 Good afternoon and welcome to all of you who are joining us for this third Thursday conversation. We had over 35 alumni register for this session and we're so excited that all of you are here with us. Becca, can you now spotlight? Thank you. My name is Janine Bertie Johnson and I serve as alumni director as well as director of campus ministries and as admissions and advancement associate. Just a couple of housekeeping details before we get started. If you have a technical concern at any time during the webinar, please send a chat message to AMBS and Becca will help you out. If you have a comment or question for our speaker, we ask that you please use the Q and A feature which you can find by hovering over the bottom of your screen. I will be watching for those questions and comments and near the end of our session I will select the ones that I'll ask Drew. Please note that the webinar including questions is being recorded. Turning now to the reason we are all here. Drew Strait joined the AMBS faculty in the fall of 2018 as assistant professor of New Testament and Christian origins and is already a beloved member of the teaching faculty. He studied at Whitworth University, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, the University of Chicago Divinity School and received his PhD from the University of Pretoria in South Africa in 2015. Before coming to AMBS, Drew taught New Testament for five years at St. Mary's Ecumenical Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. Drew will start by answering several questions I have for him. After that, we will have time for your questions and comments. And again, I invite you to submit your questions at any time throughout the webinar by using the Q and A feature. Drew, thanks for joining us today. And I first will ask you what you'd like to tell us about yourself as an introduction. Thank you, Janine. It's a privilege to be with you all today. The first thing I would share about my life is that I did not grow up in the Mennonite Church. I'm a convert as an adult to an abaptist discipleship and theology. I was actually baptized in the Catholic Church but my mom and dad couldn't quite agree on their theology. So they ended up raising my sisters and I in the United Methodist Church. It wasn't until I went to a young life camp in seventh grade that the gospel really became my own story. Young life is an evangelical youth outreach organization. From a very early stage, I felt a call toward full-time ministry. And at that time, I thought I'd be a youth pastor for the rest of my life. Fast forward to 2003 during America's preemptive invasion of Iraq. I was actually with the young life leader that weekend during the Chakanah campaign. And we were watching CNN. And I was shocked to find my leader who discipled me for years cheering on the Chakanah campaign. Totally convinced that the United States military campaign was justified and was something that God was ordaining. That sent me off on a new path of reevaluating discipleship to Jesus, rereading the New Testament. And my wife and I got married. We spent two years serving Haitian slave labor camps in the Dominican Republic. While we were there, we read Ron Sider's Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. And he talks about Reba Place Fellowship, an MCUSA congregation in Evanston, Illinois. At the time, my wife had just been accepted to graduate school at Northwestern University. So we Googled Reba and found out they have a church plant in the neighborhood that we were moving to called Living Water Community Church. So we stumbled into a Mennonite Church USA congregation while already being on this trajectory of rethinking what it means to bear witness to the gospel nonviolently in light of what I think is the unanimous witness of the New Testament. And is there anything you'd like to tell us about your family, Drew? Sure, I've been married for 14 years, I think it is. And we have two children, Lucy, who is eight and a son named Bo, who is three years old. My wife is also an academic, turned college administrator. Her background is in music and neuroscience. So we've had a very complex journey of trying to align our lives geographically as two academics in a world where there are not a lot of academic jobs. Thanks. Can you tell us a story about when you experienced God in a powerful way? Sure, it's hard for me to choose one moment. I've been fortunate to experience God in a powerful way a number of times in my life. But most recently, what comes to mind is the interview process here at AMBS. Three years ago, three and a half years ago, AMBS posted a job posting for a professor of New Testament. And this was at a time in my career where I was adjuncting and moonlighting as an academic while being a stay-at-home full-time dad. My wife was the primary breadwinner in our life at that time. When I saw the job at AMBS, I thought to myself, this is my last hurrah. This is the last time I'm going to apply to one of these positions. As you may or may not know, there are very, very few jobs in New Testament and they get a lot of applications. So it's really hard to break through into the top 10. Well, somehow I managed to get a 30-minute Skype interview with the search committee. And the night before that interview, my son, who was six months old at the time, got the flu for the first time and I was up all night with him. It was a very difficult night. And for the first time, I had to leave him with a babysitter he didn't know for this short interview. And for whatever reason, the babysitter didn't think to take him upstairs or outside as he was crying and very sick in the room next door as I was going through this very intense 30-minute Skype interview. Well, the first 25 minutes of that interview I thought went absolutely terrible. I've never asked my colleagues here what they thought but I felt like it went awful. But in the last five minutes, someone made a comment and I think they were trying to be kind of funny. They were just acknowledging that not all Mennonites agree with one another. And I said, well, I know that. I went to the Mennonite National Convention in Columbus, Ohio with my pastor, Sally Youngquist who was my mentor at the time as well. And Sarah