Regarding this: "Victor Davis Hanson I am not—I’m simply a preacher."
Dr. Milton, you are way too modest. First of all, you are more than a preacher; you have an earned doctorate and are a seminary professor in an era where it is becoming increasingly rare for evangelical pastors to go to seminary and even Bible College levels of training are becoming less common.
Second, and more relevant for this point, you are an Army chaplain and rose to the rank of colonel, and you began your chaplaincy in an era when there was a significant bias against evangelicals being promoted into the upper ranks. You know that it was difficult for evangelicals to go beyond the rank of major in the chaplaincy when you began your military service, and while that is no longer true today thanks to the collapse of the mainline denominations, you excelled in a field that very few ministers would even be interested in, and in which it was hard for evangelicals to make rank.
You combine your preaching and teaching duties with a level of knowledge of military history that most modern evangelicals, let alone modern evangelical preachers, simply do not have.
I can't think of many people who could write the article you wrote -- evangelicals who understand the military and military history from a perspective of having served in uniform.
My dear Sir: I am humbled to the floor by your generous comments. That you are a scholar and a gentleman is already known. That you are a true Barnabas is a blessing to me and I am certain to others. Your friend, Mike.
What I know for sure is that most people in the Reformed church world understand very little about the military. You do. If you were a Southern Baptist you'd be one of the biggest names in the SBC. The fact that you aren't one of the biggest names in our Reformed circles says a lot about how we have "siloed" ourselves off into our own separate spheres in which the military and the church and academia rarely talk to each other, let alone collaborate and understand each other, or learn from each other.
That's kind of what seminary-trained chaplains do. Why doesn't that happen in the Reformed world?
Here's my hypothesis.
Let's face facts: the modern American all-volunteer military, far from being a cross-section of American society, largely recruits from two key groups:
1) rural Southerners and rural Westerners from our mountain and plains states who have a strong military tradition in their families and communities and who view military service as an act of patriotism, or as a way to "see the world" for a few years on the government's dime before coming back to one's hometown and settling down, or as a ticket out of a "dead end small town" with paid job training and a chance to make it to the big city, and
2) ethnic minorities who see the military as a way to get free job training, college money, and learn discipline and work ethics that are often lacking at home.
Those two categories can overlap. Hispanics and Blacks can be rural and Southern, and especially in our Cuban and Vietnamese population, it's patently obvious that some of our minority groups are more patriotic than our middle-of-the-road population of people who have been in America for generations. Conversely, rural whites from broken homes may join the Army less for patriotism and more for some of the same reasons that minorities do. I read Vance's "Hillbilly Elegy" long before it was popular, and recommended it to a number of Reformed ministers to help them understand the rural Southern culture in which I live and work.
Other than the rural parts of the PCA, those recruiting categories are not part of the usual Reformed demographic.
The last time the Dutch Reformed were in the forefront of promoting military service was during the Civil War when Wyatt Earp's father was a Union Army recruiter in Pella, Iowa, working with Hendrik Scholte, among the founders of the Republican Party and a friend of Abraham Lincoln, to get Dutchmen to enlist to fight the South. By the time World War I hit, angry mobs were burning down Christian Reformed churches and schools for refusing to display the American flag. While Hitler's invasion of the neutral Netherlands changed some of that during World War II, even today, military service is at best an afterthought in much of the Dutch Reformed world which has tended to be countercultural and emphasize what's wrong in American life and society. While American evangelicals in the South may have too often wedded patriotism and piety, the Dutch have often had the opposite problem.
Let's ask where the PCA is seeking to grow. This isn't intended as a criticism of Tim Keller or his emphasis on urban ministry, but just how many highly educated urban and suburban professional families ever consider military careers for their teenage children? Yes, some do, but it's nothing like a typical small rural Southern town where it's actively promoted in high schools as a great idea.
The same applies to much of the YRR movement.
As for the Korean Presbyterian community -- the emphasis on going to college is so strong in America that, for Korean immigrant churches, it has overwhelmed the emphasis back in Korea on virtually all able-bodied men serving in the South Korean Army. I know what I'm talking about here -- my father-in-law was a ROK Army SFC and Korean War combat medic, and my brother-in-law was in the ROK Special Forces. Military service is assumed in Korean Presbyterianism in Korea. While not completely unknown in the Korean-American Presbyterian community, an emphasis on college is the norm and military service is rarely considered.
Given the lack of a Reformed presence in the main demographics from which the American military recruits, we probably should be surprised that the military has a disproportionately high percentage of Reformed people. Why? A Reformed world-and-life view will make a good soldier. But the soldier, when he goes back to his church community, may be met with indifference or lack of understanding.
I think this is less of a problem in the PCA because of your denomination's Southern roots. But it is still a problem and it's worse for the NAPARC bodies outside the PCA.
My thoughts, for whatever they are worth.
There's probably a masters' thesis here for a chaplain in the Army War College on the role of denominational demographics in Reformed military recruiting, but I'm not the right one to write it.
You are spot on as our cousins across the sea are fond of saying. I was critical of those practical theological visions that left out the rural communities as lacking "strategic significance." God chooses the small things, the hidden things, to glorify Himself.
