Barnabas File

Ircel Harrison, Molly Marshall, and Rita Harrison at 2018  commencement in Shawnee, KS Thanks to the reminder from LinkedIn, friends started sending me congratulations on my work anniversary last week.  I had to think for a few minutes but realized that these messages were in connection with my tenure at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. In 2004, I was serving as the coordinator of the Tennessee Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.  Mike Smith, my pastor at First Baptist Church, Murfreesboro, and I began talking about the challenges of theological education for those who were called to ministry but had families, jobs, and were already serving churches. They couldn’t easily pull up roots and go elsewhere. He mentioned specifically Beth Duke, someone I knew but he was more aware of her desire for a theological degree. She certainly fit the profile. She was a nurse at Southern Hills in Nashville, living in Smithville, Tennessee, where her ...

This past Friday night Dr. Sally Holt, who teaches Christian ethics at Central Baptist Theological Seminary Tennessee, arranged for her class in Murfreesboro to meet for dinner with a rabbi who teaches at a local university and the imam of the local mosque. Her purpose was to simply engage everyone in a time of informal dialogue in a non-threatening setting.   She was kind enough to invite me to participate.   The discussion touched on a number of topics, and I came away with many ideas, but two things particularly stimulated my thinking. First, the imam provided a good insight for our students who will serve local congregations.  He pointed out that their situation is very different from that of ministers just a few years ago.  At one point when a pastor stepped into the pulpit on Sunday morning,  there was a pretty good chance that the congregation was rather homogenous—they probably were born and raised in the local area, most were of the same ethnicit...