Wenger-Shank, our former president, her eyes just sparked up. She said, wait, you know Sally Youngquist? That can't be true. Like you know Sally Youngquist? So I was like, yeah, it turns out they were best friends and overlapped at Reba Place Fellowship over a number of years. And for me, it was a very powerful Exodus moment of God weaving together the seven years I spent in Sally's congregation, times when my wife and I were making very little money as graduate students. And I had this big dream of becoming a New Testament professor that felt truly insurmountable in a world where there are so few jobs. And somehow God brought that whole story together in that interview process. And I've never told Sarah this, but I actually think I made it to the next stage because of that interaction. That's a great story. Haven't heard that before. Yeah. So what did attract you to be part of the AMBS community since you've been talking about your interview process? Yeah. As I've alluded to, I'm an adult convert to anti-baptism. For existential reasons, not necessarily historical reasons. And what I mean by that is that anti-baptists take the teachings of Jesus as authoritative for this life. And it may come as a surprise to some of you or not a surprise, you already know this, but not all Christian traditions today think that the teachings of Jesus, specifically Jesus' teaching on non-violence, a peaceable kingdom are authoritative for this life and this world. So the attraction to teach at in a Baptist midnight biblical seminary was the opportunity to be fully me, to teach from a peace and peacemaking perspective, to use that as a lens for interpreting the life of Jesus in the apostolic mission in early Christianity. And I was just sharing with one of my colleagues this morning how grateful I am to be here that I can speak openly, that I don't have to live in fear that I might get in trouble for critiquing the military industrial complex or for talking about ways that the church's mission disrupts white supremacy, racism, urban violence. And my former institution was an ecumenical context, which I loved because I had students from all over the map. And it was an incredible privilege to teach amidst that kind of theological and political difference. We'd certainly have some of that here at AMBS, but I'm in this institution now where my boss is, if you will, and actually empower me to teach from a peace and peacemaking perspective. And I'm enormously grateful for that. Thanks. I'm wondering what classes you're teaching this year and if you can give a description of each one so that people have a sense of what it is you're engaging in the classroom this year. Sure. AMBS professors teach five courses a year. So this year I'm teaching two this fall, two in the spring and one class this summer in May, a hybrid course. This fall I'm teaching introduction to Bible study tools. This is a course that introduces students to Bible software and gives them a basic introduction to the Greek and Hebrew alphabet so that they can look up Greek words using Bible software and learn how to compare and contrast different translations of the Bible using Bible software and use that software for sermons, for personal Bible study and other endeavors they're doing with the Bible. The course also introduces students to the history of interpretation, different methodologies. I always tell students that becoming a competent interpreter of the Bible is not a class or degree, rather it's a journey. It's a lifelong journey. I'm becoming a better interpreter of the Bible every day and every week and that will go on God willing until I am in my 60s, 70s and 80s. And so this course empowers students to know where to go to get their questions answered, know where to go for secondary sources in the library online tools for getting their questions answered when it comes to biblical studies. The second course I'm teaching is the Gospel of Mark. We're looking at Mark's Gospel from a number of different angles. We're reading Chad Myers's commentary called Binding the Strong Man. It's a sociopolitical reading of Mark's Gospel. We're also reading a brand new book by Helen Bond, a rare female New Testament scholar from the University of Edinburgh called the First Biography of Jesus, comparing and contrasting Greco-Roman biography with Mark's literary aims. The third book we're reading is a new book by Matthew Teeson who's actually a fellow Mennonite scholar and a rising star in the field of New Testament studies. It's a book looking at ritual impurity in the Gospel of Mark and arguing that Jesus isn't attacking the ritual purity system but rather is still operating within Judaism and critiquing death, the ways that impurity is associated with death. So he's resisting some anti-Semitic ways we read at Mark's Gospel in today's world. And I'm really excited. Matthew Teeson is actually going to join our class for an hour over Zoom at the end of the semester and field my students' questions after we've read his book. It's a really exciting opportunity for us as he is one of the most prolific of incoming New Testament scholars in my opinion. This spring I'm teaching strange new world of the Bible too. It's an introduction to the New Testament course and is actually one of my favorite classes to teach at the seminary level because I get to offer students a panoramic of Christian origins from the Gospel of Matthew all the way to the Book of Revelation. One of the things I always do to set that course up though is to immerse my students in the world of early Judaism. So often in Bible study we jump from the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament to the New Testament but a lot went on in the world between these two texts, these two bodies of literature. And so I try to create a space for my students to understand the aims of Jesus in the midst of the first century Jewish context of Palestine wherein Rome was occupying Israel as a colonial foreign power. And I find that students react to that in very positive ways as the life of Jesus and the teachings of Paul in the Book of Revelation come to life in new and fresh ways. The other class I'm teaching next semester is called Anabaptist Approaches to Reading