I'm thankful to a couple of you who read my seminary application essay and gave me feedback. I've heard from a few more who said they wanted to read it. So, here it is. Very long, but if you have some spare reading time and want to know more about who I am and what drives me, then have at it. Only one step left to complete the application process.
My interest in attending Covenant Theological
Seminary to pursue a Master’s degree in Christianity and the Contemporary
Culture began in the early 1990s. It was at that time that I had truly embraced
the Christian faith of my culture as my own—a living, abiding, active,
transformational relationship with a sovereign Creator God who raises the dead.
And with my conversion to Christ, I immediately felt an immense desire to live
honestly, intentionally, submitting every aspect of life to his Lordship.
The importance of Christian worldview
thinking and the recognition that God in his sovereignty and perfect plan chose
with intention to call me to himself after placing me in this very point in
history, in this very culture that we do live in, infiltrated my thinking. It
continues today to hold a primary position in my own awareness as I attempt to
“seek first the kingdom of God” in all things. God put me here, now, for his
purpose.
I was a senior in college at Clemson
University pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Design when I first came in contact
with Reformed theology. I had been raised in a Southern Baptist culture in the
midlands of South Carolina. My grandmother was a believer. I would have to say
I believe my mother was a believer, but how that worked out for her was very
private. She taught me the existence of God, but she didn’t speak about how
that knowledge informed her life’s decisions or goals. My father is a good man,
hardworking and caring. He wanted my brothers and me to have our needs met and
to climb the ladder of social and professional success. He taught us personal
responsibility, work ethic, and self-sufficiency. He believed in community and both
my parents held to an open-door policy to our home. But my father never taught
or modeled a Christ-centered purpose to our human existence.
So when I met Reformed theology in 1991, my
understanding literally exploded. I had always known I believed in God. I
believed in Jesus—a real, historical man who was born from a virgin by the
power of the Holy Spirit. I believed he was God in the flesh, walking among
men. I believed he lived a perfect life and died for some general and vague
concept called “sin” which infected all of us somehow. I believed that he was
bodily resurrected. Then, once I had gotten all that believing established, I
went back to my daily life: what I was going to do, what I was going to study,
whom I was going to spend time with. Jesus had nothing to do with me. I was
busy and on a path of setting up my own future. That included finishing college
but staying in the area in order to wait out another year until my fiancé
graduated.
I took a job that was below the level of my
education but adequate to support me after graduation while I waited on my
future to begin. And it was there, in that job, that God began to work on me. I
still had a few months left until graduation, but I was thinking of myself as a
full-fledged adult. I needed to begin to do “adult things.” In my mind, one of
those adult things was to start attending church. It is what “good people” did,
after all, in our Southern culture, and in accordance with the morality of outward
appearances I had grown up with, I certainly wanted to be perceived as “good
people.”
I visited a few churches that were within
walking distance and found reasons with each to reject it immediately. It was
at the First Baptist Church—which I had saved until last because of how common
and traditional it was to me—that I found a church to call home for a time.
During the worship service on my first visit, the pastor, Mike Massar, seemed
to look me in the eye directly when he said, “If you’re looking for a church
home, I hope you know that none of us here are perfect. That’s exactly why we
need a Savior, just like you do. So I trust you will give us more than one shot
before you make up your mind to leave.” It hit like an arrow through my heart.
I wasn’t looking for a church to belong to. I was looking for a reason NOT to
be there. I stayed for the next three years. A Vietnam veteran and converted
atheist named Michael van Strien taught a Sunday school class for post-college
aged adults and young professionals and the very small group of us spent a
significant amount of study time absorbed in the scriptures, devouring both
their prophetic and symbolic meanings as well as real-life, practical
applications. Michael was a literature professor, and he saw God as a great
artist and author. I was a Design major, concentrating in humanities. Michael
spoke my language. The meta-narrative of scripture began to unfold before me,
and I knew it was true. It was too well ordered, well developed, self-supporting
on too grand a scale to be written by even one human, much less by dozens over
the course of many centuries, without Spiritual inspiration. I began to develop
a sense of awe at this Creator/Designer/Author/Story-telling God.
A few months after those seeds had been
planted, a new employee arrived in my office. She was also a Clemson student who
was working up until her graduation the following year. We shared the same
name, phonetically. She spelled hers Rebekah, while mine is Rebecca. I came in
to work one day after a long weekend and found her sitting at my desk. While my
first response was a combination of intrigue with no small amount of jealous
intimidation—I mean, was she taking my place or what?—we quickly became great
friends. And though I was aware that I had experienced an eye-opening about
God, it was Rebekah who showed me Christ. It was Rebekah who had such a
comfortable, personal, non-defensive, and joy-filled relationship with her
Savior—in no way judgmental or overbearing, demanding or insistent—that I often
found myself thinking, “I want what she has.” She made Christ so appealing,
simply by living all of her life in his presence, in submission to his will, in
trusting him to be for her good, that I saw him through her and wanted to know
the person of Christ.
