Beeson Podcast, Episode #687 Dr. Anthony Casey 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 am your host, Doug Sweeney. And I’m joined today by Dr. Anthony Casey. He is Associate Professor of Intercultural Studies at William Carey University. He’s worked with refuges and other immigrants in the U.S. and overseas for 15 years. He’s conducted cultural and linguistic research on four continents. And previously served as Professor of Anthropology at a university at Kuala Lumpar in Malaysia. He recently, just earlier today, shared a wonderful message to the students entitled “Social Sciences and the Great Commission” as part of our Global Voices series. We want to ask him about that and about his ministry in general in the minutes ahead. Thank you, Dr. Casey, for being with us. >>Casey: Thank you. It’s an honor to be here. >>Doug Sweeney: Let’s introduce you to the Beeson Podcast listeners. Can you just tell us a little bit about how you grew up, how you came to faith in Christ, how you got involved in vocational ministry? >>Casey: Yeah. I grew up in Ohio in a small town and family would have identified as Christian, but we didn’t really go to church that much. It definitely wasn’t a part of my life. And I did a good job at doing all the things that I wanted to do, even if that brought some destruction upon myself and others. And right before college, I’d already decided to go to college out of state, I just sort of wanted to get away from some things, and right before college, some friends invited me to a church camp, and I went and heard the gospel very clearly at the camp. And it was so plain to me that I was a rebellious sinner living life my own way. I mean, they were reading my script it seemed like and, you know, repentance and regeneration, restoration in Christ was so just, I don’t know, it was just laid out in front of me in a way that I couldn’t say no. And wholeheartedly said, I want this, I need this. My life is not going in a, you know, in a fruitful direction at all. So, praise God for those friends in that camp. >>Doug Sweeney: So then, did you get involved in a church or how did you grow from that point? >>Casey: So, not long after that, I went to college in Wisconsin and my dorm was on this, they call it the circle and it was a lot of dorms in a row, and the first Sunday, this church bus pulls up and says anybody wants to go, get on. And I didn’t know anything really about church at this time and I thought, okay. So, I got on the bus. And attended and served at that church all four years through college. >>Doug Sweeney: What church was that? >>Casey: It was an evangelical free church in Wisconsin. >>Doug Sweeney: Okay. >>Casey: Just a wonderful place to grow and be welcomed and really the first time in my life I experienced what a true Christian family, church family is like. And it was just refreshing and wonderful. >>Doug Seeney: Fantastic. Alright so, you go to college thinking what? Thinking you’re going to be a misologist? >>Casey: I love the outdoors and I started as a natural resources major and was thinking I would be some kind of wildlife biologist or something along those lines. >>Doug Sweeney: Yeah. So, what happened? You’re not a wildlife biologist. >>Casey: I’m not. Well, Cru, Campus Crusade, got ahold of me and was in discipleship relationship with them. That was very good for me as well. And every summer they have the Cru summer mission projects. So, my discipler said, hey I don’t know what you’re doing this summer, but why don’t you consider one of these mission projects? And I thought, sure why not. So, I went on it. And it was really, I would say, that after my freshman year, I didn’t have the words for this, but being able to do fulltime ministry, sharing the gospel, bible studies, discipling, working alongside of the people that we did, that’s the first time I really thought, wow this is wonderful, I might do something like this for a career. >>Doug Sweeney: Yeah. So, does that mean you go to seminary after that, or you get involved in church work, or campus work? >>Casey: Well, I didn’t know that seminaries existed. So, I stayed at the state university. I literally looked at the list of majors and I thought, I need a major that’s more suitable to people than animals and trees and arbitrarily picked communication and finished out in that. But God had a plan for me, so I started learning about linguistic theory, language in culture interaction, conflict, all kinds of things like that. >>Doug Sweeney: In your communications class, this was coming up. >>Casey: Yeah, absolutely. And then I was reading every missionary biography I could find. And you know, 150 years ago the Bible didn’t exist in very many languages around the world. So basically, nearly every missionary, the first thing they do is learn the language and then they translated the Bible. So, my senior year of college I thought, I want to go into Bible translation. So, part of that was what I’d learned in my communication program, reading these missionary biographies, and worked with international students on campus, did some other thing in the summers. So, I called up Wycliffe Bible Translators and I said, I don’t know anything, but these are my interests, is there any kind of project that might be available that I could join up and learn from when I graduate? And sure enough there was in the Himalayan Mountains, of all places. So, three days after I graduated, I got on a plane and landed in the Himalayas and spent the next- >>Doug Sweeney: Was this Nepal or where were you? >>Casey: It was in a country not to be named that has a very linguistically diverse place. So, I was at 12 to 18 thousand feet. >>Doug Sweeney: And you had the lungs for this right away? >>Casey: Well, so this is fascinating. I was a wrestler growing up. Always did a lot of sprots, was in the Boy Scouts, and had done a lot of backpacking and was in pretty good shape