Beeson Podcast, Episode #683 Reverend Dr. Gerald Hiestand Date >>Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now your host, Doug Sweeney. >>Doug Sweeney: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast. I’m your host, Doug Sweeney. I’m joined today by this fall’s commencement speaker, The Reverend Dr. Gerald Hiestand, the Senior Pastor of the Calvary Memorial Church in Oak Park, Illinois, and the Co-Founder and Chairman of the Board for the Center for Pastor Theologians. Welcome, Dr. Hiestand, to the program. >>Dr. Hiestand: Thank you. Great to be here. >>Doug Sweeney: Great to have you, my friend. Let’s introduce you to our Beeson audience. Tell us just a little bit about yourself, your childhood, how you came to know the Lord. >>Dr. Hiestand: I grew up in a Christian home. Kind of bible church tradition. In the Chicago area. My grandfather was the pastor of the church that I grew up in. My dad was also a pastor for a bit. Then went into missions work and executive work. So, I kind of grew up in the church and from the earliest memories have always had a sense of the gospel. Probably when I was 12 or so I was at a passion play our church put on that I just had this spirit given kind of eye opening awareness of the beauty and glory of Christ in that passion play. I can distinctly remember going home that night, 12 year old laying in bed, tears running down my eyes – just begging the Lord to let me into heaven and I felt like he told me he’d let me in. (laughs) So, that was really probably the start of an earnest faith journey. I then went on to Moody Bible Institute and did some time in pastoral ministry as a youth pastor for a little bit. Then on to graduate school at TEDS where we met. And did a masters there. Then eventually did a PhD in classics. And now pastoring as a Senior Pastor at a church in Oak Park, which is just right next to Chicago. We butt up against the Chicago border. >>Doug Sweeney: Well, because some of the people who listen to these podcast episodes are people thinking about seminary, wondering whether seminary is for them, and trying to discern what it means to say “Let’s follow God’s leading in our lives, see if God has called us to or is helping us to become pastors ourselves,” I want to ask you about that. So, you’re the grandson and the son of pastors. You had a real conversation experience. But did you grow up thinking you got to take over the family business? I mean, how did you process as a teenage Christian what you were supposed to do when you grew up? >>Dr. Hiestand: It’s not an illustrious story. I mean, here it is in brief. When I was in fourth grade we had our missions week and all the missionaries would come back and they would come to the Sunday School classes and they would tell stories about their missions work. I remember being in the fourth grade and sitting in the primary room. We had a missionary come and she said ... she was Papa New Guinea. She said, “When I was in fourth grade,” it was an older church, “I was sitting in the exact chairs that you are sitting in right now. And the missionary lady came and she was talking about missions work. And that’s when I knew in fourth grade that I was going to be a missionary.” At the time I thought, “Oh no, dear God, I’m going to have to be a missionary in Papa New Guinea.” I was actually ... it was like the hound of heaven was after me. I was very scared about that. I believed in God and I thought he was going to come get me and take me over to Papa New Guinea or something. So, I had this missions monkey hanging on my back for all my elementary years and middle school. And then my youth pastor, freshman year of high school, he said to me, “Hey, I think you would be a good youth pastor.” And I thought, “That’s it. That’s my lifeline. I’m going to be a youth pastor in the States.” That’s how I’ll satisfy this calling from God. >>Doug Sweeney: You’re still a young boy at this time? >>Dr. Hiestand: Yeah, I was a freshman in high school at the time. So, it’s kind of funny but that actually ... probably there is some truth in there. I remember thinking even from my freshman year of high school that I was going to head towards Moody Bible Institute ... I grew up in that area ... study to be a pastor and be a pastor. So, I had already made that determination by freshman year of high school. >>Doug Sweeney: Wow. All right. So, you enter Moody. Did you major in, what do they call it there? Pastoral Studies or? >>Dr. Hiestand: Yeah, I think I did biblical theology. My grandfather was a pastor, my father was a pastor, my best friend’s dad in-between that was the pastor of our church, too. I was very close with our youth pastor. So, I kind of felt like I was not unfamiliar with pastoral ministry. That didn’t seem like foreign territory to me. That seemed familiar. What I really wanted was kind of the bible knowledge and the scriptural competency to be able to exercise some of the pastoral experiences that I had seen already lived out in my family life and friends’ lives. >>Doug Sweeney: Wow. All right. So, tell us just a little bit about your early history in ministry. I mean, how did you go from feeling like that’s what God had for you to actually practicing pastoral ministry? >>Dr. Hiestand: Well, I graduated and my wife went to Trinity, which is kind of across town. We grew up going to church together. So, we knew each other. And we got married ten months out of me being done with Moody. So, we got married and then ten months later we went into ministry. My first job was a youth pastor at a church in Nebraska. It was an Evangelical