Our Asbury Days
by Bishop David W. Kendall, Free Methodist Church, (1979, MDiv)
As Lavone and I moved into Alumni Manor 3 in the fall of 1976 we had mixed feelings. For the past year friends in Pulaski, Michigan had given us a taste of pastoral ministry, and we hated to leave them. At the same time, we eagerly anticipated a new chapter of life at Asbury Theological Seminary (ATS). The mixed feelings, however, went even deeper. While pastoring had left a good taste in our mouths, good enough to make us wish for more, still we had found “church” and “church people” to be puzzling and frustrating as well as joyful and hopeful! Clearly, we needed a thorough education in light of our initial ministerial experiences.
We found living, studying, and learning at ATS to be exactly what we needed. As we look back through the years, in fact, we can see how all of the ministry priorities and trajectories we most value today originated or deepened during our “Asbury days.” I couldn’t then have imagined serving Jesus and the church in the ways I have, but clearly so much of my current life and ministry rests on foundational realities identified and embraced during those years.
During Asbury days the word of God came alive to me in ways I had yet to experience. I met brilliant faculty people who loved Jesus passionately and who taught me to listen to the scriptures on their own terms. It was at Asbury where I first considered that God’s word could “read” me, as much I might read it. I began to learn how to lay preconceived notions to the side in order to hear what God wanted to say to me and my church.
During Asbury days, I appreciated more fully the community of God’s people. That community was far richer, different, and wonderful than I had ever experienced before. Both during and since those years, God’s choice to work through a people has fascinated, challenged, and changed who I am and how I live. The loftiest notions of divine love and holiness rise no higher and expand no farther than the circle of friends with whom following Jesus has become a way of life. And, amazingly, a number of people we met at ATS have become lifelong friends, brothers and sisters in common kingdom cause.
During Asbury days, we first sensed that our true calling was not simply ours as opposed to that of others, but truly an invitation to participate in the global mission of no less than God! We also learned how deep and wide God’s mission runs. The standard divide, in the western world at least, between evangelism and justice inevitably reduces the mission and diminishes whatever we do. God made it all, cares for it all, and seeks to redeem it all. To aim at anything less than “all” requires settling for a partial mission and gospel, which subverts both.
During Asbury days, we became enthralled (again) with the wonder of God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, whose full and complete picture we have in Jesus our Lord. In Jesus we can see this God who loves and redeems us, we see who we are destined to be like, and we see the only future of the world worth pursuing.
Finally, during Asbury days we had an opportunity to be among truly great servants and leaders of God’s people and mission. Some of them we knew to be great while there; more of them we now know to be great in light of years of living and serving. That light reveals that what they taught and how they lived flowed out of a full and rich connection with the living God that I was too foolish at the time to value. Thankfully, they were patient and persistent in teaching us, and we rise up to call them blessed.