Beeson Podcast, Episode #695 Dr. Timothy Tennet 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. I am here today with my friend, Dr. Timothy Tennet, who is the President of Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. He is here at Beeson this week as our featured speaker in World Christianity Focus Week. He has preached in chapel on Tuesday. Just gave another public lecture a few minutes age in our global center. We’ve had him busy doing all kinds of things with students. We are really grateful to you, Tim, for your willingness to be here, and your great ministry among us this week. >>Tennet: Thank you, Doug. It’s been an honor to be with you – enjoyed it very much! >>Doug Sweeney: Well, I think lots of our listeners know about you already, but for those who don’t, can you tell us a little bit about your upbringing and how you came to know the Lord? And how you came to learn that the Lord was leading you into the ministry? >>Tennet: Yeah, I grew up in a wonderful Christian home in Atlanta, Georgia. My parents were faithful godly people. We grew up in the church. But it wasn’t until I was in high school that I actually really heard the gospel properly. It was through a bible study I went to led by a Baptist layman named Clyde Fortner. He was a roofer by trade. But the Lord used him in my life. He shared the gospel with me multiple times and led me to the Lord. So, actually my main interest growing up was always in History. I’m a real history buff. I love history. I like reading history. And so I majored in History in college. I always wanted ... they used to always say if you’re a History major graduate school is in your future. Because you can’t do anything with a History major. And so I wanted to teach history and I was a history major in college but when I got to my junior year I was connected to a man named Charles “Chuck” Farah who was a theologian, a wonderful professor at ORU. And he helped prompt me and talked to me and helped me realize afresh that God was speaking into my life, He was calling me into ministry. So, I made a pivot and I decided to go to seminary. I never looked back. So happy. >>Doug Sweeney: Well, we are too. Did you go straight from college into seminary? >>Tennet: I did. I actually asked him what is the best seminary in the country and he gave me some examples and I applied to all of them. After a lot of prayer I decided to go to Gordon-Conwell, which in those days was a truly remarkable place. I’m so glad I went there. So, I went directly from college to seminary. I met my wife there. And so it was great going there. >>Doug Sweeney: You were doing at least some pastoral ministry while you were in seminary? Or when did you start preaching and teaching in churches? >>Tennet: I did kind of typical guest preaching but I didn’t get my first appointment until I graduated in ’83. So, at that point I took an appointment in the [inaudible 00:03:23] conference, the Methodist Church. We had a four point circuit. We led that church in a full time appointment. I had a great experience there. Evangelism, preaching, teaching. [inaudible 00:03:38] theological education because my sixth great grandfather William Tennet founded the Log College. Which was very important in Presbyterian church history. Part of the new side Presbyterians. So, I was very interested in theological education. It was important in our family history. So, eventually it dawned on me that I might consider being in theological education. So, I was really thinking do I really want to be a pastor my whole life? Is that what I really wanted to do? I still loved that work. But the Lord eventually led me into theological education. >>Doug Sweeney: So, a lot of our students are interested in figuring out because they love study, they love theology, they love reading, the love the church and the Lord’s people the most and they try to figure out how to balance all of these things. I imagine that was a little bit of a struggle for you at this season. Were you pastoring for a while before you did your PhD? Or how did the time table go for you? >>Tennet: Yeah, I pastored for a while. I was involved in mission work in Nigeria. And so I got a ThM from Princeton in African Islam. And my plan was to come back ... to go full time to Nigeria ... it’s a long story ... that got disrupted. So, I came back and I pastored a church but then I taught half time at Taccoa Falls College. I was literally driving back and forth between pastoring, 15 minutes away, but back and forth between teaching ... I was teaching Theology in those days, not mission courses per se but I was involved with teaching at the same time as pastoring for two years. And then eventually I went full time at Taccoa Falls College and taught Missions there. >>Doug Sweeney: Well, I want to fast forward to the present in just a minute. But I want our people to know a little bit about kind of your foundation in studying World Christianity and what was going on in your life in Edinburgh so they get a sense for how you prepared to do what it was that you wound up doing. How did you get to doing a PhD and why did you choose to study World Christianity? That’s not something most pastors think they’re going to do a PhD in. >>Tennet: That’s right. Well, I had been ... very early on, in fact, my very first pastorate I became acquainted with an Indian leader from World Vision that was going back to India to start a seminary. And he came to my village where I was in a little town. And we met. During our early morning prayer time he asked me if I would join in and help him in India. So, I began, I worked at a church where I would be teaching, I would be in the church for nine months and be in India for three months. And I had this back and forth between India and my pastorate. Even my early days. I was so interested in the church around the world. I also realized ... I think I learned a lot because I kept failing. I kept