Scripture. So first time I've ever taught this course so we'll be looking at reading scripture from an Anabaptist perspective from the 16th century to the present and the course will end by reading the new book called Liberating the Politics of Jesus that the Institute of Mennonite Studies just published. It's a collection of essays mostly by women who are reevaluating the politics of Jesus and pushing back against some of the toxic ways that John Howard Yoder's work has been used to dominate others through sexualized violence. So I'm looking forward to interacting with that new material with students and thinking together in community about what does it mean to read scripture from an Anabaptist perspective. The fifth course I'm teaching is a Greek exegesis of the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount of course is a really important text for Anabaptist discipleship and theology. And so we'll be reading the whole text, chapters five through seven in Greek together looking at syntax, but also reflecting on the sermon theologically and thinking together about what this sermon means for the life of the church in 2020. So those are the five courses that I'm teaching. They're all pretty energizing courses for me. Super. And can you say a bit about how COVID-19 has changed the way you teach? What are you and other professors doing this fall to adapt for the pandemic? Yeah, that's a great question. We're innovating from one week to the next. We're sharing ideas with one another and trying new ideas each week. Because we're on Zoom, students get Zoom fatigue. So meeting for a full three hours can be a challenge or giving an hour lecture over Zoom even can be a challenge. So we are reducing the length of courses in some cases. So instead of meeting for three hours we'll meet for two hours. And I'll post a video lecture on Monday that students watch online so that when we meet together our time is predominantly focused on discussion. In addition to that, there's a lot to discuss in our personal lives about how we are applying this material to our own locations around the country. I have students right now from West Coast to the East Coast in my courses who are joining my classes on Zoom. That's why I try to be really intentional about carving out time each week. For us to talk specifically about what these passages of scripture we're looking at mean for 2020 under pandemic in a world of suffering, in a world of growing neo-fascism both in America and abroad. What does it mean to bear witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ with these growing forms of militarized and racialized power? And what does it mean to not only embrace but empower the mission of God as it's disrupting these systems of domination and systems of oppression? So instead of courses being really lecture-based right now they're really focused on discussion. And so I'll front load my classes with a lecture online but also with a set of questions and then we'll come to class and students will have time to respond to those questions and thankfully with Zoom we can break out into small groups. So there's a lot of that that we're doing as well. Thanks. And besides the classes that you're teaching for credit you're also teaching a class soon with Safwat for the church leadership center. Can you say a little bit about that? Yeah, this is the third time my colleague in Hebrew Bible Safwat Marzouk and I have taught this course. It's a six-week short course through the church leadership center called Exploring Peace and Justice in the Bible. And what's exciting about this course is that it's not a ton of work. You don't have to read research paper. There's some reading involved some forums that you post to but it's a great low impact way to gain some new angles and insights on salvation history and the biblical narrative through the lens of peace and justice and get to know some other students from around the world who participate in these courses. This year, however, in light of the Black Lives Matter movement, in light of police brutality we'll have a special focus on what the relationship is between Anabaptist approaches to peace and justice, New Testament and Old Testament approaches to peace and justice and what these texts and theological convictions mean for this moment of racial injustice. So instead of just doing online forums each week we're actually gonna meet in real time with students for one hour each week to discuss our readings and to talk more about peace and justice for this moment. Awesome. This is a big question. What is a dream you have for AMBS? Yeah, it is a huge question and it's hard to know where to stop here. I think the first dream that comes to my mind that is something I pray about daily and talk with colleagues about something that's on the radar of our academic Dean, Bev Lap and also our new president. The dream is that AMBS would become a global hub for Anabaptist discipleship and theological training. That we would become a space that is connected with Anabaptist communities and peacemaking Christian communities from around the world and that we would come up with the resources even the money to empower theological education both here in Elkhart but also in parts of Africa, South Korea, Indonesia, South America and that we would find creative ways to build relational tissue with these communities but see AMBS as a space that's incubating that is empowering this global network of Anabaptist theological education. And I think the thing that excites me the most about AMBS is that we have the oldest peace studies program in the United States of America. It's very difficult to find a seminary with an intentional emphasis on peace and peacemaking. And I'm guessing I don't have to convince any of you that the roles of peace and peacemaking strategies of peace and peacemaking profoundly matter for this moment in which we are living. We could talk about nuclear armament. We could talk about racial justice. Again, we could talk about neo-fascism. This is a moment where the church is desperate for competent leaders who have real life solutions to the problems of violence and oppression. And it gives me hope that this is an explicit value at AMBS not just an implicit