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Talbot faculty member, James Petitfils, and a panel of Talbot graduates who are now pastors in Southern California discuss why a seminary education is so valuable for ministry today.

The Christian belief system is consistent and coherent. This shows in the way that adjustments in one concept of the system often require modifications in other aspects. Increased clarity about one topic elucidates other topics. The interdependence of my beliefs was again displayed when I came across a common mistranslation of a single word in Luke’s gospel. Once I had been persuaded that the prevailing translation was misleading, I experienced shifts in the ways I view and relate to God, and how I pray and think about God’s involvement in daily life. These implications of a single word have been strong reverberations that I am grateful to experience ...

Talbot faculty member, James Petitfils, and a panel of Talbot graduates who are now pastors in Southern California discuss how local churches can better engage and love their communities.

Talbot faculty member, James Petitfils, and a panel of Talbot graduates who are now pastors in Southern California discuss the unique challenges of ministry in this region.

The idea of our identity with Christ is an important topic in my class on spiritual formation. We spend several class sessions looking at Colossians 3:1-17 from a variety of angles and often return to thinking about how our identity with Christ is foundational for our spiritual life and maturity (the students also memorize Colossians 3:1-17 over the course of the semester). The capstone to this section of the class is an assignment helping the students to reflect on their own identity. Here are the instructions ...

The season of Advent is one in which the Church anticipates, prepares for, and celebrates the coming of Jesus Christ into our midst. As I thought about waiting expectantly for the presence of Jesus, I started wondering what exactly I am waiting for. What is it I expect from his coming? Am I waiting for him to come and fix my circumstances or get me out of a tight place? Do I just want him to ease my suffering and pain, to bring comfort and solace?

Students often ask, What does a Christian leader need in order to experience an effective life of ministry in the local church? A key part of the answer has to do with the kinds of people we gather around ourselves. As I look back over some thirty-five years of local church ministry, four kinds of relationships (besides God and my natural family) have proven indispensable to the health and vitality of my own pilgrimage as a pastor ...

Stability is a good thing – knowing that your favorite chair won’t collapse when you plop down in it after a hard day – being able to count on the love of someone no matter what. But as followers of Jesus Christ, we need to be willing to adjust with the changes that come with such a commitment. The first disciples were so inclined, and because of it, we have the gospel, are born-again, and look forward to an eternity in the presence of our loving Father.

Kyle Strobel (assistant professor at Talbot's Institute of Spirtual Formation) and Jamin Goggin ('03, M.A. '08) recently released Beloved Dust: Drawing Close to God by Discovering the Truth 51���� Yourself. We wanted to learn more about this book, so we put together some questions that Kyle graciously answered.

This series of posts presents several of my active assignments from the required freshman class Biblical Interpretation and Spiritual Formation. This one has the students examine their use of time and money, and usually students are surprised at the results. Here are the instructions ...

Are you as concerned about the growing problem of biblical illiteracy as I am? We Christians have more Bible-focused resources available to us than has any generation of Christians in the history of the world. Despite this we are literally—from a spiritual standpoint—starving ourselves to death. Would you like your church, adult Bible class, youth group, or small group to reach Bible fluency by pursuing an Old Testament Fluency in 12 Weeks class or a New Testament Fluency in 12 Weeks class using the free resources at biblefluency.com? Here’s how.

What does it take to achieve Bible Fluency? In my next two posts I will guide you through how to use a brand new free resource called Bible Fluency: Sing it, See it, Study it, found at biblefluency.com. This first post seeks to answer the question: How can I use music, visuals, and a workbook to help me learn to think my way through the Bible?

Now there is a provocative title for a blog! But it’s probably not what you think. This past spring I attended a faculty development seminar at 51���� led by José Bowen, author of the book, Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning (Jossey-Bass, 2012). The main thrust of his sessions with us, and of his book, is that with information being so readily available through mass technology, we need to leverage that technology to maximize classroom interaction with students, shifting our roles from presenters of information (which students can get more readily online) to coaches who help students process that information, promoting deeper learning, critical thinking, and application of knowledge to life situations. As I reflected on Bowen’s ideas, I think we may need to start “teaching naked” in the church. Let me tell you what I mean.

