Simon Stokes (SS): I had just become a Christian when I went to college at Emory, and I had just gotten into Reformed theology, and they had just started an at Emory. And the guy who was in charge of it and getting it off the ground was a Covenant grad—a guy named Jeremy Jones—and he was really the first person to help me understand what the gospel was. He would sit with me and he would read the Bible with me. He would explain theology to me and do it in an in-depth way and do it in a very personal, one-on-one way where it was conversational. And I think I felt very seen in a way that I had never been seen.

Some of it was because he was just a good pastor, and that's just what good pastors do. Some of it was because I think he'd imbibed a lot of the ethos of Covenant. I saw that a lot in professors like Richard Winter, Dan Zink, Jerram Barrs, Dan Doriani—people who have an intense interest in people, but they're so deeply rooted in the Lord and in what his Scripture says, that when they meet people in hard things or very sad things, they can approach those people with a sense of gospel confidence.

That, to me, was a big part of the ethos of Covenant, was caring a tremendous amount about the scholarship and the study and the learning—it's a seminary—but also alongside of that, understanding that we want to form pastors who have a heart and who see people relationally and care for people relationally. And the only way to teach people that kind of grace is to give them that kind of grace and to walk with them through things that are not easy and show them how to be a pastor in the middle of that for other people.

Isaac Jones (IJ): My dad planted an RUF at Emory in Atlanta when I was about three or four years old, and Simon Stokes was one of the first students my dad met when he was trying to plant RUF at Emory. Simon was 18 at the time, a freshman, and so I'm four years old, and my favorite student that would come over and play with me growing up was Simon Stokes.

What I remember of him at 18 and what you see in him now, there's some characteristics that are still there, like his laugh. He just has the most cacophonous—it's this giant, loud, bellowing laugh he has. He would play with me all the time, and it was really formative for me actually to have a believing, cool guy like that to take an interest in me. Cut to when I got out of college and decided to do the RUF internship. They placed me at UNC with Simon, and so I got to do three years of ministry under Simon, and he got to be my boss. And for my dad to have been his campus minister and then for him to be mine was a really cool, full circle moment, and, I would say, another big influence on how I ended up at Covenant. So many times in conversations with Simon, he was always quick to point out the good he experienced at Covenant and how meaningful he thought that would be for me, so I’m really thankful for the ways that connections come full circle in the PCA and in Covenant Seminary.

SS: I suddenly had this amazing opportunity to love this young man who I had known since he was seven years old, and I knew because his dad had been my campus minister, and to help him discern a call to ministry and just play this wonderful, formative role for him, and that was such an act of God's grace in my life. I love Jeremy, and he gave me a gift I could never repay. The opportunity to care for his son and help him think about ministry and send him, with my blessing, into pastoral ministry through Covenant was really such a kind thing that the Lord did in my life, and I hope in Isaac's life too, but at least in mine.

IJ: I think for my dad, one of the coolest things when I decided to come to Covenant was being able to relate with him on the classes I was taking, not just in terms of theology or the content, but in terms of being like, “Hey dad, didn't you take Ethics with Doriani in 1993?” And he was like, “Yeah.” You know, and that's the class I'm taking with Doriani this semester, and we can compare notes in a different way in that regard, and the same is true of Greek exegesis with Bob Yarbrough. All my Greek classes have been with Dr. Yarbrough. So, a 30-year-plus difference, and to still have the same professors here pouring out knowledge and care for students is pretty special.

SS: I think some of the things that really stood out to me were things like doing Introduction to Greek and Hebrew, and just being in the trenches with guys, and just pouring over Greek vocabulary words—this really hard subject that almost no one had any background in. Covenant's vision of pastors being able to read the Bible and understand the Bible in its original language so that we can teach the Bible to people as well as we possibly can—we got that, and we got to do it together. It was really amazing. I think that was a beautiful part of the whole Covenant experience was the theology, the exegesis, the biblical languages, all of that was amazing.

You get to do that with other really smart people. I mean, people who are much smarter than me, and learn from them as they're learning it. That was an important part of the formation, but also just getting to sit and chat with professors and talk with them one-on-one and they show you something incredible from the book of Acts, or really help you make a connection to the gospel in your life where you weren't just learning how to be a pastor by studying the Bible, but you're learning how to be a pastor from these scholar-pastors who care deeply about Scripture, and were helping you to understand the Bible as they cared for you at the same time.

IJ: I keep running into people who are in ministry now who went to Covenant who have a pastoral heart and are careful in the way they approach hard issues. And they approach those issues with a care for the person they're talking to more than they care about trying to just hammer in the right answer into someone's skull. And that's the sort of thing you would point to in ministry and say, “You can't teach that, you have it or you don't.” I actually think it comes from sitting in class with professors who are the picture of integrity. The value of that is just exponentially larger for me.

SS: I'm shaped tremendously in the ministry now by what I learned at Covenant. A lot of my work as a leader is framing their stories in the story of the gospel, drawing out the hurts and the wounds and the hopes and the dreams of all these different families and all these different individuals and showing how the gospel is the answer to all those things. I learned that here at Covenant through the counseling degree, through biblical exegesis, through just being pastored really well by some of the faculty.

I don't think there's a day that goes by in my job when I'm not taking what I learned at Covenant and applying it to the real problems of a church, the real problems of the people of that church, and the world around that church as we look to engage it missionally for the Kingdom of God.

IJ: One of my Bible teachers in high school went here, and he described Covenant as Rivendell. He said, “When you come through the gates, it just feels like you're in a safe haven.” And as a high schooler, I probably thought that was kind of silly, but you do understand that's kind of true.

How do you learn about the gospel and actually still have it affect your heart? That's a really challenging question. If you're not cultivating that very carefully, you can easily go awry. And I think Covenant, at least in my experience, I don't see how you could do it much better than Covenant has.

Like many international missionaries, Doug’s story didn’t begin in the country where he now serves. He grew up in Texas, attending a PCA church with his family. That's where God first started to cultivate in Doug’s heart a desire to work in international missions: “The Lord was gracious to me as a covenant child, and I was really convinced of the gospel more deeply when I was around 20. And that’s when I started considering that if people didn’t know the gospel in other places and some people weren’t willing to go, then I was more than willing to go.”

Doug considered different avenues for international ministry and went on a number of short-term trips, including one with MTW in Sweden. He rounded out his senior year in college with inner city work in Texas before applying to MTW upon graduation. Doug’s first opportunity to serve in Ukraine came rather unexpectedly: “I said, ‘Look, I’m young, single, have no debt, and I know Spanish.’ And they said, ‘How about Ukraine?’”

It was the early 1990s, and the iron curtain had just fallen in eastern Europe. The PCA, alongside other evangelical organizations, was sending workers at the request of the Commonwealth of Independent States to teach a morals and ethics curriculum for their teachers: “I signed up to go for what I thought would be 10 months. I did my job, but I had a lot of young people and college students gathering around to talk about the Bible. At the same time, a church planting team was coming in as a follow-up to this work. I was more interested in something enduring, so I jumped on the MTW church planting team.”

The MTW team felt that Doug had a gifting for university ministry and allowed him to attend Reformed University Fellowship (RUF) staff training as a “back door” way to be prepared and equipped for the kind of work he would be doing. This special opportunity helped confirm his call to minister to college students, and the principles and philosophy of ministry he imbibed from RUF translated easily to a cross-cultural context.

During this time, the Lord also began to nudge Doug toward theological education, and—even more specifically—toward Covenant Seminary. “The guys I noticed in that room knew their stuff, but they were also gracious,” he says. “Knowing the truth is one thing. Holding and manifesting it in a way that is consistent with the gospel is actually what we’re called to. These guys stuck out to me, and I found out they were at Covenant. This was what I needed.”

Doug went back to Ukraine after RUF training to work with college students, and the Lord richly blessed the ministry. People were coming to faith. Eventually, through the work of MTW and other ministries in the region, the Ukrainian Presbyterian denomination was formed. But Doug couldn’t shake the feeling that he had all but exhausted the ministry tools he had to work with. He was sure God was leading him to long-term international missions, but he also knew he needed an education that would sustain him for whole-life ministry.

“Covenant was where I was going to go,” Doug decided. “So, I trained a girl to be my replacement before I left. That girl ended up being my wife later, by the way.” Even after arriving as a student at Covenant, Doug was traveling back to Ukraine for internships. He asked Masha to marry him, and the couple finished their season of work in Ukraine, then both started seminary in St. Louis around 2000.

“Our needs were to be equipped and grounded for a lifelong ministry, and Covenant confirmed this,” Doug recalls. “There was intentional community. And the thing that struck us most was that the professors were not primarily interested in being academicians, but practitioners who were academic. They knew their stuff, that knowledge manifested itself into pastorally caring for people wherever they were. And how they taught was a model of what I needed on how to articulate the gospel in a way that was gracious, patient, and clear. If anyone asks us about Covenant—even to this day—that’s the main thing we want them to know.”

One of the most important practices for a Christian in the mission field is hospitality. Doug speaks of how the “hospitality value” of Covenant Seminary was impressed upon him during his time as a student. “Whether it was being in Dr. Hans Bayer’s home or one of the other professors’ homes—with them being willing to be accessible and in the community rather than above the community—those personal interactions were foundational. That’s just gospel ministry. That allowed us an extra window into their lives that supported the academics. The professors, in these personal interactions, were modeling how to minister—how to care for people.”

Masha graduated with an degree in 2002, and Doug with an in 2003. Doug would also complete a ThM at Fuller Theological Seminary before the couple considered where the Lord was calling them next. A further need in Ukraine seemed like a natural fit. Doug agreed to lead the church planting team in Lviv, the cultural and intellectual center of western Ukrain, helping to multiply churches and impact the next generation of missionaries in the region. Besides coordinating children’s education, Masha uses her training to lead a multi-generational group of women in the church.

Today, the logistics of ministry in Ukraine have changed due to the realities of war. For Doug, even amid violence and trauma, the ability to rightly handle the Word of truth has made all the difference: “If you don’t know how to handle the truth well and contextualize Scripture with respect to its first hearers and to your cultural context, then you’ve really been replaced by Google. There’s just no need for you.”

Lviv has been significantly affected by the war, and the exegetical, cultural, and contextual skillsets Doug and Masha learned at Covenant are constantly at play: “In the midst of all this trauma, it's about coming together and saying, ‘Okay, what’s happening here in 1 Samuel?’ or ‘What is being said here in 2 Peter?’ And how were the first hearers suffering, struggling, or being persecuted?’ And then bringing it back to, ‘Is Christ here? Does he make promises? Is the gospel real? And who are you in him?’”

