Yearbook Interview: Mr. Pruitt, High School Bible Teacher

Mr. Pruitt’s Classroom, Photo by Robbie Pruitt, © August 2011

The students, and the teacher, of the yearbook class asked the following questions as part of an interview series on teachers, which will published in the 2011-2012 Quisqueya Christian School yearbook. Here is their interview of me:

Yearbook Interview: Mr. Pruitt, High School Bible Teacher
Name: Robbie Pruitt (Mr. Pruitt)
Grades: Bible 10, 11A, 11B, and 12

What is your favorite subject to teach? Why?

My favorite subject to teach is Bible. I cannot imagine teaching any other subject, except for maybe theology, literature, or poetry, but I would rather teach the Bible. I am passionate about God’s word. I feel like I know the Bible pretty well, or well enough to begin teaching it, but there is so much more to learn and know. This is part of why I love God’s Word so much. You can spend a lifetime learning and teaching it and never grow tired or bored of all that is there. Within the pages of scripture, we discover the God of the universe. How awesome is that?

What do you enjoy the most about teaching? Why?

What I enjoy the most about teaching is being a part of the process of someone coming to know Jesus through His Word. I like watching the “light bulbs” go on when someone learns something new. It is very gratifying. To think that someone can have God illuminated for them through my teaching is an amazing thing; it is a monumental opportunity and a tremendous responsibility. I love it!

What did your students enjoy the most? What was their favorite part of class?

This is a great question, and I am not too sure that I am the one who should answer it. I imagine some students would say that they enjoyed when my class was over, while others would say that they enjoyed how they came to know the Bible and the God of the Bible and that this profoundly transformed their lives. Some students would say they enjoyed learning “The Happy Dance,” or my jokes, or my singing. Some students may have enjoyed the music I played before class, or the stellar Power Points. Many students may have appreciated that I seemed to have a YouTube illustration for everything. It depends on the student, I imagine, and it depends on the class. In all seriousness, these are amazing and bright students at Quisqueya Christian School, who love Jesus. They genuinely enjoy learning, coming to know Jesus, and growing in their faith. It is a blessing to teach them!

Why did you come to Haiti?

I came to Haiti, because my wife, Irene, and I felt that God was calling us to come here. It has always been a desire of mine to teach, and I love the Bible. I also love youth ministry and have spent most of my life in youth ministry. Teaching Bible to High School Students in an amazing, dynamic, and culturally rich country, like Haiti, is like a dream job come true for me.

Why did you become a teacher?

I became a teacher for many reasons. God commands us all to teach in The Great Commission, see Matthew 28:18-20. I love to learn. I like to watch other people come to understand information that they previously never understood before. I am passionate about seeing transformation occur in people’s lives through learning. One of my spiritual gifts is teaching; see Ephesians 4:11 and 1 Corinthians 12. Finally, many teachers have helped introduce me to Jesus, and have helped me to grow in Him. These teachers have influenced my life for the better and I want to be a teacher like that.

Love Your God with All Your Mind

While Christianity may have been known for its intellectual contributions in the past, the word intellectual hardly describes popular Christianity, as we know it today. It especially does not describe North American Christianity. The intellect, the mind, seems to have been abandoned for a “fragmented Christianity” that does not consider the whole Christian. A Christianity that does not consider the whole person or the intellect, does not consider the all the commands of our Lord Jesus. Specifically, it does not consider Jesus’ command to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind,’ and ‘your neighbor as yourself’ (Luke 10:27).” What we are left with, in neglecting the mind, is less than holistic Christianity that considers all of the scriptures, all of God’s commands, and the whole Christian. What we end up with instead, is a disintegrated and fragmented Christianity that does not resemble what God intended for His followers to have.

J.P. Moreland addresses this concern of loving God with our minds in his book, Love Your God with All Your Mind. In this book, Moreland asserts that we have lost a major premise of Christianity by losing sight of our intellectual properties, which is a product of being created in the very image of God. Without exercising our intellect, and reason, we cannot fully worship God, know God, or serve Him well. Our intellect and our reasoning reflect our being created in God’s image and is what makes our humanity unique in God’s creation. We have been given stewardship over this intellect and over creation, and we must be good stewards of what God has given. We cannot honor, or glorify, God apart from fully exercising our capacities for thinking and reasoning. We cannot, and must not, divorce our thinking from our faith and reasoning.