While I was quick to invite others to come to
church with me for worship and Sunday school, Rebekah invited me to come to a Reformed
University Fellowship small group Bible study. It was on the book of Hebrews,
but the intern, well prepared by the RUF leader David Sinclair, led us through
all of scripture as we looked into that New Testament book. It was during that
Bible study that I began to see how Reformed theology could take all the little
bits of truth I had known and begin to put them together like the pieces of a
cosmic jigsaw puzzle. It all made sense. It all fit. Scripture interpreted
scripture, and I was hooked.
From that point I knew that I had to study
Reformed theology. I began to attend the Reformed University Fellowship large
group meetings. I asked for books to read. I got a copy of the Westminster
Confession of Faith and went through it, line by line, checking every scripture
reference. I realized that if Christ was who scripture said he was, there was
no turning back. He was what I needed. He was the union between that amazing
Designer/Artist God and me. It was all or nothing, and I was in. I could
literally feel the presence of the Holy Spirit blooming in the midst of me, and
I fell so totally head over heels in love with this amazing, sacrificial,
gracious, revelatory, humble, powerful, majestic, meek, PERSONAL God that my
whole external appearance and outlook on everything changed. I had not yet
learned about Abraham Kuyper at the time. But I had gained my own sense of
understanding along the lines of Kuyper:
If Christ was over all and in all and through all, that meant every
aspect of my own life as well as the very culture I had been specifically
placed in at that moment in the whole of history was also fully his. I had
found meaning and purpose in existence—it was all about God and his grace and
his work and the spread of his kingdom!
About that time, I picked up two more
important connections. First, I took a sample copy of WORLD Magazine from an
RUF gathering, and second, I started listening every time someone mentioned
Covenant Theological Seminary. I hungered to learn more and I felt almost
certain then that God was calling me there to study. I knew I wanted to teach.
I wanted to tell young people—teens in particular—what I had not learned in my
own adolescence and young adulthood. I wanted to help open eyes to the fullness
of God’s involvement in the world. I wanted to develop worldviews and to
prepare immature believers about to enter the world with a foundation of
certainty and apologetics to stand confidently, but not defensively in a
negative sense, before and within their culture. I wanted to equip others to go
boldly and full of joy and love into the world’s arena, putting Christ on
display before the nations and going as workers into the harvest whether they
were teachers, musicians, actors, architects, infantrymen, nurses, cashiers,
computer programmers, mechanics, writers, or anything else God had called them
to. My understanding of God working in all of life was ripe for application,
and I saw the vast potential for the growth of his kingdom through the
placement of prepared believers in every vocation.
But I couldn’t get there. I couldn’t get to
CTS at that time. I had graduated from Clemson with no college debt but no
savings either. My parents were finished with financial support. They needed me
to work and provide for myself. They could not fund graduate school. And I was
a young female with no contacts in St. Louis. So even though I spoke a number
of times in the early 1990s with admissions representatives, and I had those
white cassette tapes of Jerram Barrs’ lectures mailed to me often, I never made
an application to attend. I kept the dream, but I backburnered it. Another big
event also changed my course. I became acutely aware that the man I was engaged
to marry was not the one God intended for me. As I had been drawn first to the
church and then to Christ himself, he was being drawn more and more into the
world and away from anything he considered old-fashioned or traditional. He
outright rejected God, and I ended our engagement.
I spent the next year in Clemson, working and
enjoying being single, even though I am an exuberant extrovert and all my
college peers had moved on. I was loving the time I had to immerse myself in my
new relationship with the Lord and I grew rapidly, all the while feeling as if
he was working to prepare me for something. I knew I would never be satisfied
with purely secular work. I needed a ministry or mission focus. I found it in
December 1993. My friend Rebekah had moved from Clemson earlier that year to
Asheville, North Carolina. She went to be close to her aging parents, who lived
in Asheville then. While there, she had taken an editorial assistant position
with God’s World Publications—the publisher of WORLD Magazine and God’s World
News, and the parent company of the WORLD Journalism Institute and the
now-defunct God’s World Book Club. But Rebekah had become engaged to her
now-husband Stephen Speaks (a CTS alumnus), and she was going to leave her job
at God’s World after their wedding.