The Shepherds’ ministry in Ukraine certainly looks different than it did some years ago. Even so, the foundation for that ministry has not changed: “There’s no place that the Lord could call us where we wouldn’t be equipped with what Covenant gave us. That doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be hardship or that we wouldn’t have something to learn. But we’ve been put in the most vanilla situations where I do Bible studies and preach, and also in the most horrific, traumatic situations that are some of the darkest—and God’s promises have not wavered. The gospel truth is there. We feel Covenant prepared us to be in those places.”

Note: This article first appeared in the fall 2025 edition of Covenant magazine. Get your copy or subscribe to Covenant here.

Dan Zink (DZ): Thanks for asking me. It’s a long story but I’m happy to tell it. I usually start with the fact that I was born in Wisconsin, but when I was eight, my family moved to Quincy, Massachusetts. So, I call Massachusetts home. I know I don’t sound like I’m from there, but I am. That move was a big change for us, because my father had been the minister of a small Nazarene church in Madison, Wisconsin—a totally different denomination than the Reformed, with a more Wesleyan and Arminian view of things. When he was in college, my father had rheumatic fever and it damaged his heart, so he lived with that rather precariously for years, then died when he was 41. I was only five at the time; my brother Dave was 10, and my oldest brother Chuck was not quite 15. That was a hard loss for a young boy.

My mom thought it was wise that we stay in Madison so my oldest brother could finish high school there, then later she got a job as secretary to the president of the denominational college, a little regional one called Eastern Nazarene, in Quincy, Massachusetts. We moved there when I was 8 and Mom worked there for 10 or 11 years. I was always thankful for that move because it was a great small college with very much of a family atmosphere between faculty and staff. Our church was College Church on campus. My oldest brother, who had been attending Iowa State, ended up transferring to Eastern Nazarene. He played basketball for them, so everybody knew him, and everybody knew me. It was a great environment for a fatherless boy.

I was very much a Nazarene at that time. My oldest brother became a minister in the Nazarene Church and ended up being a well-known denominational figure before he died. I eventually married the daughter of a Nazarene college professor. After graduation, I did a master’s degree in social work at Ohio State University and started working as a social worker. I went to a Nazarene church there, and even ended up on their church board, though I was probably younger than I should have been to do that. In my late twenties and early thirties, I really struggled with theology. I was having conversations with my pastor and with my oldest brother, who had also been a social worker before going to the Nazarene seminary.

Part of my struggle was that as a social worker I was working a lot with kids in foster homes. I watched one time as an office mate and our supervisor arranged for a 15-year-old girl who was in foster care and pregnant to take a bus trip from Columbus, Ohio, to the state of Kentucky so she could get an abortion without parental consent. They facilitated that under the radar. Meanwhile, I was thinking of the 16-year-old girl and others that I was in charge of who were in foster homes, and I knew I might be in a similar position at some point. I knew I did not want to do that. I didn’t feel it was right. But I wasn’t hearing anything from my church in terms of how to back up my thoughts biblically. Around that time, I also I started reading Francis Schaeffer, and that was a big shift in my life.

Somewhere around the age of 30 or so, after I’d been working as social worker for about eight years, I felt called to go to seminary, but I knew I was not going to go to a Nazarene seminary. I wasn’t sure exactly what the Lord was doing. I thought maybe I would go study somewhere and get good theology then maybe be a missionary to Nazarenes. It was probably pretty naive of me. My wife, Carolanne, and I began visiting other kinds of churches, and I would ask some of those pastors for recommendations on seminaries, but I didn’t get much help. So, I ended up writing to three people, one of whom was Franky Schaeffer, the son of Francis Schaeffer. Francis had died in 1984, so this was sometime late that year or early 1985. I asked Franky if he could recommend a place that would really teach me the Bible and how it applies to current social issues. Franky actually wrote me back and said, “I’m an artist and not a professional theologian, so take this with a pinch of salt, but if I were you, I’d try Covenant Seminary in St. Louis.”

I’d never heard of it, but based on that recommendation I wrote to Covenant. Someone from the school wrote back—this was before the internet and email—and sent me a catalog. This was not like a picture book catalog, but one full of detailed writing about the school and the classes and the professors. My wife and I read it and were pleasantly surprised. We didn’t know there were people around who thought like this. It sounded exactly like what I needed. We sold our house and moved to St. Louis so I could do an MDiv because I thought I was going to be a pastor. With my social work background, I eventually got a job working as a counselor to support us, but for a while before that I worked at a grocery store stocking shelves from one to five in the morning, which had an effect on my studies. I still have some of my old class notes where the handwriting trails off as I fell asleep in class on occasion.

RM: So, if you came to Covenant to become a pastor, how did you end up as a Professor of Counseling?

DZ: Good question. When I graduated with my MDiv, Dr. Paul Kooistra, who was Covenant’s President at the time, helped me connect with a church in Dallas, Texas, which was pastored by a guy Dr. Kooistra knew from his years at Reformed Seminary. They needed an assistant pastor, and my brother Dave also lived in Dallas, so Carolanne and I went there. It was the first time Dave and I had lived in the same city since we were kids. Unfortunately, about six weeks after we got there, the church started to struggle, and some months later it split. The pastor got a job somewhere else and our church lost a lot of people. I knew they weren’t likely to hire a newbie like me to pastor the church, so I knew I was looking for a job as well.

I called Paul Kooistra and what happened was that Covenant eventually hired me to come back to the Seminary and restart the Student Services department, what we now call Student Life. There had been some staff changes and departures at the time, which had left no one to directly run Student Services; the Academic Dean had been covering it for a year, but that was not sustainable. So, I came back to Covenant to work, which was a surprise to me because I thought I was going be a pastor for the rest of my life. I ended up running Student Services for five years, working to rebuild it into something that would be beneficial and formative for the students. I had some awesome student workers on my staff—one of whom was Tom Gibbs, now our sixth President; another was Stephen Estock, who is now the Coordinator of the PCA’s . We had a great time.

I was hired to be an administrator, but I also served as an adjunct instructor. In that role, I was like a utility player on a baseball team, playing whatever position was needed at any given time. Mostly I supervised the preaching of MDiv students. I did not expect to be on faculty in the future, but there was a fringe benefit of tuition reimbursement that you could pay back in years of service. I decided to use that to work on a graduate degree in Marriage and Family Counseling at Saint Louis University, even though I knew it was likely I would not be able teach at Covenant. But then, in that mysterious way that God does things, during my third year in Student Services, the Seminary was gearing up to start its Counseling program, which Dr. Richard Winter began in 1993. They knew my background in social work, so when Richard arrived, I got to work with him as a sort of consultant on the creation of the program. After it was up and running for two years, it was obvious we’d need a second counseling professor. I wasn’t quite finished with my PhD, but getting close, so I applied for the position. By God’s grace, I was hired and started teaching in the fall of 1995.

RM: And now you’ve been here for 30 years.

DZ: Thirty years as a teacher, but if you tack on my Student Services years and my student years before that, I’ve been around forever! One interesting thing about that is that I’ve known or worked with all six of our Presidents in some way. I had a couple of homiletics courses with Dr. Rayburn, knew Dr. Barker a little bit, was a member of Dr. Kooistra’s President’s Cabinet, and worked with Dr. Chapell, Dr. Dalbey, and now Dr. Gibbs. There aren’t too many folks around here now who can say that; maybe Jack Collins.

RM: I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of changes in your years at Covenant.

DZ: Sure have. When I first came here as a student, this building we’re sitting in, Founders Hall, didn’t exist. We still had the old white house that served as our administration building just down the hill. There were no apartments on campus, there was no Archeology Institute, the big Community Center did not exist. The walkway that now runs from Founders and in front of the Chapel over to Edwards Hall was a driveway. Most of the parking lots didn’t exist. We didn’t have as many students then, either. Everyone was very excited about our entering class in fall 1985 because there were 31 of us—that was the biggest class up to that time. It’s a strange feeling to now be in my 70s and know that a lot of the people and things that were so formative for me are not really known by most of our newer students and staff. But that’s what happens when you’ve been someplace for a very long time.

RM: As you look back over all those years, what people or events stand out to you? What have you learned or how have you grown as a person and as a teacher during your time here?

DZ: It’s not particularly Covenant-related, but one thing I’ve always been extremely thankful for is the fact that I was trained as a social worker before I became a counselor. Social work is a broader training, and it taught me a lot about organizations and what leadership looks like. Most importantly, it taught me that fundamentally you help people most through the relationships you have with them. From the very first course I taught here, I’ve made it a point to emphasize that the relationship is the vehicle of change. I’ve basically treated the classroom and the counseling room as the same kind of environment: my students and my clients both need the same thing from me, and that is to create a relationship with them where they know I’m tuned into them, that I’m for them, and that we’re collaborating. Because it really is collaborative. It’s not just me teaching down or counseling down to them. That has become more and more important to me through the years.

Another thing is that somewhere along the way I recognized that the main foci of my life were teaching, counseling, leadership, speaking, and writing. My professional life has really revolved around those things. My primary focus, though, is on the students. I’m very concerned that the forces of our culture and the information society we’ve been in for a quarter-century or so, have pressured schools to be about the transfer of information. But for me, a counseling program—or any program that prepares people for helping others—has to have at the heart of it the transformation of people. The heart of my work is to be as transforming a force as God allows me to be with the people he puts before me. And with that is hopefully to be a transforming force for the Seminary itself in whatever way I can during the time I have left here.

More directly related to Covenant is something that has been one of the greatest blessings to me personally. About 15 or so years ago the curriculum committee was revising the MDiv curriculum, looking at places where courses overlapped and where we might be able to combine some courses together. One of the things that came out of that was the course God and Humanity: Foundations of Counseling, which brings together elements of the theology of God and man and elements of the basics of counseling, since those two are intimately related. I got to be the counseling professor in that class from the beginning, which means that I’ve been in that classroom every semester for 15 and a half years.

