Now and again I get the feeling 
Well if I don’t win I’m gonna break even.

Tom Petty, “You Wreck Me”

A Friday Blahg on a Saturday? A Friday Blahg, like…you wrote something and posted it?

Yeah, yeah, it’s been a while. What can I say, folks. It’s rather metaphorical, actually. Breaking paradigms and patterns and self-imposed restrictions is kinda what I am doing these days.

I’ve had a lot of changes in my life recently, starting with my license plate. For probably 300,000 miles on three different vehicles, my comings and goings have been marked by the expression “GRRRR” since the mid-Nineties. Those plates reflect what I hope was a playful attitude towards life’s complications in my mid-twenties. But that was half a lifetime ago, I just turned 50, and maybe it is time to grow up. That, and when your name is Ross downstream from the TV show Friends you have to lean into the “PIVAAAT!”

That has been easiest pivot of the last year. Most of the others are redefining my life in sometimes-dizzying ways.

Tonight We Ride

Let’s start with the most immediate Big Thing. I am now taking on the role of academic dean at Boise Bible College. (For process reasons this will start out on an interim basis, but the College and I are both open to this possibly becoming a long-term thing.) This news probably doesn’t come as a huge surprise to many people, since I have been Chuck Faber’s deputy for twenty years and people have frequently told me that they thought I was the logical person to succeed him. That said, it is kind of a surprise to me. For a long time and for a number of reasons I was not sure I wanted the job. I had every intention of turning it down if it came looking for me. But I have gotten used to God changing my mind, and never, ever in the history of ever has God changed my mind faster and harder than on this. And in changing my mind God has given me vision and intention for what we can be as an institution dedicated to spiritual formation and ministry training for the next 15-20 years.

For example—as someone formed and ministering within the Stone-Campbell tradition—I want to lean hard into that “in opinions, liberty” thing because I think that requires us to live according to the fruit of the Holy Spirit (love, patience, humility, all that mushy stuff). I recognize that is a big rock to roll up the hill, because we struggle to agree on what the essentials are. We always have. And we always will. This is one reason I think the history of the Church matters. The creeds of the early Church attempted to articulate the “essentials” that Scripture often assumes to be true but does not systematically spell out, and their central focus was on the nature, life, and work of Jesus Christ. Said another way, the early creeds point us to the essentials.

Unfortunately, our non-creedal movement de-emphasized—and in some cases outright distrusted and dismissed—the historic creeds because we overreacted to what (in fairness) was a legitimate problem. Post-Reformation denominations had weaponized various confessions that were much more expansive in scope and tended to blur the lines between “essentials” and “opinions,” resulting in grievous divisions within the Body of Christ. However, if we are willing to honestly examine ourselves, I think history has borne out that rejecting the early creeds did not solve the problem. We have also, I fear, often crammed too many opinions into the essentials bucket and pursued them with more sectarian arrogance than love—the very thing we came into being as a movement hoping to correct.

And that’s not even the worst of it. I am convinced that we have cut ourselves off from the full blessings of life in Christ that the historic creeds actually invite us into. The Trinity spoken of in the early creeds is everything—everything!—if for no other reason than because the Trinity is the perfect, eternal relationship of love into which we are invited and shepherded by the love and ministry of Father, Son, and Spirit.

This journey I’m on is about learning to really live the Christian life by the heart- and mind- and soul- and strength-transforming power of the Holy Spirit.

“In opinions, liberty” is followed, of course, by “In all things, love,” which is an aspiration that I think we have largely failed at. I don’t think I am being controversial with that assessment. “In all things, love” is only possible as God in his fullness becomes our treasured inheritance. Get that more right, and we can more become the best version of what we set out as a movement to be—including doing the “essentials” and “opinions” things in more healthy and Christ-honoring ways.

So, I want us as a college to keep equipping people to teach and preach the Word well, as I believe we have generally done. Adding to that, I want us to grow in equipping students to live the Word well and to embody God’s love through an educational experience that is truly transformational, not merely informational.

Yeah You Break Me In Two

That leads me to the other Big Thing, which is that I picked now of all times to start a doctorate.

Which—let’s be honest here—is smash-yourself-in-the-kneecap-with-a-hammer levels of crazy.

Let me explain.

I have been investigating possible DMin or PhD programs for a few years, hoping to continue exploring the spirituality of the historic Church—especially the Desert Fathers and Mothers, whose teachings have meant so much to me—and translating that wisdom into the contemporary American Evangelical setting. But I had never found one that really seemed like the right fit for what I wanted to emphasize or that I could realistically fit into my life without absolutely breaking it. (One program I looked at is in Manchester, England, and that would have been a great adventure for Knudsenfam but was hopelessly and hilariously impractical.)

Last September I found out about the DMin in Spiritual Formation and Soul Care through the Institute for Spiritual Formation at Biola University’s Talbot School of Theology and was really, really intrigued. It seemed like a perfect fit for me and what I want to do. However, I knew then that this whole academic dean thing was looming and the timing seemed all wrong. So, the application deadline passed at the end of October right as God was changing my mind about accepting a promotion, and then I looked at the ISF literature again and whoops—only then did I notice that the program is based around cohorts that start every three years and oh dang—January 2024 is when the next cohort starts. (This is why you always read the syllabus, my dudes.) This was the program I wanted, and the timing was so horrible terrible no good very bad, but I emphatically did NOT want to wait until January 2027 to get started.

Fortunately—and I have worked in and around college admissions long enough to know this—application deadlines are often more like what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules. So I was still able to apply (very fast) and be admitted in time to participate in what I affectionally call the Semester of Ten Thousand Pages. That’s a slight exaggeration, but we’re talking about some pretty deep theological reading drawn from Old Testament wisdom literature and historical spirituality—stuff I am well-equipped for—combined with a bunch of psychology reading that for me is waaaay up there on the metaphorical top shelf. It has been a lot of work, but I treasure everything I have learned and am still learning. Wow—God is very, very good.

