A Personal Update

Don’t bury the lede, they say, and so I won’t.

Now 63 years old, I write this personal update from the north Cotswolds in England, where we now live part of the year, where I have joined the Church of England, and where I am apprenticing with diocesan leaders on a path toward (non-stipended, very part-time) ministry in the Church of England.

Did I get your attention? Now, in this very rare personal post, I offer a few more updates, with an explanation of the Church of England move only for those who read to the end!

* * *

My academic career continues, in its late stages.

My appointment with Mercer University’s School of Theology, where I carry the ethics portfolio, is about to enter its 19^th year, in a career which began in 1993 as a junior professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. While I combined undergraduate and seminary teaching for most of my years at Mercer, I am now teaching only at the School of Theology in Atlanta, with many of my classes online now at the request of the school. It is still a great joy to train quality ministerial students, of which we have many at Mercer, and it is good to be back with the colleagues at the School of Theology. (Interested in master’s level seminary work? Come look us up!)

In 2021 I received an appointment to serve as Chair in Christian Social Ethics at the Vrije Universiteit (VU = Free University) in cooperation with the International Baptist Theological Study Centre in Amsterdam. My primary work there is to supervise Ph.D. students – one has graduated, seven are in process. (Interested in Ph.D. work with me? Look me up!) I have done just a bit of classroom teaching as well, but my primary ancillary responsibility is to serve as chair of the Ph.D. Proposal Advisory Committee, which reviews all doctoral proposals for students in the VU School of Religion and Theology. Engaging with highly talented doctoral students and colleagues from the Netherlands, Europe, and around the world is deeply stimulating to me.

For a few years I have been serving on the “Wisdom Board” of the Post-Evangelical Collective. Since about 2020, I have found myself on what I believe to be a fruitful preaching, teaching, and consulting circuit with post-evangelical pastors and churches in the US and a few abroad. Post-evangelicalism is real and it is growing. Resourcing pastors and churches in this movement is a significant task for contemporary Christian mission. It has been a joy to be invited into this role with this mainly quite young movement.

Earlier this year, I published my 30^th book, a co-edited collection on Christianity and democracy. Currently I am looking at a completed very rough draft of a study I am undertaking of the biblical book of Job. That book will come out with Orbis in 2026. My only other contracted book is a work on Christian humanism, with Bloomsbury. That may or may not be my last book. People laugh at me when I tell them I think it might be.

On the personal side, my college sweetheart Jeanie and I celebrated our 40^th wedding anniversary last year. We are blessed with one surviving parent, three surviving siblings, three children, two children-in-law, and three grandchildren. Many today are lonely, and many are estranged from their families. I am so grateful to be embedded in this loving four-generation family.

In 2017, after being exiled from US evangelicalism, I wrote a little memoir called Still Christian. I was a mere lad of 55 years old, but in that book I ended with a kind of elegy, along the lines of “it has been a good ride, I am grateful for all that was good, now I return to home and family…” Wise readers, mainly older, reached out and said to me things like “you have no idea what is coming, you have no idea what God has for you next, it is too early to say farewell and so long.” They were right. While something had died, some new things were about to be born.

* * *

Now let me go a little bit deeper on the spiritual, ecclesial, and vocational changes that my Church of England move represents.

There have been two primary veins to my ecclesial journey. I was raised Roman Catholic, all the way through confirmation. But I was not an enthusiastic Catholic and I went looking around for…something different. At the age of 16, I had a profound conversion experience in a Southern Baptist congregation in Virginia, and for decades after that I was “all in” with the Baptists – first SBC, then Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. I met my wife in a Baptist college group, I went to Southern Baptist Seminary, we raised our kids as Baptists, we did the whole Baptist thing.

However, and ironically, Jeanie converted to Catholicism 20 years ago. She is a very loyal, very engaged Catholic and it very deeply fits her. About eight years ago, in the interest of marital unity, we approached the local Catholic priest and I asked if I could be re-entered into full Catholic communion based on my Catholic baptism and confirmation, the quest for marital religious unity, and the Church’s desire to “welcome Catholics home.” The priest agreed to this request.

Since 2017, then, I have been essentially functioning as a religious hybrid of Baptist-Catholic, or Catholic-Baptist. It became clear to me quickly that it was too late for me to attempt to become a “Catholic ethicist,” to somehow switch my professional identity and retrain myself, and so this remained largely a private matter. There were things I couldn’t agree with doctrinally but on a week-by-week basis it didn’t really matter, partly because I did not seek out any leadership role whatsoever.

This arrangement made little technical-ecclesial sense, but it worked in practice, and I found my soul re-knit together as my Catholic childhood (with associated memories of my beloved late parents) and my Baptist adolescence and young adulthood could both live and breathe in my current self. I guess that awkward hybrid stage is over now -- though when we are in Atlanta I can still go with Jeanie to Catholic Church, and hey, the 9 am choir needs male voices.

