I heard Tom Skinner preach twice. He preached a soul-stirring sermon at a 1972 Madison Square Garden “Jesus Joy” concert. He preached another soul-stirring sermon several months later at an evangelistic crusade in East Lansing. However, the second was an exact repeat of the first, leaving me wondering if he was a one-note-Tommy. Nevertheless, the preaching double play left in me a memorable vision for the church.
Skinner invited both audiences to wonder how the church should interface with the world. Should we aspire to positions of secular influence? He warned that the secular probably would influence us more than the reverse. Should we withdraw from the culture? The culture would withdraw from faith and justice. Instead, he cast a vision for the city on the hill, the church that would model the reign of God for others to desire and emulate.
He was casting a vision for Christian community that, by its very treatment of one another, conveys to all around a magnetic appeal toward the Christian faith.
Where might we find such cities on such hills?
One place we might find them is on our seminary campuses. Sure, proposals to tweak the curriculum can heat faculty meetings to white hot intensity. And campus-embroiling disputes over assigned parking spaces bring out the worst, except for the even worse sporadic incidents of moral failure.
However, a robust spirit of shared purpose prevails on most of those seminary campuses. That spirit operates both in spite of and because of the enormous diversity that resides in those communities. Classicists and iconoclasts.Theoreticians and practitioners. Guild scholars and ecclesial leaders. Traditionalists and progressives. Evangelists and chaplains. Mission scholars and pastoral counselors. Add to all those differences the multicultural mix found among students and faculty on most campuses.
A fragrant aroma often rises out of such stews as these.
What’s more, that robust spirit operates in an era of expansive democratization of knowledge. In contrast to the days when scholars doled out bite-sized portions of wisdom to eager, note-taking sponges, today’s students take their professors “in context” or even “with a grain of salt” as they compare one professor’s ideas against the assertions of the countless others to whom they are exposed. The World Wide Web has become the worldwide library and the worldwide classroom, where students shop for the ideas that ring true to them.
In the seminary classroom those students engage in dialogue as colleagues with their teachers and fellow students, expecting truth claims to be substantiated, not blandly accepted by force of argument or priority of professorial status. Indeed, the second-career seminarians, many of whom have succeeded in other vocations, expect to speak into the learning of the others.
Accordingly, the life of the seminary is shaped just as much by the students as by the professors and administration.
All of which leads to the net effect: living in Christian community organized around the joint purposes of preparing church leadership and catalyzing the church’s intellectual life. The experience of community on those campuses reflects varying levels of personal engagement, circles of close friends surrounded by general acquaintances and by nearby strangers. And, many experience community with vitality.
Tom Skinner is no longer with us, having passed to the next life in 1994. He certainly was no one-note-Tommy. A preacher’s kid from Harlem, his ministerial career was one of innovative leadership in the inner city, especially with the African-American community, and as an affiliate evangelist with Billy Graham. Today, were he to look around the church, he might weep over the dimness of the church’s light on the hill. But he might encourage us in the pews to take a look at those hills topped by our seminaries. He might point us in their direction to find a brighter light.