Free Church. And we didn’t want to get too far away from Chicago. So, we kind of figured a day’s drive is about as far away as we were going to get from my wife’s family. >>Doug Sweeney: Both families were there. >>Dr. Hiestand: Both families in Chicago. And so Freemont, Nebraska was the outer edge of the circle. And they were looking. It was through the Moody Referral Listings for graduates who were looking for positions. They were looking for somebody and so we ended up going out to Nebraska where I was the youth pastor and then also did Christian education for that church. It was a smaller church. It’s all relative I suppose. But Freemont is a town of maybe 25,000 surrounded by farms. So, it’s a farming community. That was a very good experience for me, pastorally. I was the second full time pastor at the church. So, it was me and one other pastor. I got a lot of experience, I got to get my feet wet in a lot of different things. There maybe is a word of wisdom there for folks. I mean, there’s something about going into a church that has room for you to sort of be able to move in a lot of different spaces. I also pastored for a while as an associate pastor at a mega church. But it was very much more you had your lane and that’s the only thing you did. You didn’t get as much of a broad experience. The smaller church was a very good experience. That was very good. I think my wife and I would say (we were ten months married at the time) we had to figure out being married, too. And that was more of a challenge frankly than the pastoral ministry was. I think the Lord was very kind and gracious to us in helping us get over some rough stuff early on in our marriage. Then we were there for about three and a half years and then that’s when I came back to Chicago area and did a couple of years at Trinity doing some masters work. >>Doug Sweeney: All right. Let’s fast forward. The thing that most people know about you is that you are the Senior Pastor of Calvary Memorial Church in Oak Park. Can you tell us just a little bit about your church and what the Lord is doing there these days? >>Dr. Hiestand: Yeah, Calvary is a great church. It’s also unique in the sense that it’s in a unique space. So, Oak Park, if you live in the city of Chicago, Oak Park is a suburban church. Because you are coming out of ... we have a lot of young families that are moving out of the city. They want to get into a suburban church. So, they come to Oak Park. But if you live further west in the suburbs of Chicago, Oak Park is a city church because it’s just right next to Chicago. It’s got alley parking. It just has more of a feel of a city church. So, we’re kind of right at the headwaters of urban and suburban. We’re right where those two waters kind of mix. That creates some interesting dynamics and feel. That probably captures a lot of the fusion elements of Calvary. Calvary is an evangelical church, but Oak Park is a beautiful town. A great town. I live in the town, it’s wonderful. It’s very progressive. I would say it’s aggressively progressive. And so an evangelical church in Oak Park is a little bit of a sore thumb, frankly. And so that’s another kind of fusion point. You’ve kind of got the conservative and progressive elements coming together. I would say probably in my church half of my congregation votes Democrat and half votes Republican. We have a lot of socioeconomic diversity. We have a lot of ethnic diversity. But probably I don’t know 60-65% White and then it’s a mix beyond that. Predominantly African American, but also we have an increasingly larger Hispanic population. It’s an interesting conglomeration of a lot of things that tend to get bifurcated in broader culture. Also that tend to get bifurcated even in evangelical culture. So, I love it because ... I’m an Enneagram nine for anyone that cares about the Enneagram. And part of my gift set is kind of bringing things together and kind of making peace and diplomacy between things that would otherwise potentially be in conflict. And so I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity for me to kind of hold together tensions and bring things together. What I love about our church is we have, particularly over the last ten years but maybe five years, we really have coalesced around a shared love of Christ and a celebration of his love for us. And that trumps then all of our political leanings or our social leanings, or the different things that could potentially pull us apart get united and held together in Christ. >>Doug Sweeney: Yeah. That reminds me of your sermon this morning at commencement. By the time this podcast interview drops, your sermon will be edited and posted on our YouTube page, and there will be a link on the website, and so on. So, the people listening now can go hear the sermon. We don’t need the whole sermon here, but give us a little teaser. What did you talk about this morning with the students who are graduating? >>Dr. Hiestand: Yeah. The basic gist is the question I posed at the front end is what is it that someone heading out into pastoral ministry or any kind of ministry, gospel ministry – what is sort of the key thing that that person needs to always keep in mind and know? We walked through some different options. Is it the scriptures? And yes, but the scriptures can be wielded in damaging ways if it doesn’t have a heart of love behind it. So, maybe love is the key. Jesus says loving God is more important than loving others. Kind of working all the way back down to what I think the foundation is – God’s love for us in Christ. That is the bedrock foundation