The blessing of hearing my colleagues Mike Williams and then Robbie Griggs and Drew Martin teaching on the theology aspect and answering questions by going back to creation really formed something very deeply in me. They spoke about the reality that God established in creation and how he ordered things, and part of that ordering is that everything and everyone is in relationship, it’s all integrated, it’s all of a whole, and the healthiness or unhealthiness of those various integrated relationships affects everything else. It’s helped me realize as a counselor that we can’t really talk about integrating psychology and theology because they were never really separated to begin with. They were tied together at the start. That’s how God made things to work. We can break things apart to analyze them in more specific ways, but we can’t really understand creation or human beings unless you see them as a whole, and that includes relationships. We’re all individually image-bearers of God but, ultimately, we image him most fully when we are in relationship with others. I’m very grateful for those profound insights and how they have affected my teaching.

Besides these things, there have been so many people, so many colleagues and students and friends and guest speakers along the way who have had a great impact on me: Jerram Barrs, David Jones, and David Calhoun to name just a few. And Paul Kooistra, whose emphasis on grace during his time as President really helped transform the culture, people, and viewpoint of the Seminary in so many ways. All the good things that have been happening around here in recent years are really a continuation of that emphasis on being receivers of God’s amazing grace.

RM: Amen to that! One last question: We have lots of pastoral students who also do counseling degrees. How do you see those meshing together and how is that combination a benefit to the church?

DZ: I’ll answer that by reiterating what I said a minute ago about the importance of seeing each human being as an integrated whole, and just add that pastoral work, like counseling, is largely about helping people understand that about themselves. My belief is that the MDiv student who pursues a counseling degree can start to see that helping people through the means and context of relationship makes sense. That’s the best place to start because that’s the way God orders the world; that’s the way he made us.

It’s also important to not get hung up on thinking in counseling or psychological terminology. I was talking with one of our counseling grads about this recently, and he told me of a supervisor he had who required his people to write their client reports without using any kind of technical psychological jargon but to think in terms of the clients’ experience and write something closer to how they might describe that experience themselves. That was a challenge at first, but he soon found that doing it this way transformed the way he thought about people and about counseling. It gave him more of an awareness of who they were and how the things that happen to us in our lives—the good and the bad—happen through the means of relationship. People who hurt us and people who help us can only do so because there is a relationship in which they do that. That’s why knowing something of a person’s family history is so important.

That conversation just confirmed for me that the starting place for our counseling or our pastoral work is not just our understanding of God, but also how he created us to reflect him, to reflect something of the Trinity itself, which is in constant relationship. My hope is that our counseling students, because they take theology classes, will get that. And I hope that our MDiv students who also do counseling degrees, get it as well. It sounds so simple, but it’s so incredibly profound.

Note: This article first appeared in the fall 2025 edition of Covenant magazine. Get your copy or subscribe to Covenant here.

Growing up as the daughter of a PCA pastor—her father was the late Rev. Rodney Stortz, founding pastor of Twin Oaks Presbyterian Church in St. Louis and the long-time preaching voice of the radio program Oaks of Righteousness—Bekah had much encouragement in her musical endeavors from her family, peers, and especially her church youth leaders. But the most important seed for her future life was planted not by music but by water.

“I was baptized as an infant just down the road from the Seminary at Covenant Presbyterian Church,” Bekah says. “My dad had just become the pastor there, and I had the amazing privilege of growing up in a covenant home and in a church that really embraced the covenant ideals of raising up children in the church together. My parents were my first disciplers but many others also poured into me and my sisters along the way. I really experienced the joy of that.”

Later, after her father had planted Twin Oaks Church, she found herself discipled further by dedicated Sunday school teachers. “I still remember many of them, several of whom are connected to the Seminary. As I grew into middle and high school, the youth leaders at church were very discipleship oriented. I had taken piano lessons all my life, and around this time I started messing around playing and writing songs, as well as journaling, as a way of wrestling through my faith and my sin and my need for Jesus. It was a blessing that God gave me music to do that with at a young age.”

In middle school, God opened up other opportunities for her to use her gifts. “This was when worship music that wasn’t traditional hymns was just becoming a thing,” Bekah remembers. “So, as people noticed my abilities, they started inviting me to play at youth group and during the school chapel services. Then at church on Sunday evenings, the youth band would be asked to play, and I would be part of that. I realize now it was a very intentional thing on the church’s part. It would have been so much easier not to have the youth play, but the fact that they did made us feel like loved and valued members of the church. That was really important.”

An even bigger opportunity soon came Bekah’s way. “When I was in high school, my dad noticed me writing down these songs and playing them, playing in coffee houses with my friends. So, one day he said to me, ‘Will you write a song for Advent?’ I was so excited. Our music director at the time, John Haines, who is now at Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, took the tune and words I wrote and orchestrated them for full choir and orchestra. It was amazing!”

Hearing her music played and sung in church this way had a profound impact on the young Bekah. “It was one of the most humbling experiences. It was the first time I really understood that I could not have come up with these things on my own. It was a pure gift from God. And then to have someone take the time to make it something a choir and the congregation could sing—it inspired me to want to pursue music in a way that could enrich the church, not just for my own benefit.”

As she prepared for college, Bekah considered whether she should pursue her musical interests more fully or, as she puts it, “continue figuring out this whole covenant thing I’d been part of growing up. I was very hungry for theology and the Bible. I was reading a lot of theology and grappling with the sovereignty of God and why he would choose me and not some other person. Then around that time, my dad was diagnosed with cancer, and that was part of my struggle too. Why him, when he was doing so many wonderful things for the kingdom? It didn’t make sense.”

In the end, theology won out. She decided on Covenant College, where she pursued a Bible major and a music minor. “A music major probably would have been more practical, but it really was very fruitful for me at that period of my life to study under so many good Bible teachers, especially as my dad did pass away during my freshman year. I was so thankful for that community and for how God used my Christian friends to love me well. Even the writing of a term paper on heaven to help me work through some of my issues. Those four years were some of the most formative of my life.”

Also during these years, she began to sense a strong call to music ministry in the church and thought about going to seminary. “I felt like many churches, especially the ones using more contemporary music, didn’t really know how to sing well. I wanted to be a help in that, but I knew I needed more training to understand exactly what that might look like.”

Then, in her junior year, she met Jeremy, the man who would become her husband. He was a decade older and a JAG lawyer in the Air Force. “I really wanted to marry him, but it would mean not being able to pursue some of the other things I wanted. So, I married him anyway, and we went wherever the Air Force sent us for about ten years. Just like the decision to major in Bible instead of music, it didn’t make sense at the time. But everywhere we went, the Lord provided ministry opportunities.”

Soon after they married, Bekah started teaching Bible to middle school and high school students part time, while also working on a seminary master’s degree online. It was a very challenging couple of years. Then came a move to Virginia, where Jeremy taught at the Army’s JAG Legal Center and School, and the couple had two baby boys, James and Ben. They got involved in a PCA church where Bekah was able to get back into leading worship music. It was a blessed five years.

After that, they headed for Colorado Springs, where Jeremy taught at the Air Force Academy, and where their daughters, Emi and Betsy, were born. They found another PCA church. One day they noticed in the church bulletin that the music director position had opened up. “Jeremy said I should apply, but I said, ‘Are you kidding me? I’m crazy busy with four kids!’ But he put my name in for it anyway, which just shows how much he’s always supported me in this. So, I became the music director there for about four years—with babies! Sometimes I’d have babies hanging on my front in a carrier while I was playing, then go nurse during the sermon and come back to play later on. It was a wonderful church that gave me opportunities to think creatively. We started a children’s choir, an adult choir, and other things.”

Then Jeremy retired from the Air Force and the Lord called the family to Kalispell, Montana, where he started a second career as the head of a Christian school. “Montana is basically like another country,” Bekah says. “But it was wonderful. God put us in another PCA church, and I had these four little ones and figured I’d just focus on them for a while. The church had just hired a new worship pastor, but it very quickly did not work out. We’d been there about a year when the pastor called and asked if I wanted to do music for the church. The Lord just gave me the opportunity. It turned out to be probably the most fruitful three years I’ve ever experienced in ministry. I felt like I was really doing what God made me to do. The pastor loved to be creative, and he encouraged me in that. For example, one of the things we did was to start monthly vespers services that were all music and readings and prayers. I started teaching the women’s Bible studies, too, which I loved.”

She also loved Montana and the mountains and watching her kids enjoy the beauty of God’s creation. The family loved their church and the kids’ school. From Bekah’s perspective, they could have stayed there forever—but the Lord had other plans.

An opportunity came up in St. Louis for Jeremy to work in development with Westminster Christian Academy and it seemed too good to pass up. There were many other advantages to being back on Bekah’s home turf. They would be near her extended family again. And there are lots of PCA churches to choose from. It also got her thinking of going back to seminary. She got a job teaching music at Twin Oaks School, her old alma mater, and started taking classes part time at Covenant Seminary. She very quickly realized that this was what God was calling her to do full time. She quit her job and became a full-time student in the program. At the time, there weren’t many immediate opportunities to do music at her local church, but God again stepped in. The Seminary’s Chapel Coordinator position became available.

“The Lord opened that door, and it’s been a huge gift. It’s been a great experience, and I’ve learned a lot. Though planning and leading Chapel worship is very similar to what one might do for a congregation, there are also some important differences. With Chapel, we’re not really a single congregation. We have people here from lots of different church backgrounds and styles, different ethnicities, different nations. The number of songs that are familiar to everybody may not be as great as in a congregation. There’s a little more freedom to try something new. I see it as an opportunity to show future ministry leaders some of the rich music that’s out there, and the wide variety of it, so that when they go to their church’s later as pastors or music directors or whatever, they’ll know what resources are available for good music.”

Good as her Chapel experience has been, Bekah’s time at Covenant has done more than simply give her another outlet to express her musical gifts. “It has helped to shape me in new and more profound ways. As we have dived deeply into the books of the Bible, I’ve been struck by the realization that the times when God is most lifted up and glorified, when we see his majesty the most, are the times when his people are worshiping and singing to him. And that is not just one person individually. It’s always throngs of people. Even in the New Testament letters, the church is commanded to sing together communally. Just as the Trinity is complete in community with one another, so is the church when we glorify God as his people singing together. Worship is not a spectator sport. The goal is for all of us to participate—and to participate thoughtfully, which is why it’s especially helpful for those who are planning and leading liturgies and music to be thoughtful in how they put those elements together. Covenant has helped me understand that in deeper ways.”