value that you have to look under the hood to find. This is something that all of us across the board are passionate about. And in fact, the Bible department, my department is in conversation with the peace studies department about ways that we can collaborate with one another and overlap with one another in this shared vision. So I'm writing a proposal right now for a course right now called Pax of the Apostles. Pax is the Latin word for peace. So Pax of the Apostles, peace and peacemaking and the writings of Luke and Paul. And this is one way that I'm gonna try to contribute to this more hybrid vision of biblical studies and peace studies not being compartmentalized from one another but rather being integrated into this Anabaptist vision of reading the Bible toward creating God's peaceable kingdom here on earth. That sounds so exciting. Thanks. And then the last question I have for you and then we'll turn to questions that others are sending in through the Q&A box. What question or questions do you have for AMBS alumni? And maybe some people will wanna try to respond to those questions, the questions you have but it might just be something we think about for a while. Yeah, I appreciate that question. I've only been here two and a half, three years. And so I haven't had a lot of opportunity to interact with AMBS alumni. Some of them do take our short course but in that context, there's not a lot of opportunities to ask them about their experience at AMBS. So I'd be very curious to know what Bible courses alumni wish they would have taken or what Bible courses they wish were offered during their time here or wish were offered right now. I'd also be very curious to hear from those of you who took the biblical languages either Hebrew or Greek here, whether or not you've been able to keep up those languages and how you do or do not use them in your ministry today. There's a huge debate in seminaries today about whether or not we should force students to take Greek and Hebrew for credentialing in the Mennonite church. We no longer have this as a prerequisite. And so it's been a challenge to encourage students to take the biblical languages. Admittedly, it's a ton of work but Safwat and my new colleagues, Susanna, Larry and I are having conversations about how we nurture that. We think we still need pastors and activists who know the biblical language as well so that we can carry on this tradition of deep historical exegesis of the Bible. So I'm curious to know, for those of you who took the biblical languages here, if you were able to keep them up and if it has still been a relevant part of your study of the Bible. Thanks, and maybe I could add another one, just wondering, are you also interested in which biblical studies courses impacted alumni the most and why? Be helpful to you? Yes. Okay. Absolutely. Folks, we are now ready for our question and answer time. And as I said before, you go to the Q&A box at the bottom and you can either put in a comment for Drew answering the questions he's asked or responding to something else you heard him say, or you can put in a question. So Drew, the first question goes back to your story of your life and it comes from Carla Minter. How did your time at Living Water, the church in Chicago, contribute to shaping your Anabaptist theology and practice? Yeah, there's a long answer here and a short answer. It was a really powerful time in Living Water's history where a number of us were leaving evangelicalism, a number of young 20-something people, were leaving evangelicalism for various reasons and ended up at Living Water at the same time. Sally and others, some of you may know 10 peoples and other people in that congregation invested in us deeply. I mean, I had friends who had been fired from youth pastor positions at Mega Church in the suburbs of Chicago for teaching nonviolence. And so there were people who were broken and people who were really searching for a Christianity that wasn't violent and wasn't wedded to the state. So my personal immediate experience at Living Water was that I found a place where I could critique empire, where I could critique militarism and not get in trouble for it or not be judged for it or not be questioned that I'm not a real Christian. And so it opened up a space to live into the radical teachings of Jesus. I think they're radical. And to watch a body of Christ trying to live out those teachings in a way that I had actually never seen before. And for the first time in my life, I started to see why the church matters. There were people in the congregation who were interrupting gun violence through lemonade stands. There was a lot of really creative ministry going on, food pantries that fed the poor on a weekly basis. And some of you may know, there was also an intentional community of people sharing possessions. My primary interest is Luke and Acts. So Acts two and four, when the early Christians held all things common was important to me. And in that space, I was allowed to see Christians living out that radical vision of the earliest Christians. And yeah, it turned my world upside down. Thanks. A question that has come in from David Myers. What in your mind has created the silos between biblical studies and peace studies? It's a great question. I think the main thing is that you'd be hard-pressed to find a PhD program anywhere in the world in biblical studies that has a strong emphasis on peace and peacemaking. Biblical studies has a long tradition of being dominated by white men that look like myself. And I don't mean to be overly polemical here, but the reality is that the majority of those white men were in positions of enormous unearned privilege. They were at the top of the social hierarchy and they were not in spaces, they were thinking about the marginalized and the poor were real pressing for them. So I think that there's a compartmentalization of peace studies and biblical studies just because the history of interpretation in biblical studies has been dominated with people who are not asking questions about peace and peacemaking, who are not asking questions about power and privilege in the world. I think this is slowly changing right now as we see a seismic shift of people of color no