“I can’t worship to girlfriend songs” and other nonsense I heard over the Bible College dinner table

If you want to weigh up the beating heart of a Bible College, then don’t just listen to the lectures, or chat with the carefully chosen student reps – book in for dinner! It’s over the dinner table when the students have come back from class that you really hear what the student body values.

It’s not that we should completely judge a College on the theology of its students, but we’ll spend more time with them than we do with our professors. There’s a lot of influence to be had here!

Watercooler chat

The watercooler phenomenon in Bible College happens at the dinner table. Where students can vent off their own ground-breaking epiphanies without the rigors of testing that comes from raising your hand in the lecture.

My first time at Bible College was full time and live in. I was a single student who couldn’t cook and had to eat three meals a day in the canteen. All the students were older than me and had formed more strongly held opinions on a range of areas than I had.

Some of my most memorable nonsense came from these 45-minute ad hoc student seminars. So, what did I hear?

“I can’t worship to girlfriend songs.”

So many students complained that modern worship music was too ‘romantic’, ‘emotional’, and ‘sentimental.’ Heaven forbid that we should appear passionately in love with God during the times of worship set aside for just that! ‘These are songs a teenager would sing to his girlfriend’ I remember one student saying.

One of the most potent images in the Bible is of God, the intense lover, and his bride – us! Song of songs should have you tugging at your collar like an Amish boy in Victoria’s Secret, and Ezekiel 16 is not the image of two platonic friends talking Calvinism over a game of backgammon!

“Modern youth work is just pointless entertainment-driven day-care.”

I’ve been a youth worker for nearly 15 years, and – even though I agree there is a lot of entertainment and hype in a lot of youth ministry – I’ve never, ever met a Christian youth worker who didn’t at very least want young people to meet with Jesus.

What these full-time vicar students refused to consider is that teenagers with no church background were unlikely to sit and focus on a 3hr lecture on supralapsarianism without at least a packet of doughnuts! I advocate for high-content, low-entertainment youth ministry, but even I get that we’ve got to give kids a good time!

“If I ran that church, then I’d fix it!”

There’s nothing easier than sofa commentary, back seat driving, or Monday-morning quarterbacking. Students looking on at churches in the neighbourhood, or examples used in class, can easily feel like they have both the special objective knowledge, and the hutzpah required to parachute in and fix everything.

Assuming that boldness is the same as the careful process of pastoral correction and discipline that’s set out in the Bible is much the same as assuming a doctor uses a bazooka to blow a hole in a body to move around some organs. ‘Why does the doctor take so long to cut a hole – I’ll show you how it’s done!’

“Mission theory? Pah! I’d just tell people about Jesus.”

Fine, but you’ll be speaking to an empty church.

Again, there’s sympathy to be had here – I don’t think we talk about Jesus enough in mission, and I hate the funnel model of mission. That said, people don’t just magically appear in our meetings. We have to make contact! We need to build relationships and connect with a community.

There’s a reason aliens haven’t just nipped by to ask us for an apple pie recipe yet.

“I’ll take relationships over right theology any day!”

Sigh. I still hear this a lot from experienced ministers. Good relationships are born in, measured by, supported through, and saturated by right theology. At the heart of theology (the understanding of God), is a relational God.

On the flip side, an unhealthy practice can almost always be traced back to shaky theology. Distinguishing between relationships and theology is like saying, ‘you keep your rigid heart muscle and precise circular vascular system – all I need is blood… Precious blood!’ (Probably said in an increasingly creepier voice).

I get what the speaker is trying to say. It’s more important to love someone than to make sure they have exactly the right view of immersive creedal baptism! But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Photo by Kevin Curtis on Unsplash