failing. Things that would work in my church just didn’t work in India. Now I was just so fascinated by the whole process of how the church gets embodied, how it becomes alive. I met with so many challenges and questions. I never even though about asking. And I became increasingly interested in the church around the world as a young person. >>Doug Sweeney: Had you been to India or traveled much or done short term missions? How did those connections get going? >>Tennet: I had been to India and Pakistan as a young person. My wife’s great aunt had spent 33 years in India as a missionary. So, when we got invited to the Billy Graham Evangelist Conference in Amsterdam we had a real ... her aunt said, “If you don’t go to India, I’ll never speak to you again.” (laughter) So, we kind of went reluctantly. We got to India and we just fell in love with it. It was amazing. So, anyway, one thing led to another and we just kept getting involved with India and ended up spending a lot of our life there. It was wonderful. >>Doug Sweeney: So, you go and do a PhD in Edinburgh. You are able to write some more on India and further your interests there. When you were done or when you were almost done, is that when you moved to Gordon-Conwell? >>Tennet: Yes. My plan was to go back to Toccoa Falls but Gordon-Conwell interrupted it and Walt Kaiser talked to the President of Toccoa and said, “Can we have him?” And so they agreed. So, I transitioned and went back to my alma mater. It was really wonderful. So, yeah, that’s the story of my first work after my PhD was at Gordon-Conwell. >>Doug Sweeney: That’s quite a while. More than a decade, right? >>Tennet: I was there for 11 years. Yeah. >>Doug Sweeney: And then how old were you when you got tapped to be the President of Asbury Seminary? >>Tennet: Well, I was only 39 years old. >>Doug Sweeney: So, how did they know a young kid like you was ready for that job? >>Tennet: No, I’m sorry, I was 49 years old. >>Doug Sweeney: 49, yeah, that’s a little older than 39. >>Tennet: (laughter) No, I was 49 years old at Asbury. It was also a big surprise because I’d been involved in this work called Lexom Seminar for three years, which helped trained academic leadership. I was interested in leadership. I had always been gifted administratively. But never dawned on me that I would be involved in Asbury or anywhere else like that. But the Lord just let us and we kind of were foolish enough to dive into it. And it’s been a wonderful, amazing experience. I’ve learned so much about theological education that I never knew and how things work and the economics of it and the student life and all – it’s just amazing what goes behind theological education. And I just could never be grateful enough for what Asbury taught me in the last 15 years. >>Tennet: The rest of us who are involved in theological leadership look at your work at Asbury with great admiration, so we’re thankful to the Lord that he did that with you. Around town these days when people talk about Asbury – we admire Tim Tennet but we usually talk less about him than about what we’ve heard about the revival at Asbury. Could you tell us a little bit about it? And maybe I should let you know ... I don’t know if anybody has told you this but some of the Samford students went up to Asbury during the revival and came back and there was a smaller scale revival that took place on Samford’s campus. So, there was a lot of interest here in what was going on at Asbury. >>Tennet: Yeah, it was February 8th. Spontaneously chapel at the university that ended about 16 students stayed and then it just grew from there. And so I heard about it the first day because a student ran across the lawn and burst into my office and told us there was a revival. But by the weekend I realized this was big, because it was going day and night. It just expanded from there. I just want to say the media only showed, as we directed them to, only the crowds and all, but we didn’t let them show videos or pictures of the altar because it was sacred space. Having spent dozens and dozens or hours at the altar over 16 days, I just want to say it was remarkable to see God working in people’s lives. People who came to the Lord for the first time every night. Dozens of people every night came to the Lord. People with marriages healed. Sins that were forgiven and moved beyond. It was remarkable. Of course I believe, I always believe that altar experiences must be connected to discipleship and good hard growth. I don’t really view it as an end all to ministry. But I do believe that God does break through at times. Part of our tradition at Asbury in the holiness movement where God does use the altar to come and meet his people in special ways. And that clearly happened in those days. I saw it over and over again. >>Doug Sweeney: Most of what we have heard in Birmingham about the revival has pertained to undergraduate students at the university and people who visited and so on. But how did it affect the seminary? Were seminary students involved? >>Tennet: What happened was the university has one chapel that they had open and never opened any facility but their one chapel. We have a good sized chapel but it probably seats I don’t know 600 people. So, that auditorium was limited to only people from Gen Z. So, if you were 25 or older you could not get into the building. They restricted it. We agreed that they should protect the movement among whom it started. Because there was a time in the first few days where students went to class and came back and couldn’t get a seat because people from outside were sitting in their seats. They had assigned seats at that chapel. So, eventually we decided to reserve that space for Gen Z. And there were of course thousands around the country that would come from Gen Z, but there was a large group of people, the spiritually needy people from all over the world that came to Wilmore, Kentucky. So, the seminary, early