This experience is more common when I am responsible for an event, a project or something where I am the authority figure. When I am the leader, then the fears start and they can be hard to shake.

For myself, I often wrestled with certain fears while leading the Young Adult ministry at One Harbor Church. I served at my church in this role for 7 years (2017 to 2023). That is seven years of seeing a lot of incredible things happen while serving at my church. But it is also seven years of getting out of my comfort zone. As high as my hopes were during this experience, the fears associated with leadership in the church came to mind.

To make sense of those years that I led, I’ve found that articulating the fears associated with leadership would be the best way to reflect on this experience. Since I am the kind of person who has to relearn the same lesson more than once, I’d like to reflect on the types of fears I experienced so that in future leadership roles I will know how to face a challenge.

Let me start off with some backstory about One Harbor Church. This is the church I love and has given me so much life.

In 2017 my pastor Bryan Hart approached me to ask me if I’d like to help create a ministry at our church aimed at helping connect with to people in our 20’s and 30’s. I’d been attending One Harbor Church for two years at the time and I felt deeply connected to what our church was doing in our city.

Bryan said he trusted me to start a ministry like this because I’d already been working towards the goal of gathering people in this age demographic. It was clear that the idea was still being formed for what exactly this ministry would look like. And from my conversation with Bryan, he seemed open to letting me have input on what this ministry would look like.

So I said “Absolutely.” I believed in our church’s mission of building a gospel-centered community. I wanted to serve my church.

Fear #1: “I Am Afraid I Will Be Micromanaged.”

After Bryan and I met about starting the Young Adult ministry, I said “So what’s next?”
Bryan told me “Donnie wanted to help you guys brainstorm for this. Come up with some ideas about what you’d like this ministry to look like. And then meet with Donnie sometime next week.”

“Alright, sounds good,” I said, but I was nervous. Internally I started to hesitate.

Bryan said “Donnie is good at helping people think about a vision.”

Donnie Griggs was the lead pastor of the church. At the time, I had no reason to distrust Donnie. I admired him deeply as a person and was thankful for his leadership. However, despite this, my brain translated this as “Donnie will probably tell us how he wants us to do this. We likely won’t have much freedom.” I expected to be micromanaged in some fashion about how this ministry should and would be done. It wasn’t anything against Donnie as a person, it was just my brain went on high alert. The excitement somewhat wore off as I walked out of the church that day.

A few days later I walked into a room with Donnie. He introduced me to a recent college graduate named Mary Frances Hartley who also would be joining our team. My friend Mike Caputo also joined us. So it was the four of us in a room sitting around in a circle and I was preparing my mind to defend my ideas. I had my guard up that day.

Donnie stood in front of a whiteboard and said “If this ministry had no limits, what would this ministry look like for yall? Think really big.”

I told him “I think there are a lot of young professionals coming to our church on Sunday morning who need to be connected Monday to Saturday. I want those people to feel welcome and to feel connected. I think it would be great if we could have a summer cookout where people could feel welcome.”

As I said these things, Donnie vigorously wrote these things on a whiteboard. Over the course of about 10 minutes, he’d drafted out a plan for us.

I slowly realized that Donnie was invested in our idea. Donnie’s input was focused on helping us get ideas verbalized and then putting those ideas into practice. He also knew exactly what steps to take in order to put this into practice.

It became apparent that Donnie trusted us. And it felt foreign to me that I was being trusted as a leader.

My assumptions were wrong. And I was so glad.

This was the case for the next 6 years that I volunteered in this role. Even though I would often need approval from some of the pastors at the church for our ministry, I was consistently met with support and encouragement from our pastors. They delegated a task to me and they believed in me 100%.

When someone asks me now whether I want to volunteer to do something I no longer fear I will be micromanaged. Where did my guarded fear of authority figures come from? I’m not sure. But I know that now when I ask to do something at my church, I feel a sense of freedom. Even more, this has translated to my job at the community college where I am more willing now to take on leadership roles. The way I’ve been treated as a leader at my church has profoundly impacted how I perform at my job.

Fear #2: “I have a flawless vision and other people will derail it.”