when I went to and did this linguistic research. So, there was, I think, seven people and they were all from different countries, was on our linguistic research team. So, we’re in this van going up and down these Himalayan Mountains and you would get quite high. Every single person on my team got altitude sickness at one time or another except me. Which you think would be fantastic, but I was the one that got to take care of them all when they were hallucinating and throwing up and all kinds, you know, interesting things. So, it was… I was there, but it was so, it’s hard to believe it even happened. It was just an unbelievable experience. >>Doug Sweeney: Wow. So, alright. So, I don’t want to spend too much time on your early life history, but there are people who listen to the podcast who are just wondering what’s God doing in my life? They’re thinking should I go to seminary? Should I not go to seminary? And I know folks like this are interested in hearing other people’s stories like how God worked them into the situations they’re in today. How did you get from that to being like, a professor of misology? >>Casey: Never, never thought I would I do anything like this. One of my communication professors in undergrad in the state school said, oh you’re writing is pretty good, have you thought about grad school? And I didn’t have a lot of a filter, so I literally just laughed in their face. I mean, I didn’t mean to be rude, but I was so outrageous to me that I would ever do that. But looking back, I mean, God clearly, you know, looking back it’s obvious. In the moment at any given time, I had no idea what was coming next. So, did all this linguistic research, realized I needed to learn a lot more about culture, cultural research, language, missions. So, my wife’s college pastor had went to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky and recommended to me, basically, these people love the Bible, they believe it, you can’t go wrong there. So, I came back from that project, got married, and enrolled at Southern Seminary. And planned to just do an M. Div. type program where you spend time there and then you finish overseas in a mission’s context. Several things happened. I worked at their Missions Mobilization Center for a while and part of my job, I coordinated the mission trips. Another part of my job was to place professors on these short-term teaching assignments to help equip the Global Church so they would be credentialed to, you know, teach in Bible colleges globally. And, you know, the way that I like to put it is we had 72 of literally some of the best scholars, certainly in the country if not beyond, and no more that two or three of them seemed to be interested in giving up a week or two a year to equip the Global Church. And I just could not understand how people’s theology didn’t drive them to want to have some, you know, part in this. So, and I was also working with refuges in Bullittsville at the time and basically, I decided to a PhD not to be a professor, but as I was on the field, mission field, I would have the credentials to class these classes if there was a need to help equip the Global Church. So, that’s what got me into it. But then along the way I discovered I loved it. I loved the classroom. I loved teaching. Students appeared to like me. So, God just confirmed like, this is it. But I never thought I would be doing anything like that. >>Doug Sweeney: But you wound up going straight from your master’s program in seminary into a PhD? >>Casey: I did, yes. Yeah. I stayed at Southern for that and had a great experience and then when I graduated, family moved overseas to Malaysia. >>Doug Sweeney: Okay. Aright, and then we’ve already said in Malaysia, you’re teaching already. You come back to the states, you’re teaching. And we know, because you talked to the students about it today, that one of your passions is to persuade evangelical Christians to learn some things from the social sciences as they think about how more faithfully and fruitfully to witness to the gospel, particularly cross culturally. Don’t give us the whole lecture. Our listeners can go and listen to that online but give us just a little tease. What was like, the main argument you were trying to make with the students today about the value of the social science for people whose primary sense of purpose is more evangelistic and missions oriented. >>Casey: Sure. Well, I’ll put it like this. You know, we’re repeatedly called in the Bible to love our neighbor as ourselves. We live in a world with migration, urbanization, all kinds of things. Our neighbor, really here, there and everywhere, is increasingly not like us with regard to our religious, potentially ethnic background and so on. So, gaining some skills in anthropology and social sciences, for me, is a way to, you know, I can’t love my neighbor as myself if I don’t know my neighbor. And how do I get to know somebody, how do I know my community that’s become some so complex, so diverse? And the social sciences give us some help for that so that we can know our neighbor, love our neighbor, serve our neighbor. >>Doug Sweeney: So, I agree with you completely. Over the years, I’ve encountered some wonderful, faithful Christians who have kind of pushed back against an argument like that and said, hey whoa. The Bible talks about how the gospel itself is the power of God unto salvation. And the job of evangelism in missions has a lot to do with proclaiming the gospel. So, what do you need all that social science for if the gospel itself is what saves people? Help us think better about that. >>Casey: Well, the Bible itself is delivered in multiple languages, multiple cultural contexts, language shifts over time. You know, the Hebrew of the Old Testament is different in different eras, the cultural context. God is always about revealing himself in a way that people can understand. He doesn’t ask you to