In Love Your God with All Your Mind, by J.P. Moreland, Moreland addresses loving God with our minds in four parts in his book: Part One: Why The Mind Matters in Christianity; Part Two: How to Develop a Mature Christian Mind; Part Three: What a Mature Christian Mind Looks Like; and Part Four: Guaranteeing a Future for the Christian Mind. J. P. Moreland explores these themes through the following chapters: How We Lost the Christian Mind and Why We Must Recover It; Sketching a Biblical Portrait of the Life of the Mind; The Mind’s Role in Spiritual Transformation; Harassing the Hobgoblins of the Christian Mind; Clearing the Cobwebs from My Mental Attic; Evangelism and the Christian Mind; Apologetic Reasoning and the Christian Mind; Worship, Fellowship, and the Christian Mind; Vocation and an Integrated Christian Worldview; and Recapturing the Intellectual Life in the Church.

Moreland asserts, in Love Your God with All Your Mind, that Christianity in our modern day is more concerned with emotions than intellect. “Our culture is in serious trouble,” says Moreland. This trouble, according to Moreland, is coming from anti-intellectualism in today’s evangelical Christianity, which asserts that faith is “blind,” and not based on reason. Most Christians have been taught from a young age not to question their faith and that our beliefs as Christians are based solely on faith and not on rational thought, or reason. This could not be further from the truth. Our faith is based on reason and we can know why we believe what we believe. There are evidences that can be explored, and we must explore them and encourage thought and reasoning in our faith.

In “Christian education,” this becomes hugely important in our living, learning, planning, and teaching, and in our approach to integrating our faith and reasoning within every area of our lives. As Christians, we must be a thinking people who honor God with our minds, our being, and our doing, as Paul commands us in Colossians 3:17, “do all to the Glory of God.” Integrating our beliefs will encompass our entire beings, including our minds, or we are practicing something less than Christianity. Jesus Himself declares, “A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone who is perfectly trained will be like his teacher (Luke 6:40).” If Christians are to reflect the image of their maker, then we will reflect and resemble Jesus, the very Wisdom of God, and we will, as Paul puts it, “We have the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16).”

The Evangelical Christianity of today seems to neglect an integrated view of faith and life and Moreland addresses this concern when he speaks of the false divide between the secular and the sacred. Nowhere in the scriptures do we see this divide between faith and the world, or the divide between the sacred and the secular. We are called to live in this world and to bring our beliefs in God, our knowledge of scripture, and our intellect to bear on the world, just as we find it, in hopes that we will not leave the world unchanged. There is very real danger in ant-intellectualism and false divisions between our faith and our lives in this world. These false dichotomies leave the Christian fragmented, and they leave the Christian as a fraction of who they are supposed to be in Christ.

Many Christians wrongly assume that being a Christian means to be “not of this world,” and they take this to the extreme by divorcing their thinking from their faith, as if these two aspects of our being were mutually exclusive. This false belief is actually a reinstallation of the ancient heresy of Gnosticism, which claims that we are somehow trapped in this evil world and that matter is evil, and is to be transcended by secret knowledge, or escape from “the flesh.” This idea that this material world is evil, including our minds, is not a Christian idea or doctrine. Though now fallen, the mind and the body were created good, and they were created to be used for God’s Glory. We are not to be seeking to transcend the “evil matter” of our flesh, or “this world.” We are, however, called to reclaim the world and to integrate our faith into every area of our lives and integrate our faith into this world to take part in God’s restoration of the world. It is wrong for us to abandon the mind, as some have, for fear of Gnosticism. For in doing so, we may find ourselves in the very throes of Gnosticism despite of, and because of, our very efforts to avoid it.

Dallas Willard describes, beautifully, this idea of integrating our Christian faith in every area of our lives in the introduction of Love Your God with All Your Mind:

“If I am a plumber, clerk, bank manager, homemaker, elected official, senior Citizen, or migrant worker, I am in ‘full-time’ Christian service no less than someone who earns his or her living in a specifically Christian role. Jesus stands beside me and teaches me in all that I do to live in God’s world. He shows me how, in every circumstance, to reside in His word and thus be a genuine apprentice of His-His disciple indeed. This enables me to find the reality of God’s world everywhere I may be, and thereby to escape from enslavement to sin and evil (John 8:31-32). We become able to do what we know to be good and right, even when it is humanly impossible. Our lives and words become constant testimony of the reality of God (p. 12).”

