Example - Insights on Teaching New Testament from Curricular Workshops

Seminary Curriculum / Produced by TOW Project

In March of 2018, Alistair Mackenzie and Will Messenger of the Theology of Work Project met individually with 15 faculty on the campuses of three Oikonomia Network schools: Asbury, Assemblies of God and Western. The overall report on these curriculum integration workshops is here. These meetings represented a joint effort by the ON, the Theology of Work Project and the three schools to take curricular integration of faith and work to the next level. The insights from this initiative can serve to inspire and inform future curricular thinking by educators everywhere.

The May ON newsletter included an overall report on three curriculum integration workshops held in March, from the point of view of Will Messenger and myself. In addition to reports from individual seminary faculty who participated, which will come when the courses have been taught, I’m following up with a parallel series about insights and resources that Will and I thought were worth sharing following our conversations with faculty in specific subject areas.

Our conversations with New Testament professors quickly highlighted the fact that, although they share some common concerns, they also cultivate their own distinctive specialised perspectives.

Some scholars love delving into the historical background to the text. We spent time talking with these professors about:

I can’t help recalling (having received his permission to recall it here) my three conversations with Fredrick J. Long at Asbury. His enthusiasm for these topics was contagious, as he described what he had discovered in the course of writing some New Testament reflections for a book on Entrepreneurial Church Planting: Engaging Business and Mission for Marketplace Transformation. Thinking about themes of entrepreneurship and business in the lives and ministries of Jesus, his disciples, Paul and the early Christian community in Acts had clearly become an absorbing study for Fred. He has now condensed his research findings into three short chapters that can provide a very useful starting point for anyone else embarking on this study.

Fred’s journey exemplified for me the excitement and new perspectives that can be gained when we look at familiar texts through different lenses.

Other scholars were primarily concerned with exegesis and taking the text very seriously. What does it say and what did it originally mean? And where are the New Testament passages that talk about work?

  • We noticed that when John the Baptist talks in Luke 3:8-14 about “bear fruits worthy of repentance,” he identifies workplace ethics issues (see also the short Rev. Lyle Mook video on this passage).
  • We discussed how the majority of Jesus’ parables (24 out of 37 according to Fred) describe business settings, and talk about the proper use of wealth and resources. Yet they seldom offer simple interpretations, and frequently raise as many questions as they answer. For example, what did Jesus mean when he said “Are you envious because I am generous?” in his Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16).
  • We conversed about how we can understand the words of Paul about slavery when he talks about Mutuality in Working for the Lord in Ephesians 5:21-6:9, or “Stay Where Your Are!”in I Corinthians 7:20-24, or Slaves and Masters in Colossians 3:18-4:1, or Philemon and Work.

And then there were conversations with those who were eager to discern much more immediate applications of NT teachings:

These were invigorating and fruitful discussions. Yet I am left thinking that, in spite of the work that has already been done about How to Read the Bible with Workplace Eyes, we can still do a lot more to help bring the New Testament to life for workplace Christians.