become something you’re not so that you can access God. God meets you where you are. And even in the Bible, there’s so many instances of God himself, you know, incarnating, contextualizing himself so that people can not see Him as foreign. You know, He looked like a Jewish boy, He smelled like a Jewish boy, He did the things that Jewish boys did. So much so that people said, Jesus? Of Nazareth? Him? Isn’t he just the carpenter’s son? He was just so adept at walking along and doing life with people that He didn’t appear foreign at all. But yet, was their brother, you know, and then brought the power to save. So, I mean honestly, isn’t that what we’re trying to do? We don’t’ want to import some kind of prepackaged, you know, church with cultural baggage and things and force that on someone else as if we’d go into their culture and wipe the slate clean. What are you going to write onto it? And people often, whoa, well, you know, we’ll write the biblical gospel. Well yeah, but it always comes in language. It’s always clothed in culture. So, social science aren’t in opposition to that. They’re helping the gospel not appear foreign. And to so many people around the world, one of my professors used to say this, people who’ve never encountered Jesus, all they know about Jesus is what comes out of your face. And to the degree that you’re a jerk, you failed to understand their culture, you don’t care about their way of life. That’s how they perceive your Jesus, and who would want that. >>Doug Sweeney: So. Over the course of my adult life, the number of career missionaries in the U.S. has declined a bit, but the number of short-term missionaries has grown pretty dramatically. >>Casey: Yes. >Doug Sweeney: And lots of our churches are involved, in one way or another, in short-term mission trips in various places. I know from hanging out with friends who teach missions like you do that this is a little bit of a concern to some misologists because you don’t get as much social scientific and other sorts of preparation to go and do missions work if it’s all on a short-term basis. Can you help us think about, I mean, for missions pastors at churches who really care and they want to do this faithfully, they want to love their neighbors, they want to get to know them, but their job is to lead short-term trips over and over, what can they learn from the kind of work that you’ve done and apply to the ministries of short-term missions? >>Casey: Well, you know, I have a few books out and some of the strategies that I talk about in there is there’s lots of ways to think about this. When I lived in Birmingham a while back, I attended the Church at Brook Hills and around that time or shortly before, they tried to flip this on their head instead of your Jerusalem, your Judea Samaria married the ends of the earth, they said we’re going to the ends of the earth and we’re going to let that trickle back. And people that have experienced true cross-cultural work tends to open their eyes to their neighbors in a better way. So, I mean, that’s one thing that can be helpful. So, they wanted to incentivize as many people going overseas as possible with the hopes that it would increase their care and concern for their neighbor back home. So, definitely that. Something else that can, I recommended churches do a study of your own demographics in the area where your church is engaging. What people groups are there? Where are they from? And then plan your short-term engagements around those people and actually build relationships with them. Used their connections back to their home countries and then you can have a multi teared engagement where you get, obviously, cross culture training in your own community working with these people. And then those teams that would then go overseas to these people’s homeland, often in their name, you know, carrying gifts from them, you have an immediate in. And you’ve got some competencies already for that exact people. >>Doug Sweeney: Are you somebody who favors trying to persuade more and more missions pastors into doing more if it’s short-term local cross cultural? Do you prefer a combination of global and then bring the learning, I mean, as your world view expands and even just a result of travel and that kind of thing, bring that home and let that sensitize you? What’s the kind of advice you have there for acting locally, acting globally, when it comes to gospel? >>Casey: That’s, yeah, that’s tough. I think that a lot of churches have too many global partnerships and it leads to them not doing as good of a job caring for those missionaries on the field. You’re trying to recruit teams and, you know, you’re trying to do too many trips. So, what to do about that? So, I think fewer partnerships done well, done more thoroughly is a good approach. And then, I mean, just in life, like, we treat things that we don’t know, you know, as abstract principles. So, you think of Buddhist, Muslim, poor person, refugee, you know, and until you know somebody, these are just abstract categories and it’s easy to dismiss yourself from them. So, getting people out into their communities, in face to face, at a dinner table, in relationship with people that aren’t like themselves, takes those categories and puts a human face and a pulse and a hand onto it. And that, I think, is the best way to broadly transition people to be more receptive, because a lot of people, you know, I’ll give, you know, 100 dollars to missions but why should I go? My money is enough. Well, we need the money, but when you can get people out in the community in people’s home face to face, it humanizes them. And that’s a big step to expanding your church’s mission footprint locally and globally, I think. >>Doug Sweeney: I want to ask you a little bit more about ministry to immigrant groups in the U.S. Course, we all know, immigration is one of, the kind of, hottest political issues, social issues