Beeson Podcast, Episode 347 Bernard and Betsy Howard July 4, 2017 Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George. Timothy George: Welcome to today's Beeson Podcast. Today, we're coming to you right here from New York City, and I have the privilege of having an interview today with two wonderful young people. I think I can still call them young. They're not teenagers, but wonderful young people who are engaged in ministry here in New York City, church planting, Bernard Howard and his wife, Betsy Howard. Welcome to the Beeson Podcast. Bernard Howard: It's very good to be here. Betsy Howard: Thank you. Timothy George: Now, we know Betsy quite well because she was actually the director of the Beeson Podcast for some time. That's before they were married. They've been married for two years, and they're doing wonderful work for the Lord here in this great city. I want to begin with you, Bernard. Maybe just tell us a little bit about your own coming to faith in Jesus Christ, your background and how that relates to who you are in Christ today. Bernard Howard: I come from a Jewish background, liberal Jewish. It's said that where you have three Jewish people, you have four opinions, and one of those would be liberal Judaism, which is ... I suppose you could call it a relaxed or easy-going approach to the Law. We ate bacon on the weekends, for example. That would be one example. We did go to synagogue a few times a year, and probably the most meaningful thing that I did from the Jewish perspective growing up was have a bar mitzvah when I was 13 years old, and that involved reciting a lot of Hebrew, a passage from the Torah. Now, I felt at that age, 13, 14, 15, that I hadn't received the big answers to life's questions through Judaism. I felt I was still left with those big questions: Why are we here, and what's the point of life, especially in view of death? I really thought about death quite a lot, and it seemed to me that after death, I would be forgotten and everything that I had ever done would also be forgotten. That seemed to rob life of its purpose. If everything that you're doing is going to be totally forgotten, then why put effort and blood, sweat, and tears into doing it? That really troubled me. When I later read the book of Ecclesiastes, I remember thinking, "That's it. He's got it." Timothy George: All is vanity. So, yeah. Bernard Howard: Yeah. I had seen that as a young teenager. I was looking for answers and I went along at my high school to a Christian group to hear what they had to say. The speaker who came in to give the talk, must have been 15, 20 minute long talk, very clear explanation of John chapter 3, verses 14 and 15. No need for verse 16, the famous verse, so we had 14 and 15. "Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the son of man must be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him may have eternal life." The speaker explained what the reference to Moses and the snake in the desert was all about and said that just as the Israelites were saved from the problem of the venomous snakes, so we would be safe from the problem of our sin if we looked to Jesus on the cross. So rather than looking to the bronze snake on the pole like the Israelites, we needed to look to Jesus on the cross to be saved from our sin, and they explained what sin was. I was at an all boys boarding school, so the explanation of sin, that made a lot of sense to me. When you are at an all boys boarding school, you know that there is sin, that there is bad, evil behavior. So I found the whole talk extremely persuasive. There was a prayer at the end which I prayed. I was still a bit unsure. I went to the speaker and said, "It sounds great, but I guess it's not for me, because I'm Jewish." Fortunately, he had an excellent answer. He said, "Of course it's for you." He said, "Jesus was Jewish himself. If you follow him, you're following your own messiah." He told me about a friend of his who was Jewish and had begun following Jesus, and he said that he was now following his own messiah and was doing the most Jewish thing that it was possible to do: following Jesus as the Jewish messiah. That was very helpful to have that reassurance, because I didn't want to stop being Jewish if I possibly could. So to hear that I could believe in this Jesus and have eternal life, as those verses from John offered, was wonderful news. I think from that night on, I was a follower of Jesus. Timothy George: What a great account of how you came to faith in Jesus Christ and how God used that particular text in the gospel of John chapter three to bring you to that moment of commitment. Now, we don't have a lot of time for you to tell the whole story of how you got from that moment of commitment as a young Jewish man, now a believer in Jesus, to planting a church here in Manhattan, an Anglican church, but why don't you tell us a little bit about the story of the Church of the Good Shepherd? That's the title, the name of your church? Bernard Howard: Good Shepherd Anglican Church. Timothy George: Good Shepherd Anglican Church, which is on the upper west side of New York City where you and Betsy live, and both of you are engaged in this ministry. Tell us about this