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 #3 - Arden Autry

My own history with the Bible is full of complicated motivations and emotions. I remember the first one I ever got. My mom went to a Bible bookstore in El Paso, TX to buy me one because it was on the packing list for a church camp in Sacramento, NM. It had a lot of pictures in it and that’s all I remember. I was fascinated by the Bible stories from Noah to Jesus’ miracles. Right before we left El Paso in May of 1985, the church we attended, St. Paul UMC, presented me with my third grade Bible because I wouldn’t be there in the fall to receive it with all of my friends. That Bible was the Bible I read for years. I read passages that I was asked to look at for Sunday School and Wednesday nights, but I didn’t know what to do with it. When I flip through that Bible and look at the things that I highlighted, I see a record of things my pitiful newborn faith thought were important. When I became a Christian at 15, I remember coming home and opening the Bible and trying to read it, feeling frustrated because I didn't know what I was supposed to get out of it. I met Jesus and I wanted to know more about him, but the Bible seemed so inscrutable and almost unapproachable. I did everything that I could with my limited understanding to make something out of it but I never got very far. Then I was called to the ministry at 17 and I knew that I would have to make the Bible a central part of my life and work but I didn't know where to begin. So, I languished scripturally.

In seminary I learned to study the Word but it became more academic than anything else. I remember the warnings not to let my Bible assignments replace my personal time in the Word, but I didn't understand why there was a difference. I was, at times, thrilled by the Word when some of the greatest Bible teachers of the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st would lay out a vision for the story of God. Afterward I would collapse in shame and lament that there was no way this pea brain of mine would ever get an understanding or revelation the way these people had. I wanted the Scriptures not just to excite my desire and need for information but a spark to change something inside of me as a result of reading and studying.

Mixed up in all of this was a competing emotion of fear. Fear that I was going to misunderstand and misapply the Word. Fear that I was going to get a bad grade on an assignment. Fear that I would look like a fool in front of my colleagues who were also training for ministry. That's the way I left seminary. I spent time listening to some of the greatest preachers and teachers I've ever heard, living off of their encounters with the word because I was afraid that I wouldn't see things correctly, or worse, not see anything at all.

There were, however, great moments of illumination during that period for which I'll always be grateful. Most of them happened in one of two classes taught by Lawson Stone at Asbury Theological Seminary. For precision's sake, the first wasn't really a class, but a Supervised Ministry Seminar Dr. Stone led for a group of students who were doing what amounted to internships in local churches and ministries. Sitting through that class was a revelation to me, not so much about the content of the case studies and discussions, but of Dr. Stone and his personality. I would describe it, lovingly, as unashamedly committed to truth even when the truth stung. I loved his manner because there wasn't even a hint of shaming in it, and as someone whose life has been profoundly shaped by shame, Dr. Stone's manner of teaching and communication made me feel like I could actually live and act as a human and a pastor even when my self-loathing argued that I couldn't.

Sitting through that seminar gave me an intense desire to sit under Dr. Stone in a real class so I signed up the following semester for Exegesis of Jeremiah. I had no business taking that class. The little Hebrew I'd learned the previous year wasn't enough to even scratch the surface of what I was being taught in that class. I'm so glad I took it, though, if only because of what Dr. Stone instilled in me during those weeks in the fall of 2002: careful and deliberate reading. That's the key phrase for me when I think of what I've learned in classes, workshops, and Dr. Stone's writings. There is a lot to be said about careful and deliberate reading of the Bible. I've had the pleasure of having a lot of poor assumptions about a biblical story come crashing down through Dr. Stone's teaching and preaching. There have been times I've thought, "no, that can't be right!" only to look at the text and realize I'd read it too fast and too poorly to see what he saw. I still remember accompanying my daughter on a college visit to Asbury University and sneaking across the street to hear him preach in Estes Chapel on the Jordan River crossing from Joshua. I was sitting next to Bill Arnold, another great and careful Bible reader and teacher, rapt with delight as Dr. Stone opened the Scriptures. My jaw was on the floor through the whole thing. You can watch it here if you'd like starting around 21:46.

My personal feelings about Dr. Stone as a person aside (if it's not clear, I hold him in very high regard), the thing I appreciate most about his ministry of teaching is his careful reading. He seems to read texts he's read hundreds or thousands of times like he's reading it for the first time, listening intently to what it's actually saying. It's a practice I fail at more often than not, but I almost always sense his influence as I'm reading the Bible. And it's because of him I've lost most of that sense of "getting it wrong."

The second Bible I have placed in the sanctuary of Tulsa First Methodist is in honor of Lawson Stone, Professor of Old Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary. I pray that those who pick it up and read it during our services read as carefully and deliberately as he's taught thousands of students, including me, to do. And, in doing so, that the reader will meet the Living God as I have a number of times under his teaching.

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