Previously I mentioned that explaining why I have chosen to switch to the PsyD program deserved a separate post as it has been quite the journey. Many people knew that I had a strong sense of calling to lead a Twelve step Recovery ministry in a church. I even came to Fuller in part because Fuller offers an M Div with a recovery ministry emphasis. Obviously switching to the PsyD program, to do clinical psychology work, represents a significant change of plans for me that has surprised some. I decided to explain how I cam to this decision fully but I should provide some backstory that begins in Canada.
I have felt called to ministry since 2002. I felt called to go to TWU (a Christian college in British Columbia) and gave up a full-ride to UCSD and a military career to obey God’s call. On my drive up I figured if God wanted me to be an English teacher or a marine biologist He could have done that at UCSD, so I looked for a “Christian major” and settled into Biblical Studies since though I had been in church forever I knew I was very biblically illiterate.
During my four years at TWU I began to notice that both on and off campus I was drawn to people and places of pain, with a desire to bring healing. Two places deserve mention: the Lower-East side of Vancouver and Ft. Babine.
Street-Evangelism is what took me to the Lower-East Side. Street-E is a ministry where TWU students participate in evangelism on Friday nights in the Lower-East Side, which is apparently the #1 place for open-drug use in North America. I experienced this first hand as people lit up crack-pipes as casually as cigarettes with police officers only half of a block away. I was staring my own demon, addiction, in the face and did not even know it.
I later volunteered to be part of two missions trips to Ft. Babine, a First Nations reservation in central British Columbia. While there, especially in the first year, I came to love the reserve and the First Nations people. Missions work on the reserve involved a lot of doing life together and a lot of the outdoors. To do fishing, hiking, canoeing, and camping (and if I am honest, poaching…my bad Canada…) as part of missions work was a blessing. Native culture is also way more relaxed and relational. On top of that my skin color also proved especially beneficial. Even though I was clear about my heritage, I look Native. This allowed me to side-step some of the difficulties Caucasians face with working with Native Americans. I began to prayerfully consider if God was calling me to work with First Nations/Native American people.
Reservations are also places of deep pain. Abuse of every kind, poverty, sickness and addiction thrive on the reservations, at times to the point where they choke out life. My second trip to Ft. Babine a lot of my own pain that I had not dealt with was triggered by the environment and I shut down, trying to withdraw as best I could while “leading” the missions trip. I was staring my own pain, the abuse in my past, in the face and I did not even know it.
In each of these situations I felt drawn to them but also ill-equipped. I showed up but then felt like I did not have anything to offer other than, “I’ll pray for you.” Given the nature of my struggle with faith, even this felt empty. After I got into recovery and experienced the Twelve Steps I began to feel equipped and felt like I finally had something to offer the people that I felt called to. From there it just made sense to become a recovery pastor, so in short order I was off to Fuller.
In all of this I was still considering working with Native Americans. Oddly enough it seemed God was continuing to groom me towards that goal as working with Tapestry and living in West Modesto was very practical training. Native American missions are rapidly urbanizing and many of the First Nations youth have adopted Hip-hop culture as their own.
However, I quickly came to suspect that an M Div is a horrible education to get if I wanted to actually help people.
To be fair, as part of the M Div program here at Fuller I have taken some classes that have equipped me to help people better, namely the Pastoral Care classes. Yet none of these classes are core requirements and I have eaten up most of my electives to take them. As I began to look ahead in the future and what classes were actually core requirements I quickly began to get disillusioned. Was Systematics 3 or Church History B really going to help me as I worked with addicts?
This issue was hammered home one day in a conversation with a colleague at work. A very intelligent academic we struck up a conversation about academia and I listened at length to his beliefs, career goals and thoughts. In processing what he was talking about I developed what I now call my “Roy filter.”
Roy was a man I met at Ft. Babine. One morning I met him outside his house. He was completely drunk at 9:00am and he had beer in one hand and a flask of rum in the other. Whenever I am assessing if something will equip me to help addicts I simply ask myself, “Would this help Roy or would this help me help Roy?” This is my “Roy Filter.” When used to assess M Div program as a whole (and most theological education in general) the answer is a huge “No.”
