Chapter 33 Seminary, Finally!

I headed to the seminary for spring quarter. Arriving when I did meant taking classes out of the usual order. I signed up for the classes I wanted without paying much attention to the prerequisites listed in the bulletin. Several weeks into the quarter, one of the deans called me and rather crossly scolded me for taking an exegesis class without having taken the Greek entrance exam. They gave the exam each fall and entering students were expected not to enroll for advanced exegesis classes until they had passed the exam or completed two quarters of Greek there at the seminary.
I apologized insincerely. He wanted me to drop the class. I asked if instead I could take the exam. If I failed, I would withdraw without protest. He grudgingly conceded. “When do you want to take the exam?” he asked.
“What about this afternoon?”
“No,” he said. “That wouldn't be fair. You should some time for review. Let's set it up for next week.”
I agreed. I couldn't understand why he was cross with me.
I took the test and continued going to class. A week later I still hadn't heard anything so I went to his office.
“Dr. Smith, I was wondering when the exam will be graded.”
“It's graded. Did you ever live in Greece?”
I laughed. He was jesting, of course, and grumpy as ever, but I knew there would be no more questions about my taking exegesis classes.

One of the most amazing things about life at Andrews University in those days was the lousy preaching at the University Church. The pastor had been there for more than a dozen years. He was generally regarded as a nice man and nearly universally regarded as a very poor preacher. I couldn't believe it. How could the denomination retain a man who was an incompetent preacher as the pastor at the church at the seminary? After a few visits I began attending other churches in the area.
The next fall I was asked to teach a Sabbath School class for college students. It met in a large lecture amphitheater and over a hundred students, mostly undergrads, attended. As I visited with the students, I discovered that most of them simply did not go to church. They could come to Sabbath School, then go back to their rooms and sleep or go to Lake Michigan beaches or go hiking or canoeing. When they complained about church at Pioneer Memorial Church, I challenged them: If you don't like what's happening there, make your own church. Don't whine when you can do something. After months of conversations like this, a couple of girls responded, “How do we do that?”
It was all I was waiting for. We looked around for a place to meet. The university would not allow us use of any space during church time. (After all, we were supposed to be attending the university church.) Finally, a faculty member offered us the use of his living room. We invited friends. Six of us were there for our first service. Within a few weeks the living room was packed to capacity. We looked around for another place and found another, much larger living room and within weeks packed it to capacity.
I had begun the church to serve undergraduate college students who were being ill-served by the university church. To my surprise, fairly quickly half the attendance was seminarians and doctoral students in theology. We wanted our gatherings to be guided by the spirit without the constraints of any human structure. Musicians came and we delighted in the contemporary music they provided. The sermon time consisted of free-flowing discussion in the pattern of Sabbath School classes. Given all the seminarians and graduate students, the conversations became more and more erudite and pompous. There was less and less room for comments or even questions from college students. My assessment was that spiritual concerns had been nearly completely displaced by a drive to display intelligence.
Because we had so deliberately avoided any structure there was no setting in which to appropriately address the drift away from our original mission to serve students with unmet spiritual needs. No one was in charge. No one was officially the leader. There was no committee, council or board. Sure, I made sure we had a place to meet, but my initial role as leader had been completely effaced by the gathering of strong personalities.
After praying and watching and pondering for a couple of months, I stood up one Sabbath and made a speech. “This past fall, we launched this church to serve students who were not being served by Pioneer Memorial Church. We have had a wonderful time together making music and talking about our faith, but recently our conversations have not had much of a spiritual focus. We need a leader to keep us focused on our mission. Since no one else is the leader, I'm announcing today that I'm going to take over as leader. I am going to make sure our church services are anchored in the Bible and serve spiritual life. Starting next week, I will make sure we have a sermon to give focus to our discussions.”
I had never asserted myself like this before. I had never taken over a group. I did not usually fight for control of a group. It felt wrong, egotistical. I kept asking myself whether this was simple self-centered ambition or genuine obedience to a divine call. The group calmly accepted my pronouncement. The next week I preached a sermon.
We continued to grow. We quickly filled to capacity any space we occupied. We finally moved into a basement that accommodated about a hundred people if they sat very cozily.