As a musician who feels called to minister to God’s people through leading worship, Bekah found Dr. Collins’s Psalms and Wisdom Literature class especially impactful for her spiritual growth. “Thinking through why God chose to give not just the psalms, but all of this other wisdom literature to his people was just amazing to me. What a creative God that we have! But how do we teach these books well to the people in our churches? And how do we incorporate things like lament into worship? How do we lament well together?” Other classes were significant for her too. “Dr. Yarbrough’s Revelation and General Epistles class stirred my heart to the vastness of God’s world and the immense diversity of his church. Educational Foundations gave me principles I use every time I teach a Sunday school class, or even when just at home with my kids. Those are just three examples, but I’ve learned so much from everyone here. I said earlier that my college years were pretty formative, but I think my time in seminary has been even more so.”

Having graduated in May 2025 and handed the reins of the Chapel Coordinator job on to someone else, what is next for Bekah and her family?

“I’m not exactly sure yet. My husband has shifted back to education from development and is now interim head of school at Heritage Christian Academy, so we plan to be here for a while. I want to minister in the church in some capacity. I hope to use my degree in some way to help shape the worship of the church both locally and more broadly, and to continue to teach as opportunities present themselves. We’ll see what doors the Lord opens. Whatever happens, I’m grateful for my time here and for all the encouragement I’ve received. I’ll keep playing music no matter what—there is so much to sing about!”

Note: This article first appeared in the spring 2025 edition of Covenant magazine. Get your copy or subscribe to Covenant here.

Rick Matt (RM): Let’s begin with a little bit of your background. Where are you from originally? What was your faith situation like?

Jack Collins (JC): My parents are from the New York City area, but I was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. My father was a troubleshooting manager for RCA and moved around a lot to various branches and districts. We then lived in Atlanta until I was five, then in New Jersey until I was 10, then here in Missouri for a while, where my older brother became a friend of the Chapell family. He was converted through the influence of [former CTS President and current Stated Clerk of the PCA] Bryan Chapell’s older brothers. Bryan and I were classmates in school, but we didn’t know each other very well at the time. Then my family moved to the Chicago area and from there to the Boston area.

As to my faith background, my father was a lapsed Catholic. Having served in the Second World War and so forth, he was pretty bitter about religion. My mother had been raised a Missouri Synod Lutheran. So, my siblings and I were nominally Christian. I did make a sort of profession of faith when we lived in Chicago but didn’t really come to a living faith until my second year of college. I went to MIT with the intent of studying math and physics and ended up in computer science and systems engineering. My brother’s faith had really taken hold, though, and during Christmas break in my second year at MIT, he invited me to a Navigators conference. That’s where I was converted, just over 50 years ago now. After that I finished a BS and MS at MIT, then worked in the Boston area for three years before going to seminary.

In the meantime, as I grew in my Christian faith and led Bible studies with the Navigators, a new student came into my Bible study. Her name was Diane, and she eventually became my wife. We were married in 1979. She also completed her BA and MA at MIT, while I was working. After that, we moved to Washington State, where I went to Faith Lutheran Seminary while Diane worked for Boeing. Then she was able to land a job in London, so we went to the UK, where I did my PhD in Hebrew at the University of Liverpool’s School of Archaeology and Oriental Studies while living in London. We lived there three and a half years, then came back to the States, where I eventually planted a church in Spokane, Washington, over the course of another three and a half years.

RM: How did you get from there to teaching at Covenant Seminary?

JC: As the church plant was in the process of organizing, Bob Yarbrough, who was in his first stint of teaching here at Covenant, and then Bryan Chapell, who was serving as Dean at the time, both contacted me about submitting my resume for an open teaching position. Bryan and I had reconnected a couple of years earlier when he was one of the assessors at the church planting assessment I went through. So, I sent in my resume and was called to come teach at Covenant. I started in January of 1993. They wanted me because I could teach both Hebrew and Greek, which I’ve been teaching ever since, as well as classes on the Prophetical Books, the Psalms and Wisdom Books, the Old Testament Historical Books, a class on Science and Faith, and many other things.

RM: To backtrack a little bit, tell me how you went from working in systems engineering to going to seminary.

JC: I was leading those Bible studies for the Navigators at MIT while also working in engineering. But I quickly realized I was not adequately equipped. My initial goal was to go to seminary for the tools to do intelligent ministry, then finish a PhD in systems engineering. Instead, when I was in seminary, I kept getting positive feedback from the elders of the church we attended, so I decided to stay and get my MDiv. It just seemed like ministry was what I was cut out for, particularly biblical languages.

RM: How did your interest in languages develop?

JC: I’ve always been interested in linguistics. My mother’s grandparents spoke German, and I heard a little bit of German from Mom. Mostly what she said was the equivalent of “Hurry up!” My father’s mother spoke a little Irish, and the main phrase I remember her using was the equivalent of “Shut up!” I’m sure that says a lot about me! When I was choosing a college, one goal was to study German linguistics, particularly Scandinavian languages. In seminary, I also did a lot of Hebrew and comparative Semitics study. Then during the half-year before we left for the UK, I took more Hebrew, including modern Hebrew, and refreshed my French and German. Then I started graduate linguistic studies.

In the UK, my wife worked for the Chase Manhattan Corporation and we lived in the London area while I worked on my thesis. My advisor was a good, conscientious Christian man named Alan Millard, who was very helpful to me with some crises of faith at the time. Also on that faculty was Kenneth Kitchen, the renowned Egyptologist. Both men became good friends of ours. They took very good care of us.

Our church in the London area also loved us well. There was a lot of anti-American sentiment in England at the time because of the American bombing of Libya, and the planes had taken off from English bases. But our church people were very kind to us, so much so that our kids are named after some of them. I finished my thesis in 1988, then we visited the States that fall to do the church planting assessment, and I was asked to plant a church in Spokane. So, we came back to the States for good in May of 1989 and started the plant in Spokane that June.

RM: Why church planting? Had that been a goal of yours previously?

JC: No, it hadn’t. That came about because when I was looking for potential teaching jobs stateside, there wasn’t much available. And the only pastoral post on offer at the time was an interim pastorate at a church undergoing a serious crisis, which I was advised not to pursue. Someone suggested that I put my name in the hat for church planting, which I’d never thought of. I figured I’d give it a whirl. We were approved at the assessment in the fall of 1988 and ended up in Spokane in 1989.

RM: What was that experience of church planting like?

JC: It was hard work. I’d just been through a PhD program, which was hard enough, but this was a very different kind of hard work. It included a lot of people contact and administrative stuff, which I hadn’t had to do as a doctoral student. I had to learn a lot of those skills. I started the process believing we had a core group ready but soon found out we did not. We had contacts, but not a core group. I spent several months gathering one by doing Bible studies and such.

Over a couple of years of services, the church grew until we had about a hundred people in our orbit. That was extremely good at the time given that Washington was competing with Oregon as the least churched state in the country. There were only a few other PCA churches in the region and the nearest congregation to us was 275 miles away. Today we have several churches out there, though it’s still pretty hard going. So, we were doing pretty well under the circumstances.

The church was already in the midst of the official organizing process with the presbytery when I got the phone call from Covenant about coming to teach. Our people very much encouraged me to take the opportunity. They said I shouldn’t pass it up. I’m pretty sure they said that because they believed it and not because they wanted to get rid of me!

RM: I’m sure that was the case. So, you came to Covenant in 1993?

JC: It was the summer and fall of 1992 when I candidated at Covenant. I was officially called during the board meeting that September and started teaching in spring of 1993. We left the church with a lot of tears. A large contingent of the congregation came to the airport to see us off and we all wept profusely. In church plants, people tend to get closely intertwined with each other. Lots of good things happened in that congregation. I learned a lot about ministry there. I was glad to hear that they were able to find a successor for me reasonably soon, but unfortunately, he stayed only about five years before moving on. The successor after him, sadly, had some issues that eventually caused the church to close.

RM: That must have been heartbreaking for you.

JC: Yes, it was pretty hard. But a few years ago, I was asked to speak at the organization service for another church plant in Spokane led by one of our graduates. He and the pastor of another congregation who attended that service told me they thought their churches owed their existence to what happened at the church I planted all those years ago. Some of our people had been the base on which the thousand or so people worshiping in those two churches had been built. So, there was some measure of healing in that for me and, I hope, for others.

RM: What was it about Covenant that made you want to come here to teach?

JC: I was actually being recruited at two places, but Covenant was attractive first of all because it was the seminary of the denomination I was ordained in. I also had connections with various people here—not just the Rayburn and Chapell families, but I also knew David Jones, who had been very helpful to me over the years, and Paul Kooistra. There was also the Francis Schaeffer connection, which was a draw for me. Covenant was small back then, but it was starting to grow, which is one of the reasons I was hired. We saw some phenomenal growth in the 1990s.

RM: And now you’ve been here for 32 years! What are some high points for you?

JC: I have enjoyed learning how to teach, learning how to relate to students, and also learning my subject matter well enough to be able to teach it. When I started, I was thrown in at the deep end with a third-semester Hebrew class, a third-semester Greek class, and a Prophetical Books class. It was a bit overwhelming. Just because you have a PhD in Hebrew Linguistics doesn’t mean you know everything there is to know about the Bible. I had to learn a lot.

I’ve also felt stimulated to be a lifelong learner—which of course is one of our themes around here—not just because of the classroom and the needs of the students, but also because of my colleagues. I’m very, very grateful for the colleagues I’ve had. I feel like we have worked well as a team and the product of the team has been better than the product of the individual contributions. There’s something about the team itself. And I felt this way even before we started doing team teaching.

Additionally, most of the things I’ve written have come out of classes I’ve taught or issues that have arisen along the way. I’ve also had some very exciting opportunities come my way. One was a grant from the Templeton Foundation for the purpose of creating a class on science and faith. Through my work on that I got interested in the subject of miracles and God’s action in the world, which resulted in my book , and a more general book called And of course, that involved studies in Genesis, which led to further research and writing on that topic, such as my book Connections made through that process led to my involvement with the Creation Project of the Carl Henry Center for Theological Understanding at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and to a year-long fellowship there. One result of that work was the writing of my book .

My work at Covenant also got me appointed to the Creation Study Committee for the PCA, which produced the Report on Creation Days, and around the same time I was asked to be on the translation committee that created the English Standard Version of the Bible. I was chairman of the Old Testament translation team and privileged to work alongside the great J. I. Packer and many other incredible scholars. One of the great things about being on those two committees was that even though we had sharp disagreements at times, we learned how to benefit from each other, and again, I think the results ended up being greater than the sum of the individual parts. That year at the Henry Center and the opportunity to work on the ESV were real high points for me. I cannot get over how privileged I am to have been able to do both of those things.