I am not going to look at Roy and say, “Roy what you need to really understand is what Kierkegaard has to say in Fear and Trembling…” or “What you need to do is recover the scandal of the cross as directed to by Dr. Joel Green…” or “You see in Deep Church Jim Belcher explained how the current generation of Christians is seeking to blend old stuff with new stuff and how he did it…” or “If only you would get the gospel of Jesus Christ like Anslem did! (or Luther did, or Calvin did, or I do…)”
In the real world, the world where addicts live, none of this matters.
I fear that much of our theological education is only really applicable in certain sectors of our insular Western Christian sub-culture. In my experience of the Christian church we are a world within a world; we are more a gated community than a city set on a hill. Most of our theology, if it is applicable at all, only applies to our community. While I do believe that one’s beliefs drives one’s practices and in this theology can be very important, I think a lot of what we argue about, write about, and devote a lot of time and effort to are either pointless endeavors (do we really need to know how atonement works?) or not applicable to the world beyond our walls which is in desperate need.
The world is in too much pain to sit and debate Calvinism vs. Arminianism.
At this same time that I was reconsidering the value of an M Div I had been in counseling for several months and was starting to see benefits and nature of counseling. I had also came to see seen how problematic it would be to try to establish and run a Twelve Step program on a reservation because of the nature of the community.
A watershed moment came when Dr. Anderson in my Pastoral Care and Addictions class (yes that was very useful to me) told the theology students in the class to refer out to a trained professional when they hit a certain level of addiction. Hold the phone. I thought. I do not feel called to refer out, I feel called to work with addicts. When I pressed her on this issue and made plain my desire to work with addicts in what would probably be a very remote environment she said flatly, “Well then get your PsyD.” While she said it jokingly at first she repeated it more seriously and explained herself a little bit more.
After much prayer (with no answer), examining the steps necessary to switch programs, talking to many PsyD students and friends about my decision, and a careful consideration of the risks I decided to switch program. It just made sense.
By switching to the PysD I will receive training that I do not have and cannot get on my own. I have some training in theology and if I want to go deeper in theology I can always read; I cannot simply cross over and start doing professional counseling work. While I will end up with a lot more debt but I will be in a much better position to pay back my loans and there are many debt forgiveness programs available, especially if you want to work with an under-served population…like Native Americans.
In several years cold be working for the government on a native reservation, earning debt forgiveness on top of my normal salary (which would be substantially greater than a starting minister’s salary). In short, I switched programs because by doing so I could better trained to work with addicts, be doing exactly what I wanted, paid well to do it, and be earning down my debt very rapidly.
Speakfaithfully 
Christians and Dating: Dating at Fuller – Fishing in a Fishbowl
Gauging by the amount of site hits, search strings that lead back to my posts, and general conversation with my friends I can gather a general sense of what people want to talk and think more about.
One of the hottest topics among my peers is dating.
This should not be surprising given the life stage that I and my of my peers are in. I, like many of my friends, am a single Christian who wants marriage and family to be part of his future. Unless one believes that a ready made spouse will show up, which I don’t, one must go through meeting new people, dating and relationship building. For me this means I must work on myself, I must work on how I relate to the opposite sex, and I must be willing to take the risks inherent to dating. This is how the game is played and I’m putting my hat in the ring.
To this end I am going to be writing more about my experiences, reflections and thoughts regarding dating. Dating for me is new territory and fertile ground for self-reflection and growth. Just to be clear, I am not going to be giving a play by play of any dates that I go on, nor divulging any juicy details of great conversations I’ve had with a woman I am getting to know. Just because I am fantastically open and transparent about my life doesn’t mean I lack common sense in regards to privacy.
To begin…
Since my post regarding dating I have received a lot comments and had number of conversations on the issue. A number of people have complained about the nature of dating at Fuller, which I would like to think more about. At first glance, dating at seminary should be simple enough. Like college, I am once again surrounded by a lot of young Christian single women who are generally speaking amazing people. In my experience I rarely run into uninteresting, unmotivated and insincere people at Fuller. Both men and women at seminary have generally had some life experiences and are figuring out what they want from life or are already making forward progress to their goals.