This fear might also be called “I have a vision from God and I know the best way to accomplish all of this.” As you just read that sentence, you already know there can be pitfalls to this approach. But I’ll give one example of how I dealt with this thought in my own head.

After our team met with Donnie, I had confidence. But I was about to uncover another fear in the next meeting.

We’d decided to meet at the local coffee shop to discuss how we would start planning a summer cookout aimed at people in their 20’s and 30’s. Two other friends were helping with the Young Adult Team, Mike and Mary Frances. We were also working with Scott, another pastor at our church, to discuss the cookout we’d be planning.

We were sitting at the back of the coffee shop around a circular table beginning to discuss the details of the cookout. That’s when my friend Mike said “Why do we have to target this ministry towards people in their 20’s and 30’s? Why can’t it be aimed at any single person in the church?”
It was like an alarm going off in my head. Wasn’t it obvious from the previous meeting that we needed to target people in their 20s and 30s? Wouldn’t including anyone over the age of 40 create some unnecessary awkwardness?

Mike continued and said “I know multiple people in their 50s and 60s who would like to develop more friendships in our church.”

I was angry and likely my tone of voice became defensive: “I don’t get it. Anyone over the age of 40 needs to find their own way of meeting people. I thought we had agreed to have a space for people who were in their 20s and 30s to meet other people their age. That just seems like an awkward mix of people.”

Mike still disagreed.

So there we were in this small local coffee shop and thankfully our pastor Scott Beierwaltes was there. Scott, in an impartial tone of voice, said “I can see how both of you guys see it differently. It seems Mike wants people to feel welcome and Nate wants to focus on the younger crowd.”
We continued to discuss it. We eventually decided that it would not be a “singles” group but a group aimed at young professionals in their 20’s and 30’s group. We’d voted on it and Mary Frances felt the same way I did. All in all, I got what I wanted. But somehow Scott had said handled the tension in a way I have never forgotten. I saw in Scott a skill of handling disagreement in a meeting in an objective manner. Scott did the following in this moment: (1) identified what the differing opinions were, (2) accurately articulated both perspectives to everyone, (3) helped the group to continue the discussion regarding the pros and cons and (4) then asked for everyone to take a vote.

It was at that moment I realized I did not understand how to handle disagreement in meetings with my peers. Scott had this special skill that I’d never seen before. Was it a gift? A skill? A mixture of both? Whatever it was, I started to pay attention to how Scott behaved in our meetings.

By the end of 2017, I was leading the meetings for our Young Adult ministry. I’d like to say that I quickly learned Scott’s way of being open to new ideas when I took the lead. But that’s not the case. This was the beginning of my process of “learning how to find consensus and not lose my cool when challenged.” During this time, I still could sometimes see other people’s ideas as threats to my own. It was a process of not holding onto my own ideas so tightly.

Soon thereafter, Rob Thompson joined our team. Rob had a similar skill set as Scott in terms of finding consensus regarding new ideas and decision making. Thanks to Scott and Rob, I had two examples of how not to get too locked into my own vision for our team. They showed me how to integrate other people's ideas into our meeting. God gives other people gifts and perspective.
When leading in the church(or anywhere), I try to constantly remind myself of the passage in I Corinthians 12. It is the familiar passage where Paul uses the analogy of the body to be a team to point out each person’s unique gifts:

“If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable…”

When I lead a team, I desperately need other people. Even if it is my vision that I feel God has given me, I need other Christians to accomplish the task. I have detected within myself a feeling of seeing other people as threats to “my vision.” But instead I must try to see what gifts others have or see how their feedback might improve the execution of the vision.

Fear #3: “Our event was a failure. We didn’t get the response I expected.”

In 2019 Rob Thompson came to me with a need he saw in our church. Rob was passionate about practical methods to promote discipleship within One Harbor Church. It started out as a conversation about a need in the church and eventually we started to think about how the Young Adult ministry might have an event where pastors could teach about discipleship in the church.

For the first 2 years, our focus was mostly on just giving people a space to meet one another and hang out. We also wanted our Young Adult ministry to have a space where we could integrate teaching from Scripture about specific topics. What did we do? We decided to have a mini-conference discipleship weekend.