Of course, there have been some challenges along the way as well. My work on the historical Adam and Eve has not always been well received by some in our circles, but it has opened up a lot of opportunities and new avenues for ministry in speaking about the topic and why it matters. I’m happy to say that despite that critical fire I’ve always felt well supported by the Seminary administration, even as we’ve been through several transitions in leadership over the years. They’ve always been very helpful and encouraging of me and my work.

RM: So, as you get ready to retire, what’s next for Jack Collins?

JC: Well, I have about five or six very nerdy research projects that I want to do while I still have the energy and the mental capacity to do them. Some of those are building on things I’ve already done, if only tangentially, but others more substantially.

As for other plans, I have grandchildren who live locally so my wife and I look forward to being more involved in their lives, which is a big deal for us. Also, our daughter is moving back here after 11 years in South America. Our plan is to stay here in Missouri, but we would like to do some traveling and other things we haven’t been able to do during the years we’ve been here. Diane is from the Pacific Northwest and “pines” for it, you might say, so we’ll probably head out that way. She also really wants to see Italy, so I guess sooner or later we’ll do that.

RM: Do you have any last thoughts you’d like to share about Covenant?

JC: Mostly I would like to say that my colleagues are an absolute treasure, and I would like people to treat them as such. None of us is perfect and there are always ways we can improve, but people improve better when they are loved and appreciated. These are good, learned, sincere people, and it’s been an immense privilege to know and work with them. I would like them to be appreciated for what they are.

RM: Amen to that!

What may be less known is that through its RUF International (RUF-I) arm, the organization has, since the late 1980s, been expanding its unique brand of college outreach specifically to international students studying at American colleges and universities. There are currently 25 RUF-I ministries on US campuses. Over the last decade or so, RUF has also branched out even further through RUF Global (RUF-G), which, in partnership with the PCA’s Mission to the World (MTW), the ministry of Serge, and several national denominations, has begun ministries to college students on 8 campuses in other countries. All of these growing ministries provide an essential Reformed Christian presence in the lives of young people during some of the most formative and challenging years of their lives.

Covenant Seminary grad Rev. Chad Brewer (MDiv ’00) knows all about the challenges college students face and the difficulty of struggling with life’s hard questions without much of a framework for answering them. For him, as for many others, college campus ministry became a safe harbor for asking honest questions, helped him to experience true Christian fellowship and real spiritual awakening, and planted the seeds of his future life calling. Chad now serves with RUF as Assistant Coordinator for RUF International and RUF Global, overseeing and equipping teams to start and run the individual campus ministries under these names. Before stepping into this role, he spent 21 years as an RUF Campus Minister himself, serving first at the existing RUF ministry at the University of Missouri–Columbia, then starting new ones at Penn State University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of California, Irvine. He loves to speak about how the Lord used such a ministry so powerfully in his own life.

Asking Questions—AND MEETING CHRIST—ON A COLLEGE CAMPUS

“I grew up in a small city called Westminster, Maryland, on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border,” Chad says. “I did not grow up in a Christian home, and for college I went to Shippensburg University, in South Central Pennsylvania. Like many students, I started wrestling with the meaning of life and asking questions I had never really wrestled with before. I was getting depressed. One day I just started walking and ended up at a nearby church, sitting in the back listening. I bought a Bible and tried to read it, but it didn’t make all that much sense to me.”

After about three months Chad grew more discouraged. One day he saw a sign on campus that said, “Christian Fellowship—Come and be loved.” He wanted to go, but he also thought it sounded a little weird. He convinced some friends from his dorm to go with him, and they went the last week of the semester. They were surprised to find 70 or 80 people in attendance, all of whom were friendly and welcoming. Chad decided he would come back after Christmas break and keep coming until he could decide whether what he was hearing at the group was true or not.

The second meeting after the break turned out to be a three-hour prayer party. “I thought, ‘Three hours!’ But I had promised myself to do everything they did until I believed it or not, so I went. I sat there for the entire three hours listening to people pray. Afterwards a guy asked me if I would like to do a Bible study with him. So, I did. We read the Bible twice a week. It was the book of James. I became a believer a few months later.”

Chad notes that this group was not like the campus ministries most of us are familiar with, such as RUF, Cru, the Navigators, or InterVarsity. This one was entirely student-led and it was the only such group on campus. After he became a believer, he got deeply involved. A year and a half later, he was President of the group, even though, he says, “I was still a very immature Christian, very young in my faith. I didn’t have a lot of older people in my life to guide me. I went to church a little, but I was church hopping. I made all these decisions pretty much on my own.”

Chad began to rethink what he wanted to do with his life. He had intended to become a high school teacher and sports coach, but by the end of his sophomore year, he wasn’t so sure. He thought God might be calling him to the ministry. “I really loved talking to people about Jesus. In my senior year I began to explore ministry options. There was a campus ministry based in Pittsburgh called Coalition for Christian Outreach that sounded good. I interviewed with them and got a job. But I ended up not taking it because I thought I needed more training. I needed to go to seminary. The question was: where?”

A friend gave him a magazine advertising a large number of seminaries. It had pullout cards to mail in for more information. He knew nothing about any of them or the various denominations they were associated with. He chose nine of the info cards, filled them out, and sent them in. Another friend advised him to be cautious since not all seminaries are alike. Chad decided to only apply to seminaries that emphasized one’s relationship to Jesus, and not all the other benefits of attending that school. As the responses came back, one by one he opened the envelopes. One by one he read, “We have great professors,” or “We have wonderful classes,” or “We have a high placement rate.” One by one he tossed them in the trash—except for the one response that began, “We believe that a seminary education is successful only if—at its end—the student knows Jesus Christ more intimately than at the beginning.” That one school was Covenant Seminary. Chad had never heard of it but he decided that that’s where he would go. He began the application process.

FACING CHALLENGES—AND FINDING GRACE—IN SEMINARY

Meanwhile, he graduated from Shippensburg, went back home to Maryland, and got involved with a church there Chad asked the assistant pastor if he had heard of Covenant Seminary. The pastor laughed, “Of course. We’re a PCA church and Covenant is the PCA seminary.” Chad had no idea. The pastor asked if he wanted to meet the then-President of the seminary, Dr. Paul Kooistra, who would be speaking nearby for a fundraising event in two weeks. Chad jumped at the chance. That meeting sealed the deal for him. But the Lord’s mysterious way of working brought about a slight detour first.

“I have a brother who is eight years younger than me,” Chad says. “He was not a believer, and he didn’t have any other people in his life who were. He looked up to me and I felt like I couldn’t go off to Covenant and leave him that way.” Chad decided to defer seminary for a year and spend time with his brother, a sophomore in high school at the time. “We hung out together and did a Bible study for about year. By the end of that time, my brother became a believer. God is good. Then I went to Covenant Seminary.”

The first semester was challenging, to say the least. He began with intensive summer Greek, often referred to by students as “suicide Greek,” and rapidly found himself floundering. After a week and half he called the professor, Dr. Jack Collins, to tell him he was dropping out. “Dr. Collins talked with me for 45 minutes. He was very understanding. He calmly talked me down off that emotional ledge. I did finish the course and things got better after that, but it was rough going at first.”

The next few years were a whirlwind of learning, challenge, growth—and immense blessing. Chad came to understand the meaning of God’s covenant, the fullness of God’s sovereignty, the depth of God’s love, the caring way that Jesus did evangelism, and, most importantly, the power of God’s transforming grace in ways he never had before. “Dr. Phil Douglass’s class on Spiritual Formation was especially helpful for me,” Chad said. “He introduced me to Jerry Bridges’ book , which was a life-changer. And his teaching on divine design showed me how the Lord made me in specific ways for ministry.” A recommendation from Dr. Douglass also gave Chad the opportunity for an internship at a church in Palo Alto, California—an opportunity that would help set the course of his ministry life.

Though the internship gave him opportunities to preach, the major part of it was teaching a six-week summer class on evangelism and pursuing young people to get them more involved in the church. Chad enjoyed it all, but he especially loved working with young people, reaching out to them, encouraging them, sharing Jesus with them. He loved helping a group develop and begin to grow. The experience was wonderful, but he still had no clear idea of what he would do after seminary.

As graduation time loomed, advice came from an unlikely source. “I worked on the grounds crew at the Seminary to help support myself,” Chad notes. “My boss was a man named Eric. I was talking with the other guys on the crew about how I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t really want to pastor a church. I had been impacted by campus ministry but had already turned down a job with one. I was at a loss. Eric overheard this and said almost casually, ‘Chad, why don’t you just go do RUF?’ Something clicked for me and I knew that that was what I was supposed to do.”

GATHERING PEOPLE—AND MAKING DISCIPLES—IN THE US AND BEYOND

So, after graduation, he went to the University of Missouri to take over the existing RUF ministry there. He stayed for five years, and the experience simply confirmed for him that he was doing what God meant for him. As with his internship in California, in the midst of all the teaching and preaching and seeking out potential new leaders, the part he enjoyed most was pursuing people who were not yet in the group, not yet believers. After Mizzou, he went to start an RUF chapter at Penn State, and again after five years went to start another one at the University of Minnesota, then another at the University of California–Irvine. In every case, he says, “What I really loved was gathering and connecting with people who were not Christians and sharing Jesus with them. That’s been the pattern of my ministry with RUF: gathering the group and helping it develop to sustainability. Then I’m ready to do something new.”

The most recent “something new” was accepting the role as Assistant Coordinator for RUF-I/RUF-G in 2019. That move developed out of a couple of mission/vision trips with the PCA’s Mission to the World (MTW), and out of MTW’s Global Missions Conference in 2017. In 2005 Chad visited Riga, Latvia, then, in 2014, he went to Italy, where MTW was exploring partnership possibilities with a Reformed Baptist denomination. The Italians were especially interested in RUF as they had nothing like it. In the course of conversations, Chad met an American graduate student from Ohio studying at the University of Trent. The man led a Bible study for about 12 students there (out of approximately 16,000 at the time), but he was graduating soon and concerned about finding someone to lead it after he left. Chad was taken aback to learn that this was the only such ministry on the entire campus (unlike some American universities that often have twenty or more), and that none of the participants were Italian; all were international students from other countries. Through these experiences, “the Lord stirred my heart again for reaching underserved people with the good news of the gospel.”