longer being pushed off to the periphery of biblical studies and being invited into the center to really change the ways that we're thinking about the biblical narrative. We still have a long ways to go, but there are exciting seismic shifts taking place in power dynamics that are changing. Even so, I still think that the relationship between peacemaking and biblical studies is a profoundly underdeveloped one, which is why I'm spending an enormous amount of my spare time right now studying the Pax Romana and reevaluating these texts in light of Roman imperialism in the ways that I see the gospel disrupting the three dominant metaphors of Roman imperialism, namely being racism and xenophobia, military domination and enslavement. And I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done there. And this is another reason I'm glad to be at AMBS because it's allowed me to be around colleagues who are far more sophisticated than I am on strategies of peace and peacemaking. Thank you. Ken Hawkely has asked, what considerations influence your teaching methods and content with a diverse and international student body? Thank you, Ken. That's a great question in one that we are constantly reevaluating, especially as our student body becomes more global. For example, I have five different countries represented right now in my Gospel of Mark course. The danger here is that we choose primarily Western readings from the European and North American tradition. So there's a shared interest, a vested interest among the teaching faculty right now in intentionally choosing readings that get us outside of our bubbles. So for example, in my Gospel of Mark course, for the past four weeks, students read an essay by a scholar writing from a different perspective. So they read an essay by a liberation theologian, an essay by a black New Testament scholar, an essay by a womanist scholar, and an essay by a feminist scholar. And tomorrow afternoon, each student is going to give a five minute presentation on the question, what does it mean to read Mark's Gospel from the margins? What does it mean to read Mark's Gospel from a marginalized perspective? So there's a shared attempt here to kind of throw the history of interpretation, as I said, is dominated by white men to throw that off kilter and intentionally encourage students to read books that don't come from their dominant tradition that they've been socialized into. This is an ongoing challenge though with global students. They're operating in English as a second language and some of the books I think they would love us to assign haven't been translated yet. And so I think the next question we really need to be exploring is how do we bring perspectives from Ethiopia, from Tanzania, from Argentina, from Indonesia, into the classroom in an even more dynamic way? And part of that is simply going to mean stopping class and allowing students from those contexts to speak and creating space for them to speak. Thanks. Laura Funk has asked, what from your religious background, your faith traditions background, do you still cherish and allow to influence your theology and teaching? Yeah. Wow, that's a great question. Thank you, Laura. You know, I'm still socialized into evangelical discipleship. Even though I have a knee-jerk reaction to the language around a personal relationship with Jesus, it is still something I value, a personal dimension to knowing God. Evangelicalism's emphasis on the Bible and some kind of mission of the church. Again, these are buzzwords that sometimes we have a knee-jerk reaction to. And I certainly have felt that at times because culturally, these ideas have been co-opted by kind of a Christian nationalism movement. But still I find that those expressions of Christian discipleship profoundly impact my life, even though I'm now very critical of aspects of the evangelical movement that nurtured me. When I was teaching at St. Mary's Ecumenical Institute, it's actually housed at the oldest Catholic seminary in the country. In my third year there, I was really honored. They invited me to teach Luke Acts to Catholic priests. It was an experience that profoundly impacted me. It was my first time in my life that I'd had an opportunity to truly sit at the feet of priests in training and hear their perspective, hear their passion. And I was profoundly struck by their passion for the Eucharist. And in the evangelical culture that I grew up in, the Eucharist was very peripheral to my spirituality. I actually didn't need it. It was not important to me at all. It had virtually nothing to do with my worship and devotion to Christ crucified. And as I read their papers, as I watched them take the Eucharist seriously, it really turned me upside down and gave me a whole new angle on the significance of the Lord's Supper. And especially the ways, whether you believe in transubstantiation or whatever your approach is, the ways that they understood taking in the body and blood of Jesus as an empowerment of God's mission, as a reincarnation of God's mission on earth, this mystical union with Christ was something that really stood out to me. So I still value ecumenism in this space of collaborating with these other Christian traditions, even in the Orthodox tradition as well, as we work together to build a better world. I found that there are peacemakers in all traditions and a Baptist don't have a monopoly on it. There are peacemakers in the Catholic tradition in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. I have Presbyterian brothers and sisters who are peacemakers. Even this morning on Twitter, I had two evangelical friends come out and talk about how much they admire Anabaptism. And when it comes to a social division of the kingdom of God, they consider themselves Anabaptists and it kind of took my breath away. And it made me wonder how many other closet Anabaptists are there out there who are afraid to come out and talk about these things explicitly out of fear of retaliation in their own faith communities. Thanks. The next question is from Jacob. I believe it's phrase in Canada, but it might be froze, but Jacob asks, or thanks you for your faith introduction. And he is asking about present students. Are they also evangelical