Beeson Podcast, Episode #636 Jeff Gissing Jan. 10, 2023 >>Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now your hosts, Doug Sweeney and Kristen Padilla. >>Doug Sweeney: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast. I’m your host, Doug Sweeney, here with my co-host, Kristen Padilla. With today’s episode we’re starting a new series on the theme of Beeson Divinity School and bible publishing. We’ll interview two of our alumni and one of our professors, all of whom are active in translating, publishing, or marketing the scriptures. We’ll give you an inside look at the people and the processes through which we get our bibles. And we hope this will help you to pray for these folks in the life saving, life giving work they’re doing. Before we dive in, let me invite you back to campus on Tuesday morning, January 24th at 11:00 AM for opening convocation. Our new Anglican Chair of Divinity, Dr. Jonathan Linebaugh, will preach in that service. He’ll launch our spring series on the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Find out more about coming back to chapel and enjoy checking out our entire spring series at www.BeesonDivinity.com/worship. Today’s guest is joining us by Zoom from the suburbs of the windy city – Chicago. So, Kristen, who is he? And how he is involved in making the word of God available to Christians around the world? >>Kristen Padilla: Hi, Doug. Thank you. And hello, everyone. Welcome to the show. We have with us today Jeff Gissing. Jeff Gissing is Director of Acquisitions for Bibles at Tyndale Publishers. He is one of our best Beeson graduates, having earned his MDIV degree in 2002. And he is ordained in the ECO a Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians. We’re going to hear more about Jeff in just a minute. But welcome, Jeff, to the Beeson Podcast. >>Jeff: Thanks, Kristen. Thanks, Doug. It’s fantastic to be with you this afternoon. >>Kristen Padilla: Well, I gave a short bio, but as a way of introduction to begin the show, please tell us more about yourself. Introduce yourself. Where are you from and how did you come to faith in Jesus Christ? >>Jeff: Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Kristen. I like to say that I’m from a little bit of everywhere. I actually grew up abroad. I spent the formative years of my childhood in the United Kingdom. And then moved to the US on the west coast when I was a teenager. So, I kind of split my time between Europe and then the west coast. I went to high school in Las Vegas. So, I have been around the world to interesting places. And grew up in the church. My parents are believers and raised me as a believer. I grew up going to an evangelical congregation in the south of England. And so I was really nurtured in the church and the process of faith of my parents becoming my faith was really sort of convalesced around an experience with someone that I’m sure many of us have heard of as Billy Graham. He came and preached in the United Kingdom in I think it was 1989. And so I was at a satellite location and had heard the gospel growing up and been around church, but it really sort of impacted me in a deeply existential way that day. And that’s when I really made a very concrete and life-changing decision to follow Christ. And so that’s how I came to faith. It was not the beginning of my faith, but it was certainly when it became the most deeply meaningful for me and sort of changed the direction of my life. So, yeah, that’s a little bit about who I am. I lived in Chicago, I live in Wheaton, Illinois, and we’ve been here for about five years. So, yeah, excited to be here. >>Doug Sweeney: Wonderful. Jeff, Kristen has already bragged about you and said you’re one of our favorite alumni here at Beeson. But tell our listeners how did you decide to go to seminary in the first place and why did you come to Beeson? >>Jeff: Sure. I felt called into ministry when I was in high school. And a really significant influence on me at that point in my life was Franklin Lewis. He was just recently retired as the pastor of First Baptist Church of Nashville. And he was my pastor when I was in high school. And it was during those years that I felt called into ministry and he walked me through that process; preached at our church in suburban Las Vegas. Frank was a Samford alum and that was how I’d first heard the name Samford. And so I came and did my undergraduate degree, Philosophy and Religion, there at Samford. And after I graduated was looking at options for how to take the next step of my vocational journey and kind of thinking about doing graduate school in philosophy and back then when you got applications from grad programs in philosophy it came with a very scary letter that said, “You really should think twice about doing this, because the job market for philosophers,” was and I’m sure still is fairly limited. And so I decided that seminary was the better option for me and I think that was a pretty wise choice on my part. So, I actually started seminary at Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey. And did my first year there. And I sort of had to move away from Samford and from Beeson to really appreciate it. It was during that year at Princeton that I really realized – I’m an evangelical. And I want to be among evangelicals in a school that is confessionally rooted. And so at the end of that first year I transferred my credit back to Beeson and was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Academically I just loved my time there. The community of scholarship and of friends, student friends, faculty friends was just really significant. And I felt known and I felt like I belonged there in a way that just never was true at Princeton. As fine of a school as that is, I just ... Beeson, I realized pretty quickly that Beeson was where I was meant to be. >>Kristen Padilla: And of course you came here and you met your wife. >>Jeff: I did, yes. >>Kristen Padilla: So, that was a big