In 2017, Chad attended MTW’s Global Mission Conference in Dallas. He came back energized, feeling that familiar movement of the Lord in his heart toward some new ministry opportunity, but he didn’t yet know what. Soon after this, RUF approached him with a proposition: “How would you like to coordinate the efforts of RUF International for us?” Chad and his wife, Christie, both loved the idea, so, he began his new role with RUF-I in 2019.

At that time 16 American campuses hosted RUF-I chapters; today there are 25. But with 1.1 million international students studying at American universities, there is still significant work to be done to reach more of them. “There’s never been a time in history when the nations of the world have sent this many students to another nation to be educated. We have a unique opportunity to welcome international students, the majority of whom are black. Many come from places where we can’t send missionaries. It’s a wonderful grace that the Lord in his kindness is sending so many people to us.” Of the 25 RUF-I chapters, 20 are on campuses that also have a standard RUF ministry; though RUF typically ministers to American undergraduates and RUF-I is aimed more at international graduate students, leaders seek opportunities for cooperation and collaboration between the groups, which benefits everyone.

Chad also coordinates RUF Global, which functions similarly to RUF or RUF-I ministries with ordained ministers serving as shepherds for and connecting links between college students and local churches. There are currently eight RUF-G ministries—four led by PCA teaching elders as missionaries with MTW (in Colombia, Ukraine, West Africa, and Japan), and four led by men ordained in their respective national churches (Mexico, Uganda, Gambia, and Australia). These leaders are trained in the US by Chad and his staff, and he and others from RUF and MTW hold monthly Zoom meetings and sometimes visit in person to ensure that they stay well connected and well resourced for their various ministries. Chad notes that ongoing conversations with several leaders could possibly double the size of the ministry in the next few years.

SHARING THE HEART—AND THE HOPE—OF CAMPUS MINISTRY

From experience, Chad knows how crucial campus ministry can be for young people. “Campus ministry is really strategic,” he says. “In 2022, the Pew Research Center said that 31 percent of people in the US ages 15 to 29 will either move into the church or, if they’re already there, walk away from it. People are going through big transitions during those years. They’re making life-changing decisions on their own for the first time. They’re easily influenced by those they know and those they choose to follow. So, there’s this very narrow window where we have the best possibility of reaching them. It only gets harder after that.

“Ministries like RUF provide a safe haven to ask questions, experience fellowship in a non-threatening environment, and be guided by trained ministers who care about you, point you to Jesus, and help connect you with a good local church. Without that kind of influence, it’s no wonder so many young believers are tempted to turn away from their faith. And without that kind of influence, there would be fewer opportunities for unbelievers to hear the gospel. People are longing for relationships, longing to be loved, longing for Jesus, though they may not know that’s what they need. Campus ministry is a beautiful way to make the gospel real and tangible during a time when many students are wondering what matters most. We’re there to show them Jesus.”

Note: This article first appeared in the fall 2024 edition of Covenant magazine. Get your copy or subscribe to Covenant here.

Rick Matt (RM): Thanks for agreeing to talk with me. Can you first give us a bit of personal background and a glimpse of how you came to know the Lord?

Bob Yarbrough (BY): Sure. There is a little Christian heritage in my family background, but not much. My paternal grandfather was a Baptist layman, a subsistence farmer in the Ozarks, and was a deacon and song leader in his church. He would pray for me and my siblings, and my mother often took us to church, but I never saw my father pray. I wouldn’t say I grew up in a Christian home.

I was 9 when I first heard the gospel during an evangelistic weekend at the Baptist church we attended. I knew I was a sinner, I believed that Christ died on the cross for my sins and that I owed him my life, and I was willing to offer it to him. But I didn’t really know what being a Christian meant except going to church. I never heard about discipleship until I was 20.

Through my teen years I did all the things teens usually do, but I worked a lot too. I got married at 19 to Bernie, a Catholic girl I knew in high school, and we moved to Montana to attend the University of Montana. We went there broke and both had to work. On Sundays, we attended a Catholic church one week and a Baptist church the next. One week, the Baptist pastor invited us home for lunch, and he led my wife to Christ. That really began our spiritual pilgrimage together.

I started serving in that Baptist church, working in the nursery and teaching the youth, even though I didn’t really know much myself. I also drove the church bus and shoveled snow. A year or two later they asked me to be a deacon. I read the Bible a lot but didn’t know much about Bible scholarship or study resources. Still, in the first five years of our marriage, my wife and I both grew a lot as Christians.

I had started a forestry degree at college but ended up working as a logger for four years while my wife got her nursing degree. But the Bible was always on my mind and I struggled with my spiritual direction. Our plan at the time was to buy some land in northwest Montana and live out our days there. But one day after church, I had this distinct impression that God was speaking to me. His question was, “Are you willing to devote your life to spreading the gospel?” Well, if God asks you to do something, there’s really only one answer. I didn’t have a choice. I said yes. I tentatively shared this with my wife not knowing what she would think. But she was on board with it, and that began a new phase for us. We had followed Jesus thinking he’d help us with the plans we set for ourselves, but now I realized my life was not really my own anymore.

RM: Where did that clear sense of a call from God lead you?

BY: Not where I initially thought it would! I worked as a logger until Bernie graduated, then we moved back to Missouri, where she worked as a nurse while I went to a Christian college to finish my degree. An English major, I also studied Greek and as much Bible as I could. When I graduated, we moved back to Montana. I thought I’d be a bi-vocational pastor or church planter. I worked as a logger four days a week and worked in the church three days a week, but soon realized I still didn’t know the Bible very well. After a year, we moved to Illinois so I could attend Wheaton College grad school, where I did my MA while serving as interim pastor at two different Baptist churches in the Chicago area. I did tree work in the summer to make money. By then, we thought we would be missionaries in Europe.

Around this time, my professors encouraged me to pursue a PhD, so we went to Scotland for three years to do that. I eventually became a deacon at a little Scottish Baptist Union Church where Bernie and I also served as the youth leaders. In 1985, we came back to the US and I accepted a teaching appointment at Liberty University, while continuing to raise support to serve as missionaries at a seminary in Germany. After two years we hadn’t raised even half of what we needed. Then in 1987 Wheaton called me to fill a New Testament position. I taught there for four years and also served as an adult ed teacher at College Church. Near the end of that time, I was attracted to an ad for a New Testament professor at Covenant Seminary, and even though my ordination at that point was still with the SBC, they offered me the position—with the proviso that in two years I would have to be a Teaching Elder in the PCA.

So, I read up on the Reformed faith. I realized I was a Reformed Baptist. I had also realized from my years of study up to that point that I was a covenant theologian. As I re-read the Westminster Standards, I became convinced of a covenantal understanding of baptism. In April 1991 I moved my ordination to the PCA, and I taught at Covenant—the first time—from 1991 to 1996.

RM: What happened to draw you away from Covenant?

BY: Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, contacted me—three times—about teaching there. The third time, my wife said, “You should check it out.” I interviewed, but for several reasons, we initially did not want to go. But this was one of those times where God said, “You should go.” How do you know God is telling you something? One clue is you don’t want to hear it. You can’t always make decisions based on listing all the pros and cons. We had our list, and the only pro was, “We think this is what God wants us to do.” So, we went. We were there 14 years.

RM: And what brought you back to Covenant?

BY: We decided we needed to be in St. Louis to care for my aging mother and stepfather. Covenant had a New Testament opening and was willing to bring me back. We moved here in 2010, and I taught at Covenant while my wife left nursing to care for my mother and stepfather. She did that for the next 14 years. Both have passed away now. I was blessed to be able to do both of their funerals.

RM: I’d like to pick up on another thread of your story. I know you have for many years done annual teaching trips to train pastors in Africa and other places. How did that come about?

BY: When I was at Wheaton they had a program called the Wheaton Faculty Missions Project, which got requests from overseas for all kinds of teachers, especially Bible teachers. I started going on some of these trips, first to Cairo, Egypt, in 1989, then to Romania in 1990 and 1991. I came to Covenant in ’91, so missed a couple years, but beginning in 1994, since I had this established relationship with the Romanians, Wheaton sent me back. I went twice a year for one week each time from 1994 to 2007 Emanuel University there. In 1995, I went to Khartoum, Sudan, to Nile Theological College, a school supported and staffed mainly by Reformed and Presbyterian churches in the US. Sudan was unbearably hot and my students suffered terribly from malnutrition and living in refugee camps. There I saw the real hunger for the Word of God in developing nations. The Christians in Khartoum were persecuted and had nothing to eat, but they wanted training to become pastors!

From 1999 to 2012, I taught twice a year in Khartoum in addition to Romania. The sponsoring church was Presbyterian, the Khartoum Evangelical Church, founded over a hundred years ago. In 2012, we got shut out of Sudan, so in 2013, we went to South Sudan to train pastors for a week. Then a civil war started in South Sudan. So, in 2014, we started going to South Africa, and we still go every October for a week in Cape Town and Johannesburg.

RM: And this is all through the Wheaton project?

BY: Not after 1999. It’s too complicated to explain how it all evolved. It has to do with a trust fund in Britain, some generous Christian donors, and a Lutheran church in Chicago where I have connections and I preach occasionally. They put up a considerable amount of money each year to support this. It’s really just God raising up people who keep putting money in this fund, so we keep going. One of those donors is a doctor, a retina specialist, who went to Sudan in conjunction with our conference 13 times to provide cornea transplants for people who needed them. I once told him I couldn’t believe how the money kept coming. He said, “People keep giving because they know you’ll use it for what they give it for.”

His own Christian generosity was evident even beyond his medical expertise. One time as he headed back to the States, he handed me $400 and said, “Do something good with this before you leave.” That night I met with a group of recent Christian converts, among whom was a little girl who looked to be three or four years old but was actually eight. She had chronically infected tonsils and adenoids and could barely swallow. An operation to fix this would cost about $400, which was an absolute fortune for these people. Through my friend, the Lord had provided the funding. That had a powerful impact on the community. It was a blessing to be part of that.

RM: God certainly does some pretty amazing things through the generosity of his people.