like you or are they more liberal issues oriented? And just wondering how do you see evangelism being valued by your students now? Thank you, Jacob. There's more theological and ideological difference at AMBS than I anticipated when I came here. In fact, the first day I taught a course here, it was my Lukak seminar. I said something that presumed that everyone in the course grew up in the Mennonite church. And I had a couple of students raise their hands to be like, hey, we just wanna remind you that we're not all Mennonites in here. We all are sympathetic to where the Anabaptist tradition, but we all didn't grow up in that tradition. So we have students across the ideological map. We have very liberal students who are really struggling to see a redemptive purpose of the Bible in the life of the church. We've seen ways that the Bible has been used to oppress people, oppress women, oppress people from the LGBT community. We've got other students who have an extremely high view of the authority of scripture and go to it with a posture of trust rather than a posture of suspicion. So in short, my answer to your question is that we have a surprising amount of difference here at AMBS. And one of the arts and crafts of teaching here that I certainly don't think I've mastered in any way is holding that difference together in ways that reflect peace and peacemaking. I think as we go out in minister and society, we need to be people who can embrace difference rather than fear it and have habits and capacities to sit down at table with people who are different than us and have hard conversations about hard things. So that's an ongoing conversation we're having here as a teaching faculty. A couple of my teaching faculties I think are really, really good at this. I'll name one of them, Melinda Berry, I think does an exceptional job at empowering students to have a skill set and an experience in class of holding these differences together while naming them. And certainly in my seminary experience, this was not something that happened. My professors were profoundly homogenous theologically. There was no space for difference. And I could share stories, stories that make me squirm in my seat today as I look back at the ways these professors were communicating one way of reading scripture in a very hegemonic way. So we're not perfect here at this yet, but there's a fair amount of diversity and we're trying to find ways of holding that together in ways that reflect peace in ways that reflect reconciliation as well. Thank you. Drew, four responses have come into your question. So I'd like to just share those with the group now. And then if you have any responses afterwards, you can do that. Anna Ruth Hirschberger said, I was awful with languages and I don't practice reading Greek or Hebrew, but I am so exceedingly grateful for people who pay attention to that piece of biblical education. Currently, I'm in a women's Bible study and our leader, also an ambious grad, has used her knowledge of the Hebrew language to clarify scripture at multiple points. Very helpful. I hope you keep requiring languages. And Sharon Norton said, I took six semesters of Greek and Hebrew and loved it. I am not in pastoral ministry, but I do use it when I preach occasionally. I find that the practice of contouring has stuck with me even when I read devotionally and of course, when preaching. Luke acts with Mary Shirts was probably the most impactful. I wish I could have taken a class on revelation. Well, Sharon, we'll hope one is coming up that you can. Julia Smucker said, I took Hebrew and Greek at AMBS and I'm still sometimes delightfully surprised at sparks of recognition in connection with certain words and concepts. Even though I'm not working in a ministry setting. One example of that is simply singing a couple of songs in Hebrew in a choral setting and being able to wrap my mind around the grammar and morphology to really enter into the text when singing it. And Ellen Rudy Fros said, the biblical languages were important for me and my favorite courses were exegesis courses. I haven't been able to keep them up but I'm able to do word study in a more helpful way than if I didn't have the languages. But I think more important for me has been the ongoing awareness that language is contextual and that there are some ideas, words and concepts that aren't easily translated. Learning the biblical languages and other languages helps me to recognize both the limits and the gifts of language. I think it gives me more grace. So if you have any responses to their answers to your question, go ahead and share. That's enormously helpful and encouraging and reminds me that even for those who've forgotten the languages still can find it helpful for negotiating commentaries and using Bible study tools that don't translate the Greek or Hebrew for you. I think as a professor, one of the questions I ask is an ethical one. When we have students take these languages it takes an enormous amount of time from things they could be focusing on elsewhere. And so sometimes I've worried if we're asking them to put in 600 hours parsing Greek verbs and nouns and then they go on and forget it was that a waste of their time or their time have been better spent studying the gospel of Mark or the book of Revelation in more detail or memorizing the gospel of Mark in English for that matter. So I appreciate those responses. The Bible department is actually in conversation about sending out a survey to every student who's taken Greek and or Hebrew over the last decade so that we can get some actual data on this and start talking about ways that we can empower alumni to keep up their languages. And as a reminder, every Wednesday here we have a Bible reading colloquium and we do occasionally have alumni zoom into those meetings and read Greek or Hebrew with us. It's a one hour meeting over lunch with students from various levels of reading. So that's an exciting opportunity for keeping up the languages. Thank you. And thanks to all of you who sent in your own experiences. The next question comes from Al Longenecker and he is curious about the art piece that's behind your head. So maybe if you could slide to the side everyone can see it and tell