plus as well. >>Jeff: Absolutely. My wife, Anna, and I met or at least noticed each other for the first time in the computer lab. That was where I met Anna and we went on our first couple of dates and got to know each other and ended up getting married, which has been just a huge blessing for me. And so yeah, absolutely love Beeson and my time there. >>Kristen Padilla: Well, as Doug mentioned, you are our first guest for this series on publishing, specifically as it relates to bibles. And as I mentioned, you are the Director of Acquisitions for Bibles at Tyndale. I just wonder if you can tell us about your work and what does an Acquisitions Director of Bibles do? So, tell us about your work on a daily basis. >>Jeff: Yeah, sure. In the world of publishing, the people in acquisitions are the people that go out and find authors to write books and take on publishing projects. And so I do some of that. It’s a little different in bibles, because any bible that we publish, 95% of it is already written and translated. And so my work is ... we think of publishing in sort of two halves. Half of it is acquisitions and we might also use the term “product development” – it sounds a little more commercial, but it’s really sculpting and creating a book or a bible that is going to meet the needs of an audience. And then there’s the marketing side, which is the process of connecting that book, bible, or other kind of published product to that audience. And so on a daily basis I’m splitting my time between working on ideas for new possible kinds of bibles that we might want to publish off into the future and bible publishing is a very long horizon industry and so the shortest you can do a bible is two to three years. And so we’re often working years and years in advance, identifying the kinds of bibles that we’ll need. Responding to trends that we’re seeing in the marketplace. So, part of it, like I said, is going out and finding individuals or organizations that we might want to partner with on bible projects. And another part of it is working on the bibles we already have and keeping those fresh, looking at how our community of readers around the globe and especially in North America are responding to what we have brought to market through social media, through ... I don’t manage our social media but we get feedback from customers and fans and readers who tell us what is really connecting with them about the formats of the bibles. And we’re always wanting to come up with ways of presenting the bible that are going to meet the ways that people read the bible. So, in some ways bibles are like tools. Many of us have many bibles. And we have a bible that we preach with, we may have a bible that’s beside our chair that we do our devotional time in the morning. We may have a bible that we read like a one year bible or something that we read devotionally and intentionally working through the entire canon in the course of the year. All of these are things that I get to work on. And kind of try to respond to what we’re seeing and hearing and helping to make the word of God, to present it in a way that is going to connect with people where they are. Whether they’re a commuter or somebody that’s working from home, and all of the different changes that are taking place in the way that people read and engage with the written word today. >>Doug Sweeney: I come from a family of publishers, Jeff, and I just find this stuff fascinating. And I’m thinking about our listeners right now. Probably they’re thinking right now about the bibles they have in their home, most of our listeners, not all of them, but most of them are Christians who are avid bible readers. And I wonder how many of them know about the bibles that you and Tyndale House have done over the years. You’re famous for The Living Bible, the New Living Bible ... but tell them a little bit ... let’s make a connection between the work you do at Tyndale House and the sorts of bibles that our listeners are used to reading and using. >>Jeff Absolutely. Yes. Tyndale House Publishers owns the translation The New Living Translation, which was first launched in 1996. That’s when I was in college. And among the bible translators on that team were Beeson faculty. Ken Mathews and Alan Ross, both of whom were on the translation committee for that and continue to serve I believe on that committee. And so we’re probably best known for The New Living Translation. But we publish all different translations. I mean, maybe some listeners will know this, but others may not. Every bible translation that is a modern translation is owned by somebody and so you look down a list of ... let’s take the New Living Translation as owned by Tyndale House Publishers, the English Standard Version is owned by Crossway. Sometimes they’re publishers like Crossway or Tyndale, sometimes they are foundations or other kind of organizations, as in the case of The New International Version (NIV) which is owned by Biblica. Which is the new or more recent name for the International Bible Society, or the New American Standard Bible that’s owned by the Lochman Foundation. And so lots of different publishers will publish these translations, but they have to do so under a license or with an agreement with the original owner of the translation, which may sound a little strange to those that aren’t familiar with it. Can you really own the bible? But it’s actually a good thing, because it preserves the integrity of the translation. And it means that someone can’t just pick up a translation and make individual sort of changes to it in order to corrupt it or to change it in a way that’s expedient or more appealing to a certain audience. It’s intellectual property that is owned and protected legally. So, we own, like I said, the New Living Translation, but that translation comes out in all different kinds of bibles. And so one of the probably most well known bibles is the one year bible, which many people use devotionally