We’d planned out a 2-day event where we’d have one of our pastors speak at our friend Daniel and Haley Chaney’s house on Friday night and then on Saturday night we’d have 2 speakers at the church on a Saturday night. We made a detailed plan, advertised on Facebook, told our friends and identified specific tasks to knock out.

The first night of our mini-conference was an absolute hit. Our pastor Bryan Hart spoke at the Chaney’s house. We’d made food and had people gather in the Chaney’s living room who had an incredible ranch-style living room. Their living room was like a mini-amphitheater packed full about 30 people.

Bryan spoke about how Jesus invested intensely into 12 disciples in order to change the world. Bryan challenged the idea that we should have a huge audience, but instead focused on mentoring and training a small group of people. It wasn’t like one person just leading all these people, but just one person who intensely focused on training a few men. I remember sitting on the floor, hearing Bryan teach and feeling like I was a part of a revolution.

Night 1 of our mini-conference experiment checked all the boxes. People showed up. It felt intimate and organic since it was not at church but in the Chaney’s living room. Afterwards people stuck around and discussed Bryan’s sermon. This exceeded all my expectations.

The second night of our mini-conference we had my friends Rob and Hilary giving presentations about what it means to be a disciple of Christ. Rob’s talk was titled “Personal Discipleship: Conforming to the Image of Christ.” Hilary’s talk was titled “Discipleship in 2019.” This was a Saturday night and we were holding this in a historic building in downtown Beaufort. Rob and Hilary gave solid presentations on their topics.

However, we had about 15 people show up. The room we’d reserved for this event could hold 60 people easily. Why didn’t more people come out for Night 2? If 30 people came out for the first night, why didn’t the enthusiasm carry over for the 2nd night? I left disappointed.

But should I have been disappointed? We had 30 people the first night and 15 people the second night. Would it be fair to paint this event as a failure? Looking back I realized that my own expectations had painted our work towards this mini-conference in a negative light.

The problem was my high expectations more than the reality of what happened. My own unrealistic expectations can cloud the reality of what actually just happened. My own unrealistic expectations can blind me from seeing a prayer that God just answered.

I’m not sure what the answer is on how to judge the success or failure as a leader. I’m sure it is different for every leader and for every situation. However, I know that I must be aware of my own tendency to fixate on what did not happen rather on what did happen. I have an ingrained tendency to ruminate on unanswered prayers rather recognize the answered prayer that God explicitly answered.

Trust and Delegation that Allows People To Grow into Leaders

I would have never become aware of my own leadership-related fears if it not been for three pastors at my church: Donnie Griggs, Bryan Hart and Scott Beierwaltes. I want to give credit to these guys for trusting me as a leader and giving me the space to grow. My central goal in this ministry was to help people in their 20s and 30s walk with Christ. These three men empowered me by allowing me to watch their example and giving me the space and freedom to learn from my own mistakes.
The reason I wrote this blog entry is so that I will not forget the fears I experienced when in leadership at the church. I must remember these fears. When I am in leadership positions in the future at work or at church I need to remember that anxiety and fear are part of the experience. Will I let my fears get in the way of doing what I think is right? Will I depend on God to help give me strength when I feel exhausted? Will I make a rash self-centered decision that forgets about First Corinthians 12?

Fear and worry are just part of the pressures of leadership. I need methods ingrained in my mind when that moment comes to press forward and find my way forward. Don't forget what you've learned about the normal pressures of leadership. Don't forget.

Teaching online forced me to create a lot of materials from scratch. I had to carefully and logically write out weekly directions for students in new and engaging ways with PowerPoint, Word documents, video content, and consistent content creation. In some ways, teaching online is like maintaining a social media presence. I’ve taught at least one online for 10 years straight, which is 20 semesters. After all these years of teaching online, I have found teaching online made me a better face-to-face teacher.

While teaching online has made me a better teacher, is the same true for college freshmen?

Students in their first year at the university should consider whether they can handle online classes. That is especially true for students who just graduated from high school. I'll first start off with some stats my co-worker and I ran after analyzing some data about student success rates. After that, I'll share a few reasons why I think online classes can be more challenging.