us what the story is behind that art piece. Yeah, it's an image of the sugar cane fields in the Dominican Republic. As I mentioned, my wife and I worked in the cane fields and slave labor camps in 2004 to 2006. And it was a very, very formative time in our marriage and in our vision of what we wanted to do with our lives. I was teaching helping Dominicans and Haitians teach some theology courses for pastors there but we found this painting in downtown Santo Domingo and bought it. And for me it represents God's love for the poor in agrarian environments and this vision of Jesus coming out of agrarian Palestine as a resistance movement toward the systems of oppression. And so the image takes me back even to agrarian Palestine, the world that Jesus operated in including the parables of Jesus that are very farmy, if you will, employ the language of the people to articulate complex ideas related to the kingdom of God. I'll say one more thing. I was very grateful that my wife decided she doesn't like the frame because I thought it would go in our house because it's like my favorite painting we have but for some reason she doesn't like black frames all of a sudden so it's allowed to stay in my office for a while. Awesome, thank you Al for that question. We do not have other questions in the chat or in the Q and A right now so please send some in if you have any comment or question for Drew. But Drew I wanna ask you a question as we're waiting for those. What are some of the things happening in the field of New Testament studies currently that are most exciting to you? Yeah, the main thing that's exciting to me is an awakening to race and racism not only within the history of interpretation but in terms of a seismic shift as I mentioned a little bit ago where we're seeing scholars of color both men and women no longer operating at the periphery of the academy but now taking center stage to give you one example a New Testament professor at Princeton Theological Seminary her name is Lisa Balance just published this week a book called African American Readings of Paul. It's the first book of this kind that goes into this much detail animating African American interpreters of the Bible as a language of resistance in the United States of America. The book is getting significant reviews including from some of the most senior scholars in the field. And so we're seeing this kind of this shifting of power dynamics where marginalized voices are no longer operating at the edge of the academy but are now taking center stage and really, really impacting the ways that we think about the history of interpretation. For example, David Harrell who's a famous New Testament scholar in Britain also is publishing a book coming out next week looking at ways that the study of the historical Jesus in the post enlightenment world is profoundly influenced by white supremacy and male domination as well. So I think this is a really exciting change because it's opening up not only new optics for looking at these texts but also for owning and lamenting the ways that seminaries in the academy have been dominated by white men who look like me in finding ways for us to shift power into live into this radical vision of Paul and Jesus of gentile inclusion and of disrupting racism. There are a number of other books coming out on this. I think the work of Willie Jennings is really significant in this area. Work of Shelley Matthews, there are others and trying to animate these scholars voices right now is I think a really important job of seminary professors and pastors for that matter around the country. Thanks. Now, something completely different, Drew. I think you're a fan of Star Wars maybe. Yes. Can you tell us why that matters in connection to your studies? Yeah. I rewatched the Star Wars series with my daughter when we moved here. And it was a really powerful experience for me as I watched her young imagination come alive to these forces of evil and forces of death. As an Anabaptist family, we never cultivated in her a desire to have toy guns and weapons and watch cartoons that facilitate this idea of redemptive violence. But watching Star Wars was really her first exposure to weapons and cosmic forces of good and evil. And as I was watching it as an adult and as someone who knows a little more about the Bible than I did as a kid and teenager watching those movies, this just clash of cosmic forces really stood out to me. And I think that one of the ways that I've grown in adulthood is realizing that sin, and when Paul talks about sin, I don't think we should translate it as sin lowercase S but sin is uppercase S. For Paul, sin is a personified fallen cosmic power in this world that wreaks havoc on human relationships, institutions and the environment. And I think that the Gospels answer to the problem of sin uppercase or what one scholar calls the cosmic tyrant is the life, death and resurrection of Messiah Jesus. This is the agency through which God's spirit is disrupting the cosmic tyrant to bring about a new creation. So Star Wars just became an interesting paradigm for me of kind of unpacking these ideas with my daughter, this collision of cosmic forces. And of course, I think some of the quotations by Yoda are just are absolutely genius as they're animating this collision. Thanks. Last chance for anyone who's participating to put a question or a comment in the Q and A and while we're waiting for that, I'll just ask one more, I don't know if it's a brief question or not, but last year, the AMBS Library was able to acquire a new treasure and you have been very excited about that. Can you tell us about it and why? Yeah. A lot of beginning students of the Bible think that the Bible wrote itself overnight. As many of you know, the Bible was written by different authors in very different contexts in different geographical locations and it didn't come into its final form until a few centuries after the death of Christ. The earliest fully extant manuscript we have that includes all 27 books of the New Testament is called Codex Sinaiticus. And it ended up, it comes from the 4th century, beginning of the 4th century and somehow ended up at the oldest surviving Christian monastery in the world called St. Catherine's