The Best Courses Always Include...(Part One)

By Steve Huerd

It’s the most wonderful feeling as a speaker or teacher when someone comes up to you after you’ve finished speaking and says, “I felt like God was directly speaking to me through what you said.  It’s like you were just talking to me.”  These affirmations provide the speaker with assurance that God is using them in people’s lives through their teaching.

If our purpose as Christian educators is to teach to change lives so that we might present everyone mature in Christ (Col. 1:28), then this dynamic interaction must occur somewhere in the teaching process.  When it occurs and the light bulb comes on, a glorious thing transpires in the student’s mind and life as the Holy Spirit uses our words and life to create change in the learner.

Having sat under many Godly men and women educators during my twelve years of graduate school, I’ve noticed that the best courses always included professors making the material especially applicable to my life.

For example, while I was taking a course called Human Growth and Development at Talbot School of Theology, party of Biola University’s graduate school, I had no idea there was a scholarly area entitled “Faith Development.”  At that time, I had spent roughly twenty years investing in people to help them in their faith development as a practitioner and I was shocked to learn that scholars had been researching my life’s work!  I was so thrilled at this discovery, and grateful to my professor, Dr. Jonathan Kim, of Talbot School of Theology, for his teaching, that I devoted my dissertation to the subject of spiritual development in youth.

It was Dr. David Clark, now provost of Bethel University, whose unique and simple way of presenting his arguments in the apologetics course I took from him years ago enabled me to share these arguments with hundreds of students over the years.  Or Dr. Walter Kaiser, Old Testament Scholar and former president of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, whose love and passion for the Old Testament inspired me to read and love the Old Testament every year in my devotions.  It can even be as simple as sharing from your own life as Dr. Klaus Issler, professor of Christian Education and Theology at Talbot School of Theology, often did in our Philosophical Issues class causing me to rethink my own presuppositions and see Jesus in new ways.

While there is certainly not just one way to make material applicable to student’s lives, it seems all the best courses include professors who somehow have figured out how to make that happen.  Whether through their teaching methods, their insights, personal examples, relationships, etc., they always find a way to connect their subject matter to their students’ lives.

Time is Money: Pay it down, Part 2 of 2

by Josh Mathews

In the first post of this two-part topic, some parallels were drawn between the deficits of time and money that many of us experience. Returning to this "time is money" equation: I wonder, are there any principles that help in managing finances that can apply to time management as well?

Now I am neither a financial adviser nor the son of a financial adviser. However, it seems to me that, given some similarities between time and money, there is at least one practical bit of financial advice that works well with time management too.


Manageable Bills: Rapid Paydown


I once heard a finance expert say that the best way to pay down debt quickly is to start with the smallest bill and work up from there. Focus as much of your resources as possible on one debt at a time in order to pay it off completely. Getting one debt totally taken care of breeds extra motivation to keep going and pay off the next one, and the next one, and so on.... On the other hand, it's hard to get excited about making minimal payments on several bills only to make very gradual progress on each individual bill. This expert even admitted that, given interests rates and other factors, this approach does not always make the best sense mathematically. His point, however, was that with finance management, success fosters a sense that debt and bills are more manageable than they sometimes seem. And this perspective motivates further financial success.


A Manageable Agenda


An undergrad professor of mine had a rule of thumb for staying on top of the various teaching, administrative, writing, etc. duties and responsibilities that were on his desk each day. He would try to work on one thing at a time, giving it his whole attention until it was completely finished. Only then would he move on to the next thing. Just like the rapid paydown principle in finance management, this "system" of time management takes into account the negative effect of having so many things on our plate that, at times, we can get overwhelmed and bogged down.

Sometimes I've thought it would be better to make progress on the overall mass of responsibilities before me, committing time to several individual tasks in a given day in order to chip away slowly but steadily on all of them. While this may theoretically be a more efficient way to make progress on the overall sum of work to be done, it is not effective towards limiting and managing the number of tasks on the agenda. And I might speak for myself (though I doubt it) when I say that completely wrapping up a task is exciting and energizing. Even if I still have several things to do, it helps greatly to devote my attention to one task until it is finished before moving on to another thing.

Of course, this principle does not apply without exception. If the tasks on my agenda include, say, writing a monograph, teaching classes, applying for jobs, contributing to a blog, and being a husband and dad, the principle becomes a bit more complex. I can't focus all of my time on applications or the blog and leave the monograph revisions completely on the back burner. Large projects (dissertation much?) obviously require consistent attention, even though many other small responsibilities will come up before the large project is finished. And things like teaching, parenting, or "husband/wifing" cannot always flex around our plan for effective time management. On Thursday mornings, whether or not I'm finished with the small task I'm focusing on in order to finish it completely, I need to teach from 8-11 AM.

Taking into account these qualifications, it does seem to me that the rapid paydown principle of finance management may have some helpful application to time and task management.

Time is Money: Burnout and Bankruptcy, Part 1 of 2

by Josh Mathews

We have all heard it said that "time is money."  If there is indeed any truth to this adage, typically attributed to Ben Franklin, then some parallels may be worth exploring. In this first of two posts I'm suggesting a few parallel struggles related to time and money respectively. Then, in part 2, I'll explore a helpful financial principle applied to time management.


Busyness and Burnout 

There are more things I need to do today than time enough to do them.

Many of us face this struggle often, if not everyday. And this situation does not apply only to those who use their time poorly, wasting much of it on frivolous things (and whether watching college basketball in March is frivolity is perhaps a debate for a different time). Even if we don't spend one minute of the day wasting time, chances are we all wish that we had more time, and that we could be more efficient with the time we do have.

I've thought about this issue often. How do I accomplish all I need to accomplish in a limited amount of time? Are there things I can do, principles I can apply, that will help me to be more efficient with my time? With several things on my plate, how do I know what to work on first? How much time do I spend on a given task when whatever time I give to one task is time I am not spending on another, perhaps equally important, task?


Bills and Bankruptcy

Whether school loans, credit cards, or rent or mortgage payments, there are certainly many people dealing with overwhelming bills and debt, especially in these economically difficult times. All kinds of obstacles foil efforts to get out from under this financial burden. For some, getting ahead financially can be a very slow and long process. Others remain stuck with apparently insurmountable financial debt, living from paycheck to paycheck and breaking even, but never able to pay down the bills that have accrued. Still others find themselves going deeper and deeper into the red, sometimes to the point of bankruptcy.

Tasks add up in a way similar to the accumulation of debt. We might have several things on our to do list and at certain times it might seem like we are far into the red on the budget of time we have available to allot to those tasks. As with money, we can find ourselves either making slow progress to get ahead, stuck in a constant state of being behind, rushed, and unable to do anything as well as we would like, or getting further and further swamped with responsibilities, sometimes to the point of burnout.

Let's say I've made a plausible case for the analogy between the "debts" of time and money. In Part 2 I will apply one particular finance management principle to the struggle of time management.