First, the data. I work at Carteret Community College in Morehead City, NC and my co-worker and I ran some stats on all ENG 111 classes from Fall 2021 to Spring 2023. That not only includes my classes but also multiple other English professors. This a class almost all students at our college has to take. When looking at this period of time, we found that 60% of students took this class online(417 total), while 40% of students took ENG 111 seated(282 total). We found that 63% of all students who took ENG 111 online were successful (made a C or higher), whereas 74% of all students who took ENG 111 were successful. But one particular number stood out even more and that is that when we looked at students who were between the ages of 18-23, 75% of students who took the class face to face were successful, where as 60% of online students were successful. Overall, students right out of high school are 15% more likely to pass ENG 111 face to face in contrast to those who take the course online.

Now, why is this? I'd like to go over 4 observations as to why students who take English online struggle mixed in with observations as to why students in seated classes succeed. Here are my reasons why....

1.) The Face to Face experience of Being Required to Listen to a Professor's Lecture is Underrated.

My face to face students are forced to listen to me lecture about how to make an A. My online students may choose to skim the directions.

Taking any college class requires a certain amount of self-discipline and self-control. Self-control is a certain kind of muscle that you have to develop.

Taking online classes and taking seated classes require different kinds of self-control. What kind of self-control do you have?

If you take a class face to face, the main type of self-control you will need is to get to class and take notes. Getting to class on time and being mentally available for the lecture will take real time and effort. In this situation, a certain amount of responsibility is put on the teacher to present the material in a clear manner and engaging. A seated class puts the “material presentation” on the teacher. For me, I lecture for 20-30 minutes per class and often have 15 minutes of discussion and 10 minutes of in-class reflection. In this case, it is the teacher’s responsibility to connect with the students and make the material engaging. In a way, the teacher’s job is somewhat like an entertainer.

The “Tattoo this to your face” announcement method is something I’ve always found effective as a teacher. This is a moment in a live lecture where I can say to my students: “If you want to make an A on this paper, you need to ________________. Tattoo that to your forehead.” I explicitly give tips to students on what they should pay attention to and prioritize in an animated manner like waving my arms, raising my voice and putting something on a PowerPoint slide in all caps. When I do these kinds of things-------students listen and most of it is audience specific because I can tell what each class is struggling with.

I can’t do spontaneous “Tattoo this to your face” announcements with my online courses.

Online classes require a different type of self-control considering the online instructor is more of a facilitator rather than a direct instructor. I teach all asynchronous English classes and I operate more like a facilitator who offers resources for students to study on their own time rather than for me to explicitly instruct them in real-time. This means that online students have to force themselves to watch Youtube lectures, read Word documents and read over online resources. This type of self-discipline is then put on the student’s ability to force themselves to watch a 25-minute Youtube video that I’ve made or perhaps read a 4-page long essay in APA format. This is a different type of self-discipline. This puts a higher value on a student’s ability to push themselves to self-motivate.

Imagine yourself joining a Crossfit gym where you work out in person with a trainer. The trainer has a set routine for what he wants you to do. You aren’t the only person in the class. You are there with 10 other people who all want to get in shape, so you aren’t working out alone. Or perhaps you do not need a trainer. You would prefer to work out alone because you are able to self-motivate and complete the work on your own. A seated class is like joining a Crossfit gym where you will train on a schedule, learn in real-time with your peers and take detailed directions about what you will do. An online class is like training by yourself on your own schedule and training by your own set routine.

Most college freshman that I teach are still developing their internal self-control muscles. So I find that seated classes are often best for college freshmen to take.

Questions to Ask Before Taking an Online Class: Are you the type of student who would do better showing up to class to hear the lecture? Or are you the type of person who can read Word documents and watch Youtube videos alone?

2.) Seated Classes Allow Space for Students to Ask Questions in Ways That is More Difficult Online

The ideal online student reaches out to me through email when he or she has a question. The ideal online students arrange a phone call with me during my office hours to discuss their essays. The ideal online student schedules an appointment with me to look over an essay.

