Integrating Missionally

In 1997, I was pastoring my first church out of seminary. It was in Louisiana, literally in the middle of no where. It was a young church that had been without a pastor for almost two years before I arrived. They forced their first pastor out by cutting his salary and making life hard. After less than a year, they were doing the same to me.

I was married just over a year and loved my wife dearly. During the week of Mother’s Day that year, she flew to spend time with her mom and dad and I spent that week praying and fasting. It was during the first night of that journey that God broke through and in very clear terms indicated that I was to resign. Two weeks later I did. We sold our house (3 days, all cash) and moved to my in-laws’ condo in Central Florida.

My wife’s cousin knew a guy who had started an internet company, and since I had a degree in computer information systems, he gave me a shot to do some light database work. That led into internet programming. That led into more intense programming and five years and two companies later, I had done work for Microsoft, a Top 5 CPA firm, the 4th largest law firm in the US, and the largest association of retailers in the country. I would go on to do some contract work for a division of AOL/Time Warner.

I had not only programming experience, but enterprise systems administration experience. I had load-balanced web servers, clustered databases and managed some pretty rugged hardware. I was good, not the best by any means, but good and respected among my peers. I still mess around with coding some and often tell my friends that while I can make things work, I don’t always know how to make things pretty!

I have recently reflected back on those days with fondness and disdain. It was good money and I got a thrill out of solving problems and working on different projects. However, I also knew what it was like to work 80-100 hour weeks, to neglect my family, and to live an unhealthy lifestyle.I was thankful to get back into ministry.

As I reflected back on my programming experience, I thought about those I followed and the joy and struggle of figuring out how they wrote code. Programmers often have a signature way of writing code. You can tell their code from others, you can tell their influences, and you can learn a lot about their maturity as a programmer. You can even assess how they think.

For instance, I break everything down into functions. If it can be broken down and used more than once, it immediately goes into a function. I once did some highly complex programming for a web project where everything was a function. The web page code was a series of function calls that were part of a separate file. Some functions did complex work and others just wrote out html.

In having to understand other people’s code, programming is a lot like doing biblical hermeneutics. So in a new series I have entitled “A programmer’s guide to biblical hermeneutics”, I want to try to assert what I am calling a relational hermeneutic. I will walk you through how programmers write their own code and how they decipher other programmer’s code. I will then apply that to biblical hermeneutics and try to demonstrate the importance of a relational hermeneutic.

I hope to provide you with an unique perspective on interpreting scripture as a result.

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