Classroom Ministry
I first felt a call to ministry when I was 15. I had made a bargain with my German parents that I would go through the rite of confirmation so long as I never had to go to church again. God had other plans. Being a bookish if pimply teenager, one Sunday I picked up the New Testament for the first time and started reading the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus had me at “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” I knew then that I would dedicate my life to being his disciple.
Teaching is not what I first thought I was being called to do. I felt called to parish ministry. My best friend’s father pulled me aside one day and told me that I should be a professor—I didn’t have the personal skills to be a pastor! It was good advice. I worked to improve my personality. By the end of my undergraduate degree, I thought I might also be a teacher and a scholar.
My calling is to teach the Bible in a way that doesn’t burn the world down but helps us to learn from Scripture how to live into God’s reconciling work of bringing a new creation.For over 30 years I have felt called by God to teach the New Testament and early church history at Vancouver School of Theology. Every year feels as fresh as the last. At the start of each semester, I am excited by a new class of students. Who will be they be? What insights will they come with? What diverse life experiences will they bring? What will students introduce to the classroom that will open new ways of interpreting biblical texts I hadn’t seen before? What will I learn from the conversations my lectures prompt?
God meets us through the encounter with others. My calling is to help create an arena for such encounter through teaching the Bible, and to discover with students how God is inviting us to engage scripture in a way that equips us to live more fully and abundantly into our life with God and our contemporary context. That calling is not something I have chosen; it has chosen me.
Teaching and scholarship are things that I cannot not do. They energize and enliven me. They drive my interests and commitments. They are central to who I am.
This calling can make me nervous. Will I teach clearly? Will students receive what I am trying to convey? Will I correctly discern the deeper questions behind student queries?
I don’t think I am unique in this anxiety. I saw the best New Testament scholar I have met also anxious before his lectures. When I first started teaching at VST as a sessional lecturer, I watched my predecessor Professor of New Testament, the esteemed Lloyd Gaston, pacing the hallway outside his office before each lecture. He often said that students don’t give themselves enough credit for how capable they are. Perhaps part of the reason he was pacing the hallway was because he was anxious not to disappoint them. He wanted to give them his very best, and for Lloyd, his very best was global in its power to transform an entire discipline of Pauline study.
The stakes are very high in biblical study. Indeed, they can be a matter of life and death.
I am no Lloyd Gaston, but I do know what is at stake in my calling as a teacher of the Bible. I too do the equivalent of pacing the hallway before each class. Like Lloyd, I want to give my students my very best. The work I do is serious. The stakes are very high in biblical study. Indeed, they can be a matter of life and death.
We can see that abuse of the Bible has unleashed enormous violence and suffering upon the world—it still does. The legacy of the residential school system is an outcome of genocidal ways of reading the Bible. So is the debacle of Christianity wedded to right wing politics we see playing out both in Canada and the United States.
God calls me to offer biblical instruction and interpretation that does not destroy lives but builds them up. My calling is to teach the Bible in a way that doesn’t burn the world down but helps us to learn from Scripture how to live into God’s reconciling work of bringing a new creation. Given the significant challenges of the environmental crisis, global conflict, and social injustices that roil our society, the classroom is for me a place of urgency: there is not a minute to lose in theological instruction, as the tasks we are called to are critical for the thriving both of religious communities and wider society.
There is excitement when I see students connecting with the materials I teach. Teaching certainly involves learning abstract concepts. But it is also about embodied conversion—both of student and teacher. For example, when I teach the Book of Revelation, that strange book of visions and otherworldly characters has led my students and me to consider what word of life we should bring to unmask life-destroying pre-occupations and to hear God’s invitation to the thirsty to come to the water of life, to drink without price (Rev. 22:17).
Dr. Harry teaching a hybrid class | Photo by Christopher Sanford Beck
On one level, my calling demands a good deal of solitude. To exercise it faithfully requires innumerable hours poring over texts and scholarship. But at another level, a company of interpreters situates my vocation. Just as there is no scholarship without a community of scholars, there is no biblical instruction without the companionship of others. I didn’t get that from a book. I learned it at my mother’s knee.
My grandparents and parents came to Canada as refugees who suffered unspeakable trauma in war-torn Europe. None of them went to university. Most never completed high school and some of them, like my father, didn’t finish elementary school. Without the benefit of academic study or formal training in biblical languages and exegetical methods, they came to know more about the Bible than I do, and certainly more than one can find in a scholarly commentary. Life taught them not only how to read the Bible, but to hold fast to its promises as though their lives depended on it.
As I grew up listening to their trauma and the faith forged from their suffering, my family taught me the importance of holding story—both the Bible’s and the narratives of the ones reading it—carefully and gently. This too is my calling. While the work of scholars is important, the life stories of my students are central to what I do. God calls me not only to teach written scholarship and share academic insight, but also to learn from the living wisdom my students bring to the classroom.
From the surprise of being called to faith as a pimply teen reading the Sermon on the Mount for the first time, to the astonishing wisdom of student companions who join me in discovering what God would teach us from the New Testament and the church’s history, to family members who have modelled lives of faith, I have been gifted with riches beyond measure. Praise God for my calling.
Harry O. Maier is Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Studies at Vancouver School of Theology and Fellow of the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt. In addition to several edited volumes, he is author of Picturing Paul in Empire: Imperial Image, Text, and Persuasion in Colossians, Ephesians, and the Pastoral Epistles (2013) and New Testament Christianity in the Roman World (2018).