church. Bernard Howard: It does relate to my background, because the big attraction of New York, to me, was its Jewishness. It's a remarkably Jewish city, and the upper west side is particularly Jewish. It's really one third of the residence are Jewish, which for Jewish population is vast. The number of Jewish people worldwide is very, very small, and across the United States as a whole, it's just 2%. So to have 32% in a very significant residential part of New York, the upper west side, is remarkable and unlike any other big city in the English-speaking world. I was very drawn to it. I just thought if I can do ministry here, I'll be among Jewish people and there'll be opportunities along the way to speak to them about Jesus. I have friends in Britain where I'd been trained in what you might call regular church of England ministry, evangelical ministry, on that side of the church of England. They found it hard to understand why I would want to come to America, because from the British point of view, America is the land of Christian plenty, whereas Britain is very spiritually barren. So to go from a spiritually barren nation to the land of Christian plenty was hard for them to understand. I had to explain it's the Jewishness of New York in particular that is the great appeal for me. Timothy George: Yeah. Out of this vision has come the Anglican Church of the Good Shepherd, and you're the rector. We should say this is a very new experiment in church planting. You, when we're recording this, are three months old as a church, right? Betsy Howard: Yes. We started in March, 2017. Timothy George: Yeah. So how's it going? Bernard Howard: Well, relatively well. The two big unknowns for us were: Would we have enough people for it to be viable? Like most church plants, we began by gathering people in our living room in our apartment, but in Manhattan, you don't get very big living rooms. That limits the number of people you can gather before you actually start meeting as a church. We had maxed out in our living room at about 12 to 15 people, which in any other part of the country, you would say, "Hold on. You need more people if you're going to start a church than 12 to 15 people." But in Manhattan, that was the limit of our living room. Trusting God, we decided to give it a go and see how it turned out. We have found that we have visitors every week, and we've also added a few people to that core group, and so now we're in the sort of 20 to 30 amount of people coming along each week, which is great. The other big unknown is whether you'll have enough money to survive long term. We raised enough seed money to see us through 2017, but we will need to add monthly givers if we're to get through 2018. So that unknown ... I feel like the people unknown, I feel much more settled and comfortable about that. It's great to have between 20 and 30 people coming. The financial unknown is still there as a bit of a kind of knocking on my shoulder. We just don't know whether the church will still be in existence in a year's time with the money angle. Betsy Howard: It's really driving us to a lot of prayer, you know? While it would be great to have all those things resolved and settled, I think God is probably using it to let us know that if this church survives long term, it won't be because we had everything that we needed. It will be because He provided what we didn't have in terms of funds and in terms of continuing to send people. Of course, the eventual goal is that the congregation will grow large enough that it could be financially self-sustaining. We're just not yet to that point. Timothy George: Betsy, where are you all meeting as a church now? Betsy Howard: We meet in a little theater. It's called the Triad. It's an off-Broadway theater on 72nd Street. It's small and we rent on Sunday mornings only, and we have a coffee time afterwards. It's been the perfect meeting place for us, and it's easy to find. It's by an express stop, which in Manhattan, is something that people love because it means you can get there quickly. So that's where we're meeting. Timothy George: Now, this church is Anglican, but it's also evangelical. Could you say a word, Bernard, about both of those words, Anglican and evangelical? What does that mean? Bernard Howard: It means different things. The word Anglican means different things in different parts of the world, often. It all comes out of the church of England. That's where the Anglican name comes from, from England. In America, the form in which the service usually takes seems to generally be what you might call high church. You go into a typical Anglican church in America, whether Episcopalian or Anglican, and the difference between the two is a whole other conversation, but they both spring from the Church of England. In either Episcopalian or Anglican, you'll find, generally speaking, the people leading the service wearing robes. There will be Communion every week, and that will be in some ways the high point of the service, and so you could describe that as high church. The more evangelical Bible-believing Anglican churches in England and in Australia and Singapore and other parts of the world where Anglicanism has spread to, the more evangelical