upon which the gospel minister has to build his/her ministry. And thinking of Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3 that we are “rooted and grounded in God’s love for us in Christ.” And if we try to build a ministry that’s rooted and grounded in our love for God or our love for others or even the scriptures, we’re not down far enough into what are the roots of the foundation which is God’s love for us. >>Doug Sweeney: That’s a wonderful truth. I think probably one of the things that was in the sermon that the Lord used to make it so effective in so many of our lives, at least thus far, it’s only been a few hours, but it seemed like the Lord was really at work as you were preaching – was the story you told of the time in your life when you just weren’t sensing God’s love in your own life. And you kind of looked at the students as somebody who has been doing pastoral ministry for 20 years and it’s as though you were just being honest with them and saying, “Look, this is important and it’s not automatic.” I mean, God’s love is unconditional but we need to let God’s love in. >>Dr. Hiestand: That’s right. Even Revelation 3 where the Lord stands at the door and knocks, right? What is he ... I think why don’t we open the door? What are we afraid he’s going to do if he comes in? I think we say we want to let Christ in, but the truth is it’s vulnerable and messy, and if he comes in who knows what he is going to do. And it’s just safer to keep him on the outside and work for him than it is to let him in on the inside. I think that’s what I had found I had fallen into that over a long season of ministry where I was working for Christ, doing things for Christ, teaching for Christ – and at the same time praying, “Lord, show yourself to me.” But it was inviting Jesus in with the left hand and holding him out with the right hand, too. And I think I didn’t even quite know how to stop doing that. And I think that sabbatical experience, which I talk about in the sermon, but that experience sort of forced me to come to terms with that sort of divided heart or impulse, which I wasn’t fully conscious of. It wasn’t a conscious thing. >>Doug Sweeney: That’s a perfect seminary student ... for reasons that are good. We’re busy for the Lord. Every day. All the time. And if we’re not careful, as you were suggesting during the commencement ceremony, we can let our busyness for the Lord be the thing that we think is going to sustain us in ministry. And it’s not. >>Dr. Hiestand: I think where I maybe had gone before is I would say, okay, yeah, I can’t let my busyness for the Lord trump my relationship with the Lord, so I need to always remember to love Christ first, but that still was me loving Christ. I had taken it back down to that point. But if you’re not letting Christ love you, you actually don’t have something to love Christ in return with. Right? And so it’s not just kind of getting rid of the distractions and the busyness of life so you can focus on loving Christ better, you have to get rid of the busyness and the distractions and even you have to set aside your attempts to love Christ and just focus on how he is loving you. And that provides then the wellspring of love that you can love him back with and love others with and then do ministry with. So, when I came back from my sabbatical the first passage that I preached from was in Nehemiah 8 where the joy of the Lord is your strength, right? I think I had spent so much of my pastoral ministry ... I think I would have said that the conviction of the Lord is your strength. Firm convictions ... we have to have firm convictions. And that’s what kind of gives us the energy we need to press through the hard times. But yeah, I just think looking as a parent, looking even some into my congregation, I don’t know that the firmness of my convictions is what my congregation and my kids and my family really need from me. Not that they don’t ... we need convictions, but convictions come from joy. And if you get convictions without joy that’s actually life-sucking, not life-giving. >>Doug Sweeney: I want our listeners to learn about and pray for and support the Center for Pastor Theologians. I said at the top of the show when I was introducing you that you’re the Co-Founder and Chairman of the Board of the Center for Pastor Theologians. Of course, the Center for Pastor Theologians has been active and at work at Beeson Divinity School for a little while now. But I bet not all of our listeners know as much as they should about what we call the CPT. And we’ve got the Founder here. Tell us a little bit about the Center for Pastor Theologians and why you’re so excited about it? >>Dr. Hiestand: The Center for Pastor Theologians, the seminal idea for it ... we really have you to blame, Doug, because it was in Doug’s Jonathan Edwards’ class ... I remember raving this insight when you were explaining that in Edwards’ day in New England the majority of the New England theologians far and away they were clergy. Right? So, if you wanted to grow up and be a theologian, you had to grow up and be a pastor. Because no one else was going to pay you to be a theologian except the churches. So, the vast majority of the texts that were in the Yale library or the College of New Jersey Library, these texts were written by pastors, New England clergy. I had come to TEDS out of pastoral ministry and I was feeling the disconnect of I came to TEDS to study theology out of pastoral ministry but the theology that I was reading sometimes felt disconnected from the pastoral ministry that I had been doing and I wanted