This past Monday I began my first week of residency in person, at Biola University in Los Angeles. I love my fellow students. I love my professors. I love what I am learning. And so far it is (to use some very technical theological language) kicking my tailbone through my teeth on an emotional level that has taken me very much by surprise. This stuff is forcing me, an already introspective person, to go so much deeper into my soul than I knew it was possible to go. I am encountering things both painful and beautiful that I did not expect to find as the Holy Spirit (again, I’m using some very precise spiritual formation terminology here) “cracks me open.”

I wish I could explain this better, but you may have experienced things yourself that you can’t really describe satisfactorily. Try to describe a total solar eclipse that you have seen with your own eyes in a way that remotely does justice to what you saw. I dare you. You can’t do it. Anything you say or write will fall short—woefully short—of the mark. That’s where I am right now—I am up against the limits of what I know how to put into words.

It’s good. It’s humbling. It is really something.

It has also been helpful, in concert with my professors and my eager, hungry, and thoroughly wonderful fellow flock of DMins, to prayerfully—and forgive my em-dash addiction and head full of untrained and very hyperactive squirrels right now but I do mean prayerfully; we start with prayer, we end with prayer, we stop and pray mid-lecture all the time, our group projects are marinating in prayer, and we get sent out for individual prayer projects focused on very narrow, introspective topics—think through the dynamics of the Holy Spirit’s work in me and the dynamics of what is going on in my own heart and mind and soul. (I should edit that sentence but I’m not going to. I can only hope to write a run-on sentence as out of control as the Apostle Paul someday but that one will do for now.)

This is confirming that many of the dots I have connected in the past few years while exploring the wisdom of the Desert Fathers have been connected well, which is such an encouragement to me. It turns out that what I think I have been seeing about our often skewed and incomplete formation in Christlikeness in American Evangelism may actually be there—it would be a great thing to be wrong about, but if it is there I want to see it and understand it and know what to do about it. But now I am getting some new dots to connect, and sometimes the old dots are getting reconnected in new ways. And there have been dots I had connected but had not given the attention they deserved or had needed to consider their implications more completely.

The Trinity spoken of in the early creeds is everything—everything!—if for no other reason than because the Trinity is the perfect, eternal relationship of love into which we are invited and shepherded by the love and ministry of Father, Son, and Spirit.

It is hard to escape this: I understand more clearly than ever why a movement such as mine, shaped by the work ethic of American rugged individualism and by the intellectual framework of the Enlightenment—and, crucially, by a rationalistic allergy to the Holy Spirit—so easily gets caught in the beartraps of moralism and self-help spirituality. And I want to be clear about this—there can be the best of intentions and the most admirable of motives behind the choices and habits that lead us to those bear traps. But trapped people are never free. And we are made and redeemed and being transformed by God to be free. Doing God Things in the power of the flesh will never make us the people we say we are or the people we say we want to be. There is a better way.

I really should stop here or I will get even more completely out of control and probably overwhelm my sevens and sevens of readers. But here’s the short version. This journey I’m on (and have been on even before this rather recent side quest) is about learning to really live the Christian life, not according to the flesh—armed with a bunch of nifty and mystical disciplines and sent out to “work harder” at sanctifying ourselves—but by the heart- and mind- and soul- and strength-transforming power of the Holy Spirit.

The Ministry of Self-Reconciliation

These two things—leading the academic team at Boise Bible College and reclaiming the philosophy, vocabulary, and processes of spiritual formation—are happening at the same time for a reason. I am convinced of it.

A lot of what I brought with me into this new journey is good, but sometimes a bit distorted or misdirected. I am not fully self-reconciled—my head and my heart are not always traveling on the same trajectory. Over time the compounding impact of those small distortions can really add up, but that does not mean wholesale change is warranted or even wise. Instead, a small but significant pivot is needed to start doing the good things in healthier ways, so that what I know is fully integrated and reconciled with a heart that has been shaped by God to love what God loves.

I think something similar is true of Boise Bible College. I think we will be the most on-mission version of what we were founded to be if we balance biblical information with heart transformation. Head knowledge is essential to spiritual formation, of course, but is not enough without heart knowledge. What’s more, head knowledge without heart knowledge can be incredibly damaging. What we know and what we want can’t be two horses galloping off in different directions, unless the goal is for our students to be torn apart—to become dis-integrated. (Just to be clear, that is emphatically not the goal. Has Ovaltine sent you your decoder ring to understand my sense of humor yet? No? Oh dear.) As we diligently study the Word, we also need to be open to the work of the Holy Spirit in changing our hearts as only he can.

I don’t think that finding a healthy balance requires radical change, because I think the College does a lot of things well. Some of them may need to be done with more intentionality, and some may need to be done with more humility. Some things may need to go, and other things may need to be added. But the core of what the College does is good and is positioned to meet the needs of rising generations in a changing and challenging world.

So I think our best future does not require radical change but rather to carefully and prayerfully pivot. That pivot needs to add missing or underdeveloped elements of spiritual formation to the DNA of Boise Bible College in ways that are thought through well and prayed through thoughtfully. This will be a years-long process, one I intend to lead and to facilitate but not to unilaterally impose. I trust my team, and I want their input and their evaluation as we try as an institution to grow in how we equip men and women for holiness and for service.

I am constantly amazed at all the little ways I have been prepared for this peculiar task over the course of the months and years and even decades leading up to this most surprising season of my life. God will surely finish the work he has begun, and no doubt I will be surprised many times along the way by how he does it.

But he is faithful. He will surely do it.

Photo credit: Max Vakhtbovycn at Pexels