BY: We’ve seen him do it many times. He’s also brought us through many close calls. Once in Khartoum my companion and I were confronted by four guys who saw us go through customs and knew we had money and computers. They were pretty threatening, but I didn’t see any weapons, so we pushed our way through to where people were waiting for us. That was a tense moment. Another time we were almost arrested at the airport because an informer told police we had been baptizing Muslims, which we had not. As we boarded the plane, we heard the loudspeaker call our names to come to the security desk. We got on the plane because the passport agents didn’t speak good English or recognize our names, but the plane was held while security came looking for us. They photocopied our passports and then, for reasons I don’t understand, let the plane go with us aboard. Shortly after that the persecution of Christians in Sudan increased dramatically. It turned out to be significant that the Presbyterian church in Khartoum had been able to encourage so many pastors in those conferences over the previous 13 years. Things are worse now, with the Christian minority caught in the middle of an ongoing war between rival Muslim armies. Some have fled to other countries but others aren’t able to get out.

RM: It sounds like God has greatly used those pastoral training conferences to encourage and build up his church for hard times.

BY: God never wastes the making of disciples. When you really connect with the people you’re helping to equip, it has a ripple effect—probably more than we know. God has ways of multiplying the effects of his work through us that we’re not able to plan for or foresee.

But that’s getting ahead of the story. As Sam tells it, everything began with his name.

“I was named after my mother’s father, who passed away from a massive heart attack around the time Mom graduated from high school. She vowed then that her first son would be named Samuel, partly because he was such a significant guy. He was the first black assistant principal and head principal in Henry County, Georgia, where I’m from. He was well-known and well-loved, and his death sent shockwaves through the community. So I inherited his name, but with that I also inherited a lot of expectations.”

People who knew the relationship weren’t trying to put pressure on Sam, but, he says, “I definitely internalized it that way, and put a lot of pressure on myself to be great because he was great.” Being the son and grandson of preachers also came with its own set of high expectations. In school, he was successful academically, and playing sports gave him another avenue for achievement. When his parents divorced it only added to his difficulty.

He tried harder and harder to be the “good kid” everyone thought he was and that he expected himself to be. He thought that’s what God wanted from him too. But it never worked. He always failed in some way. Eventually he realized he could never be perfect, so he gave up on that and decided to be a “bad kid” instead. He started college at Georgia Southern in Statesboro with that attitude and threw himself into campus life in many ways, some good, some not so good. One night in his freshman year, after an important relationship fell apart, he found himself lying on his bed in pain and confusion, with nothing to fall back on but what he remembered from growing up in church. He prayed, “God, I know I’m not living right. Can you please send someone to show me the way?” Again, as is often the case with God, he showed up in an unexpected way.

At the start of his sophomore year, while helping new freshmen move into the dorms, Sam came across a young man standing by himself. Sam struck up a conversation with the man and discovered they had a mutual interest in soccer. When they met later to kick around a soccer ball the man told Sam that his name was Andrew, that he was not a freshman but had recently graduated from Georgia College and State University, and that he was on campus working with a college ministry called Campus Outreach looking to develop young Christian leaders.

During a Bible study they did together. Andrew shared with Sam the evangelistic “bridge diagram” based on Romans 6:23 (“For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus.”) and how even the best efforts of an unholy man could not bridge the gap between him and a holy god—only Christ could do that.

Suddenly, everything clicked for Sam. “I understood at that moment that this whole thing is about Jesus and not at all about anything I could do. I finally understood why Jesus had to die for my sin—because he was perfect and I was not, and he took my place so I could live. He is the only way. I would say I became a Christian from that conversation.”

From that day on, Sam’s life slowly began to change. He got involved with Campus Outreach. He started to question his life goals and wondered if he wanted to be a pediatrician after all. His involvement in a plethora of campus organizations and leadership activities was teaching him a lot about what he was good at and opening up new possibilities he hadn’t considered. He thought about becoming an epidemiologist instead of a pediatrician. He decided he really liked mentoring people. He even entertained the idea of maybe being a teacher. He still struggled with being motivated by perfection and achievement, but he was slowly learning to let God’s grace have its way with him.

Then one summer he went to a conference related to Campus Outreach and heard a Christian singer sing a song based on Isaiah 6, “Here I Am, Send Me.” “When I heard that I thought: There are lots of people around the world who don’t know Christ. Could I be a missionary? Could I do some other kind of ministry?”

During his senior year, a friend again brought up the idea of being a missionary. Sam at first said no—then qualified his answer with, “Unless I’d be going to a Spanish-speaking country.” He’d always had an affinity for Latino culture, ever since a teacher in elementary school introduced him to the Spanish language. He took Spanish classes in high school and did a minor in it in college.

God apparently took Sam's off-hand comment a bit more seriously than Sam did. A week or two after the conversation, Sam attended a breakfast for graduating seniors that featured opportunities with various Christian organizations. One sounded particularly exciting: a two-year mission to Cusco, Peru, as part of a partnership between the PCA’s and Medical Campus Outreach.

The more he looked into it, the more attractive it sounded. “It involved a clinic in one of the poor areas of Cusco where they provide good medical care at reduced cost to people who wouldn’t normally have access to it. It would be a chance for me to shadow some doctors in actual practice and see if I still had any desire to be one. It would also give me a taste of serving in ministry. And it was in a Spanish-speaking country. It was one of those moments when you know God must really be listening to you!” In spite of some initial difficulty in raising financial support, Sam eventually made it to Cusco eager to dive into the culture and the work head-first.

His first surprise was that the Spanish he thought he knew so well was less help to him than he had hoped. The language in Peru was heavily influenced by Quechua (Inca) culture and many of the words are different than one might find in other Spanish-speaking countries.

The other surprise he encountered shocked him even more. He was unprepared for the level of internal conflict within the team he worked with. “It was crazy to me that Christians could not get along. I didn’t have a category for it. It was hard seeing these mature Christians, many of whom were well-established doctors, not getting along well with each other. At the end of the day, we’re all still sinners. It was a formative experience for me.”

Near the end of his two years in Peru, Sam had the opportunity to do some additional leadership assessment and training, for which he and some others were sent to Thailand. During the training, he gained some insight into relational dynamics that he thought could be helpful with his team back in Peru. One of the trainers asked him, “Well, Sam, how do you fit into all this conflict?” Sam said, “It really doesn’t have anything to do with me.” To which the trainer responded, “You’re a member of the team. Even if you’re not directly involved in the problem, you could be directly involved in the solution. You can contribute to the healing and reconciliation.” That hit home—hard. “This challenged me to rethink my role as a team member. I went back to Peru with a newfound appreciation for how God had gifted me, and with a new vision for ministry.” Unfortunately, by the time he got back, the team had completely fallen apart and many members had to return home. Sam finished out his time in Peru serving as an interpreter for other doctors from Canada and the US who could not speak Spanish.

But God used even that as another piece in the puzzle of Sam’s preparation for ministry. One day during a medical campaign, he was helping the doctors with a man who had terrible aches and pains, which the man attributed to the trauma he had experienced growing up. At that moment, Sam says, “There was no audible voice, but I sensed God telling me, ‘Sam, you’re not going to be a physical doctor, but a spiritual doctor.’ I realized in that moment that physical medicine has its limitations. You can diagnose sicknesses based on the symptoms and often there are vaccines that can provide immunity or medicines that can help or cure the sickness. But there are times when someone has experienced something so traumatic that there’s a sin issue, and no physical medicine can deal with sin. Only the gospel can do that. I felt like that was where God gave me my internal call to ministry.”

Sam returned to the States and to the church that had been instrumental in supporting him in Peru, First Presbyterian (PCA) in Augusta, Georgia. He interned at the church while also working for Campus Outreach at Paine College, an historically black college. He talked with one of the pastors at First Pres about his interest in seminary. The pastor said, “Sam, you could go anywhere for seminary, but Covenant Seminary produces great pastors. If you want to be a great pastor, that’s where you need to go.” So, Sam visited Covenant and loved it. “It just felt like a place with actual community life. It felt like a close-knit family.” He decided to start courses online part time and move to St. Louis later to complete his degree.

Meanwhile, the Lord continued working behind the scenes. Through a friend, Sam met Caroline, the woman who would soon be his wife. The relationship started slowly, but soon blossomed into the real deal. They talked early on about the inter-racial aspect of their relationship and both were willing to accept the challenges it might bring. Caroline was on board with Sam going to seminary and even had family members in St. Louis. So they married on June 12, 2021 (the anniversary of the date in 1967 when interracial marriage became legal in the US). Two weeks later, they moved to St. Louis, where Caroline now works as a teacher at a local school. Sam graduated with his MDiv in May 2024 and is now working on a Master of Arts in Counseling, which he'll finish in 2026. Meanwhile, he is gaining valuable experience by doing a pastoral residency at a local church called New City Fellowship–West End.

Of his time at Covenant, what has most helped shape Sam for ministry? “Definitely the story work we do here—understanding that God is writing a story and seeing how your story fits into that, how all our past experiences shape us. Then learning to reconcile with that past and acknowledge the joys and growth and grace of God in the midst of the pain. Knowing myself better makes me better able to love others.”

Now that he has a seminary degree and some ministry experience under his belt, what advice would Sam give to others thinking about ministry? “Trust God. That’s the clichĂ© answer, but it’s true. God really does care for his people. It’s been evident in my story. God provides everything needed along the way, and he grows us into the people he wants us to be. Trust him.”

Note: This article first appeared in the spring 2024 edition of Covenant magazine. Get your copy or subscribe to Covenant here.

Rick Matt (RM): Brian, thanks for agreeing to take time from your sabbatical to share your story with us. What have you been doing with your time while you’ve not been teaching this spring?

Brian Aucker (BA): Mostly, I’m working on a commentary on First Kings and trying to make progress on that. I’ve outlined it in detail and now I’m inductively firing questions at the text as I walk through it. I’m hoping that will help me make connections with things that come up later in the book so I can address them more thoroughly. It’s going well but slowly. That’s the main project right now. But I’m also trying to do some renovation work around my house. It needs a lot of help! It’s a huge undertaking; like a second job, really. We’ll see how it goes.

RM: Sounds like you’ll be very busy for the next several months! Like all our profs, I know you spend lots of time with students outside the classroom and often form deep friendships with them. But not everybody gets to hear the details of profs’ personal stories and how the Lord brought them to where they are today. Can you give us a sense your own story? How has God been working in the life of Brian Aucker?

BA: It’s hard to know where to begin, but I’ll start with this. A couple of years ago, my mother had an unexpected, extended illness which led to her death. I was one of her primary caregivers. One day she was particularly distressed, and I asked what the matter was. She said, “When you were born, I struggled with post-partum depression. I was concerned that I might kill you. So, I prayed that God would help me through that and if he did, I would dedicate you to him.” That was a strange thing to hear, especially since I didn’t grow up in a Christian home. We didn’t attend church at all. So this was news to me and got me thinking about how I got where I am.