meetings, Anglican meetings, in most countries would be low church, and so you would not have service leaders wearing robes. You would have Holy Communion once a month, and the services would be much more similar to a Presbyterian service here or even a Baptist service. And so that was my training back in Britain, and so I faced the choice when church planting an Anglican church here in America, do I do it the usual American way and start wearing robes and having Communion every week, or do I stick with my ministry upbringing and DNA and do Anglicanism in that low church way? I decided to go for the low church option, partly because it was what I was so familiar with, it would have just felt alien and strange to have done anything else, but also for more considered reasons, ministry reasons. I think it is easier for someone who's very unfamiliar with Christianity to come in off the street and find people wearing regular clothes who are speaking to them. It may seem like a small thing, but I think it's easier to relate to someone who is in regular dress than to someone wearing very unfamiliar uniform, religious uniform. The choices that we've made about what you might call the ministry design are deliberate ones with the context in mind. Timothy George: Let me ask you two related questions. One, preaching. You're the rector of this congregation and you preach regularly as a part of your role. And then music, worship. Why don't you tell us about preaching, and then Betsy, chime in on music, if you will. Bernard Howard: The pattern that we follow at Good Shepherd Anglican Church is to go through books of the Bible with expositions. We try to go through at a fairly good pace. The idea is to track with the segments within John, so you have the prologue those first glorious 18 verses. Well, that's a segment in its own right, so why not preach it as that segment going through those 18 verses? Similarly, as you read through John, you realize there are blocks of teaching material, and so I think it makes sense to track with that in preaching rather than going at a much slower pace where you miss out on the messages that John has through those blocks of material, those segments. That's the approach. Betsy Howard: We're not doing anything revolutionary in terms of music. Because we're small and we don't have a lot of musicians in our congregation, we have just a piano player every week and then a song leader. We have a mix of hymns and ... I would almost say contemporary hymns. You could say they're praise choruses, but we tend to go for the wordier, more meaty contemporary songs. One thing that you deal with when you have a church plant, especially a plant in New York where many people won't have attended church before, is they don't know all of the songs that you sing. We're trying to pick the songs that we want to sing often and help our people learn those, so we're repeating things fairly often. We have a small rotation of songs, because we really want the congregation to sing and to worship and not view it as, "Oh, there's a person up front singing and I'm gonna listen to them." We really want it to be a congregational worship. Timothy George: Here's another question both of you can answer. If you were going to give advice to a young couple who felt led to plant a church as you, in fact, are doing right now here in New York, especially in an urban setting, what would you tell them? What warnings would you give them? What encouragements might you share? Because a lot of our students at Beeson Divinity School and other theological schools are really interested in church planting today. It seems to be a movement that's arisen to bring into being new congregations of believers. Bernard Howard: I would say the most helpful thing that I've held onto through the process would be Psalm 23 and its message that the Lord will be our good shepherd and provide for us. That doesn't mean that the church is gonna be a success. It does mean that if it's not, He will still provide for us and still lead us and guide us, and as the song goes on to say, will follow us with goodness and love all the days of our life and we'll dwell in the house of the Lord forever. I've kept trying to preach that to myself, that whether the church grows and is sustained in the long term or whether we have to shut our doors, and that will be very sad, but Jesus will still be our good shepherd and will still guide us and provide for us. Betsy Howard: We've really seen the need for prayer, lots of prayer, as we feel so unable to make it happen in our own strength. There's many good training programs out there, there's lots of books you can read, there's different things you can do, but I think prayer is the most important thing. I've actually, at some point, stopped reading books about church planting because it was fostering in me the desire to get it right. If I just had enough information, we would get it right, whereas I think what God is calling us to do is to listen to Him and obey Him and take the next step of faithfulness, and to put the onus on Him to have this succeed if He wants it to succeed, and hopefully give Him the glory for it. Now, that doesn't mean we sit back and don't do anything at all, but