In December, that first fall, five of the seminarians who were involved in Home Church were summoned to a meeting with the university president and the pastor of the university church. I was not invited. The guys who were invited were all “sponsored”—that is they were already employed by the denomination as clergy and were attending the seminary on full scholarships. They insisted I come along. In fact, they insisted I take the lead in responding to the president and the pastor. Once we were seated in the president's office, one of the five made a little speech.
“You invited us because we attend Home Church. We invited John because he is the pastor.” It went from there.
The two men were courteous but emphatic: we had to quit. Home Church was not a legitimate Seventh-day Adventist Church.
I asked, “What makes a Seventh-day Adventist Church?”
“It is a group of believers organized according to the constitution and bylaws of a local Seventh-day Adventist Conference.”
It was a perfectly sensible answer coming from administrators who had spent a lifetime in the church bureaucracy. It may have offered plausible support for the veiled threat they were wanting to communicate to my five friends: Either you quit or we will talk to your presidents [their employers]. Your presidents would not want you involved with some offshoot movement, now, would they? However, since I was not receiving any financial aid from any denominational source, and since I was a young idealist, this bureaucratic definition of the church was almost laughable. It said nothing about faith, doctrine, theology, mission or people.
“We started this church,” I said, “to serve students who were not being served by the University Church. Most of the kids who attend our church would not attend any church if they weren't coming to Home Church. Closing down our services would mean abandoning our call to serve these students. You might remember Peter's words when the priests tried to shut down his ministry, 'we ought to obey God rather than man.'”
The president and the pastor were, of course, completely unpersuaded by my logic. They tried to explain to me the vital importance of ecclesiastical structure and respect for church authority. I wasn't buying it. The other seminarians wisely did not say a word.
I then switched tacks. “You might be interested to know that over the last six months we have turned into two thousand dollars of tithe to Pioneer Memorial Church.”
They were interested.
“You take offerings?” they asked, clearly surprised and disturbed. “Who authorized you to do that? How do you handle providing tax-deductible receipts for contributions?”
I laughed. “We don't provide tax receipts for money that is used in our own operations and our acts of benevolence. The tithe we just turn into the office at Pioneer, and your treasurer provides the tax receipts.”
The power balance had suddenly shifted. I was a mere student, a long-haired, unemployed one at that, with a reputation for being rather eccentric. But we were talking money, now. Two thousand dollars was a tiny blip in the church budget. But still, it was two thousand dollars. Quite possibly two thousand dollars they would never see if they shut us down. In addition, in contrast to my five confreres who were paying reduced tuition and were supported by denominational scholarships, I was paying full graduate tuition. (Well, actually my dad was paying most of it.)
The president and the pastor began to talk about ways to bring us at least functionally, if not officially, under the umbrella of Pioneer Memorial Church. Perhaps they could assign an elder to consult with us. Maybe the church treasurer could set up a separate line item to keep track of the money received from Home Church. The implied threat against my buddies evaporated. Home Church continued with the unofficial blessing of the university and church.
Given the large number of seminarians involved with Home Church, it was only natural that we spent hours and hours talking about what we were doing, about what we ought to be doing. Because we were running our own church, we had no one to blame but ourselves if church was not going the way we thought it should. As children of the sixties, most of us were radically anti-authoritarian. Hence our initial “no structure” approach. When that didn't work and I asserted my own role as leader, through more hours of conversation we came up with a triumvirate—three leaders, none of whom was regarded as “the leader.” This also proved unworkable. Eventually, we ended up—surprise, surprise—with a designated leader—me—and a board.
I rotated the preaching among the seminarians who attended, some of whom were excellent preachers. After months of this I was surprised when people, including some of the seminarians, insisted I do more preaching. I knew it was not because they were dissatisfied with the quality of the preaching others did. What they said was they wanted me to preach because I was their pastor.
It was my first introduction to the mysterious significance people invest in their pastors. They know pastors are regular people with the frailties and failings common to humanity. Their pastors may not be particularly effective public speakers. The parishioners may even dislike their pastors. Still, many people invest the role with a mysterious significance. A visit from a lay leader in the congregation may be appreciated, but he/she is not the pastor. Others in the congregation may be holier and smarter. They may be more highly educated in theology. They may be former preachers who have served larger congregations or in high positions in the denomination. But none of those things confers on the person the same mysterious significance carried by “the pastor.”
This dignity of the pastoral role gave a whole new meaning the significance of “the call.” A pastor was not “his own person.” Like a musician whose performance is empowered by an electrified audience, so a pastor carries the presence and grace of God not only because of his own spirituality, education and skills. Part of the “power” of the pastorate is the expectation of parishioners.


Home Church was the most influential element of my seminary experience. Certainly I learned in my classes and sharpened my thinking in hours and hours of conversation with other students. But the experience of Home Church has powerfully shaped all of my ministry.

The class on urban ministry by Benjamin Reeves awakened all my old zeal for city ministry. His lectures and the books he assigned painted a picture of ministry that was worthy of one's best energies. Urban ministry was where real humans and the power and call of God actually collided and interacted. I could feel the siren call of New York in every class period.
I took the required practicum in evangelism from Roy Naden. He was an excellent teacher. However, the “evangelistic process” felt artificial. Elder Naden did the preaching at the meetings. He was a skilled presenter. The content was interesting and understandable. We students were there to give personal attention to non-Adventists who came to the meetings. Over the course of the five-week series of meetings, we were supposed to move people from outsiders to insiders. The prospects my partner and I were assigned appreciated our attention. But the focus of the meetings—all the details of Adventist theology and prophetic interpretation—seemed to have almost no connection with their lives.
The seminary professor who most engaged me was Carsten Johnson, a Norwegian philosopher, who was the most boring lecturer in the world. However, once you got past his plodding prose, his ideas were relevant, insightful, compelling. He offered an intellectually rigorous defense of classic, conservative Adventist theology. He translated the ideas of Ellen White into coherent, systematic philosophy. His personal life was not nearly as tidy as his philosophy. His participation in church life appeared negligible. He seldom attended worship. But he provided a powerful framework for integrating Adventist (that is to say, Ellen White) theology. He then used that framework for a compelling analysis of both classic and contemporary philosophy.
Perhaps he is to be credited with my own commitment to go beyond merely affirming Adventist doctrine to finding language and metaphors that connect our theology with the culture outside the church.

Occasionally conference presidents visited the seminary to interview prospective pastors. Most seminarians were already under assignment. The minority of us who were not yet employed eagerly sought any chance for an interview. I was not a likely candidate. Many of the seminarians wore suits and ties to class. I wore Hawaiian shirts. Most ministerial students were married. I was single. In one interview, the president asked if I was interested in women. According to my friends, when I was absent from class, the most popular church history prof remarked to the class that McLarty would never get a job as a pastor. He was very nearly correct. I came to the end of the final quarter without a job offer. Three days before graduation, I received a call from Ted Wilson who was the head of something called Metro Ministries in New York City. He had heard I was interested in working in New York. He remarked it was rare to find young Adventists who had any interest in urban ministry and doubly rare to find anyone interested in coming to New York City. He didn't really have a specific job slot for me, but given my interest in the City, he wanted me to come. I was hired!