to read through the entire bible in a year, in 15 minute kind of increments. It doesn’t go canonically. Some of them go chronologically, others go just in a different order that will take you through the Old Testament, New Testament, Psalms and Proverbs in a year. That’s a specific kind of bible that we do. And actually is one that we’re most well known for because it pretty much is the leader in devotional bibles. And has been since it came out and I think it came out in the ‘80s. But I’d have to check on that. It was an idea that when it was first proposed by Ken Taylor, who was the Founder, nobody thought it would work. Everybody thought, “Who is going to buy a chopped up bible that is not canonically ordered?” “Who is going to want to do this?” And he prevailed and it’s been on the best seller list ever since then. So, yeah, those are a couple of the things that we’re most well known for. We also publish the Swindoll Study Bible with Chuck Swindoll, who is a well known bible teacher. And all kinds of other different types of bibles and products, including the Filament bible and also our Filament enabled line, which is kind of a cool thing that I’ve found really appealing about Tyndale was we have hybrid text bibles with an app that allows you to access digital resources on your phone or iPad, which I think is a really wonderful way to have the best of both worlds. Because I really don’t want to see print bibles go away. I think the experience of opening the scripture and sitting with it is something that is too valuable to want to simply just give up for a digital screen as convenient as that is. But I think we found a way that people can have their cake and eat it, too, with the Filament app that we’ve developed. >>Kristen Padilla: You mentioned marketing when you were talking about your job, Jeff. And that’s something that I do here at Beeson and as you were talking I was thinking back to various experiences going to the Christian bookstore and shopping for a bible – like, I want a pink leather bible or a study bible, or a pocket bible. So, what goes into marketing and selling bibles? What are the types of questions and processes that go into getting bibles out there and meeting the needs as you mentioned earlier? >>Jeff: Right. Yeah, when we think about selling and marketing bibles our approach is mission driven. We always start with a premise and that premise is that reading the bible and understanding will change everything. It is a source of transformation in the lives of people – people who don’t know the Lord and who read the word, who pick up and read the word, and come to faith through the ministry of the Holy Spirit. Those who are already believers and are growing in their faith, the Word is a means of grace. And so as we are marketing that’s always the core conviction is anything we do, the most important thing we do is provide an accessible and accurate translation of God’s word for people. And so that’s the bottom line. That’s why we exist. On top of that we do think about, “Well, how are people going to read this? How are people going to use this bible?” Here in Chicago many people commute to work in downtown Chicago on the train. And so I think of friends who are commuters and who need a small bible that they can slip into a brief case or into a pocket and they can pull it out and read during their hour long train ride from downtown Chicago out to Wheaton. There are people who use their bible to preach. And so a preacher has very different needs from the kind of person that is a commuter. Or a student in high school ... And so we think about what would make the word of God appealing to every different kind of reader that would be interested in reading our translation? Or the other translations that we publish. And we do publish NIV bibles. We do publish an ESV bible and King James Version bibles. But the New Living Translation is our bread and butter. It is our kind of flagship thing that we product or translation that we really ... our mission is to get that into people’s hands so that they can read it and be changed. So, we’re always kind of thinking how can we connect with new readers? And who is reading? How are they using it? And we know there are certain trends in publishing that women buy more books than men across the board. Women tend to buy more bibles than men. That doesn’t mean we don’t publish bibles for men, it’s just that we’re sensitive to knowing that there are certain things that women value in bibles that men don’t value. And some people may want a bible that is simply the biblical text with some footnotes to help them understand the context or cross reference. Some people want study notes and they really want to have the opportunity to dig into the scripture and apply it to their life. The Life Application Study Bible is one of the big bibles that I get to work with. And that’s a really significant bible that offers the opportunity to combine not just sort of historical background and there’s some of that in there but it’s also very oriented towards life change and the cycle shift – the goal there is to apply the bible to life so that the bible can be lived. And that’s really what we are all about is trying to get the bible into the hands of people so they can understand it by the ministry of the Spirit and so they can live it as well. >>Doug Sweeney: I’m in the middle of writing a global history of Christian doctrine these days, Jeff. A global history of the ways in which we’ve taught the faith that we confess to people over 2,000 years of church history. And it has me thinking more than ever before about what I have in common with brothers and sisters in Christ in other parts of the world. And as I think about that in relation to the conversation we’re having now, I’m wondering about the degree to which even at Tyndale House Publishers you all are thinking about making bibles for people not just Americans not just people where we are but in