It is interesting that nearly 40 years ago Jeanie and I explored switching to the Episcopal Church in the US; in the end, we decided against it. But some of the same yearnings, instincts, and preferences that led us into that inquirer’s class lead me now to the Church of England. I like the liturgy, the prayer book, the beauty, and the theological-ethical breadth -- Anglo-Catholic to evangelical, high church to low church, conservative to liberal.

At least in this part of England, where there is one CofE church per village, if that, a big tent approach is the only option. But it’s more than that – in the training materials I am reading, I am learning that this is part of the Church of England’s commitments, its ethos. They try to live with the tensions in shared community, to find unity in Jesus Christ, the tradition, the liturgy, and in love of the family of faith. And I have witnessed this in action at the local level multiple times since coming here.

This breadth is actually (re)teaching me something like, let’s call it religious tolerance – this, after decades of making arguments and fighting with people who disagreed with me and, yes, writing off all too many of them in the heat of battle. I say this last bit with sorrow.

And now, I am having the joyful opportunity of participating in local parishes in the Cotswolds, offering service through preaching and assisting in the liturgy as my apprenticing continues. The ministry is undertaken here by a small team of clergy, deacons, and volunteers in a region with a number of mainly quite small parishes and congregations. It’s a circuit-riding village and rural ministry. This past Sunday evening, we were in a village of 100 souls, in a church that is only able to be open for worship occasionally. We helped the church be a place of worship and community that night.

I can be of help here. It’s a sharp learning curve, which challenges me. It’s face-to-face ministry in a wearisome digital age. All of this is deeply appealing.

* * *

I don’t think this mean that my “ethics days” are over. But mainly that work is done, at least at the level of scholarly production. I have had the opportunity to create an extensive written legacy and people tell me sometimes that my writing still matters to them. Probably a few more books and a few more lectures will be added to that legacy as long as my health and energy remain. These new books are more about extending my range and my research in creative ways, not rehashing old work. Thirty books are in place. “What I have written I have written.” There is no reason to beat a dead horse.

One thing that is very clear to me is that my energy and my resilience for conflict are simply gone. This is undoubtedly a byproduct of age, but it helps to remember that I have been writing into controversy and entering conflicted spaces since the mid-1980s. I have the scars to show it – notably on torture and climate change in the 2000s, LGBTQ + inclusion since 2014, and our bitter political problems the whole time but especially since 2016.

The decision of US voters to return Donald Trump to office in November pretty much put a stake through my heart and almost an absolute end to my ability, interest, and sense of calling to address US public life. One reason for the part-year move to England is found there. US public life is alien to me now. Everything that I had to say to try to prevent where we have gone, I said, to no avail.

I am not asking for any reader’s approval, I am simply reporting the reality of what has happened in my spirit and the decision-making process that has followed.

* * *

If I have anything to say about how “we” the church and the academy are to respond to “this moment,” it looks something like this – we need to re-anchor ourselves in our best traditions and offer our best contributions from within those traditions. At least, that is what I feel called to do.

The Christian Church is 2000 years old, born from and rooted in the Jewish religious tradition which is centuries older. The Church has its ancient traditions, its well-worn practices, its language and liturgy, its intellectual and spiritual lodestones. Helping the Church to be the best and most faithful version of itself in local church expression, theological/moral reflection, and mission is plenty to do – and it is the calling to which I gave my life when I felt called to ministry at 17 years old, with ordination at 25.

The western university tradition is rooted in the Church and is itself centuries old. Its traditions emphasize the search for truth and the creation of knowledge, with canons of excellence honed over centuries through academic practices such as painstaking original research building on prior knowledge and tested through rigorous peer review.

One of the things I have truly enjoyed about my involvement with VU Amsterdam at the doctoral supervision level is watching its scholars at the height of their powers using their gifts and training with relentless diligence both in doing their own work and in assessing the work of students. At VU they still speak of standards of “scientific excellence” that apply in all fields, including theology and religious studies, and they are not being ironic.

I am especially attracted to, and have had the privilege of working in, universities that combine serious Christian commitment and the highest academic standards in a vision of consecrated learning. And I love being in spaces of Christian scholarship in which religious and scholarly devotion mutually, creatively, and powerfully reinforce each other.

Church was my first calling. Academia was my second. Church and Academia, both doing what they are uniquely called and gifted to do, seems the need of the hour. This is, at least, my calling.

I have written this post so that those who no longer see me on social media, but have taken the trouble to sign up for this Substack, can get some idea as to where I am at this rather quiet time in my long career. I will post sermons and various materials here occasionally, but my work will mainly be face to face in the spaces I have described.

O God,

the strength of all those who put their trust in you,

mercifully accept our prayers

and, because through the weakness of our mortal nature

we can do no good thing without you,

grant us the help of your grace,

that in the keeping of your commandments

we may please you both in will and in deed;

through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,

who is alive and reigns with you,

In the unity of the Holy Spirit,

One God, now and for ever.

--Collect for First Sunday after Trinity, 22 June 2025