstanding work and dedication to public service in the local community and abroad); selection for the Becton-Tannenbaum International Medicine Fellowship (awarded annually to one medical student for work in the local health care system of a developing country – in her case Honduras); and selection of her research on children’s infectious diseases at St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital to be published in the peer-reviewed journal Microbial Pathogenesis.

This is a record worthy of note, and it is clear that Tiffany’s intellectual gifts and heart for service deserve such attention. But what impresses me most about Tiffany is how she has grown to understand her calling from God, foundationally as a woman saved by grace and called to follow Jesus, and then as a woman with specific God-given gifts who is committed to living out a life of whole-hearted service toward others, for the glory of God. I asked Tiffany to write down her reflections on calling, and it’s a privilege to pass them on to you here.

Next is Jenny Belz Gienapp, who grew up in Chattanooga and Asheville, NC, graduated from Covenant in 1992, and now works at Covenant as event planner in our alumni office. Jenny lives in Chattanooga with her husband, Andy, and their five children, and the Gienapps attend New City Fellowship. I’ll let Jenny speak for herself in reflecting on God’s callings in her life, but here’s just a bit more introduction. Click to continue »

This time around and with my wife’s permission, I’m posting a blog entry which she recently posted on the website of The Gospel Coalition. The posting is self-explanatory, and I will only add here that creation care is one of many issues and movements on Christian college campuses which demand both trenchant scholarly attention and biblically faithful discernment.

I am very, very grateful for Covenant’s enduring and joyful convictions about the authority and sufficiency of God’s inerrant Word and the crucial centrality of the biblical gospel, which provide the foundation and framework for our entire program. On that foundation and out of that framework we are called to provide an educational enterprise that unpacks assumptions and presuppositions, makes careful distinctions, demonstrates truth, grace, and justice, and unfolds in service to the church, in care for God’s world, and in submission to the Lord of the Scriptures. Kathleen’s posting provides an important example of thinking biblically and in light of the gospel about a hugely important and popular topic.

Click here to view her posting on The Gospel Coalition’s website.

In last Friday’s Chattanooga Times Free Press, an article on the front page of the business section noted that a local Belk department store floor will be leased to a specialty fashion retailer with the name “Forever 21.” While the Forever 21 website offers no background for the name, it’s not hard to imagine the thinking: Today’s Americans idolize youth, and, no matter what a person’s age, it’s apparently desirable to dress and look and act and try even desperately to be forever 21. Just this weekend, as Kathleen and I ate breakfast in a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, hotel, we looked around at a good number of fellow guests, probably close to our ages (56 and 54), who were—how shall I put it?—striking examples of this phenomenon.

Well, count us out.

I have many wonderful memories of my 21st year. That was the year I fell in love with the woman who would become my wife, as we toured the Loire Valley on our way from Paris to Nice during a summer French studies program. Click to continue »

Last Friday (August 20) was move-in day for new students at Covenant. It’s one of my favorite days of the year as we welcome freshmen and transfer students, along with their families, to the College community. Not only is there tremendous excitement about arriving on campus, moving into residence halls, meeting roommates and new friends, and beginning to enjoy our spectacular campus, but there are also opportunities to start to focus in on God’s specific calling for these years: the calling to be a student.

At Covenant we talk often about the biblical concept of calling – both the calling of the gospel to believe and trust and obey through the grace that is ours in Jesus Christ, and the specific callings which are the God-provided pathways for living out the reality of the gospel calling in particular ways — like being a college student or a college president; a roommate or a professor; a father or a daughter; a neighbor or a church member. Each of these is a calling from the Lord, in which and through which we are called to live out the gospel calling in worshipful obedience to the Lord.

Each year my wife Kathleen and I have the privilege, during the evening of that move-in Friday, of giving the first lecture of the course “The Christian Mind,” which is the foundational introduction for all new Covenant students to the distinctive educational venture that lies ahead of them. Click to continue »

In the August/September 2010 issue of First Things, Editor Joseph Bottom describes the “crossroads” of religion and public life in America this way:

There is a marker at that place, naming its many promises and dangers for travelers, with the word abortion at the top. Even now, abortion remains what it has been for more than thirty years: the signpost at the intersection of religion and American public life.

 

Of course, there are those who think this shouldn’t be so. Personally, I cannot see how abortion could not rank first. We eliminate 1.3 million unborn children in this country every year, a number that dwarfs, by far, the impact of every other activity with which the moral teachings of the churches might be concerned. For that matter, the story of abortion is a tale of blood and sex and power and law – I do not know what more anyone could need for public significance. The people who say they are uninterested in the issue of abortion have always seemed, to me, to be trying to suppress the imagination that most makes us human.

Commenting on Indiana governor Mitch Daniels’ statement that, in order to make progress on important economic issues, we will “have to call a truce on the so-called social issues” (which Daniels and others* have called “divisive issues”), Bottom writes, “Abortion is here, and not to take a stand is to take a stand.” Click to continue »

We regularly use a phrase around Covenant that expresses our understanding of the pathways of life and service, both for us who teach and serve at the College and for our students and alumni: extraordinary callings in ordinary places.

The principal point of the phrase is to remind us of the primary way in which God has from the beginning accomplished his redemptive and reviving work in the world: through the faithful, day-by-day, most often mundane work of his people, most often in “ordinary” places and through “ordinary” means, as by his mercy and provision they fulfill the extraordinary callings to which he has called them.

Once in a while he raises up extraordinary leaders whom he uses for dramatic, history-changing purposes – the apostle Paul, Martin Luther, C. S. Lewis, and of course many others across the centuries. But even they seem to come to their historic uniqueness of leadership through rather ordinary means: as hard-working scholars or faithful churchmen or teachers or accountants or whatever, carrying out their daily duties without much sense of God’s grander design for the outcomes of their efforts.

I recently came across a brief essay, written by pastor Kevin DeYoung, which offers further reflection on this theme (“The Glory of Plodding,” originally published in the May 2010 issue of Tabletalk magazine). DeYoung writes: Click to continue »

How the years do pass! We’ve come to the conclusion of another academic year at Covenant, with our 55th Commencement exercises scheduled for this Saturday, May 8, with Dr. Sinclair Ferguson as our speaker. It’s a special commencement for our family with the graduation of our youngest son, David; we’ve finally arrived at this major transition in our family’s life.

This has been a remarkable year at the College, particularly in light of how things looked a year ago – economic crisis, budget worries, enrollment questions, fund-raising uncertainty. After careful planning and difficult decisions, accompanied by a sense of anxiety which affects even those who trust in a sovereign and gracious God, we began the year with strong student enrollment. The fall also brought surprising strength in gifts, including the largest single gift the College has ever received, from the estate of long-time Covenant friend Lowell Andreas. Spring enrollment and giving have remained on or above goals as well, so that, as we look to the end of our fiscal year on June 30, we are anticipating a positive budget outcome and solid financial position entering the new year. Click to continue »