other contexts, too. And here I’m not exactly sure, is it ... I know historically American publishers have produced a lot of bibles for people in other parts of the world as well, in some developing countries these days I’m sure there are good publishing houses that publish bibles so that there’s maybe less of a need today than there might have been before for Tyndale to produce bibles for other sorts of folks, but where are you now at Tyndale when it comes to bible publishing for others? Not Americans, not westerners. >>Jeff: Right. To me that’s one of the most exciting things about Tyndale. From the very first royalty check our Founder, Dr. Ken Taylor, received from publishing the Living Bible back in the ‘60s. That very first royalty check he actually used to create a foundation. That foundation exists today. It owns Tyndale Publishers. And so we’re a nonprofit ministry. And all of our profits go into the foundation. And one of the stated purposes of that foundation is to provide funding and resources to the translation of the word of God around the world. And so from our founding this has been kind of part of our DNA that we throughout foundation are involved in providing resources, expertise, guidance to indigenous groups translation around the globe who are looking to produce bibles that may echo the New Living Translation stylistically. But we often will work with individual publishers in countries around the world to produce a bible ... not a bible that’s a translation of the New Living Translation or the Living Bible into another language, not an English to another language translation, but to help those publishers go back to the critical texts of the Hebrew and Greek and create a new bible translation in African or German or Italian that is derived from the Greek and Hebrew text but that is influenced stylistically by the sort of philosophy and style that the New Living Translation has taken on. And so that is a really big part of our foundation’s work is partnering with groups around the globe who are doing that translation work; often in places where it is not commercially viable for them. North America is a huge bible market. But at the same time, the rest of the world needs the scripture, too. And increasingly we’re finding that the Spanish language bibles, for example, and Portuguese language bible readership is growing. And so we’re involved in New Living Translation-like translations in Spanish and Portuguese that we actually own and then distribute to Latin America as well as in the North American market as well. So, yeah, it’s really part of our DNA. I like to think of it as ... one of the things that attracted me to Tyndale was that it’s really a ministry that is commercially viable. It’s a ministry first. Right from the very beginning every bit of profit has been returned and been given out. So, there’s an amazing level of generosity that I’ve experienced in terms of royalty revenue, profit being sent out around the globe, funding theological education, funding bible translation, funding ministries of mercy, and funding some of the household name ministries back decades ago that we might think of today as sort of leading the way to being really significantly involved – Wycliffe Bible Translators, for example. In terms of sharing financial and other resources with them to help them meet the goal of providing a bible for all the major language groups in the short term future. It’s a really big part of who we are. >>Kristen Padilla: That’s a nice segue into what I want to ask you about. And it’s really just about your own ministry. You mentioned this is a ministry, you’ve worked in publishing before Tyndale, you’ve also served as a pastor. I wonder if you can just talk about the ways in which you’ve seen God at work in these various ministries, how they fit together, and then if you want to say a word about how Beeson prepared you to be equipped for these various types of ministries as well, I would love to hear what you would say to that. >>Jeff: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for me, the desire to enter into bible publishing is directly related to my pastoral experience. And especially going into working with Tyndale and the New Living Translation. The last church I served kind of at the height of the pandemic, as a transitional pastor, I remember standing and talking to one of our members after a church service and he looked at me and just said, “Pastor, I need resources to be able to understand the bible. It doesn’t make sense to me. We’re teaching Sunday School, I’m going to Sunday School, in small group ... where can I go to find a bible that I can read and understand?” And this was around the time that I actually had started using the New Living Translation to preach from. Before that I had primarily used the New International Version. Mostly just because that’s what the churches that I had been in used. And I found that as I was switched to preaching out of the New Living Translation, people were hearing it and understanding it and it was connecting to them in a way that was ... in other words, I didn’t have to spend a lot of time in the sermon going back to the Greek and the Hebrew, which is not a bad thing to do. And I realized that every translation to some extent in varying degrees is an interpretation. And each of us has to kind of figure out what level of that we’re comfortable with. But as I was working in and serving a church where I was the person with the most education with a master of divinity in our congregation. There were one or two PHD’s but in veterinarian science or math or something like that. But overall I was the person that knew the most about the bible. In the grand scheme of things, compared to faculty at Beeson, that’s not a whole lot. But at the same time, what I wanted to do is to be able to lead these people to read and understand and engage the scripture. And that really led me to Tyndale and the opportunity to