However, one of the most frustrating situations at Fuller, and one that I hear complained about most often, is how small the pool of eligible bachelors and bachelorettes is and the problems that this brings. Of the five thousand students that technically attend Fuller for any one person looking to date at Fuller there is only a handful of people who will be practically available to date. When you cut out the married couples, couples that are already dating, extension campus students in other cities, commuters students who you never see, foreign students (who are also almost always married – even if you were down for a “cross-cultural exchange”), and students in other programs (Dear beautiful Psych/MFT ladies: I know you are busy but it is okay to talk to people from other programs) the actual dating pool that exists at Fuller is much smaller than one would initially think. This is before we even begin to talk about who an individual person is physically attracted to, compatible with, and whose life goals are at least somewhat in-line. Because the singles community is so small it creates a situation that my counselor has described as “incestuous.” While the language might be a bit over the top I think he names a common tension many people feel but do not talk about. Let me explain…
There are many women at Fuller that I am interested in getting to know. I literally had a list of eight women that I wanted to get to know coming into this quarter. They ranged from very specific names to “That girl with the amazing hair in the library” (you know who you are). But I was instantly hit by a problem. Many of these women know each other. What will they think if I they learn I asked both of them out to coffee or was flirtatious with both of them in the same quarter? Two of them study together regularly in the library and are friends. I am genuinely interested in getting to know both of them but feel like I have to pick one. In this context attempting to just get to know both beyond a surface level could give me a negative reputation on campus. Done wrong, I could easily develop a reputation for being “that guy” who just “leads girls on.” This one I can’t talk to because my friend liked her last year and it didn’t work out. This one I can’t get ask out on a date because my friend is crushing on her madly but refuses to ask her out. I am at a party and I am trying to get to know three of the girls there. How do I approach this situation without sending the signals of “I’m not interested in you” or “I’m taken with someone else” when I really have made no such commitment. If I start dating a girl in my community of friends it might work out great, but if it ends badly our friends have to take sides and we might have to split up our friends like a divorced couples has to split up their kids.
Dating at Fuller is akin to fishing in a fishbowl: the size of the community seriously limits the possibilities and adds a lot of drama and tensions that would otherwise not exist. I fear this is why many incredible people who want to get married some day are simply not dating. Incredible catches are content with being “just friends” with the opposite sex and seem to perpetually stay there. I was recently given a high five from a friend for doing what she just recently complained many men are not doing: I asked a girl at Fuller out on a date.
(Sidenote: I am very tempted to name names of some of my quality guy friends who are the apple of many a single woman’s eye on campus but who are for some reason not dating. Restraining myself and exerting self-control in this area is an incredible feat of surrender and a testament to the Twelve Step program.)
Some of these are obstacles that can be overcome with a little work. For example going out to seminary-wide events and accepting invites to go out with new communities is a relatively straightforward one. One could go out of one’s way to meet people from another program. However, some of these just come with the territory.
At this point some people might be tempted to complain about the nature of Fuller and this is what I have historically done in the past. I am routinely frustrated when I meet amazing women who are for one reason or another unavailable. However, to suggest that “all the good ones are taken” is a pit I want to try and avoid. There are over six billion people, roughly half of them are women, many of these women share my values and faith, and I live in the L.A. area. To suggest that “all the good ones are taken” I would have to bury my head in the sand.
I am convinced the solution to the challenges of dating at Fuller is not about changing Fuller, but about widening the dating pool of one’s life. If it appears all the good ones are taken, you need to meet more good ones. This takes intentionality, work and time. My friend Leah responded to my previous blog and lamented how difficult following Dr. Cloud’s advice regarding this point is. I would agree. It is hard work. It can be fun, and rewarding if we have a good attitude about it, but it does take time and intentionality to meet new available singles. It is especially hard work for those who think that God will just drop off a spouse for them one day as asking such people to do anything is requiring them to do more than they were doing previously.
The classic avenue to do this in Christian circles is often to get more plugged in at Church, especially the young adult or singles ministries. Sometimes this is bemoaned and people do not like the “meat-market” mentality at Church. While I get this, and I would hate to be labeled as “that guy” who joined a mixed small group to meet women, would people rather I meet women at bars, or clubs, or public parks, or bus stations? If I am looking for a woman who has a lot of the same values as me, the Church is probably the best place for that. However, a lot of the young adult communities in Churches run into the same problems at seminaries. Unless your single’s ministry or young adult community is very large you are going to meet the same singles and you’re going to hit the same tensions that exist at Fuller.
Some people see where I am going with this. The biggest pool out there is online dating. And as some have guessed I joined a number of online dating sites, including eHarmony.com, match.com and plentyoffish.com to experience these for myself before I advocate for their use by other Chrisitans. In my next post I’ll talk about online dating and my initial experience of these sites.