What is real? Every semester a few online students reach out and intentionally asks questions. Most of my online students choose to stay anonymous the whole semester.

Most online students feel like they are bothering me when they ask me a question. This is a problem.

Yet.....there is a clear advantage for seated students when it comes to asking questions.

Students who take a face-to-face class with me understand that I am not a scary or unapproachable person. I work hard in my seated classes to make my students feel comfortable with coming up to me after class and asking me a quick question. Just having those 2-3 minutes after class when I am at the front of the room packing up often allows students to approach me with what they are confused about. I know what my seated students look like. I see them on campus, I greet them and I try to ask them if they have any questions.

Students in seated classes can hear the questions of their peers during Q&A time. If a fellow student asks “How do you write a thesis statement for the synthesis essay? I don’t understand how to do that,” then I can publicly answer the question. This demystifies the idea that other students are all smarter than them. Hearing the questions of other students allows them to understand that everyone in the class is on the same journey as their classmates.

In general, I have noticed that my seated students are more willing to admit to me they need help. I am still unsure why this is, but this is just a general observation I’ve seen for at least the last 5-6 years.

Questions to Ask Yourself Before Taking an Online Class: Are you the type of person who has the courage to email your professor a question? Can you push yourself to ask the online professor a question if you are confused about something?

3.) Students are Overconfident in how well they can Digitally Multi-task For Multiple Hours.

I spend at least 4 hours a day at my desk creating lecture material, writing out directions for classes, grading papers, and doing research. I spent a lot of time adjusting assignments on Moodle and rearranging the layout of each Moodle webpage for both online and seated classes.

Is this fun? Sometimes it is and I do enjoy the design and creative part of it. Yet other times when it gets hard I want to get on Youtube and watch videos. Or worse, I get on sports news websites and start reading articles about the NFL.

The temptation to multi-task for college students today is real. Can we recognize that we are now working in a virtual world where we can easily waste our time on web content? If you are a student who is only taking online classes this means the experience will require significantly more screen time for you. This also means that there is a much more likely chance the student will be multi-tasking between multiple tabs on their laptop. One writer named Julie Morgenstern, a productivity expert, says this about multi-tasking on the job:

“It has been scientifically demonstrated that the brain cannot effectively or efficiently switch between tasks, so you lose time. It takes four times longer to recognize new things so you're not saving time; multitasking actually costs time. You also lose time because you often make mistakes. If you’re multitasking and you send an email and accidentally "reply all" and the person you were talking about is on the email, it’s a big mistake. In addition, studies have shown that we have a much lower retention rate of what we learn when multitasking, which means you could have to redo the work or you may not do the next task well because you forgot the information you learned. Everyone’s complaining of memory issues these days – they’re symptoms of this multitasking epidemic.”

Morganstern here mentions that we have a lower retention rate for learning when we are multitasking. It also means that we are more likely to make mistakes.

We’ve mistakenly come to the conclusion that our 21st century brains are able to handle multi-tasking and perhaps even thought that we’ve become excellent digital multi-taskers. As Morganstern states above, we have believed the lie that digital multitasking means that we are at peak productivity. This is a myth. Digital multi-tasking does not equal peak productivity.
Yet, a majority of online classes inherently invite digital multitasking. During the pandemic, I created a Youtube channel with lectures that would give my students variety. My students enjoy these videos and I’ve received positive feedback from multiple students about my videoes. Youtube is a multitasking mental experience as there are various recommendations popping up on the sidebar. I made Youtube videos during the pandemic because it was the easiest platform to give my students access to my lectures. However, I know that the sidebar of entertaining recommendations on Youtube will be tempting for anyone.

The multi-tasking nature of the online component of a class is unavoidable. We all need to learn to multi-task well. The self-control to focus on one video at a time will be essential for the online student in contrast to the seated student.

Question to ask yourself before taking an online class: What methods do you use in order to not get distracted by clickbait online while you are studying for a biology exam? What methods do you use in order to avoid multitasking between entertainment and studying for an online exam?

4.) Students Learn as much from One Another as they do from the Professor.

