In the fall of 2024, our church replaced all of the hymnals and Bibles in the pew racks. We all had an opportunity buy one or the other, or both, and dedicate them in honor or memory of a person. I paid for three Bibles dedicated to the lives of three men who have had a profound impact on my love for the Bible and how I read it. I wanted to write about each of them and how they have been formative influences on me, which I am now posting here in three installments.

I'm posting these chronologically in terms of when I encountered these men in my life as my interactions with them are also part of my journey in Christ.

Post #1 - Jim Lenderman
Post #2 - Lawson Stone

In my journal entry for January 7, 2023, I wrote about my first experience in the Epiphany service at our church. It’s a service that has occurred annually for almost 80 years. The vignette I wrote about was when I overheard someone ask what my role in the service was. The response delighted me to no end. The answerer said, “He’s the new Arden.” I know what she meant. She meant that I was filling a role that had long been that of a dear saint who has been a part of this church for a long time. But, there something of pride stirred in me as I imagined what it would be like to be the kind of person who could truly wear the mantle of “the new Arden.”

The last of these posts is about the person I met most recently. When I arrived at Tulsa First Methodist Church in the summer of 2023 as the Pastor of Discipleship, one of the first things I did was to sit down and get to know all of the Sunday School teachers. One of the surprising things I discovered early on about this church is that it is probably the most biblically literate laity I've ever encountered. The reason for this is largely because of the pattern of Sunday School teaching that the late Dr. L.D. Thomas, pastor of First Methodist from the late 1960s until 1984, set up during his tenure as Senior Pastor. Each class has a rotation of teachers who teach for two month rotations. Over the course of five years, the classes are instructed in the entire New Testament and vast swaths of the Old Testament. It has been a remarkable teaching program for over forty years.

One of the teachers I met in August 2023 was Dr. Arden Autry, retired professor of New Testament at Oral Roberts University. Dr. Autry had my attention from the moment he met with me in my office. He is a humble deep well of wisdom and Scripture. He, like Dr. Stone in the previous post, promotes a careful and deliberate reading of Scripture. As we talked that first time, I did something I don't normally do. My life has been pockmarked by a number of missed opportunities because I was too timid to ask for what I wanted. Because I did not ask, I did not receive. This time, however, I stepped up and asked. I asked him if he'd consider doing an independent study with me during the fall. He said he'd pray about it, and a day or two later he called and said, "Let's read Hebrews together in Greek." I said yes even though I'd been a mediocre Greek student at best in seminary and worse than mediocre in college.

At this writing, we've been at it for almost a year and a half. Slowly, we've translated Hebrews, stopping for more than a few minutes along the way to open a Greek grammar or the New International Greek Testament Commentary by Paul Ellingworth. Not only has the experience been one of rich discovery, it's also been a spiritually enriching endeavor. I've been caught off guard a number of times by my tears as we've translated and talked about passages. Having to slowly reckon with Hebrews 2:14-15 comes to mind. Or a few verses later in 3:1 where the writer takes pains to point out that Jesus is God. The printed out pages of the Greek text littered with my terrible handwritten notes with a Sakura Pigma Micron pen are a treasure to me because they're like flecks of gold panned from river water. Of course, the not infrequent excurses have been some of the most delightful parts of our time together. In our most recent time together, we spent twenty minutes thinking aloud through the meanings of Holy Spirit baptism and a second work of grace and how they developed. Having done a whole project on entire sanctification I thought I’d thought through those topics thoroughly, but clearly I had not. That’s just one example of what Dr. Autry draws out of both the biblical text and out of me. It's been hard work but the treasure has exceeded the difficultly required to extract it. This is all thanks to Dr. Autry's patient and loving guidance through the whole process.

I've written less in this post than the other two but that's owing to the fact that I had decades to ponder and learn from Jim Lenderman and Dr. Stone. If the last eighteen months are any indication of what the future holds, though, Dr. Autry's influence on me and my Bible-reading life will easily rank with Jim and Lawson. I can't wait to see what unfolds in the coming months and years through his friendship and mentoring. That's why it is a joy and a pleasure for me to place a Bible in the pews of Tulsa First Methodist Church. I pray that those who pick up the Bible I dedicated to Dr. Autry will read to find the pure gold in the words printed within it just as I have.

A special thanks to my daughter, Elizabeth, an English student at Trevecca Nazarene University for editing this piece before publishing.