The Main Wycliffe Blog

If you’re near my age, or older, you likely remember seeing this photo in a newspaper in June 1972, probably on page one. It shows nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc, her clothes and most of her skin burned off by a napalm bomb that had just been dropped on her village from a South Vietnamese Skyraider military aircraft. Her face distorted by pain, she’s running down Route 1 in Trang Bang, South Vietnam, trying to shake off the agony. But napalm sticks, and you can’t outrun it.   

11 Come, children, and listen to me; * I will teach you the fear of the Lord.

12 Who among you loves life * and desires long life to enjoy prosperity?

13 Keep your tongue from evil-speaking * and your lips from lying words.

14 Turn from evil and do good*

seek peace and pursue it.  (Psalm 34:11-14)

Like many of you, I spend the first week of the New Year going through my diary, trying to anticipate some of the challenges and opportunities the next twelve months will bring. There’s the weekly rhythm of chapel services at the College, the regularly scheduled meetings with staff and faculty, the monthly gatherings of the Board and college committees, and the odd business trip. It’s a review I generally look forward to, especially as a remedy to the usual chaos of Christmas!

The film "John Wycliffe Morningstar," produced by Trinity Digital Ltd., was released on Reformation Day—October 31. 

In my first year of graduate studies at Yale University, I was asked to be a teaching assistant in a course that allowed for “the yeah, yeah experience” to arise. (The “yeah, yeah experience” is the term given to describe the feeling women have when we realize how much we have in common with other women.) I had never been in a class that deliberately aimed to cultivate such empathy before, but I soon realized that doing so was an effective way of allowing students to share ideas and experiences that encouraged them to be all that God called them to be.

“My soul longs, indeed, it faints for the courts of the Lord”

Psalm 84 is a psalm of longing or lament, and it is also a psalm of pilgrimage. Three times a year the people were commanded to make a pilgrimage to the temple to appear before the Lord (Exodus 23:14–17).

In late October I attended a conference at Yale commemorating the centenary of Hans Frei (1922-1988), one of the leading historical theologians of our age, and the most important figure in the so-called “Yale School” of theology and scriptural interpretation. His masterful The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative and The Identity of Jesus Christ should be required reading for theological students, clergy, and others interested in the recovery of traditional Christian modes of reading Scripture.

I don’t often think about Kyrie – and, in fact, when I saw the name, just like that, “Kyrie,” in my newsfeed last week I thought I was seeing the Greek word kyrie, meaning “Lord,” as in kyrie eleison, “Lord, have mercy.” That was an exciting moment: New Testament Greek breaking the social media barrier (I briefly thought). It turned out we were talking about a basketball star.

I joined the faculty at Wycliffe in 2019 only a few months before the start of the pandemic. I was in Toronto first, and visited a number of churches in-person, but by the time my wife joined me the city was in lockdown. We found ourselves trying to decide on a new church home in a world where we could only experience churches in virtual form. We were blessed by the online services we attended and as the lockdowns eventually came to an end, we were able to visit many of these churches in-person. It was wonderful to be able to worship with God’s people face to face again.

Ours is not a time of rest. I need not enumerate the many troubles that we face today, but it should be uncontroversial to point out that we live in a world ever more enveloped by fear. And who can blame us twenty-first century folk for suspecting that danger lurks in the shadows of every path? What we assumed were the unshakeable foundations of life now show themselves to be more brittle than we'd ever cared to admit. And so, in many ways, the future has become for us not the occasion for the realization of hope, but rather for the confirmation of despair.