It is a bad model of education to think that the student can only learn from the professor. We underestimate how much students can learn from their peers. One gregarious, intelligent student might be able to explain a concept to her fellow classmate better than the teacher explained it.
At UNCW I befriended a guy named Kyle Abode in my chemistry class. The class had at least 80 students in it. There was little chance I could find time to meet with the professor(he was not an approachable person). So I depended upon Kyle to help me understand the key elements of chemistry. Kyle and I would sit in the library for 2 hours at a time talking about chemistry. He ended up being a pharmacist, naturally. His guidance helped me at least get a passing grade (the only D I made in college).

If I had taken chemistry online, I would have failed. There was no way I would’ve made even a D without Kyle’s help. Did I also mention that Kyle was incredibly funny? He was fun to hang out with as we studied in the UNCW library.

As an online student, the responsibility of meeting and learning from other students is solely put on the student. Online students must reach out to other students intentionally to make connections.

In contrast, I design student interaction for my seated classes. I require students to do group work on a daily basis. I require students to give one another in-class feedback on one another’s essays. I require students to introduce themselves during the first week of class. Recently I’ve even been integrating mid-semester icebreakers so students will learn one another’s names. The nature of my seated classes has a design so that students can learn from one another.

I design 5-6 discussion forums in my online classes. Online students do have opportunities to meet other students, but there are opportunities for students to interact online, but it is significantly less.

The nature of the online class is more geared towards the student learning from the instructor. However, the advantage of the seated class is that students can more easily learn from both the instructor and their classmates.

Questions to ask yourself before taking an online class: What methods do you have for meeting other students at your college? How can you actively take steps to meet other students on campus in order to have more student-to-student sharing/learning?

Did you know that the online experience is significantly different from the face-to-face experience? Most students do not know the difference. I wrote this blog entry with the hope that you now know some of the differences. I recommend that you consider the questions I've mentioned above before making a choice. If you are terrible at science, I would not recommend taking Anatomy and Physiology online. If you are strong at writing, then you might do great at taking American literature online. However, you may miss out on the in-class discussions about the Robert Frost poems that you enjoyed. Most of this comes down to self-awareness and your ability to know your academic strengths and weaknesses.

If you are on the fence about which one to take, I'd recommend face-to-face. The picture of the guy with the face tattoo represents my ability as an instructor to say to my students "Of all the ideas we've covered this week, remember these 5 things." And then I hammer home a few ideas for 5 minutes. My ability to stress certain ideas while looking my students in the eye often makes an impression on students that I can't replicate in any other way. For some struggling students, hearing me say these words gives them hope that they can actually pass this class; it lifts away crushing academic despair and instead of failing the class with F, they get a second wind and make a B.

When I was about 28 years old, I found myself in a semi-friendly debate with my friend Spencer about whether God existed. Spencer suggested, “Why don’t I give you a book by an atheist and you give me a book about by a Christian.” I told him I’d think about it. It had been maybe 8-9 years since I’d read any Christian apologetics. A friend told me Tim Keller’s “A Reason for God” presented a good argument for the existence of God. So I picked up a copy.

I debated whether I should read it before giving it to Spencer. I like to go by the policy of “Read a book before you recommend it to someone else.” So I decided it would be best to skim some of Keller’s book when I sat and waited on my laundry at a laundromat on Spring Garden Street in Greensboro about a mile from UNCG where I was in grad school.

It was a sunny day and the light was shining through the large 8 foot tall windows at about 2pm on a weekday afternoon. I was sitting on a wooden bench at the laundromat as I waited for my clothes to finish so I could switch them over to the dryer. And that’s when I read the sentence from my copy of A Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism:

“Foucault was pressing the truth of his analysis on others even as he denied the very category of truth. Some kind of truth-claim, then, seems unavoidable. The inconsistency of working against oppression when you refuse to admit there is such a thing as truth is the reason that postmodern “theory” and “deconstruction” is perhaps on the wane.”

