Musings on Spiritual Matters

For my readers that are preachers, do you remember those days in school, and especially in undergraduate school in which the teacher would make you quote one of these strange works.  The professor would always require to quotations from to scholarly journals.  You were probably a better student than me, so maybe you read the whole journal, not me, these journals never made sense.  It was like reading German or worst.  So mostly I looked for a line that seemed to make sense and quoted it.  Well done, I got my two articles in there for the mark.  Now graduate school happened, and at these places you had to read them and report on them.  At first this was hard, but with time, and yes 6 years of graduate work, two graduate degrees do that to you, the journal made sense and yes, were interesting.  The journals really honed in on the verses that we were studying.  Mostly, if there was a class without journal articles, I would wonder about the level of it.  But on to the Doctorate level, at this point, funny but you can argue with the articles, yes, they make sense enough that you can actually think through what the guy is saying and disagree.  You can interact with the guy.  So why have I told this little story about scholarly articles, why to help people use them.

1. As ministers, scholarly articles can go to the way side like Greek.  You read them in school, and now you are done.  Most times the level of the article is too much for the average church member.  But do not give up on them, use some of the insight of the articles into your teaching on the text.  The members will love some awesome insights that you can bring from the articles.  Now do not quote them, but explain what the guy is saying in normal talk.  It will add a lot to your preaching and teaching.

2. Some journals are just “up there.”  It is really too much and too technical.  So I recommend “Interpretation”.  This is an excellent semi-scholarly journal that has good articles and a section of sermons and numerous book reviews.  If you want just one, this is the one to have.

3. Continue to think theological.  There is an art to this, and if you do not use it you lose it.  Continue to challenge yourself with this journals.  It might just be you reading for yourself, but you are developing your mind.  This is a wise practice.

Well, hope everyone enjoyed a little walk down journal lane.  This is one of the reasons that I have stayed in school for so long.  It continues to challenge me to grow.  Journals do this, so try to keep this a part of your working for the Lord.

Related posts:

1. Scholarly Articles-Pain or Pleasure
2. Preacher’s Keeping Journals
3. The Role of Religious Journals in the Restoration Movement
4. The Problem with Preachers
5. Study the Word

Tags:

This entry was posted by Matthew on Thursday, January 19th, 2012 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Church News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.