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Our Apostolic Partnership

Published Date: May 1, 2013

by J. Ellsworth Kalas

Some years ago the United Methodist Publishing House invited me to write the student’s quarterly for an Adult Bible Studies unit.  I’ve been doing so at intervals ever since.  Later, when I began writing books, a variety of church groups adapted some of these books for class study.

In time, as I spoke here and there around the country, people introduced themselves to me by telling me that they were teaching from a quarterly or a book I had written.  Slowly it dawned on me (I’m sometimes quite slow) that these teachers and I were in partnership.  I write books or quarterlies and what happens after that depends very much on the people who interpret the books to their classes.  Even though the teachers and I are not physically acquainted, we’re a team.  I pray for everyone who reads what I’ve written because I want God’s Spirit to bless them in their reading, but I pray especially for those who teach from my writings because they can do so much to make the written material more valuable to their class members.  I cherish my partnership with these generally unknown persons.

Then, recently, something else occurred to me (as I’ve already mentioned, I’m sometimes slow).  I was studying one of Paul’s epistles while developing a sermon when I realized that in preaching from this text I was in partnership with Paul.  He’s the author and I’m the teacher/preacher.  What Paul carefully crafted or perhaps poured out in a torrent of holy excitement is now trusted to my hands.  I can make his material more accessible or I can cloud and bewilder it.  What Paul wrote in hopes of building up the saints can in the preacher’s or teacher’s hands become dull or even disheartening or destructive.  

For as long as I’ve preached I have seen preaching as a sacred trust.  Somehow, however, putting a human face on the biblical writer has introduced another dimension.  Obviously I don’t know what’s on the minds of the apostles and prophets in their eternal setting, but I can’t help wondering if Isaiah is muttering prayerfully, “Heaven help us, that erratic preacher in Texas is about to do violence again to my report on my experience when King Uzziah died.”  Or does Paul complain to Barnabas, “If preachers insist on using my love chapter from that Corinthian letter as a text for their wedding homily, I wish they’d do it justice.”

That is, I wonder if even the bliss of heaven is troubled for some biblical writers when they see what we earthly preachers and teachers do with their writings.  It’s quite awesome to think that when I teach and preach I’m in partnership with Isaiah, Amos, Luke and Paul.  But I wonder how they feel about it?   

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0 responses to “Our Apostolic Partnership”

  1. Lori Broschat says:

    Dr. Kalas, I just had the pleasure of writing a student book for ABS that will publish in June of 2014!

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