This struck me as an odd statement. How could postmodern theory be on the wane? I was in the middle of getting my master's in literature where the subculture of the literature department was religiously devoted to literary theory and writers like Foucault. Critical theory was the pinnacle of truth and meaning to my professors. At the end of that last sentence was a footnote, so I flipped to the back of the book and I read the following:

“Emily Eakin, “The Latest Theory is that That Theory Doesn’t Matter,” New York Times, April 29, 2003, and “The Theory of Everything, RIP,” New York Times, October 17, 2004. See also Dinita Smith, “Cultural Theorists, Start Your Epitaphs,” New York Times, January 3, 2004.”

I vividly remember feeling a considerable amount of hope and excitement. I felt this excitement because Tim Keller was the first Christian apologist that I’d ever read who explicitly challenged critical theory. Most Christian apologists in the early 2000s ruthlessly critiqued postmodernism. Yet it seemed like none of them knew the fact that everyone in academia in the early 2000s was obsessed with deconstruction and critical theory. When was a Christian apologist going to write about Foucault and Derrida?

I decided that I did not want to do a book swap with Spencer. This was no longer about me winning a “theist vs. atheist” debate. I have that tendency in me to debate atheists and it typically doesn't work in the traditional point-counterpoint style. Rather I needed Keller's “A Reason for God” for my own personal growth. I needed to read the whole book for myself. The book was giving me hope in a time when I was running on empty, a kind of subconscious emptiness that I didn’t realize until I read this book.

Thank you for your ability to use 47 footnotes in one chapter and not be boring. I now love footnotes.

Writer David Brooks explains in his Op-Ed Tim Keller Taught Me About Joy” that “Tim could draw on a vast array of intellectual sources to argue for the existence of God, to draw piercing psychological insights from the troubling parts of Scripture or to help people through moments of suffering.” Brooks says that he and Keller developed a friendship where he and other friends would have Zoom conversations in recent years. Brooks describes Keller’s response on a Zoom call once asked “Tim, what do you think?” about some political, personal or social issue:

“He'd start slow, with that wry, friendly smile. He'd mention a relevant John Bunyan poem, then an observation Kierkegaard had made or a pattern the historian David Bebbington had noticed. Then Tim would synthesize it all into the four crucial points that pierced the clouds of confusion and brought you to a new layer of understanding. I used to think of it as the Keller Clarity Beam. He didn't make these points in a didactic or professorial way. It was more like: Hey, you're thirsty. I happen to have this glass of water. Want a sip?”

It is one thing for a person to be intelligent and well-read. It takes another set of skills to be able to make connections between multiple texts and come to useful conclusions. Some might call this wisdom. Some might call it insight or synthesis. Or you might call it using your knowledge to serve your fellow humans. Whatever it was, Keller had it.

Speaking of synthesis, part of my job as a college writing professor is to coach college freshmen on how to write research papers. Synthesis is the method of taking multiple perspectives and sources in order to come to a stated conclusion. Two years ago I started teaching it more explicitly, yet I had a hard time finding an article that sufficiently cites their sources. Many of the articles I read online (specifically the Atlantic) did not explicitly use citations or footnotes.

Where could I find an article that sufficiently synthesizes sources for the sake of an argument?
It was during this time when I was reading Keller’s book “Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering.” It hit me one day when I realized that Keller used the whole first chapter to make an argument that people in the 21st-century in America are more prone to ignore or escape from their suffering. Keller argued this was an unhealthy habit in contrast to methods from previous decades (and centuries). So, why not have my class read the first chapter titled “The Cultures of Suffering”?

The chapter reads like a stand-alone academic essay that calls into question the strength of our own culture’s ability to cope with traumatic events. He uses a total of 47 footnotes and quotes Max Weber, Peter Berger, C.S. Lewis, Richard Dawkins, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn (among others). The chapter isn’t explicitly Christian because his goal is to critique the secularist worldview that most Americans unintentionally ascribe to regarding suffering. He starts off the book with a smart rhetorical move by identifying something we can all agree is a problem: Americans are not good at dealing with trauma and then goes on to explain why.

I have my composition class read this because he so seamlessly is able to integrate all these sources and his writing is engaging and life-giving. With Keller, the more footnotes, the better.

Thank you for smoothly synthesizing multiple sources and writing like a journalist. I want to write like you.

