IBTS Community Blog

This has been, once again, a profoundly meaningful and enriching time as part of the community of IBTS.

The first week of these Intensives was, as always, quite exhausting! The second week of chatting, reading, discussing was a good balance. Concentrated listening, analysis, response and interaction are good but need recovery time! Yet the combined result is something that makes this environment quite unique. This is no school for learning a set of principles, a place for the ‘right answers’. Frankly, people should have passed into and through that stage of their development long before they come to this decidedly post-graduate environment.

IBTS is for people who, having learnt the basics of the Faith in their original cultures and context, realise that to develop as disciples and as effective Christian teachers, they must now face new questions and challenges. They realise they have to come to the Scriptures with fresh eyes. They know that humility and the place of listening is at least as important as hope and faithful preaching. To acknowledge that others they once refused to meet with might have, after all, some insights into the truth and life that is in Jesus Christ.

I am so thankful for my involvement at IBTS over the last 12 years. As it moves next year from Prague to Amsterdam, I am excited about future developments and opportunities. For this is a unique environment, a place to meet other, wonderful disciples from around the World who can and will impact and shape each others lives as we seek to move into the deeper, richer and life transforming power and perspectives of God’s Word and Spirit.

- Jim Purves

Mission & Ministry Advisor

Baptist Union of Scotland

Each January sees 36 Research Students and up to 12 Adjunct Supervisors descend on IBTS for the Annual Research Colloquia week when Baptist and baptistic scholars from around the world gather to discuss their doctoral dissertations as they prepare them for examination.

This January was extra special as we were also delighted to welcome the Dean of the Faculty of Theology at the Vrije Universeteit, Amsterdam (VU), Professor Wim Janse and the Professor of Baptist Identity and History, Professor Henk Bakker, together with Hugo Meijer, who manages the Master’s programmes to tell our doctoral students how welcome they will be at the VU, when IBTS moves there in the summer of 2014.

It was an exciting week with research projects presented on topics to do with Missiology – varying from how can Christianity interact with a deprived housing area in a United Kingdom city, through to the establishment of missional churches in mid west America and on to building Christian presence and witness amongst converts from Islam in a Middle Eastern country.

Historians were also in abundance looking at the life of Anabaptist refugees in central Europe, the expansion of the church to the far north west in the United States, the development and influence on discipleship training amongst youth in the eastern seaboard of Canada and the planting of the first Baptist community of Bohemia.

Theology was explored and interacted with including some of the leading baptistic theological thinkers such as James William McClendon Junior, Paul Fiddes and Glen H Stassen.

The multidisciplinary interaction was very special and amongst our conversant partners we had Professor Nancey Murphy (Fuller Theological Seminary), Dr Stuart Blythe (Scottish Baptist College), Dr Marian Carson (an Old Testament scholar), Dr Simon J Oxley (a former senior staff member of the world Council of Churches), Dr J Andrew Kirk (one of the leading missiologists in Europe), Dr Jim Purves (Mission and Ministry Adviser to the Baptist Union of Scotland) and the IBTS Academic team.

Conversations continued long into the night on key topics affecting Baptist life and mission in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and North America.

On the Friday, the research students presented outgoing Rector, Dr Keith G Jones, with a special book of mementos and in a moving ceremony laid hands on him and prayed for his future life and work.

…Or at least the majority of those involved in this week’s Colloquium.

And here we are, working hard around the ‘square table’ in the chapel.

That’s how many of us are here in the chapel for the start of the Doctoral Colloquia week – and are still awaiting a few colleagues and students held by delayed flights or flus. Parush and Keith are giving an update on what we can expect in the coming months, and we also had the round of brief introductions of everybody in the (square) circle – quite an amazing array of countries and stages of doctoral research journey.

It’s going to be a VERY intensive week (those of you who have experienced timetables set by Parush and Norbert will know what we mean!). All students registered for the Doctoral programme are expected to be present, to report on their work and to attend Supervisory sessions. There will be research caucus meetings for those donig applied theology and contrextual missiology themes and for those engaged in church history research, and a number of other meetings and seminars.

Wish us strength and energy!

This is the hymn the four of us present in chapel this morning sang during the prayers  – we used a different melody but these old, 18th-century words spoke powerfully into the close of 2012 and the beginning of 2013:

Great God, we sing Your mighty hand

By which supported still we stand;

The opening year Your mercy shows,

That mercy crowns it ’til its close.

By day, by night, at home, abroad,

Still are we guarded by our God,

By His incessant bounty fed,

By His unerring counsel led.

With grateful hearts the past we own;

The future, all to us unknown,

We to Thy guardian care commit,

And peaceful leave before Thy feet.

In scenes exalted or depressed,

You are our joy, and You our rest;

Your goodness all our hopes shall raise,

Adored through all our changing days.

(Philip Doddridge (1702-51)

May that guiding Hand continue to be upon all of us, both the community present at IBTS campus and those dispersed throughout the world. Happy – and truly blessed – New Year to all!

- Lina

I have stumbled upon this poem today through the Emergent Village, and thought you might find it speaking to you too. Blessings and greetings from from our snow-less campus for these last days of 2012.

The kingdom

by Shelly Barsuhn

When, secondhand, we heard the shepherds call,

“The anointed has come!”

we set out,

arriving in this kingdom a moment or a lifetime ago.

We have journeyed from

continents apart,

tundra, tropics, poverty, privilege,

energy, exhaustion, giddiness, grief.

Through some miracle,

the Messiah has brought us together.

We are all refugees

with nothing of worth to bring–

no gold, frankincense, or myrrh.

We have no drum to play.

The gifts we tried to carry,

our best doctrines, rules, and dogmas,

slip like air through our fingers.

We cup our hands, offering offer nothing.

Come stranger,

we have found our home.

The songs that welcome us here

are not the songs of angels

(who harmonize in a different realm)

but the hum of God’s grace and love

which we intone in messy unison.

In this kingdom,

no one who journeys to the Christ

is unworthy or alien.

In this kingdom,

we are companions

standing close as the wind howls.

- Lina

…and it’s beautiful. No matter how many times I’ve seen it before – the snow, the courtyard, the Christmas tree, the Advent wreath (read this post if you’d like to know more about that)… So here are some pictures for you to enjoy if you cannot be with us or visit us during this season of Getting Ready to Wait.

Wanted to take a picture of our Advent Wreath, but people kept getting in the view!!