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 #2 - Lawson Stone
Post #3 - Arden Autry

I can sometimes be overly self-reflective, which means I look back over my life a lot and notice where I could have done things better or where I wish things had been different. One of those seasons of life was when I first came to trust Christ when I was 15. I had always been (and often still am) very guarded about what's going on inside of me, and so when I returned from summer camp in 1992, having prayed to follow Christ, I tried to live as a disciple completely on my own. I didn't tell anyone what had happened which meant that I never got any help. I've often lamented that I didn't have anyone in my life to come alongside me to teach me how to pray, how to read the Bible, and how to live as a Christian. That was almost entirely my fault because I didn't ask for help.

A year later, I moved to Hot Springs, AR in order to finish my last two years of high school at the Arkansas School for Mathematics and Sciences. The day I moved in, there was a group of folks from the community gathered behind the dormitory offering us opportunities to get connected. One of the groups was First United Methodist Church in Hot Springs. The new associate pastor, who was also over the youth program, was there inviting us to connect with that church. Having just come back from a great Sr. High youth camp, I was eager to get connected, and so I did. That was the first time I met Jim Lenderman, a man who had a tremendous impact on my life both in high school and as an adult.

I not only started attending church there, I immediately got involved in the youth group that Jim was leading. Within that first month, I started attending a 6:30 AM Bible study Jim was leading for Sr. High boys. I can't recall there ever being more than five of us there, but having no transport of my own, I would wait for Jim to show up on Tuesday mornings in this great big boat of a car having already stopped by a donut shop, and we would drive down Central Ave. to the church. We had a healthy breakfast of donuts and Coca-Cola from glass bottles as he opened up one of those Serendipity Study Bibles and worked through the Scripture reading for the day. I didn't know anything, but I wanted to. It's funny when I think about how little I knew of the Bible, but I listened intently. I didn't read it on my own very much because I was so wound up about doing it wrongly, but I did try on occasion to read it for myself. I probably read more because of Jim than I would have on my own, which is just one of the reasons I'm so grateful for his life and witness. The following year, when our school required us to "shadow" someone from the profession we were interested in, I shadowed Jim for a day. We did a hospital visit that morning, and he fed me lunch at Applebees. Then we went back to his office to talk about seminary. He had encouraged me several months before to go to Asbury Theological Seminary, advice I rigidly followed to my great benefit and delight. As we talked in his office that day, he told me about the Bible classes he took and even printed out a document of notes from one of those classes with the now late David Thompson. I'll never forget seeing at the top of those notes "CIE - context is everything." I remember smiling broadly six years later when I was sitting in Dr. Thompson's inductive Bible study class on the Pentateuch when he gave us that same nugget, thanking God for Jim for instilling that and other principles for reading Scripture when I was a teenager.

Eighteen years after that class, I got to serve under Jim as his associate pastor. Now in my forties, with an M.Div. and D.Min. from Asbury under my belt, I was a much different person than the goofy teenager he'd met 25 years prior. I was a goofy middle-ager who still looked up to him as the older brother and father figure I always needed. This time it was a little different in some ways. I would often find Jim pouring over his big old New Living Translation Study Bible, which was similar. What was different was a slight insecurity that he carried with him following his treatment for non-follicular lymphoma a few years before that. He had what he called "chemo brain" and was frustrated that he couldn't remember things as well as he used to. Frequently, he'd call me to his office to ask if I remembered where this or that verse or story was in the Bible. I grieved for him that he was having trouble remembering due to side effects of his chemotherapy treatments, but it was such a weighty honor to serve him like that. I cannot describe what it meant to me to serve the man who taught me the Bible, who taught me to love the Bible, like that.

Three years after coming to work for him, he died after a hard fought battle with pancreatic cancer. In his last months, I shared with him something I'd been pondering from John 17:26 - "I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them." It was the idea that Jesus prays the Father will love us with the same love with which he loves the Son that floored me. We talked about that for a bit and over the course of the next two and a half months, that's what he was thinking about. He mulled over that verse as he headed toward his death, comforted at the end of his life by these words of Scripture.

Jim loved the Bible because it lived in him. It showed him the way to the Father. It nourished his soul. Out of that flowed a love for God and a love for people. I was one of the many fortunate ones to have experienced that love from Jim, and I'll forever be grateful for it. It's why I've placed a Bible in the pews of Tulsa First Methodist in his memory. I hope whoever picks it up on a Sunday morning and reads experiences the same love with which the Father loves the Son.