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bobby gross

Why Bother with Advent?

Part of a series of occasional reflections over the weeks of Advent initially created with the hope of encouraging the reader to embrace keeping the season of Advent. Advent resources have continued to grow on the Emerging Scholars Network blog over the course of the past several years. Charlie Clauss’ tireless labors through the Keeping Advent Facebook Group have been a blessing to many individuals and families seeking after the Lord during this busy time of year. ~ Tom Grosh IV, Associate Director, Emerging Scholars Network, 11/22/2016

Sufjan Stevens
Despite the title of this album, “O Come O Come Emmanuel” is a traditional hymn for Advent, not Christmas.

Here we are in Thanksgiving week. Turkeys are thawing. Cranberry ice is freezing. Grandmothers throughout the land are preparing for the loud, chaos-bringing arrival of grandchildren. And in countless department, toy, electronics, sports, and other stores, retailers are eagerly (if with some anxiety) awaiting the Friday after Thanksgiving, commonly known as “Black Friday” (because they hope that the profits made that day will set them on the positive side of the accounting ledger).

Known to fewer people, the Sunday after Thanksgiving this year marks the beginning of the liturgical season of Advent. This is a season of waiting and preparing for Christmas. Advent runs through the four Sundays preceding Christmas (this year Advent is as long as it can be, with Christmas falling on a Sunday). November 27 will be the “First Sunday in Advent,” and each Sunday following being respectively the second, third, and fourth. Advent ends at sundown on December 24 – Christmas Eve.

Why Bother with Advent?

Why should we bother with a thing like Advent? Christmas is the “real deal” – God coming to us in Jesus. Shouldn’t we just start celebrating Christmas just as soon as we can? There are several reasons.

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Marsden and Ono on Renewing the Campus

I’ve written about Dr. George Marsden’s recent talk to InterVarsity staff, and now you can hear it for yourself. We’ve posted all of the talks from the conference on InterVarsity’s audio page, but here are the direct links. All links go to mp3 audio files. If you want to download them for later listening, right-click on each link and choose “Save Link As…” to save them to your computer.

A special thanks to Kevin Ford, Gordon Govier, and Lorrey Thabet for helping us post these online!

By the way, the InterVarsity audio page is a virtual treasure trove of great speakers. I cannot overstate how many great talks are posted on that page. You can also subscribe to the InterVarsity Podcast on iTunes to get new talks as they are posted.

Lenten Preparations: A Time of Contrition

As you prepare for Lent, meditate upon (and share with a friend) these words from C.S. Lewis’ Miserable Offenders: An Interpretation of Prayer Book Language:

Rembrandt. “Return of the Prodigal Son.” (1662)

The Lenten season is devoted especially to what the theologians call contrition, and so every day in Lent a prayer is said in which we ask God to give us “contrite hearts.”1 Contrite, as you know, is a word translated from Latin, meaning crushed or pulverized. Now modern people complain that there is too much of that note in our Prayer Book. They do not wish their hearts to be pulverized, and they do not feel that they can sincerely say that they are “miserable offenders.”2 I once knew a regular churchgoer who never repeated the words, “the burden of them (i.e. his sins) is intolerable”,3 because he did not feel that they were intolerable. But he was not understanding the words. I think the Prayer Book is very seldom talking primarily about our feelings; that is (I think) the first mistake we’re apt to make about these words “we are miserable offenders.” I do not think whether we are feeling miserable or not matters. I think it is using the word miserable in the old sense — meaning an object of pity. That a person can be a proper object of pity when he is not feeling miserable, you can easily understand if you imagine yourself looking down from a height on two crowded express trains that are traveling towards one another along the same line at 60 miles an hour. You can see that in forty seconds there will be a head-on collision. I think it would be very natural to say about the passengers of these trains, that they were objects of pity. This would not mean that they felt miserable themselves; but they would certainly be proper objects of pity. I think that is the sense in which to take the word ‘miserable.’ The Prayer Book does not mean that we should feel miserable but that if we could see things from a sufficient height above we should all realize that we are in fact proper objects of pity. … [Read more…] about Lenten Preparations: A Time of Contrition

Week in Review: What’s your story? How do you tell it?

What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them. If you have items you’d like us to consider for the top five, add them in the comments or send them to Tom or Mike.

Bobby Gross, Director of InterVarsity Graduate & Faculty Ministries
Bobby Gross, Director of InterVarsity Graduate & Faculty Ministries

1. Inhabiting God’s story? Over the past several days Tom hosted Bobby Gross, National Director of InterVarsity’s Graduate & Faculty Ministry.  They had a number of conversations with faculty, pastors, and friends of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.  As part of the visit, Bobby participated in an Ascension Day service at First Presbyterian Church, York, PA.  The gathering was in partnership with Hearts and Minds Bookstore.  One of Byron Borger’s recent blog posts related to the event, Living the Christian Year author Bobby Gross to speak here on Ascension Day (5/10/2010) commends several books on the topic. In another post Byron shares that the beginning of Living the Christian Year: Time to Inhabit the Story of God is worth the price of the book.   Here’s an excerpt he highlights:

“Most of us think of ourselves as ordinary people living quiet lives in unremarkable places. We are merely hobbits in our shires. But listen! We may not be caught up in dangerous drama like Frodo and his loyal companion, Sam, but we nonetheless live inside a big story, one that started long before our birth and that will go on long after our death, one that’s as wide as the universe and as old as eternity: the Story of God as centered in Jesus the Christ.