I've had to continually renew my mind to realize this is not up to us to get everything right. We're gonna make mistakes, but we need to pray God's blessings are on us that in spite of our mistakes, in spite of all the unknown, that He will have us be found faithful and make us adequate to the task. Timothy George: In the midst of all of your labor and work and hard effort that you put into this, you are learning to relax into grace. Betsy Howard: Definitely. Yes, and just resting in not knowing the future, and recognizing that we are not put ... People who feel like they don't have a future, that they ... Right now, we don't know what the next year or two will look like for us. Many people think they know what the next year or two will look like, but really, none of us know. Timothy George: Yeah. That's in the hands of God, of course. One more question about the church planting. It seems to me that if you're coming into a situation like the two of you are doing here, one of the struggles might be, who are my friends? Where do I turn to for friendship, for counsel, for fellowship? I can imagine you could be isolated even in a city with so many millions and millions of people such as New York City. You could feel alone. How does that work for you? Where do you find your friends, your counselors, people to pray with, to stand by you? Betsy Howard: One advantage that we have that missionaries or church planters 100 years ago or even 50, 20 years ago wouldn't have had, is the internet has allowed us to keep in such good touch with people back home, people from Beeson, people from Birmingham, people from England where Bernard's from. So I still talk regularly to friends. Both Bernard and I have a small group of people who are committed to praying for us that we send out weekly confidential requests to have that support. In addition, we have gotten to know people in New York. There are more Christians here than there were a few decades ago, so before our church started, we got to be friends with people from other churches and would meet regularly for prayer and things like that. There have been times that we felt very alone, but that hasn't been the rule. God has brought us people to support us and to pray with us. Now that our church is off the ground, we're quickly having close binds more with the people that we meet every week on Sunday for worship and they come to our home for Bible study. It's wonderful to see that Christian community starting to build. Timothy George: As I said, we're coming to you from New York City, and tomorrow is Sunday. This is a Saturday, and so I'm going to visit your church. I'm looking forward to it very much. Bernard Howard: We're looking forward to having you with us. Timothy George: Now, we just have a few more minutes, but Betsy, I wanted to ask you a little bit about your work with a new venture, really. The Gospel Coalition has been around for, what, 10 or 12 years? Betsy Howard: Yes. Timothy George: Something like that, but there's a brand new effort to kind of pass on the faith intact to the rising generation through a catechism that you've been involved in helping to edit and put together. Tell us a little bit, what is The New City Catechism that The Gospel Coalition has produced? Betsy Howard: The New City Catechism originally came out of Redeemer Church here in New York. Tim Keller and a woman named Sam Shammas put it together to use internally in their church because they realized there's a lot of historic catechisms, like the Heidelberg Catechism, the Westminster ... but they're much longer and were a little bit hard for people to learn. So they combined different elements and different questions from those catechisms and condensed it down to 52 questions and answers, and that is what the New City Catechism is. It's not original thinking. It's taken from historic reformation catechisms, but it's shorter so that if you learn one question and answer in a week, you could learn the whole thing in a year. The Gospel Coalition recognized there was a lot of potential for this that other churches, other families around the country and around the world would like to use this, so Redeemer basically gave it to The Gospel Coalition to make more widespread. In partnership with Crossway, we've now published two books and are in the process of developing a children's curriculum that could be used in Sunday school, homeschool, Christian school, to help learn this catechism. Timothy George: Wonderful. Betsy Howard: We also have a website and an app. Really, we're trying to make it in as many forms as possible so that people can choose what works best for them. Timothy George: Now, I remember when I was a lad in Sunday school many years ago, Bible memorization was a big deal. We were expected and encouraged to memorize verses of the Bible, and I still remember some of those verses. All these many years, they've stuck with me. What about memorization as a form of catechizing? Betsy Howard: This is certainly not meant to replace Bible memorization at all. That would be supportive of and part and parcel with that. Memorization ... We like to use the metaphor of you have to put logs in a fire in a fireplace to build to prepare for a fire, and