Author Archives: mhick255

Seeing the Fruit of ESN

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My work with the Emerging Scholars Network helps students become professors. This process takes years, sometimes more than a decade, so it is rare to see short-term results. Our work is more like a grape vine than a summer vegetable garden. Grape vines take far more investment, preparation, and patience than tomato vines, but grape vines will produce fruit for an entire generation. (The average grape vine lives for 25 years. Here’s a story about a grape vine that has been growing for over 400 years!)

Just this week, I received an email from a young woman named Heather[*]. Three years ago, she attended Urbana, InterVarsity’s triennial student missions conference, and came to a seminar I gave called “Serving Christ as a Professor.” She had been involved with InterVarsity as an undergraduate, and, at the time, she was a PhD student at a major research university. Though she didn’t tell me at the time, she was in the process of deciding whether to pursue a career as a professor.

Urbana confirmed her decision. Today, she’s a first-year professor at one of the famous “Public Ivies” – public universities that give students an Ivy League-quality education. She’s become involved with a community of Christian faculty that InterVarsity sponsors on her campus, and her research and teaching are influencing the next generation of our nation’s leaders.

Why was she emailing me? She’s looking for a mentor to help her in the next stage of her life and career. Heather is coming to Urbana again this year, and I’m working on finding just the right faculty member for her to meet with.

It’s so exciting to see God work through so many people over so many years. I’m sure my ESN seminar was just one of several factors that influenced Heather, but I know that ESN gave her the message that God honors the work of Christian faculty members.

I will present this same seminar — “Serving Christ as a Professor” — at this year’s Urbana. In fact, it will be part of a special series of seminars called “In the Workplace and in the Academy.” This is the first time that Urbana has devoted a seminar series to missions in these important arenas. Who knows how many future professors, businesspeople, and Christian leaders will hear God’s call in these seminars?

Prayer Requests

  • Praise God for his work in Heather’s life!
  • Pray that God will be bring me the right person to help Heather in this new stage of her life.
  • Pray for my seminar, that God will bring the right students to hear my message and that the Holy Spirit will give me the right words to speak into their lives.
  • Pray for future opportunities to work with Heather. Her research deals directly with issues that affect ESN, and her past and present universities are schools where ESN hopes to have an impact.

[*]I’ve changed her name to protect her identity. Some university departments are friendlier to Christians than others.

Advent Devotional – 2009

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I delivered this devotional at the Christian Marketplace Network luncheon on Friday, December 11, 2009.

We say we’re in the Christmas season, but for most Christians around the world, Christmas hasn’t started yet. This is the Advent season, when we prepare for Christmas. The word “advent” means “the coming of something.” Specifically, we look for the coming of two events.

First, we go back in time and look forward to the birth of the Messiah. Israel waited centuries for the Messiah, while Mary awaited the Messiah’s birth at any moment. Biblical scholars tell us that Jesus was probably born in the spring, not in December, but can’t imagine Mary in this final month of pregnancy? She was physically ready for Jesus’s birth. More importantly, she was spiritually ready for the Messiah to save Israel.

Secondly, Advent also looks forward to the second coming. We live in a time of “already, but not yet” – Jesus has already died for our sins and risen to give us new life, but we have not yet seen God’s kingdom established on earth.

December is a hard month. We’re supposed to be celebrating; at the same time, we can’t help but think about our loved ones who aren’t with us this year, about the people in our community who don’t have enough food or money, about people around the world who lack basic necessities. We are singing great Christmas songs along with Star 93.3. At the same time, we are groaning prayers of hope.

The prophet Isaiah knew this paradox very well. For years, he had warned Judah that their sins were going to lead to destruction. When that destruction was almost upon them, though, God gave Isaiah a message of hope that we still hear today. In Chapter 40 ,Isaiah delivers the words that we know so well from the ministry of John the Baptist, announcing the arrival of the Messiah.

    A voice cries,
    â€œIn the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord;
        make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
    Every valley shall be lifted up,
        and every mountain and hill made low;
    the uneven ground shall become level,
        and the rough places plain.
    And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
        and all flesh shall see it together,
        for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

We see the glory of the Lord revealed in the infant Jesus, and we await the glory of the Lord to be revealed in full when Jesus returns. And so, this Christmas we pray, with Israel and the early church, “Come, Lord.”

The Advent of Christ for All People

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This month, we remember the first coming of Christ and anticipate the second coming. Here is early church leader Irenaeus, on the coming of Christ:

For it was not merely for those who believed on Him in the time of Tiberius Caesar that Christ came, nor did the Father exercise His providence for the men only who were not alive, but for all men altogether, who from the beginning, according to their capacity, in their generation have both feared and loved God, and practiced justice and piety towards their neighbours, and have earnestly desired to see Christ, and to hear His voice.

— Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.22.2, via Veli-Matti Kärkäinen, An Introduction to the Theology of Religions

Who was Irenaeus? He was an early Christian leader, Greek by ethnicity, Turkish by birth, who served as bishop in modern-day France. (See – globalism is not only a contemporary phenomenon!) He was the “spiritual grandson” of the apostle John, having been discipled by Polycarp, a disciple of John’s.

Tim Keller and Redeemer Pres

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Thanks to Tim Stafford for pointing me to this great New York Magazine profile of Tim Keller.  From the opening:

Keller is a 59-year-old bald, large-framed man, dressed today in a blue blazer and gray slacks. For those expecting hellfire and brimstone, the first surprise is the voice. Keller doesn’t speak in theatrical, over-the-top tones but in a soft, conversational manner, as if he’s sharing a confidence with a friend. For today’s sermon on a passage from the Old Testament Book of Habakkuk, in which a minor Jewish prophet rails about the misery brought on by the Babylonians in the seventh century B.C., Keller jumps to the recession and what he sees as shameful finger-pointing by both liberals and conservatives. “The Bible doesn’t let you do that,” Keller intones from the pulpit. “The Bible is nowhere near as simplistic, dare I say it, as either the New York Times’ or The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. You can write that down. Put it on your blog, I don’t care.”

I prefer to show rather than tell when it comes to my work with the Emerging Scholars Network, to point to examples like C. S. Lewis or Fritz Schaefer as role models for thinking Christians.  Tim Keller is another of those great examples.