In effect, if we “loose our minds” as Christians, we will also lose our concept of the reality of God, we will lose our concept of reality, we will lose our freedom, and we will lose our testimony to a lost world, who just so happens to be a thinking world. We have an obligation as Christians to be a thinking and teaching people. Our Lord Jesus commands this in Matthew 28: 18-20 saying, “’All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.’ Amen.” God has called us to teach and to make everything that He has taught us known to the world.

J.P. Moreland’s Love Your God with All Your Mind is a fantastic book that all Christians should read so we can recapture our minds for the sake of the Kingdom of God, for the sake of the gospel being proclaimed in the world, and for our own sakes. We must close the false chasm between the secular and the sacred and we must not “check our brains at the door” as it pertains to our faith. As Christians, we are obligated, even commanded, to integrate our faith into all of our lives. We must not live fragmented lives where we do not love God with all our minds. Christians must assert their stewardship over creation and over their thinking. We must live lives of intellect and reasoning, offering all of ourselves up to God in worship, including our thinking and reasoning. Only then will we be able to worship holistically, and in a God honoring manner as God calls us to, like Paul mentions in Romans 12:1-2, “Present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”

Bibliography

Moreland, James Porter. Love Your God with All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul. NavPress, Colorado Springs, CO., ©1997

The New King James Version. Nashville : Thomas Nelson, 1982.

A New Year in Haiti!

Photo by Robbie Pruitt, © November 2011

A New Year in Haiti!

It seems strange to be writing a letter in January when the sun is shining and it’s 85 degrees outside—one of the many odd moments that come with living in Haiti. Since the beginning of August, we have been enjoying getting to know a new place, new jobs, new friends, and a new culture. It has been an exciting time, and we have been richly blessed.

Just a couple weeks after we arrived, Robbie dove into his work as the Bible teacher for sophomores, juniors, and seniors in high school. He started the semester in all of the classes with series of student presentations about 40 of the most critical stories in the Old and New Testaments. As the students presented their stories, Robbie tied them together and showed the students how they connected with the larger story of God’s plan of redemption. Even the students who have grown up in church were amazed at the connections, and told him that much of what he said was new to them. Even in these few short months, many students have grown deeper in their relationship with Christ. Both of us have recently started to lead discipleship groups with high school students, and we are praying that God will use those groups to draw the students into a closer relationship with him.

Irene has also been busy at work as the school’s Guidance Counselor. Part of this role is to help the seniors with their college application process. Most students at QCS study in the US or Canada, and she’s enjoyed helping them discern God’s call for the next step in their life. Many of the students have dreams of returning to Haiti after college, in order to serve in missions or in other organizations—it is truly humbling to realize that we are, in fact, helping to shape the future leaders of Haiti. Another part of Irene’s work is to provide counseling to children and their families. As in the US, many of the children at this school suffer emotionally in many ways—divorce, post-traumatic stress, separation from parents, grief and loss, and child mistreatment. Being able to walk with people through the counseling process has always been a sacred experience for Irene, and it is a blessing for her to be able to serve this community in that way.

These last few months have been full of many other joys and blessings. Living on campus with about 15 other teachers has been a precious and fun experience of Christian community, with frequent worship nights, volleyball games, dinners, and weekend trips. We have also been trying to learn more about Haitian culture, and have started to take more formal Creole classes (Robbie too!). Haiti, for all of its problems, is a beautiful country with many wonderful people, and we have loved starting to get to know it. Both of us have been writing about our reflections and experiences, and you’re welcome to read them on our blogs at www.irenepruitt.com and www.robbiepruitt.blogspot.com.

We are so grateful for your prayers for us over the last several months. We also think about and pray for you often, and ask the Lord to bless you, protect you, and provide for all of your needs.

With much love,

Irene and Robbie

Please pray...

• That God would draw us both closer to Himself and continue to transform our lives through His love and power.
  
• That all of the students at Quisqueya would come to know God’s saving grace and forgiveness.
  
• That the Holy Spirit would use Robbie’s teaching to shine truth and light into the students’ lives.
  
• That God would give Irene wisdom in her interactions with students and their families.
  

Financial Support

Now that we have a clearer picture of our expenses while living here, it has become clear that we need to raise financial support to supplement the partial salaries that the school provides. In order to cover our bills, we need to raise $1000 per month. Would you prayerfully consider supporting our ministry?

You can find a link to our contact and support information page here.