Monastery in Egypt at the traditional site where Moses received the 10 commandments. And in the 18th century, a Bible explorer named Constantine Von Tischendorf set out around the Mediterranean to find these Greek manuscripts to come up with a more reliable Greek New Testament to translate into German. Well, Tischendorf ended up at this monastery and he convinced the monks there who according to his side of the story were using these manuscripts to start fires in the middle of winter. He convinced them to take them and borrow them and bring them back to St. Petersburg, Russia who was funding his explorations to study them there. Well, long story short, he brings some back to Heidelberg where he was a professor some day St. Petersburg and those end up being sold off to the British library in London and they were never returned to St. Catherine's Monastery. Well, in the 1960s, the monks there found some more fragments of this manuscript. So at this point in history, Codex Sinaiticus was spread across four different locations, Germany, Russia, England and Egypt. So to study this famous Greek manuscript, you had to get multiple plane tickets, spend a ton of money, travel around the world to even get a chance to look at this text. Well, about 10 years ago, someone got a grant for millions of dollars and went to these four locations and took high quality digital photos of Codex Sinaiticus and published it in a 35 pound, $1,000 book. We call this a facsimile. And we had a generous donor who gave us some money last year for us to purchase Codex Sinaiticus. And I'm able to use it in my introduction to the Bible study tools course, my Greek based reading of the Sermon on the Mount so that we can look at the ways early scribes are editing that material in the margins and annotating it and look at ways that the manuscript has been corrupted by water or by bugs and insects that got into it. So it's a really exciting pedagogical tool for understanding really the human aspect of the Bible. Our Bibles today are pretty sanitized. They're published in a nice tidy bound book. That's not the way early Christians experienced these texts in their bookish culture. Yeah. Thanks. And the final question comes from Mary Ann Weber and she asks, what is your favorite New Testament scripture and why? Boy, that's a great question. I probably have to go with Mark 115. Repentant, believe the good news. The kingdom of God has drawn near. Mark is the earliest gospel we have. Comes from the late 60s or early 70s around the time the Jerusalem temple was destroyed by the Romans. And that saying of Jesus, when I started learning about it in undergraduate school was an invitation to expand my understanding of the kingdom of God. Jesus didn't preach justification by faith. The gospel that I knew at that time was profoundly evangelical. And I had really a reductionistic understanding of the gospel. I understood the gospel is having to do with how sinners get saved and get out of hell and get eternal life. But that's not what Jesus preached. He didn't preach justification by faith as many reformers argued. He preached the kingdom of God. And that notion politicized the gospel for me and gave me a much bigger vision for the aims of Jesus in terms of how God's coming kingdom is overturning the systems of oppression of this world and bringing about a new just world. So I think I would say Mark 115, although it's a very difficult question to answer, but that is a verse that has stood out to me for a long time. Interestingly, the Greek verb for the kingdom of God drawing near is in the Greek perfect. And we don't have a verbal form like this in English. So we can't actually translate it properly. The Greek perfect had to do with something that happened in the past with ongoing significance for the reader or audience today. And so when Mark says that the, or Jesus says that the kingdom of God is drawing near, it's something that was launched through the agency of Jesus's public ministry, but has ongoing implications and significance for the audience of Mark's gospel today. And that was something that really stood out to me, again animating the importance of the kingdom of God for our understanding of Christian origins and Christian discipleship today. Thank you, Drew, for answering all these questions and giving us a wonderful insight into your work at AMBS. And I want to thank you for joining us today. We had else from the Netherlands and many people from around the US and Canada. I just want to let you know that before next month's third Thursday conversation with Nikisha Elena Alexis, you will need to register again. And then after that point, we've got it now set up so that when you register for the next third Thursday conversation, that will give you entry into all of the series, but between today and next month, you will need to register again. And then you'll get reminders of each month's conversation. Thank you to our alumni for your ongoing support of AMBS. Alumni are our most important influencers in the church, both of prospective students and of donors. And so I ask you to keep encouraging people you know to consider attending seminary, even trying just one class. If you know of a prospective students, you'd like us to contact, please send me their name and contact information at JBJohnson at AMBS.edu. I also encourage you to give generously to the seminary. Alumni are a critically important source of our financial support through their own gifts and their influence on other donors. Finally, I hope you will stay connected to the seminary through ongoing classes and church leadership center audit rate for you. And you now have the option of auditing online courses. So if you'd like to take a class with Drew or someone else this spring, let me know. I also hope you can participate in the pastors and leaders event that church leadership center is planning for the first week of March. This year because of COVID-19, it will be an online event. Thanks to all of you for joining us this afternoon and thanks especially to those offering support to this webinar, Becca Barattu, Ben Parker-Suter and Jewel Gingrich Langenacker. This concludes our inaugural third Thursday conversation. Have a wonderful day.