Inside a Great Commission Classroom

Across five different classrooms, featuring five distinct disciplines, Southeastern’s newest faculty bring their classes into session.

Two of these courses take place twice a week on campus. Two others are hybrid offerings, providing off-campus students with an in-person classroom experience over the course of a weekend. The fifth is a virtual doctoral seminar, held online over three days.

Stepping into each classroom and sitting side by side with the students — some college freshman, others finishing their MDiv, and a few approaching long-anticipated dissertations — the differences are abundantly clear.

And yet, a striking similarity runs between each classroom, from one professor to the next. That connection is a shared mission, a united purpose, and collective care for the students who sit before them. At Southeastern, every classroom is a Great Commission classroom.

Undeniably, this resolve starts first and foremost with the faculty.

 

“What’s the greatest commandment?” Landon Dowden asks, stepping around the lectern. He serves as associate professor of preaching and pastoral ministry at Southeastern, and though this is his first time teaching a master’s level course, he has taught adjunctly at the doctoral level for the past 10 years.

After a moment’s pause, the voices of his Bible exposition class chorus in response: “To love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.”

Dowden pauses for a moment before asking, “How have you done with that today?”

The room grows quiet.

Across the hall, another professor directs her students’ attention to God’s word and his instruction for his people.

“I want us to look at what Scripture says,” Kelly King, assistant professor of Christian ministry, tells her class. This is her second year teaching at Southeastern, first as a visiting professor and now as part-time faculty, but she is no stranger to campus — or to teaching.

“If you have your Bible,” she said, “how about those of you whose last names are A-G, you look at Titus 1:6-9 . . .”

Across the room of 30 or so students, she assigns three passages of Scripture and then steps aside.

For the next five minutes, students lean over their Bibles in silence, turning pages and marking notes.

Truth, goodness, and beauty are evident in God’s word. How might they also be reflected in God’s world and in the work of his people? What about in literature?

“This is a list — it’s a catalog of sorts. But what effect does that have? I mean, is it over the top? He’s talking about prayer; do we feel like this about prayer?” asks Olivia Rall.

The “he” in question is George Herbert, and “it” is a poem titled “Prayer (I),” written by Herbert in the early 1600s.

Rall, a Judson College alum and also Judson’s newest English professor, looks intently around the room of British literature students, her questions hanging in the air. So far there have been varying opinions on previous poems — what they mean and how they feel and what they were meant to do.

But this poem, in particular, seems strangely simple.

In a very different setting with more seasoned students, another professor takes on the mantle of guide.

Following their lunch break, a group of Doctor of Education (EdD) students gather on a computer screen for the next leg of their virtual seminar. Their professor, Jason Engle, leans forward, sharing on his own screen an outline of Ephesians 1:16-19. As he breaks the passage down into its individual elements, he underlines various words and connecting statements.

“Here’s the truth,” Engle says. “The spiritual reality is so much greater — a greater reality — than even the physical one that we experience.”

In Paul’s prayer, he points out the three things that the apostle asks God to grant believers in Ephesus: “that [they] may know what is the hope to which he has called [them], what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward [those] who believe” (v. 18-19 ESV).

“Because of our ongoing struggle with sin,” Engle explains, “we tend to only think about things through our physical senses. So the more that we are brought in line with the reality of God and his good plans and purposes, the more we need spiritual senses to be able to see the spiritual reality around us.”

As Engle’s students listen, nod, and take notes, he then turns the lecture outwards and begins to engage their thoughts.

“What does spiritual maturity look like?” he asks. “Well, in this case, it looks like becoming more and more attuned to the spiritual reality of God’s good plans and purposes.”

Engle then prompts them with the question: what else should believers pray for? What truths from Scripture should shape the way believers live here on earth?

In his class, Engle’s students are not just learning about discipleship and spiritual formation; under Engle’s teaching, they are experiencing it as well.

For each class and group of students, the practice of discipleship and personal application takes on a different appearance.

In Appleby Hall, the campus’s designated college building, Rhyne Putman teaches a class of 30 or so students, many of them in their first or second year at Judson. The amphitheater-style room opens downwards to where Putman teaches, pacing around his lectern.