to go back and to do some more of. And it struck me that that shift in social occasion where the theologians used to be pastors but now the theologians are professors. And so if the social location is sort of animating and driving and provoking the questions that theologians are asking, well, the ecclesial context is going to provoke one set of questions and the academic context is going to provoke another set of questions. There’s some overlap between those two, but those are not exactly the same. And it struck me that whereas in New England to be a theologian was to be a pastor, you fast forward 300 years and to be a theologian is to be a professor. It’s completely shifted. And so I began to think about what would it look like to try to help pastors reclaim their sense of identity as theologians? Not just for their local church but certainly for that, but also for the broader church community. Right? So, that the church rather than sort of passively ... and the pastoral community rather than sort of passively standing with its hands out theologically speaking and asking the academy to fill them with theological riches, the pastoral community would begin to take responsibility for itself of mining and thinking about the scriptures and the great tradition and answering the questions that the church is faced with today – from a pastoral perspective and with pastoral wisdom. So, the CPT is looking to fuse together the life of the mind and the great sort of intellectual theological resources of the Christian tradition with pastoral ministry and bringing those two things together for the benefit of local congregations but also for the benefit of just the broader church. >>Doug Sweeney: What does that look like in practice? You are somebody who is obviously very smart and learned. You have a doctorate and so on. But you’re a pastor. You pastor a church every week of your life. You don’t operate mostly as a professor or maybe ... tell us, if you’re going to kind of live this out ... it’s an early stage in the movement. Of course, this is something that’s in development. But how do you put this into practice in the church? >>Dr. Hiestand: So, I mean, I was the executive pastor of the church where I’m serving now for eight years and then I’ve been the senior pastor now for another four. So, I’ve been kind of doing this in both an associate role and then also senior pastor role. And I think those are a little bit different. When I was the associate I had a bit more mental space maybe because I wasn’t preaching every week. So, you’re kind of theological musings are maybe more focused on whatever it is [inaudible 00:21:57] I actually did my PhD during that associate pastor phase. It would be very hard for me to pull that off now as a senior pastor. I don’t think I could easily do that. Because as a senior pastor I’m preaching every week. It’s not every week, I’m kind of three on, one off, is sort of the rotation that we have worked out. And my preaching ministry occupies a lot of my mental space now. But I also am very intentional about how I use my time. I’m currently writing a book right now on the doctrine of justification for Baker Academic. It’s part of a soteriology series. I’m about halfway through it. It’s not a popular level book. This isn’t written to ... this isn’t repackaging my sermon series and just kind of broadcasting it. This is a standalone volume. A lot of what I’m researching and writing for this book is finding its way into my sermons, but it’s kind of tangential. I’m probably doing about two chapters a year. Making progress on this book. So, I’m not writing it with lightning speed. But I’m making steady progress on it. And along the way I’ve also written a number of chapters for this volume or chapter for that volume and mostly in and around patristics and early Christianity, which is where my doctoral work has been. So, I don’t want to give some romanticized vision that it’s super easy to do. But I also want to just say that this is not impossible, right? I think the Lord is calling every pastor to be a theologian for their own local congregation. That’s just a given. I think that’s part of the job description. So, if you don’t think of yourself as a theologian you need to think about your calling. Because that is the calling, to be a theologian for your congregation. But not every pastor is called to write books for Baker Academic or even to go on and get a PhD. But some are. And I think it is possible and it should not be seen as an impossible task. I think that’s something that pastors should consider. I think what I want with the CPT is you have these young people, like me when I was in grad school, and you come to that fork in the road where you’re like, “Oh, I like theology and I like scholarship and I could see myself writing theological scholarship. But I also like people and pastoral ministry and I could see myself pastoring. And I just don’t know which to choose. I’m going to have to pick one or the other.” I want to say, no, no, those can be held together. Those could be held together. You can do the theological scholarship and the writing and pastoral ministry and loving/caring for people. And that is in fact the native home of theology. That’s what it is for. It’s for the care of souls. >>Doug Sweeney: I agree. What difference do you want this emphasis to make in the lives of the people in your church? Clearly, listening to what you just said, it’s going to make a difference in the way a pastor thinks of what he’s doing day by day. But what difference do you want it to make for the people? >>Dr. Hiestand: I would say that my congregants, most of them probably don’t even know that I’m writing a book on the doctrine of justification. So, the work that I do as a pastor/theologian with a PhD who is trying to provide leadership to other pastors and theologians, that’s largely above and beyond what my congregants are interested in. Right? And I don’t try to make them interested in it. The way I think about it a little bit is you think about a physician, like a family doctor. The family doctor has to read all the academic medical journals to make sure he/she understands how best to care for the patients that come in. But when the patients come in the family doctor does not need to sit down and explain to them all of the academic medical journals. That’s more than what the patient needs. The patient just needs to know how to live a healthy life and to take care of whatever ailment is affecting them. So, I think that’s what every pastor needs to be, is like the family doctor who is availing themselves of the theological teachings and scriptural expertise that’s enabling them to care for their congregation. But their congregation doesn’t need to know everything that they know. But then I think what I’m trying to inhabit is sort of a middle space where there’s a research doctor that doesn’t just write the academic journals but also doesn’t just see patients, sitting kind of in that middle space where they see patients and they are reading and contributing to academic journals, or scholarly journals, and they’re trying to bridge the gap between these two worlds. So, that’s a bit of how I see my work. Again, much of my writing is ... in fact, I’m going to say most of my writing is not written to my congregants. I write it in ways that are non-specialist. And so there are a fair number of my congregants that are very motivated and they like reading what I write. But my audience is usually like pastors. I’m trying to influence pastor/theologians. And other scholars and thinkers that care about the church and are interested in the life and health of the church. I don’t know if I answered that question or not, but ... >>Doug Sweeney: No, you did. And you’re doing that ministry very, very well. I can testify as somebody who knows you well. All right, Gerry. We always like to end these interviews on the Beeson Podcast by way of kind of personal edification in the lives of those who will listen to us. And we do so by asking our guests – what’s going on in your life these days that the Lord is at work in? What’s the Lord teaching you these days? What is the Lord doing in your life these days that we might conclude with as a way of building up those who are listening? >>Dr. Hiestand: I would connect that back into what I was sharing earlier. I still feel like I am learning how to live into it, I feel like the Lord taught me during my sabbatical experience about being open and staying open to the Lord’s love for me. And we’re preaching through 2 Corinthians, have been now for the better part of a year and a half, and in 2 Corinthians 7 the apostle Paul, he’s appealing to the Corinthians and he says, “We’ve opened wide our hearts to you. Open wide your hearts back to us.” And he’s asking for open heartedness. And he’s asking for open heartedness by giving open heartedness. So, he’s opening up his heart without a guarantee that they’re going to open up their hearts back to him, or that they’re not going to just abuse his heart, that he’s just exposed and laid bare. There’s such a powerful ministry that Paul has with the Corinthians but beneath that, the reason Paul can open up his heart to the Corinthians is because he’s opened up his heart to Christ who has filled his heart with Christ’s love. And so I was just thinking just a couple of weeks ago about a challenging week that I had in front of me and I could kind of feel some of the stressors lining up on the runway getting ready to kind of come in and land on my head. I was praying about it. I just felt like the Lord just saying, “Stay open hearted.” I think what I can do when I feel the stress stacking up is I just start tortoise shelling up. I don’t get mean. I don’t get necessarily angry. But I just kind of retreat back into myself. But when you do that you lose the capacity to love. And you’re also not just shutting out the stressors, but you’re shutting out Christ, too. I think that’s the thing that I’m really trying to stay cognizant of and just staying open to God’s love for me so I can continue to love other people in the way that he’s calling me to. >>Doug Sweeney: A wonderful way to conclude. You have been listening to the Reverend Dr. Gerald Hiestand. He is a dear friend and has been for many years. He serves as the Senior Pastor of Calvary Memorial Church in Oak Park, Illinois. He’s also the Co-Founder and Chairman of the Board of the Center for Pastor Theologians. He preached a wonderful sermon in today’s commencement service. Please check it out at the Beeson YouTube page. And be edified by it yourself. Listeners, we love you. We thank you for tuning in. Please pray for the students of Beeson Divinity School and for the pastors involved in the Center for Pastor Theologians. We say goodbye for now. >>Rob Willis: You’ve been listening to the Beeson podcast; coming to you from the campus of Samford University. Our theme music is by Advent Birmingham. Our announcer is Mike Pasquarello. Our engineer is Rob Willis. And our show host is Doug Sweeney. For more episodes and to subscribe, visit www.BeesonDivinity.com/podcast. You can also find the Beeson Podcast on iTunes and Spotify.