On the Rampart

Old City Walls...from the outside, Photo by Chad Rosenthal, Chadica, © July 21, 2008

On the Rampart
(Habakkuk Chapters 1-3)

“I will stand my watch and set myself on the rampart, and watch to see what He will say to me, and what I will answer when I am corrected.” – Habakkuk 2:1

Habakkuk is an Old Testament Minor Prophet, but he is no ordinary prophet. Habakkuk is known as “The People's Prophet.” While most prophets intermediate oracles, or words from the Lord, to His people, Habakkuk seems to take the people’s concerns, and his own concerns, to God. This prophet is full of the questions that we all seem to have deep within us, but we hesitate, or dare even, to ask. In our sufferings and in this fallen world filled with sin, injustice, pride, corruption, and falsehoods of all kinds, we have the “Why?” and the “What?” questions. “Why is this happening to us? Why is God allowing this? What is God doing? What good, if any, can come of this?”

Habakkuk was a prophet as well as a watchman responsible for warning the people of coming danger and judgment. If he failed at his job as watchman, he would be guilty and would have the people’s blood on his hands. The watchman was also responsible for announcing the morning, the dawn of a new day, and the returning of the people to the land. This position held a high responsibility, and exposure and vulnerability to danger. From the ramparts, the defensive walls, the watchman would be the first to see the danger coming and would be the first to be in danger’s path. In Habakkuk’s case, he was watching for the coming judgment and he recognized that he himself deserved what was coming Israel’s way. He was well aware of what was on the horizon at the dawning of a new day, The Judgment Day of the Lord.

This “Day of Judgment” would not be the last word; however, because God had promised Habakkuk that he would do an unbelievable work. God said to Habakkuk in chapter one verse five, “Look among the nations and watch—Be utterly astounded! For I will work a work in your days which you would not believe, though it were told you.” God was promising judgment. We know this from the verses that follow, but there was going to be more to come, so much more. Habakkuk assumed that God was being unjust for allowing a pagan nation to judge a “more righteous” nation, Israel, but God would ultimately judge both nations. All people would be judged, and no sin would go unaccounted for or un-atoned for.

As Habakkuk looks at the sins of his people, the sins of the pagan nations, and God’s coming judgment, he dares to ask the hard questions. He dares to seek God out. He bravely goes for the answers and risks what he may find. In Habakkuk 2:1, Habakkuk stands at his watch on the rampart, waits, and watches for what God may say to him about all his inquiries. He wonders what he may say to God in response to what he may hear when he is corrected. When he is corrected? At the first glance at Habakkuk 2:1, we may miss this, but he does say, “When I am corrected.” It looks as if Habakkuk is taking responsibility for the coming judgment that God is sending, or at least he is taking responsibility for his part in it. It is at the judgment of the Israelite people by the Babylonians that Habakkuk begins questioning God, and now he waits for God’s response and owns what may be coming his way as well.

God assured Habakkuk that no sin would be overlooked, not the sins from the pagan Babylonians who would judge Israel, not Israel’s sins, and not even Habakkuk’s own sins. God promised that he would judge. Habakkuk pleaded with God in Habakkuk chapter three verse two: “O Lord, I have heard Your speech and was afraid; O Lord, revive Your work in the midst of the years! In the midst of the years make it known; in wrath remember mercy.”

God did extend His mercy in the midst of His wrath and judgment. His mercy would indeed come in the person of His own Son Jesus Christ who would ultimately take on the wrath and judgment, which we all deserve because of our sin. God took our judgment in our place. If we are willing and able to see what God has done, we will indeed “be utterly astounded!” God has exercised His wrath and judgment, and in His mercy, God has taken it in our stead; setting us free from our sin; setting us free from ourselves; and setting us free from hiding behind our “defensive walls.”

Having received such forgiveness and freedom, we are able to say with Habakkuk from on top of the rampart, "Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation. The LORD God is my strength; He will make my feet like deer’s feet, and He will make me walk on my high hills (Habakkuk 3:18-19).”

Bibliography

Elwell, Walter A. ; Comfort, Philip Wesley: Tyndale Bible Dictionary. Wheaton, Ill. : Tyndale House Publishers, 2001 (Tyndale Reference Library), S. 1296

Jamieson, Robert ; Fausset, A. R. ; Fausset, A. R. ; Brown, David ; Brown, David: A Commentary, Critical and Explanatory, on the Old and New Testaments. Oak Harbor, WA : Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1997, S. Hab 2:2

The New King James Version. Nashville : Thomas Nelson, 1982, S. Hab 2:1

Walvoord, John F. ; Zuck, Roy B. ; Dallas Theological Seminary: The Bible Knowledge Commentary : An Exposition of the Scriptures. Wheaton, IL : Victor Books, 1983-c1985, S. 1:1512