“Everything that’s revealed in Scripture is important. Underline that and underscore it,” Putman says. He’s in the middle of explaining the concept of theological triage and the role that doctrine plays in the identity of a church.

“No doctrine in Christian theology is unimportant or insignificant, but some doctrines weigh more than others in the scale of importance and significance. And there’s a couple of different ways that people do this,” he says.

He begins to explain the pitfalls that churches can experience when determining the importance of doctrine. He explains theological maximalism and how it considers all doctrines as equally important and necessary for someone to be a believer. And he explains how theological minimalism, on the other hand, views all doctrines as subjective and a matter of personal opinion.

As he comes to the end of his lecture, Putman turns the lesson over into the hands of the students, dividing them up into “churches” from different denominations and giving them each a long list of doctrines to sort into first, second, and third tier issues.

However, before splitting the students off into their “churches,” Putman shares with them a clarifying vision. What is it, he asks, that defines evangelicalism?

In answer, two things: the gospel must be shared, and the Scriptures must be valued.

With that in mind, the room begins to bustle with activity and conversation as the students discuss and consider — how do churches differ on doctrine, and what is essential to the Christian faith?

Beliefs and doctrine are not simply a matter of the head but are also a matter of the heart, affecting believers’ entire lives.

“What if it is exactly like this?” Rall asks earnestly. “Wouldn’t that change our whole lives if we actually believed prayer was like this?”

“Prayer!” she exclaims and quotes Herbert’s words: “God’s breath in man returning to his birth … / The six-days world transposing in an hour, / A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear; /  Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss, /  Exalted manna, gladness of the best, / Heaven in ordinary … .”

She pauses, allowing silence to settle, before saying, “And that final line, famous for poetry lovers: ‘The land of spices; something understood.’”

Rall turns from the words, back to the young men and women in front of her. “What if prayer is like that, even in those prayers we hardly have words for?” she asks, referring to Paul’s words in Romans 8:26. “But still it is ‘something understood.’ That’s what prayer is: understood by someone.”

This matter of being understood and of being known is profound, but it is also a frightening thing apart from the hope of Christ.

In King’s classroom, the five minutes come to an end, and she begins calling on volunteers to read passages aloud.

The three texts share a lengthy list of God’s qualifications for the role of elder in the church. Working with her class, King begins to compile each criterion on the board.

While the Bible is clear in its instruction for men to hold the position of elder, King points out that it also calls for very specific men of character within that role. She wants her students to see that the passages do not simply give gender-specific instructions; they also give character-specific instructions, because the person’s heart matters to God.

“They need to be qualified men,” she explained, “who we think really are striving to follow God and follow him with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength.”

At one point in her conversation with the class, she notes the obvious. The long list of qualifications seems almost impossible to meet.

But turning to her students, she asks, “Who’s our example? Our example is Christ, right? He’s the head of the Church.”

Faithful ministry, apart from Christ’s substitutionary atonement, is impossible. The hope and truth of the gospel give life.

Dowden’s classroom grows solemnly still as his students sit with the weight of the Greatest Commandment, considering the words they just voiced.

He breaks the silence after several long seconds go by, seeing that his point has sunk in.

“The second one is, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ I have never done either of those fully for any day of my life — but Christ has.”

This conversation came about from a question on biblical exposition: How exactly does every passage of Scripture center around Christ, and how do pastors faithfully exposit this to their congregations? To answer in full, Dowden holds up the truth of Christ’s work on the cross.

“We don’t go past the gospel,” he says. “We go deeper into it.”

The gospel, he explains, doesn’t just apply to one moment in believers’ lives.

“Friends, the gospel is key for every step of sanctification, because we’re resting in what he’s done. We’re now walking in his power. And it is my hope that he is changing my wanting and my working,” Dowden expresses. This, he says, is “the hope of the gospel in us.”

 

In their teaching, mentoring, and ministry, Southeastern’s faculty leave a lasting Great Commission legacy in the lives of their many students. They do so out of a shared mission to equip students to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ by serving the church and fulfilling the Great Commission.

For these students and alumni who are now serving as Christ’s witnesses to the ends of the earth, this legacy proceeds not from the graduation stage or the late-night assignments but from these Great Commission classrooms and the faculty within.