Media, 2015

When I started writing every day, more than two years ago, I encountered an enormous upwelling of words that I couldn't hope to contain. Here were words that didn't know if they were scholarship, philosophy, preaching or fire. There were, and are, more ideas than I could hope to parse on my own. I knew that I needed a community of people who would help me critique, refine and shape what was pouring out.

The Society of Vineyard Scholars has been that community for me. I'm profoundly grateful for this strange group of pastors and scholars, steeped in Pentecostalism, Catholicism, Anglicanism, Methodism, Calvinism, secularism, Orthodoxy, Evangelicalism and more, grafted together by some gentle, but very un-tame gardener.

So it's incredibly fitting that this year's Society of Vineyard Scholars began with Michael Raburn commemorating some old cassette tapes by Don Williams, in which Don sounded an awful lot like a scholar, and an awful lot like a preacher. In those tapes, he said things that burned and called us to repentance. Then, like a character in a book-on-tape come to life, Don stood up, prayed over us and called us to repentance.

And it is incredibly fitting that the conference ended with Bethany Joy Kim pouring out her heart about the paper on limnality that was too limnal to write. The scraps of a paper she had were scrapped the night before, at communion. As she sat in the hotel lobby that night, laboring over some kind of paper, she exuded a kind of peace that she couldn't have possibly been feeling. And then, in her presentation, scholarship erupted into preaching and tears. The Holy Spirit fell powerfully on all of us, gathered there. As anyone who was there can tell you, that is a certain, precise and irrefutable empirical statement...the only sort of language that can accurately describe the event.

So this is what I've been learning, through the Society of Vineyard Scholars: Pastor. Study. Burn...so gently, so untameably, so powerfully, as the Holy Spirit leads. And then study, and pastor, but in a way that has been transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Or I can put this less elegantly, but more densely still. At the beginning of the conference, I joked with Jon and Beth Stovell by tossing out some absurdly vacuous, theological academic nonsense: what really mattered was the epistemic ecclesiology of our chiastology. But yeah. You can say it like that, too.