on, we ... I told our team, I said, our mission is to have radical hospitality. We want to be hospitable toward this. So, we first opened our Estes chapel and then our McKenna Chapel, and then our cafeteria, then our gymnasium. We eventually had five spaces. We actually were hosting more people on the seminary side as the university side. In terms of just numbers of people. And then in addition to that, our students were involved because we had five prayer teams and these were multiple times during the day. So, each day you have three prayer teams around ten people each, 30 people, and then every day. So, we had a lot of student involvement, learning how to pray for people. A lot of people in the seminary had never led someone to Christ before. They got to do that every night, one after the other. Every night we’d say, if you haven’t received Christ, raise your hand, come down and receive Christ. So, I got to see students lead people to Christ, pray for people that had burdens, unforgiveness, bitterness. A lot of shame. A lot of young people were experiencing shame from social media and a lot of depression. Things like that. So, a lot of people sharing their deepest heart. And to see students interact with that pastorally when they really don’t have a lot of experience in that, as we might have, was really part of the blessing. So, we took it as a great blessing that our students got trained in hands on ministry opportunities like that. >>Doug Sweeney: What a wonderful work of God. >>Tennet: It was. 16 days of it. Day and night. (laughs) >>Doug Sweeney: Shifting gears a minute here. Another thing that a lot of people in our region connect to when they think about Asbury and the Methodist Church these days is some of the division in the Methodist Church these days. There are a lot of churches in our area that have removed themselves from the United Methodist Church and either become part of the Global Methodist Church or become independent. But not everybody, particularly if you’re not a pastor or denominational leader, not everybody knows quite what’s happened, what’s going on. Could you educate us briefly? What’s going on in the Methodist Church these days? And what is the Global Methodist Church? >>Tennet: Right. Well, for 40 years the Methodist Church has had a very, a lot of challenges over issues of human sexuality, more recently gender issues. But largely it’s because the UMC was largely embraced from ’72 onward it was Theological Pluralism. So, they were very open to a lot of divergent ideas. So, it created an increasing tension with more evangelical voices within the Methodist Church. Asbury has generally been the main seminary that serves the evangelical wing of the United Methodist Church. We’re not an official Methodist seminary. We’re independent and serve a wide variety of denominations. But it has been difficult because these years are the years when finally a new church was formed. And they created at the last Methodist general conference in 2019 a special provision which would allow churches to leave the denomination if they fulfilled certain obligations regarding pensions and apportionments and various things. So, this paragraph that was passed has become a famous paragraph in the Methodist circles because it’s basically a roadmap to allow you to leave the denomination. The Methodist church has a trust clause which means the denomination owns your property and your building. So, even if you paid for it with yard sales and people’s tithes and offerings, it still belongs to the denomination. So, that created a big challenge. This gave a more favorable pathway. So, because of that, thousands of churches ... over 3,000 churches took advantage of that and left the denomination. That’s what’s caused a lot of the media and so forth. It’s been going on slowly for many years. And I think Asbury at one time when I first got there, probably half of our student body were United Methodist. But that number has been dwindling over the years anyway. We’ve picked up new groups. So, I don’t think it’s going to impact us dramatically because the people that mostly came to us are now a part of the Global Methodist Church. What happened is there have been United Methodist Churches that went to the Wesleyan Church and the Free Methodist Church. But the largest group has gone to a brand new denomination called the Global Methodist Church which was founded just a year and a half ago. That church has not yet had its first general conference. It will happen in September in Costa Rica. That will be the founding conference, what we call the “Christmas Conference” – the famous founding conference for the Methodist Church in the 18th century. This is their version of that. So, this is going to be a really important conference where we will officially establish what the discipline will be and the doctrines and theology and so forth. But it’s made up of very strong evangelical contingent of the Methodist movement. >>Doug Sweeney: As a seminary leader, a theologian and so on who is now in the Global Methodist Church, what are your hopes and prayers? What kind of influence are you trying to have as the Global Methodist Church kind of comes to be? >>Tennet: We hope that they are not simply reactive to problems. I think it’s important not to say we’re the church that is against certain problems in society and the church, but rather to say what is your vision for really being the New Testament embodied church in the 21st century? I think it’s really important that they not just be a collecting denomination for people that are disaffected United Methodists but they ... I said many times if in ten years half of your members don’t remember the days of this separation/split then you’ve not done a good job. We want to have a lot of growth with church planting. Asbury has done a lot of raising money to help the GMC plant new churches. And so we have a partnership which allows not