I had the equivalent of a minor in
humanities, a passion for literature, and an even bigger passion for impacting
the thinking of young people for Christ. I applied for the open position, and
began work in March 1994 with God’s World Book Club. I met my husband Bill
later that year at Arden Presbyterian Church, where he had come to faith, and
it became clear that Asheville was my new home. Within five years, I was
managing the Book Club division. Our mission was to select the best of the best
reading material for homeschool and Christian school students—a broad range of
books from both Christian and secular publishers—which represented the “all of
life” worldview that the Reformed faith taught. It was a dream job. I have been
with the same company ever since—except for a few breaks here and there when
some of our children were born. My position has changed much over the years. I
have seen most of the company from the inside.
Currently, I am the editor of the children’s
magazines, God’s World News. I love my job, as we write today’s current events
for young readers, ranging from Preschool to 9th grade, presenting
the news with a specifically biblical perspective. My job gives me opportunity
to speak biblical truth into the specific instances of noteworthy events
occurring in our culture. It lets me challenge our readership to apply their
own evaluation through a scriptural lens, and our goal is to encourage them to
incorporate biblical thinking and putting Christ on display in all areas of their
own lives, for God’s glory and their future impact on the culture they live in.
Bill and I have been blessed with four unique
and outrageously amazing daughters. Our youngest will begin first grade in the
fall. Modern technology and a flexible, willing-to-be-cutting-edge workplace
has allowed me to continue to work while never having to put any of our
children into daycare. I have even been able to do some homeschooling over the
years, though we have found the environment and opportunities at the Christian
school to be the best option for preparing our children for all that God might
have in store for them as they seek to walk in his will for their own futures.
And so, with the little one going to school in the fall of 2013, I find myself
now freed up some, with some time to return again to that dream of graduate
school at CTS which I could never quite close the door on in the last two
decades.
In late October, Bill and I made the road
trip to St. Louis to visit the campus of the seminary for the first time. I
needed to know that the gilded image I held in my mind of Covenant was real and
had held up to the vision I had so cherished all this time. I was prepared to
find that CTS indeed did not meet my long-held expectations, but quite the
opposite was true. I have to say it exceeded all that I had built it up to be
in my memory and mind. The visit was nothing except affirming. It was clear
that technology has come to the point of allowing me to do most or perhaps even
all of my degree work through distance learning, while managing a level of
interaction that is satisfactory if not absolutely ideal. But a move to St.
Louis for our entire family is not feasible at this point. I do hope to be able
to take advantage of some low-residency, intensive classes on site, perhaps
once per year, but for the most part, I will be working from our home in
Asheville.
It is my hope that the Master’s of Arts in Theological
Studies in Christianity and the Contemporary Culture will further equip me to
do the work I am already doing as editor of God’s World News, writing for
children and teens and helping to build both their scriptural knowledge as well
as their biblical worldview integration and application. But in addition to
continuing the job I currently have—perhaps with just a larger or more full
“toolbox” to work from—I also hope to travel for God’s World, speaking to
parents, teachers, journalism students, and young people about integrating
their faith into all of life, engaging and relating to the culture in which God
has placed them, and finding the common ground of humanity that needs a Savior,
so that God’s kingdom may grow and flourish through them in all areas of life.
Additionally, I am interested in taking the courses on educational foundations
for teaching teens and young adults. I have a passion for the place in life
that high schoolers and college students find themselves, because that is where
I was when God claimed me and brought me to himself. It is a time of great
potential being realized and focused, and thinking and owning one’s own
thoughts, beliefs, and opinions. It is a time in which optimism about life’s
opportunities, when powered by a real and confident faith in an omnipotent God,
can, if fanned into flame, change a culture—a generation on the brink of
adulthood. I would love to teach Bible and Christian worldview, particularly in
regard to living actively and intentionally for Christ in this culture, to high
schoolers, college students, and even on the institute level if God were to
lead that way.
For the last two years, this idea of seeking
seminary has been in discussion again between Bill and me. We’ve prayed and
wondered, inquired once before and then withdrawn that inquiry. We believe God
has led and developed, pushed the pause button on my dreams at times, but now
is opening the doors through timing, technology, the age of our children, and
even the transformation of this particular degree to the distance program to
make it possible for me to finally get started. That same God looks over the
universe and lays claim to every single inch of it. There are still details to
be met, and I may not be able to see how he is going to do it all yet, but I am
confident that he will. It is an approach he keeps teaching me as hardship and
trial come—and they have. I stand ready claiming only this much. If it is of
the Lord, he will provide all that is needed. He has given me enough to step
out in faith and begin the program. And like Abraham, I will go until he tells
me to stop.