Half of my teaching load each semester consists of teaching the required freshman class Biblical Interpretation and Spiritual Formation. Although I thought the combination of these two topics in one class was strange when I first read the job posting, the class has grown on me and I now love teaching it. I see the connection as leading from proper reading of the Bible to spiritual formation: the very structure of the class helps prevent us from merely reading the Bible in an academic fashion. We spend a large part of the semester looking at the different genres of the Bible (law, prophecy, etc.) and then we reflect on spiritual formation topics related to those genres (such as legalism and idolatry).

A family had a priceless family heirloom – a vase – that was passed down one generation to the next generation. One day, the parents of the family who had possession of the vase, left the teenagers at home while they went out shopping for the day. When they returned home, their children met the parents at the door, with sad faces, reporting: “Mother, Father… you know that priceless heirloom our family passes down one generation to the next… while our generation just dropped it”

Occasionally I find myself in a conversation with a non-Christian friend. Sometimes, I have to pay close attention to the language I use if the talk turns to things related to God and ultimate reality. I do the same when I talk to my children about Bible things. I want to be understood, but the normal Christian terms are a foreign language to many people, Christians included. The terms are difficult to use when they don’t communicate.

Have you ever felt like a failure? Inadequate? Ineffectual? Have you ever examined your heart and glimpsed sin and darkness and defeat? I have. It is discouraging and demoralizing. It makes me wonder what God sees in me. There is no doubt that I am a flawed vessel. But does that mean that I am a useless vessel?

One of the qualifications for an overseer/elder/pastor (all the same office in the Bible) is that he be “free from the love of money” (1 Tim. 3:3). Now suppose that you are on an elder board and seeking to know whether a new candidate for the office is in fact free from the love of money, how can you figure it out? Here are five useful diagnostic questions.

Each August the Hellermans spend several weeks vacationing in the mountains, in Mammoth Lakes, CA. One afternoon, on one of our getaways, our oldest daughter (then thirteen years old) came out of her room with a play she had written. Rebekah has always been into drama. She had participated in a number of children’s theater productions at our previous church. On the home front, Rebekah recruited neighborhood friends and staged “plays” before a captive audience of indulgent parents ... So began an adventure that continues to unfold today, sixteen years later.

I am all for weekends (even when I have to work, such as doing lesson planning, grading, or writing a blog post!). But sometimes we can fall into the trap of thinking of work as the negative and leisure or rest as the positive aspect of our lives. Work can become something we need to “get through” in order to make it to the weekend; Sundays are our “spiritual” days as opposed to our “working” days that begin on Mondays, and so forth.

I gleaned more wisdom from my parents than any blog could contain, but here are three more lessons that stand out in my mind and heart as I remember Bob & Reka, lovebirds to the end.

In 19th century England, Atheists knew more about the Bible than most Christians do today. So did Liberal Anglicans, Anglo-Catholics, Unitarians, and Agnostics. So claims Timothy Larsen in A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians (Oxford, 2011) ...

It’s been over two weeks since I last shared on the Good Book Blog. That means it’s time for me to share some more tidbits for life gleaned from my folks.

A question that naturally surfaces in [the reading of Luke 18:18-27] is whether Jesus considers wealth to be compatible with a life of faithful discipleship. Some interpret this story to say that material things and following Jesus do not mix well. This interpretation is sometimes based on a plain reading of passages like this, but it can also be motivated by material excesses in Christianity that make us uncomfortable. Too much focus on material blessing as a necessary indicator of God’s approval can stifle efforts at legitimate Christian disciplines such as frugality, generosity, and financial sacrifice. As such, divesting material wealth is sometimes seen as a corrective to bad prosperity theology ...

In my last post, I talked about the importance of our ministry with children and some ministry objectives we need to pursue. In this follow up blog I would like to talk about four aspects of children’s ministry that together help us accomplish our goals of helping children grow and mature as a part of the church, the people of God. These are worthy goals, and it can be tempting to try to design one children’s program in the church to address them all. But if we take them each seriously, it will soon be clear that this is more than a matter of having a class or a club program for children. Instead, it requires thinking carefully about the full life of the church, as well as the church and family environment our children grow up in. It has implications for what we do for our children, with them, to them, and the opportunities we provide for them to be engaged in ministry themselves. I invite you to read and think with me about what this might look like.