There is a tendency among Christian content creators today that hesitates to quote movies, magazines, literature, newspapers, or song lyrics that are not explicitly Christian or conservative. When I say “Christian content” I mean sermons, blog entries or Christian literature. Pastors often other pastors, theologians, or the Bible in their sermons rather than quote a source created by someone who is not a Christian. Pastors do give illustrations of popular movies or from a secular source in order to diagnose a cultural or social problem. Some pastors do this well, but in general, I find that some pastors, thinkers, and bloggers stay in their comfort zone of quoting other Christians.

This generally pisses me off. Why? It is generally because I am an English professor at a public college who has to use the hints of eternity seen in Keats's poetry to make an argument for the existence of heaven. I have to ask my students questions about “what it means to be human” because I can’t explicitly say what Paul says about the servanthood of Christ. I can’t explicitly quote the Bible or a theologian (although I sometimes do), but I have to do in a way that seems like it fits the context. At a public university, it is all about being creative enough to use cultural problems to bring up hints that the Christian faith might be worth exploring.

Keller helped me understand how to take cultural hints from articles in the New York Times to point to a need for Jesus Christ. Many evangelical Christians are skeptical of the New York Times because it is politically more liberal. Yet Keller regularly quoted the New York Times in his books that would support his argument for the truth of Christianity. His attitude was “I’m going to use whatever references I can to help people see the serious need to explore Christ as someone worth following.”

Let me give a more explicit example. Keller often uses non-Christian thinkers to highlight serious cultural problems. The following question can be troubling: Why are so many Americans getting divorced?

That’s a big question that all Americans see that is both troubling and confusing. Yet for Keller in Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matter he used a quote from sociologist Ernest Becker to help explain why so many people in the 21st century are disappointed with marriage. Becker says we can place “cosmically impossible expectations” on our partners because Western culture replaced belief in a God with the romantic partner:

“The love partner becomes the divine ideal within with to fulfill one’s life. All spiritual and moral needs now become focused in one individual . . .In one word the love object is God . . .Man reached for a “thou” when the worldview of the great religious community overseen by God died. . . After all, what is it that we want when we elevate the love partner to the position of God? We want redemption---nothing less.”

Becker(a non-religious man) argued that when a secular culture no longer acknowledges God, people replace God with a romantic love partner. Thus society ends up putting an unreasonable amount of weight on the other person. Keller used this argument to say that we need to look for redemption and existential meaning in God rather than a romantic partner. I mention this because Ernest Becker is not a religious person and Keller compliments Becker’s point of view rather than subtly dismissing his view.

Often Christians take it for granted how freely we can talk about the gospel and Scripture. But if you work in the secular world, it takes work to be like Paul in Acts 17 where he is able to communicate clearly with the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers so that he can talk to them about following Christ.

Thank you for teaching me how to creatively highlight cultural problems around me to show others the need for the message of Christ.

Then there is the strange phase of adulthood which is my thirties. I am 39 years old as I write this. I am coming into the final years of my thirties in a state of surprise. How on earth did I become 39 years old? It is somewhat terrifying and troubling to know that I am almost 40 years old. However, the one thing I am proud of from my thirties is the work I’ve done at Carteret Community College as an English professor.

I considered quitting when I was 30 years old. I got demoted from full-time to adjunct after budget cuts in 2014. That means I took a $28,000 pay cut. The pay difference between an adjunct professor and a full-time professor is huge. I thought to myself “Maybe being an English professor is a pipe dream. It may be time to look for another career.”

Then I started reading Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work in the January of 2015. This book helped me endure the time of being an adjunct. Nine months later, I was offered a full-time job at Carteret Community College. I almost burnt out. Keller analyzes why Americans both idolize (“I gain my identity through my job”) and despise (“working for the weekend”) work. This book helped me think about how God uses me on a daily basis to serve people. It shifted my mind from fantasizing about being in an unrealistic profession or just thinking about my next vacation.

I see now how God uses me every day as a teacher. I thank God for using Keller's book to help me find my life's purpose. If you feel like you are about to burn out at your job, get a copy of this book and read it.

Thank you for teaching me how to see my job at the community college is charged with meaning (even on the bleakest of days).