“But one of the glories of education is the opportunity to hear the truth come out of a human being with blood in the veins and air in the lungs, and not just off a printed page” (Douglas Wilson, The Case for Classical Christian Education, p. 198).

When I first saw that quotation, the person who immediately came to my mind is my professor for Prophetic Books, Michael Kelly. And, as he tells it, he is who he is today largely because of another professor who embodied what he taught, the late Harvie Conn. Harvie once said something to the effect of “the Bible begins in a garden and ends in a city; so if you want to be moving in God’s direction, move south of Cheltenham Ave.” (Cheltenham Ave. is more or less the dividing line between the northern suburbs of Philly, where WTS is located, and the real city of Philadelphia). Mike took that quite literally, moving his family into one of the tougher neighborhoods of Philadelphia in order to make “bringing the eschatological but already-inaugurated Kingdom of God from the future into the present” not just something he taught but lived.

I hope he won’t mind me telling here a story he has shared in class. Down the street from their row house is a city park. When Mike and his wife Shareen moved there, no children could play in this park, no families picnicked there. It was the domain of drug lords and perverts. Then one evening Mike’s small group from his church were pondering what they could do for their neighborhood. Someone wondered what would happen if they planted a garden in the park. So was launched the Fisher Park Community Garden. There is a long story leading from that beginning to a rebirth of the park and the beginnings of transformation in the neighborhood, but I’m hoping Mike will find a venue to tell that himself someday.

One day Mike and Shareen were working in the garden. Mike was putting in some new bulbs, when he glanced up to witness, in broad daylight, a drug deal going on just a few dozen feet away. He looked down at his arms up to his elbows in dirt, then back up at the drug deal, and said to Shareen, “What are we doing here? What were we thinking?”

As Mike tells it, his raised-in-Michigan-Dutch-Kuyperian-Calvinism wife turned to him and said, “This is my Father’s world!”

So happy birthday, Mike. I don’t know if I’ll remember every Hebrew paradigm you ever taught me. I don’t know if I’ll be able ten years from now to explain the literary unity of the book of Isaiah. But I am quite confident that because of your embodied teaching, I will always see “my Father’s world” through eschatological eyes.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 4th, 2006 at 11:13 am and is filed under Discipleship, Family & Friends, MereMission, WTS, Worldview. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.