I was a pretty good student as a kid and seemed to enjoy school, but for various reasons, I went off the rails in my high school and college years. There was absolutely no reason I should have gotten into college with my academic record. But I had played lacrosse in high school, which got me noticed by a college coach, so I ended up going to college based on that. I never really played because I was so off the rails at that point. But the Lord got hold of me in my sophomore year and began to straighten me out.

I was a biology major and I decided to pursue something called nuclear medicine. This was the early 1980s. Nuclear medicine is basically a branch of diagnostic radiology, using radiopharmaceuticals to help diagnose and treat various illnesses. Then in the mid-1980s magnetic resonance imaging became more clinically available as well. So, after college I worked for a company that did nuclear medicine and MRI, while my wife Pam and I got married and started our family. I did that all through my twenties.

I also worked at my church, doing some small group leadership and Sunday school teaching. I enjoyed it. I had been thinking about seminary and did some classes through a local seminary in Maryland called Chesapeake Theological Seminary. It had been started by a Covenant Seminary alumnus. At that time there weren’t any online or hybrid options, so the school was a way for people to continue to serve in their local congregations but also get better prepared for ministry. I also visited Covenant in 1986. One of the guys I stayed with on campus, Khen Tombing, had an incredible impact on me in such a short time. I was also deeply impressed by the sense I had of full-orbed, fully organic care for the students and community, for the whole family. My pastor at home had graduated from another seminary but he encouraged me to come here, which I decided to do.

Soon after that, though, I got a call from a physician I had trained with who was planning to build an MRI facility. He asked if I would be the technical director of that facility, which I agreed to do. So that led me in a very different direction for a couple of years. I didn’t get back to Covenant until 1992. By that time, I was 32 years old, but that’s the trajectory the Lord had me on. Of course, I needed a way to support my growing family while in seminary. It so happened that Missouri Baptist Hospital, just up the road, had a desperate need of someone with nuclear medicine experience. They hired me per diem, and I worked for them as much as I could all four years I was at Covenant.

RM: It sounds like the Lord took you on quite a roundabout path before bringing you here to study. How did you go from being a Covenant student to being a Covenant professor?

BA: That same kind of irregular path continued while I was a student. Early on, my parents went through a difficult divorce that impacted me, my brothers, and my mom for many years. But again, the Lord knew what he was doing. My first class here was summer Greek taught by . There were many guys in that class who are now or were at some point professors and colleagues of mine, people who had a huge impact on me: Jimmy Agan, Zack Eswine, Mike Higgins, to name a few. , , and started teaching here near the end of my student years. But Dr. Phil Long really impacted me greatly with his Old Testament Historical Books class. His teaching on Samuel was remarkable. I had no idea this kind of narrative existed or that it was so rich. I hadn’t been raised in the church and I didn’t know the Bible well at all. How I even passed the Bible Content Exam I don’t know. It was definitely a Holy Spirit thing.

Phil was good friends with Iain Provan, who taught at Edinburgh and had written an excellent commentary on Kings, in which he talked about the need for the church to recapture the Old Testament. I had never heard that idea stated the way he said it. It grabbed me. Providentially, he happened to be coming to the States at one point, so Phil took a bunch of students to lunch with Iain and we got to know him a bit. Through that I decided I wanted to go to Edinburgh to study with him. The question was, how to make it happen financially. There was no way we could do it ourselves and my parents’ marriage was completely dissolving at this point. Then God providentially stepped in again. My wife had a “chance” encounter in the library on campus with someone who had heard about my interest in studying overseas and our need for financing. He said he knew someone who might be able to help and if we could get him a budget, he would see what he could do. We gave him that information, and then one day not long before I was set to graduate, our phone rang. It was this man and he said—and I quote— “I don’t know if you have a fattened calf but if you do you ought to slaughter it. I have someone who’s willing to give you $75,000.” And he came over and gave us a check for $25,000, with the promise of $25,000 more for the next couple of years. With no strings attached. To this day I have no categories for that. And that’s how I ended up going to Edinburgh to study.

RM: So, you got to study with Iain Provan, the guy who wrote that commentary you liked?

BA: Yes, but only partly. After the first year, Iain took a call to Regent College in Vancouver, which was a bit disheartening to me at the time. He eventually also convinced Phil Long to go to Regent, which is another twist in the story, because Phil then called me and asked if I’d like to come back to Covenant and teach his classes as an adjunct. I was thrilled to have that opportunity, so I said yes, and came back here in August of 2000. I had finished my classwork in Edinburgh, but my thesis wasn’t done yet, so that made things a bit challenging, having to prep for and teach all Phil’s classes while trying to finish the thesis. It was a hard time, but it taught me that I liked being in the classroom teaching. But around the time that school year was finishing up, there was a ministry opportunity at Covenant Church near the Seminary and I went to serve there as an assistant pastor. I did that for three years while looking for other academic positions. I felt increasingly that I was called to be in the classroom.

Then, once more through a connection I had with someone at the Seminary, I found out about the need for a Bible teacher at Westminster Christian Academy nearby. It was a great experience teaching high school students. They are remarkable. They don’t let you get away with anything. Adults will figure out ways to check out in the classroom without letting you know they’ve checked out. High schoolers just say, “You’re boring,” and put their heads on their desks. But it was a good experience. It certainly gave me a lot more practice in classes and grading and all of that. Then after about three years at Westminster, I got a call from the dean of academics at the Seminary asking if I’d be interested in applying for an OT position at Covenant. I said yes. That was in 2007 and I’ve been here ever since.

RM: It’s been quite a wild ride, hasn’t it?

BA: It certainly has. God has taken me on a remarkable journey to get to this point where I can use whatever gifts he’s given me for his glory. In the midst of that, I’m conscious of a sense of obligation and gratitude, of what we owe the Lord for his mercies and what he invests in us. Hardly a week goes by that I don’t think of the fact that someone, by God’s grace, had the funds to help me get to Scotland with no strings attached. That just doesn’t happen! But if you hang around Covenant long enough, you’ll find many people with similar stories of God’s amazing grace.

RM: I love hearing how God does his work in people’s lives. He never wastes anything, any experience.

BA: Yes, that’s true. All that experience in the medical world helped me as a pastor to know how things work so I was able to be a help and comfort to sick people and their families. Other people have similar stories of how the Lord somehow used their previous experience to benefit a new calling.

One of the great things about working at Covenant is that, when it’s appropriate, I can share with students the stories of God’s grace and providence in my life. I never take for granted the fact that I’m here or they’re here. I don’t deserve to be here and neither do they. I’m just a guy trying to do the job God brought me to using the gifts he gave me. I don’t know what he’s doing in their lives but I can encourage them with what he’s done in mine. They need to know that it’s not only the classroom stuff you need. The really big lessons come from just living life and trusting God in whatever is thrown your way. That’s the real preparation for ministry.

Note: This article first appeared in the spring 2024 edition of Covenant magazine. Get your copy or subscribe to Covenant here.

Rev. DAVIS MOONEY (MDiv ’19)

Raised in Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, in a Christian family, Davis Mooney’s faith began to grow through his involvement with Reformed University Fellowship (RUF) in college. There, the care and mentorship of a faithful campus minister helped him develop his own gifts for ministry. That led to an internship with RUF and eventually a move to St. Louis to pursue ministry training at Covenant Seminary. Today, Davis is excited to be sharing the gospel with the next generation of believers as Pastor for Students and Families at Hope PCA in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he resides with his wife, Hannah, and their two young sons. Below is part of a conversation with Davis, who was one of the recipients of our Founders Scholarship during his last year at Covenant.

Can you share some of your story and the path that led to you pursue ministry?

It’s remarkable to look back on my life and see the Lord’s great faithfulness, which began even before I was born. He placed me in a Christian family and a solid PCA church where people reflected Christ’s love to me as I grew. In my third-grade Sunday school class, God began to open my eyes to his love for me and my need of his grace. Then, when I was 17, my father passed away suddenly of a heart attack, and God revealed to me both his comforting presence and my need for Christian community. He provided that again when I went to college through the ministry of RUF and a wonderful campus minister who helped me grieve the loss of my father and pointed me to the gospel. His friendship, example, and influence opened the door for considering ministry myself, and led to a two-year internship with RUF at Virginia Tech, which only increased my passion for sharing God and his Word. I knew I needed more training, so I began to think about going to seminary.

Why did you come to Covenant Seminary for the training you needed?

I wanted to dig deeper into the rich, biblically rooted Reformed theology to which I had been exposed at my home church and through RUF. I also wanted a deeply relational seminary so that I could build strong long-term relationships with fellow students. My RUF campus minister at Virginia Tech was a Covenant graduate and always spoke highly of his experience there. It was clear to me from his preaching style and the gracious and pastoral way he interacted with students that he was living out what he had learned at Covenant. My pastor at home was also passionate about Covenant and believed strongly in the school and the kind of pastors it produces. It was evident to me that Covenant would be academically rigorous and but also concerned with developing spiritual health and pastoral sensitivity in the leaders it trains. I certainly found that to be the case.

In what ways did your Covenant experience help to further prepare you for ministry?

God used Covenant to draw me closer to himself in so many ways. The professors often reminded us that we are not the end of our own learning but are called to rejoice in the Lord’s faithfulness to his sinful people and to share that good news with others. Their passion for what God’s Word is clear, and their humility, pastoral sensitivity, and understanding of their own need for grace are the basis of everything they do. They are great pastors as well as remarkable scholars and are always willing to share themselves and their lives with students both in and out of class. They could be talking about exegetical issues one minute then sharing how the Lord was working in their hearts or asking for prayer about something the next, then transitioning back again to the Bible—and relating all of these together seamlessly. I pray the Lord will use me in the same way as an instrument for advancing his Kingdom as I apply the academic knowledge and the pastoral sensitivity I learned at Covenant.

What did the Founders Scholarship mean to you during your last year at Covenant?

When I first heard I had received the scholarship, I was astounded. My wife and I were expecting our first child and weren’t sure how we would provide for our growing family. The scholarship was a fantastic blessing, not only financially but also as an affirmation of my call to ministry. We are so grateful to those who gave so generously to bless us in this way. We couldn’t have done it without them. Thank you!

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