It’s not every day all five of us are on the podcast, and we wish it was for a more cheerful reason. But in this episode, we say goodbye to Foreword as we’ve known it.

As the Foreword team goes our separate ways, we want to express what a pleasure it has been to do this together. It’s been a highlight for each of us during our time together, and we hope that it’s been enjoyable for you too. And we, of course, want to thank our producer Curtis Pierce, without whom none of this would have ever been possible, our graduate assistant, Lauren, and especially you. Thank you for investing in us, in our guests, and in the Church we are all striving to serve.

These words are the last in our Foreword.

Our final guest for the season is Dr. Ahmi Lee, author of God’s Grand Drama: A Biblical Theological Approach. Ahmi is an MDiv. graduate of TEDS, and she also gave the 42nd Annual Rohm Lectures on Preaching on campus this year. She has taught at Fuller Theological Seminary, and is now the Chief Partnership Officer at Resource Global, a Christian nonprofit organization dedicated to equipping young professionals for having an impact for the gospel in their contexts. She is interviewed by Dr. Michelle Knight and Dr. Madison Pierce.

Ahmi begins by sharing her calling to develop Christian marketplace leaders to make a difference for Christ at Resource Global, along with her prior experiences teaching preaching at Fuller. Her discovery of this calling originated from a life of preaching and ministry, beginning in South Korea and Japan. The secular and pluralistic environment she encountered in Japan instilled in her a desire to share the gospel to those around her. Ahmi reflects how these experiences taught her how to be a flexible preacher who listens to her or his people in order to identify areas where God is already working. She also speaks about how the church can be both faithful and faithless, beautiful and ugly, but how God still operates through all of it. The group then shift to discuss Ahmi’s book on preaching. She notes how her approach splits the difference between a more traditional, propositional approach and a more listener-based approach. To do so, she recommends four “perspectives” to which the preacher ought to attend when she or he preaches. From there she talks about her future project on the office of the pastor and the benefits the early church can provide. In particular, there are lessons to be learned from these figures on how to preach during difficult times. She concludes with some recommendations on how to prepare sermons, the role of delight in that process, and how one’s understanding of God ought to be formative.

Along the way, listeners will discover…

• What it’s like to do street preaching in Japan when you’re a highschooler
• Ahmi’s hopes for pastors and teachers as they construct beautiful things
• The best tools for preaching in a way that invites others into God’s great drama

To learn more about Dr. Ahmi Lee, you can watch her Rohm Lecture here, you can watch the follow-up Q&A here, you can acquire her book here, or you can see the kind of work she does with Resource Global here.

Joining Foreword this week is Dr. David C. Kirkpatrick, Assistant Professor of Religion at James Madison University. David is a historian of religion, politics, and social movements working at the intersection of Latin America and the United States. He completed a PhD. at the University of Edinburgh’s prestigious Centre for the Study of World Christianity, but not before passing his way through TEDS, earning an MDiv and MA in Intercultural Studies. Dr. Fellipe do Vale and Dr. Madison Pierce have a lovely conversation about David’s work on Latin American Evangelicals and their contributions to understandings of how evangelicalism is defined.

David’s work focuses on 20th-century figures like René Padilla, Samuel Escobar, and Orlando Costas, evangelical theologians who called for a holistic understanding of the gospel that extended to concern for the poor as a corrective to approaches that neglected such dimensions. They trained alongside and in conversation with familiar figures like John Stott and Carl F.H. Henry, yet often speaking from convictions forged in their own Latin American contexts. There is something noticeably distinct about these figures; while they are recognizably evangelical in their doctrinal commitments, they also differed strongly from their North American conversation partners on social issues, even whether Christians ought to engage them, and David brings out these differences well. This, of course, is a fundamental question about what the gospel is and its relationship to every element of life, and the answer of these evangelicals is illuminating for the contemporary concerns of many Christians. Finally, David shares about his rewarding experiences teaching in a research university as a Christian.

Along the way, listeners will discover…

• What makes the state of Wisconsin so wonderful
• What Madison was like as a seminary classmate
• Which TEDS professors had the biggest impact on David in shaping his studies

To learn more about Dr. David C. Kirkpatrick, we encourage you to check out his book, and keep an eye out for his two other forthcoming books, Global Visions of Violence: Agency and Persecution in World Christianity and Blood and Borders: Violence and Intolerance at the Intersection of Latin America and the United States. See also his department page at JMU, where he teaches some excellent courses!