Our personal narratives take their fullest shape and deepest meaning in relation to God’s purposes for us and for the world. As Eugene Peterson puts it, “God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.” A very large context and very long plot indeed. — Living the Christian Year: Time to Inhabit the Story of God (5/11/2010)

2. Want to know Why Amish businesses don’t fail (Geoff Williams, CNN Money, 5/4/2010), then read Erik Wesner’s new book Success Made Simple: An Inside Look at Why Amish Businesses Thrive.  By-the-way, the 95% success rate Wesner uses is based upon a 2009 report by Elizabethtown College sociology professor Donald Kraybill, who has spoken for two Central PA Emerging Scholars Network events. HT:  Scot McKnight,  Business folks, what do you see here? (5/13/2010).

“studying several Amish settlements, Kraybill found failure rates ranging from 2.6% and 4.2%; interviews with loan officers, accountants and industry professions in other Amish regions yielded additional anecdotal evidence of closure rates significantly south of 10%.Compare that to the average five-year survival rate for new businesses across the United States, which hovers just under 50%. So what’s the secret?” — Why Amish businesses don’t fail (Geoff Williams, CNN Money, 5/4/2010)

3.  The New War Between Science and Religion (Mano Singham, The Chronicle Review, 5/9/2010) opens
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Bobby Gross: Living the Christian Year

First Sunday in Advent in November 29
Check your calendar for the first Sunday in Advent.

Here at the ESN blog, one of our main topics is spiritual formation in higher ed: Christian practices like prayer and Bible study that shape us more and more into the image of Christ. The stress of Christmas may seem to be an unlikely time for spiritual growth, but for centuries, Christians have set aside the season of Advent as a time of spiritual preparation.

I had the opportunity to interview Bobby Gross, Vice-President InterVarsity Graduate and Faculty Ministries about his book, Living the Christian Year: Time to Inhabit the Story of God, to learn more about the meaning of Advent and how Christians in the academy could benefit from its observance. Bobby has served InterVarsity in many capacities: as a campus staff worker at the University of Florida, a staff supervisor in Florida, the Southeast, and New York/New Jersey, and a national field director based in Atlanta.

Photo by Per Ola Wiberg via Flickr

Micheal Hickerson: How did you come to write a book about living out the Christian year? You’ve told me this wasn’t part of your background growing up.

Bobby Gross: I grew up in a Southern Baptist church and then worshipped in a variety of evangelical churches, but was never part of a church that was particularly liturgical or did anything with the Christian year. In my second year of marriage, my wife Charlene and I moved to Miami and we looked for a church together. She grew up Catholic, and we were wide open to any number of churches – we wanted our church to be smaller rather than larger, multiethnic, spiritually alive, Bible-centered. The church that caught our attention, from an ad in the paper, was a small Episcopal church. We went to visit, and it met all our criteria.

Bobby Gross, Director of InterVarsity Graduate & Faculty Ministries
Bobby Gross, Vice-President of InterVarsity Graduate and Faculty Ministries

Charlene was immediately at home and more or less knew what to do in the service. I was lost for some months, really, but I stuck it out and slowly began to appreciate the beauty and the power of the liturgy as framing our weekly worship. Then, in the course of being in the Episcopal tradition, I learned about the Christian calendar and the way that liturgical rhythm, over the whole year, can give shape and meaning to our spiritual lives and reflections.

Working for a broadly evangelical organization, I found myself many times frustrated and saddened by the lack of awareness, even interest, of many churches and many Christians in this tradition and practice that goes back to within a few hundred years of Christ’s life. So I was motivated to write a book that could bridge from the liturgical world over to those who are not part of those kinds of churches. I wanted to make the bridge easy for evangelicals to walk across so that it would feel inviting and helpful to them.

MH: We have similar backgrounds. I grew up Southern Baptist as well and then worshipped at an Anglican church while I was in Canada for my master’s degree. Many people from Baptist or other non-liturgical backgrounds are often suspicious of adopting practices for which we don’t see direct Biblical connections. What are the benefits of observing the Christian year?

BG: First of all, let me point out the Biblical underpinnings for this practice. What’s striking in the Old Testament is that God himself, for his people, instituted a calendar with regular festivals, including pilgrimage. The Jewish year was oriented around certain festivals and certain points of remembrance. The most important, of course, was the remembering of the Exodus by celebrating the Passover. For Jesus, this was part of his life – the festivals, the pilgrimages, the Passover meal, as well as worship in the synagogue. [Read more…] about Bobby Gross: Living the Christian Year