just with GMC but with many other groups to help them plant churches effectively and to bring in new members. So, my first hope is that they would be fully Wesleyan, not just generically evangelical. That they would be fully engaged in church planting. And they would obviously be global and be a global Wesleyan movement. Not just a local one. And so that’s my hopes and dreams and it could all very well happen in God’s providence. >>Doug Sweeney: Yeah, we’re praying with you about it. Okay. So, this has been a wonderful week for Beeson Divinity School because you’ve been here among us, giving our World Christianity lectures. By the time our interview here drops, we’ll have edited version of your chapel sermon and today’s lecture available so that our listeners can tune in and watch these lectures or listen to them themselves. So, we don’t ... I’m not about to ask you to give us the lectures again but can you give us just a little teaser. We want to interest our listeners in tuning in and watching them. What are they going to get if they do? >>Tennet: Well, the main lectureship that happened today was based on what can we learn theologically from the rising global church around the world. And so we often think about the church around the world being different culturally or whatever. But trying to understand how it affects the way we do theology, the way we talk about doctrines of the faith - like the atonement or about the life of Christ in different contexts. So, that lecture is talking about the growth of the church around the world and the implications of it for how we think about theology. >>Doug Sweeney: And you’re making a pretty big claim, which I affirm wholeheartedly. Can you give us the short version of the thesis from today? >>Tennet: The short version is that now that the Western world is the minority part of the Christian movement, we need to do a lot better job listening to the global church because they’re writing and saying some really amazing things that can help us strengthen our own faith and our own writings. I’ve always believed that every church has unique insights. And blind spots. That’s true for every church on every continent. So, we can help them strengthen their work and they can strengthen our work. >>Doug Sweeney: Amen. So, if there’s some lay folks listening here who every once in a while come to the seminary and hear talks and so on but don’t have as good of a sense as you do for how they might learn a little bit more about what’s going on, even theologically around the world, what could they do? Are there websites you’d recommend? Or introductory books they might check out? >>Tennet: Well, there’s been some nice introductory books by Philip Jenkins that have been popularized. We jokingly said when his books kept hitting the New York Times bestseller – we’ve been saying these things for years! Our books never hit the bestseller ... because we weren’t writing to people the way that he can write to people. So, his book ... he has several books on the new faces of Christianity or on the growth of the global church that would be just Philip Jenkins. I think it’s probably one of the best just kind of basic introductions for a lay person to see what God is doing around the world today. >>Doug Sweeney: All right. Dr. Tennet, we always end these podcast interviews with the same question. The question is what is the Lord doing in your life, teaching you these days? And of course the reason we end in this way is we want to end on an edifying note for those who are listening. But the premise is even these world famous theologians and seminary presidents we bring to Beeson, who have been walking with the Lord for years and years are still growing in the Lord, are still learning things. And so what’s he doing in your life? What are you learning these days? >>Tennet: Thank you. Yes, these have been good years of growth for me. When I came to Asbury I think it was in my third year I realized that I needed to go deeper to handle the capacities that were asked of me. My wife and I decided to get up an hour early every day and start ... we did a 150 day experiment and sang through the psalms. We did that in 2012. And we got to the end of it and we said we can never stop this. It’s just too enriching. So, we’ve done that every day since 2012, including this morning. We do it on the phone if I’m traveling like this. I found the Psalms have really helped me a lot. I think in more recent years ... I’m leaving Asbury in a few months. I’ve realized how much my identity has become so wrapped up in my job, in my work. I think that happens to pastors, it happens to all of us. But I feel like particularly in this role where I became ... I was just the president. And so I think the Lord really has been working in my life the last year and a lot through the Psalms to remind me of my core identity in Jesus Christ. And that He loves me just because I’m his child, not because I’ve done something for him. And I think that’s been good for me, it’s been good for me to kind of reclaim and be refreshed and just what a joy it is that my name is written in heaven and I belong to Him. And I don’t have to do something to make Him happy or pleased. I just want to rest in Him. God is doing a lot of good work in our lives. And just reminding us of what it means ... I know it sounds so simple but what it means just to be a child of God. >>Doug Sweeney: What a wonderful word, wonderful way to end. You’ve been listening to Dr. Timothy Tennet. He is a lot of things: a student of world Christianity, a theologian, a missionary, a pastor, president of Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. We’re grateful to you, Tim, for being with us this week. Your ministry has been wonderful. Listeners, we’re always grateful to you for your prayers, for our students especially. We’re praying for you, too. We love you. And 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.