be part of something that is a ministry that was really connecting people to God’s word and helping them understand it. One of the things that our Founder, Ken Taylor, used to say is, “The best bible translation is the bible you read and understand regularly.” So, in some ways I care less about what translation people use, what I care about is that they’re reading and engaging with God through the word on a regular basis and that through that encounter they are being changed. And in terms of how Beeson kind of shaped me and helped me on this trajectory towards a ministry of publishing. At every different level I think as I reflected on my time at Beeson in preparation for our time together I think that at the sort of 30,000 foot level it was always really clear to me as a student at Beeson that the word of God is central to ministry of the church, the pastoral ministry ... that we are people of the book and it is a trust that is given to us whether we’re pastors, professors, bible publishers, elders, deacons, in a congregation – the word of God is the rule of faith. We examine our lives and our doctrine according to it. And so it needs to be in people’s lives and they need to be engaging with it, and we need to be helping them. That’s just sort of the 30,000 foot level. But then as I took classes like Gerald Bray’s History of Biblical Interpretation, it was just such a fun experience to be able to survey the various schools of interpretation across time, and to understand how there are so many perspectives on the bible that we still often think is self evident. It sort of creates I think a humility before the text. And a desire to know more and to read broadly and to hear the voices of sisters and brothers around the globe and across the centuries; to know that I don’t bring the authoritative reading to the text. I sit under the text rather than over, standing over the text. And then just very practically, I think as well, I was thinking about Calvin Miller who I took for preaching and just the significance not only of the word but of the [words/works 00:31:01], and how our ministry is conducted not exclusively but predominantly through words, words that we speak, we certainly act as well, but as we preach, as we teach, and counsel, even as we have conversations with parishioners in their moments of crisis, we are using words to speak the word. And so there’s a ... Beeson gifted me with a really high appreciation for the word and the words that we use to describe our faith and to share the experiences of our congregants and fellow travelers. And so I think of my friends that are out there today as authors and from Beeson as authors and professors and pastors and many of those relationships continue to today and are I think a testimony to that shares sense of the primacy of scripture and the value of communication, especially through the written word. >>Doug Sweeney: That’s wonderful. And what a wonderful way to get to spend your days, making God’s word available to people, putting it into people’s hands. >>Jeff: It is. I feel very privileged to be able to do this. >>Doug Sweeney: I hate to say it, Jeff, but we’re about out of time. Kristen and I always end our interviews by asking guests what God is teaching them these days. And so we don’t want to end without asking that of you. Anything that you might encourage our listeners by with regard to how God has been working in your life in recent weeks? >>Jeff: Absolutely. Sure. Yeah, I think as I reflect on where I am vocationally and in these sort of moments I think God is actually teaching me patience. And I was reflecting on the fact that when I was a pastor I was often an impatient pastor. And I tend to think that impatient pastors aren’t really good pastors. (laughs) So, I had a lot of room for growth there. And I often found myself becoming impatient with my impatience. But one of the things about bible publishing and publishing in general is that it is a collaborative and complicated endeavor. And so there are very few things that I do that only I can do. I am dependent on bible translators, people who write, authors who write notes for bibles, people who typeset the bible, people who market it, who shepherd the schedules, the multiyear schedules that it takes to produce a bible. So, through all of that God has been teaching me patience, because in my impatience is sometimes a tendency to want things to happen at my speed, on my schedule. And there’s so much more going on in the world, thank God, than what I think is important. And God is at work in so many different ways in the lives of the people that are working on these projects and the people that are picking up and reading these bibles. And so it’s been a reminder that God’s purposes are never thwarted. Regardless of how strong or how weak the economy is, or how many supply chain headaches there are, God is doing his thing, his mission is being accomplished and I’m just grateful to be a part of it. >>Doug Sweeney: Amen. What a great word. What a great way to end this episode. Thank you, Jeff Gissing, for being with us. Thank you, listeners, for tuning in. You’ve been hearing Jeff Gissing, Director of Acquisitions for Bibles at Tyndale House Publishers, based in suburban Chicago. We thank you for tuning in. We hope this conversation has been a reminder to you to get back into that chair and read your bible, prayerfully, and grow in your relationship to God. Giving thanks for people like Jeff, who make that possible for all of us. We love you, thanks for being with us. We say goodbye for now. >>Kristen Padilla: You’ve been listening to the Beeson podcast. Our theme music is written and performed by Advent Birmingham of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama. Our engineer is Rob Willis. Our announcer is Mike Pasquarello. Our co-hosts are Doug Sweeney and, myself, Kristen Padilla. Please subscribe to the Beeson podcast at www.BeesonDivinity.com/podcast or on iTunes.