Christianity Today senior editor reflects on theological education, failure and flourishing
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07/20/10
Fuller Seminary welcomes Andy Crouch as a new member of its Board of Trustees. Currently a senior editor at Christianity Today International, Crouch is author of the recent award-winning book Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling. He has also served as executive producer of the documentary films Where Faith and Culture Meet and Round Trip, editorial director of the Christian Vision Project, editor-in-chief of re:generation quarterly, and campus minister with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at Harvard University. He holds an MDiv from Boston University School of Theology.
Below Crouch discusses his passions, views on theological education, and thoughts about Fuller.
What drew you to Fuller?
I was drawn to Fuller first of all by the great number of friends who have been students, faculty, and staff there. Even though I live three time zones away, I've been paying visits to friends in many stages of their education and leadership at Fuller for years now. I would be hard pressed to think of an institution that has shaped more of the people I have learned from, prayed with, and served alongside in ministry. So deeper involvement with Fuller made a great deal of sense. I also am energized by Fuller's global and ethnic diversity, by its remarkable entrepreneurial spirit, and by the sheer breadth of expertise and excellence, from missiology to psychology to biblical studies to musicology, that converge here. Who wouldn't be drawn to that?
How does the work and mission of Fuller intersect with your own passions?
I love the phrase [from Fuller’s mission statement], "the manifold ministries of Christ and his church." A great deal of my passion is in extending the vision of Christians for what it means to be ministers of the gospel—not just ordained ministers, though that is important, but ministers in the sense of commissioned servants announcing the good news of God's reign in every sphere and scale of culture, and ultimately, when our "glorious liberty" is fully revealed, to the groaning cosmos itself. Theological education can't restrict itself to the care and feeding of professional Christians—it has a broader mandate, to train leaders who can help all Christians see themselves as part of that grand story.
I am also passionate about a deeply biblical Christianity. I attended a much more liberal seminary than Fuller, in the early 1990s, and at that time we were just seeing the emergence of a generation of evangelical scholars who would end up offering a much more persuasive historical and critical reading of the New Testament, in particular, than the self-styled historical critics had offered themselves! Now much of that work has borne fruit and we are able to approach the New Testament texts with a confidence quite unlike either twentieth-century liberalism's sterile skepticism, or that century's brittle fundamentalism. Fuller managed to avoid the Scylla and the Charybdis of twentieth-century Protestantism and maintain a deeply evangelical confidence in Scripture that is now simply the most intellectually serious game in town. There is great work ahead in recovering a "proper confidence" (to use Lesslie Newbigin's phrase) in the gospel, and I see Fuller at the very heart of that project for both the academy and the church.
As a new trustee, what would you like to see happen at Fuller and through Fuller?
Most of all I want to see this institution flourish, which really means I want to see people flourish. The test of any institution is whether it creates an environment for human beings to become gloriously alive and more deeply capable of bearing the image of God in all its manifold diversity. So I would want to see scholars become better scholars, preachers become more vivid and truthful preachers, missionaries become more fruitful missionaries, counselors become more effective counselors, worship musicians become more skilled and sensitive leaders, and so on. I'd want to see our various ethnic cultures and our various temperaments and talents be seen more and more as indispensable gifts to the whole Body of Christ.
In attending to flourishing, trustees especially have to take the long view—not just the question of whether students, faculty, and staff are flourishing right now, but whether we are creating a "cultural flywheel" that will harness and disperse creative energy long after we are gone. Fuller is still a very young institution. What will it take, in our generation, to deepen its resources so that it can contribute to human flourishing for many more generations?
There's one other theme that is especially important for trustees, I think. One of my mentors said to me, "The trustees of an institution are those who have forgiven it." No institution is without faults, even grievous faults. I hope that Fuller will more and more become the kind of place where, rather than being covered up or ignored, failure and sin are named and forgiven. It's a paradoxical but wonderful truth that it is precisely those institutions, and institutional leaders, that have learned how to quickly and honestly recognize their own failings, that end up being most able to foster human flourishing.
Any other comments to help us get to know you better?
Well, I fail regularly and often. The place where I'm most privileged to fail and be forgiven is as a husband to Catherine (who teaches physics at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania), and father to Timothy (13) and Amy (10). I also love to fail musically—which is also known as practicing. I failed diligently enough and long enough at piano that I eventually became a professional worship musician, and still love to help congregations sing. And most recently I've started failing at another glorious instrument, the cello, in hopes that by the time my children are in high school, we can have a functioning string quartet—Catherine and Amy on violin, Timothy on viola, and Dad catching up on cello.