in the U.S. today. I know that you have some extensive experience working with immigrant groups in the U.S., planning churches with immigrant groups in the U.S. What has your ministry to immigrant groups in the U.S. taught you about the way we ought to think about ministry to immigrants generally, and maybe even the politics of immigration in America these days, or around the world these days. >>Casey: Sure. Well, you know, I’m not in politics. I’ve never run for office. Don’t plan to do so. Everything I do, I really do try to run through the biblical, the biblical lens. And if you read the Bible, just really from creation Genesis to Maps as some, you know somebody’d like to say, you see God’s heart. What He wants is people made in His image with dignity and worth, feeling the earth as His image bearers, with His name on their lips. And of course, the fall broke that down, but you know, God implements a plan of redemption and that’s essentially where scripture ends is the whole earth is filth, the new earth is filled with His glory as His image bearers from every tribe, tongue, nation, and people worship Him together. And there seems to be something in the scripture, if we are truly made in the image of God and image bearers, our world is incredibly diverse, this can’t be an accident by God. So, several people, Tim Keller and others, have alluded to this idea that we can see more of the person of God in the diversity of the world as we see people who aren’t like us but still made in His image. That doesn’t mean that every, you know, cultures are Godly and without sin and not in need of redemption. But there’s something beautiful in clearly God is after a flourishing society in scripture and that will include tremendous diversity. So, policies aside, experientially, the places that I’ve live, the U.S., overseas, I’ve just benefitted wonderfully from people that aren’t from here and have learned so much about life, parenting, being a friend, and a Christian from these people that weren’t like me and feel that my life has flourished for it. So, yeah, just that really helped me to look at a diverse world and see beauty in it instead of threat, apprehension, you know, fear. >>Doug Sweeney: What’s some of the ministry, just concretely, that you’ve done with immigrant groups in the U.S. and is it the kind of thing that well let lay people in churches could also do or do you need to be somebody who’s studied what you’ve studied to do it well? >>Casey: Absolutely, we need well led lay people. So, for example, Louisville, Kentucky had about 12 thousand plus refugees resettled and I was part of a group that go to their apartment complexes where they had been resettled. And we would put on interviewing workshops, you know. Because refugee doesn’t mean, you know, poor. Some of these were doctors, had extensive education, great skills, had lived in refugee camps for 25 years, didn’t know how to translate that to the U.S. workforce. So, we brought so called regular people from the community that had worked, you know, professional jobs and we sat them up with refugees and we had a resume building workshop. So, we’d talk to the refugees, what’s your background, what’s your education, what jobs you’ve had, and try to put that in an American style resume. Then we did interviewing workshops with them so they would get comfortable. A lot of people around the world, it’s embarrassing and wrong to talk about yourself. They would say, I don’t know, ask my neighbor what I’m like. But at a job, it’s like, well why should I hire you? >>Doug Sweeney: We Americans tend to be good at talking about ourselves. >>Casey: Yeah. And we’re blunt and straight forward. So, we would coach them in that. Just so much good came of that. And yeah, that’s a great, great thing right there. >>Doug Sweeney: Well, Dr. Casey, we always like to end our podcast interviews by asking guests about what the Lord’s doing in their lives these days. Mostly as a way of edifying our listeners by way of conclusion. Is there anything the Lord’s been working on in your life, or teaching you, or doing in your life in recent days that would be helpful for us? >>Casey: Mainly that the Lord has a plan for me, for you, and He will do things that you have no idea He’s doing. So, for me personally, you know, having found a call to missions, sold everything, moved overseas, thought I would be there long-term, then God’s providence, my health failed, my immune system revolted. Really a difficult time. That’s why we left the field. And I spent quite a few years after that just, I don’t know what, I mean, guilt, discontent, unrest, should I be on the mission field but yet He’s given me this ministry with students as a professor through my local church. And I really struggled with just guilt of why am I here, I should be there. And I would say in the past year, probably, He’s really helped me to see that I’m still a part of the Great Commission. He’s at work. It’s His commission, it’s not mine. You know, I’m not the one that’s got the best plan for how it should be accomplished, He does. And that’s given me a lot of comfort that I can be happy and content where I’m at doing what I’m doing and not feel like it’s not enough. >>Doug Sweeney: Wonderful way to end. Listeners, this has been Dr. Anthony Casey, Associate Professor of Intercultural Studies at William Carey University and Global Voices lecturer today here at Beeson Divinity School. He’s a long-time friend of our own Dr David Parks, who runs Beeson’s Global Center, dear brother in the Lord. Thank you very much for being with us. Listeners, thank you for being with us as well. We hope this conversation has excited you about participating in God’s redeeming work in your own backyard and maybe other parts of the world as well. We love you. We’re praying for you. Please continue to pray for our students. 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.