by David Melton
I am writing at almost 40,000 feet heading home from a ten-day study trip with Boston students and staff. More than 40 of us have spent the past week and a half on the ground in Israel. Now we are almost home, and we have the obligatory olive wood souvenirs, tourist t-shirts, dirty laundry, and tired feet to prove it!
When we recruit students here, we talk a lot about “Think — Discover — Impact: Think Biblically, Discover Globally, Impact Eternally.” That is not just cutesy marketing jargon. That is us. Every spring break for the past ten years we have taken students to Europe or the Middle East to study biblical or church history on location.
Do we have fun? You cannot spend this much time with so many clever, witty people and not laugh a lot. I am smiling now as I think about that long Boston line trampling through the ancient water tunnel constructed by King Hezekiah 2,700 years ago — 25 minutes of sloshing through knee-deep water running through a channel carved out of solid rock below Jerusalem! Our big guys squeezed through some tight spots. Our young women learned to power themselves through crowded souks and barter deals with the best of them. Lots of memories of our tenth anniversary study trip.
Do we work hard? Oh, man! So much information, a working knowledge of the land of the scriptures, connecting the dots in biblical stories and their application — this is no vacation … this is big-time study. Students get to a whole new level.
At Boston, we embrace the demands that today’s students put on us … students want to be challenged, they want to explore, they want to ask (and answer!) hard questions. Many desperately want the Word of God to burn in them white hot, and our faculty, staff, trustees, and administration — and our supporting churches — want us to meet that challenge. This world needs the touch of competent, Spirit-driven men and women more than ever. It is our job to help get them ready.
A bunch of us sat out on the roof of our hotel in the old city of Jerusalem and talked about our discoveries in the biblical world. Kayla will graduate in less than two months and she and others in her class will have studied on the ground in Greece, Italy, Israel, and all over Europe. Our students have the course work to match up with anybody from any college, but they have “discoveries” that nobody can match. That is just a Boston fact. Nick still talks about the food in Italy. Jamie can talk about ancient Ephesus and Corinth. Now Stephen and Rob and Travis and Michelle can talk about Capernaum, Nazareth, and Jerusalem in the first person. We have walked those hills, we have divided up and yelled at each other in David’s Valley of Elah like Israelites and Philistines, and we have trekked down the Mount of Olives with Jerusalem in front of us bigger than any IMAX.
Ten years of study trips, the first ten years winds up today. Discovering the world of biblical studies is just in the soul of Boston Baptist College. Next spring we will “discover” some more.