then you light the flame. Our idea, if you're teaching a catechism to children or if you're teaching Bible memory to children, God may not have yet brought them to faith, but you are laying the fire, in a sense. You're putting logs in that fireplace. You're giving them Scripture, you're giving them Christian doctrine, so that hopefully the Holy Spirit will kindle that fire someday. You're laying the groundwork for them to have an understanding of what the Christian faith is. Memorization ... There are verses, there are songs, there are hymns that I memorized as a small girl that come into my mind at some of the most difficult moments of life. Things that you memorize really stay with you. They shape your thinking. The catechism does things like define sin. Having a definition of sin that has been carefully crafted can be a really useful thing for you for the rest of your life, both in conversations with non-Christians and discipleship just in your own wrestling, knowing what sin is is a really helpful thing. The catechism gives children and adults these sort of logs in the fireplace that then the Holy Spirit can use to kindle faith. Timothy George: Wonderful. Now Betsy, you wrote a book a few years ago about waiting. I see a connection between that book and your church plant now, because you've already indicated you don't know the future. This is in the hands of God, and so you're in a kind of waiting zone right now, aren't you? You're booked out with waiting for marriage, waiting for a new job, I don't remember all of the issues, but that this is a ... There is a spirituality of waiting. Say a little bit about that in terms of what you're doing now as you wait in God in the work of Good Shepherd Anglican Church. Bernard Howard: It's been a huge feature of our church planting. It was something that we decide ... We decided to church plant. We'd been thinking about it for many months. We decided around March 2016, and so that's exactly a year before our first service. That's a whole year of preparing for something without knowing if it's really gonna work out long term, and still, as I was saying earlier, we don't know if it's going to work out long term. It causes trust in God to grow because you're doing things that you believe are the right things to do, the things that He wants you to be doing, without knowing for sure whether they are going to work out. That's hard, but healthy. It's healthy to be in that child/father relationship where you are looking to your Father, our God, for His provision day by day without having the results yet. Timothy George: Yeah. Betsy Howard: I've tried to get myself out of the mindset of thinking, "Oh, when we're out of this phase, things will be easier." You know? Because we will always be waiting on something, and there will always be something that we have to depend on the Lord for. Right now, it's having our future being a little bit uncertain and wanting God to provide financially and provide people for this church. But we could grow really quickly, and then we would need to depend on God for very different things. All of a sudden, we would have too many people to handle, or there's all different kinds of ways it could go, but wherever we are, we're gonna need to be walking in dependence on the Lord. We're trying to help each other learn that. Timothy George: One of my least favorite theologians in the history of the church was Friedrich Schleiermacher, but he did say one thing that was really good when he defined religion as a feeling of absolute dependence. That is really close to the Gospel, that we are dependent creatures, and as Christians, as believers, as pastors and leaders, we are dependent upon God. You've been saying that in this interview. Now, do you have a church website? How could anybody find out about you? Betsy Howard: They do. Yes. Our website is www.goodshepnyc.org. So goodshepnyc.org. Timothy George: This Beeson podcast goes out to, really, hundreds, thousands of people that listen to this all around the world, and some of them, I daresay, might occasionally come to New York City. Betsy Howard: We would love to have anyone visit our church, or send people. If you have children or grandchildren moving into the city, friends, send them our way. Timothy George: Wonderful. Well, my guests today on the Beeson Podcast have been Bernard and Betsy Howard. They're involved in an exciting, brand new, still fragile and young but full of all kinds of hope, because it's the hope of the Gospel that you're about. It's called The Good Shepherd Anglican Church. It's in the upper west side of New York City. Thank you so much for sharing your heart, your passion, your vision, and your need for God's grace and mercy in this great work you're doing. Thank you so much. Bernard Howard: Thank you. Betsy Howard: Thank you for having us. We enjoyed it. Announcer: You've been listening to the Beeson Podcast with host Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson Podcast at our website, Beesondivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational, evangelical divinity school training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work, and we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson Podcast.