(Ignore the most recent Heidelberg Catechism message on Q&A20. There were audio problems that I didn't catch until after the event was over, and I'm going to have to figure out what happened and fix it.)
We're regularly getting an online audience of 400 to 600, and sometimes well into the thousands. Most people watching are connected in some way with the military and for a variety of reasons either can't attend a Reformed church or are non-Reformed evangelicals looking for serious biblical exegesis, which is sadly lacking in too many broadly evangelical churches.
The short version is after twenty years of complaining about lack of a confessionally Reformed option anywhere close to Fort Leonard Wood that will accept infant baptism -- we drive well over an hour to church in Springfield -- my wife and I decided to stop complaining and start doing something. When a local Methodist church closed, we bought the building and began an evening Heidelberg Catechism program. Without going into details, the fact that we paid cash for the building indicates pretty clearly that we have no need for a salary or any outside financial support. Not everybody can do this, obviously, but there are plenty of Reformed businessmen who own their own businesses and drive long distances to church who could do something very much like this.
We in the Reformed world need to ask why the Baptists took over the South and the Methodists took over the North during the expansion of the American frontier in the late 1700s and early 1800s. The number one factor was inability to provide Reformed ministers for the frontier, and by the time that villages expanded to towns and became cities large enough to support a full-time paid Reformed or Presbyterian pastor, the Baptists and Methodists had taken over and the older traditional denominations were playing catch-up.
I firmly believe we need to be using the ruling elders in church planting, and with the availability of the internet, there's no reason that much smaller groups of Reformed people can't be starting a small group that can't support a pastor but can come under the auspices of a Reformed church, even many hours away, that is willing to look at what the Baptists and nondenominational churches are doing today, and taking what we can that works and isn't contrary to Reformed principles.
Amen, brother! (To use a Southernism.) BTW, "spot on" is also Canadian, not only "across the sea." I grew up in Michigan and heard it regularly because of cross-border contacts with Canada.
Regarding this: "Victor Davis Hanson I am not—I’m simply a preacher."
Dr. Milton, you are way too modest. First of all, you are more than a preacher; you have an earned doctorate and are a seminary professor in an era where it is becoming increasingly rare for evangelical pastors to go to seminary and even Bible College levels of training are becoming less common.
Second, and more relevant for this point, you are an Army chaplain and rose to the rank of colonel, and you began your chaplaincy in an era when there was a significant bias against evangelicals being promoted into the upper ranks. You know that it was difficult for evangelicals to go beyond the rank of major in the chaplaincy when you began your military service, and while that is no longer true today thanks to the collapse of the mainline denominations, you excelled in a field that very few ministers would even be interested in, and in which it was hard for evangelicals to make rank.
You combine your preaching and teaching duties with a level of knowledge of military history that most modern evangelicals, let alone modern evangelical preachers, simply do not have.
I can't think of many people who could write the article you wrote -- evangelicals who understand the military and military history from a perspective of having served in uniform.
My dear Sir: I am humbled to the floor by your generous comments. That you are a scholar and a gentleman is already known. That you are a true Barnabas is a blessing to me and I am certain to others. Your friend, Mike.
Appreciated, Dr. Milton.
What I know for sure is that most people in the Reformed church world understand very little about the military. You do. If you were a Southern Baptist you'd be one of the biggest names in the SBC. The fact that you aren't one of the biggest names in our Reformed circles says a lot about how we have "siloed" ourselves off into our own separate spheres in which the military and the church and academia rarely talk to each other, let alone collaborate and understand each other, or learn from each other.
That's kind of what seminary-trained chaplains do. Why doesn't that happen in the Reformed world?
Here's my hypothesis.
Let's face facts: the modern American all-volunteer military, far from being a cross-section of American society, largely recruits from two key groups:
1) rural Southerners and rural Westerners from our mountain and plains states who have a strong military tradition in their families and communities and who view military service as an act of patriotism, or as a way to "see the world" for a few years on the government's dime before coming back to one's hometown and settling down, or as a ticket out of a "dead end small town" with paid job training and a chance to make it to the big city, and
2) ethnic minorities who see the military as a way to get free job training, college money, and learn discipline and work ethics that are often lacking at home.
Those two categories can overlap. Hispanics and Blacks can be rural and Southern, and especially in our Cuban and Vietnamese population, it's patently obvious that some of our minority groups are more patriotic than our middle-of-the-road population of people who have been in America for generations. Conversely, rural whites from broken homes may join the Army less for patriotism and more for some of the same reasons that minorities do. I read Vance's "Hillbilly Elegy" long before it was popular, and recommended it to a number of Reformed ministers to help them understand the rural Southern culture in which I live and work.
Other than the rural parts of the PCA, those recruiting categories are not part of the usual Reformed demographic.
The last time the Dutch Reformed were in the forefront of promoting military service was during the Civil War when Wyatt Earp's father was a Union Army recruiter in Pella, Iowa, working with Hendrik Scholte, among the founders of the Republican Party and a friend of Abraham Lincoln, to get Dutchmen to enlist to fight the South. By the time World War I hit, angry mobs were burning down Christian Reformed churches and schools for refusing to display the American flag. While Hitler's invasion of the neutral Netherlands changed some of that during World War II, even today, military service is at best an afterthought in much of the Dutch Reformed world which has tended to be countercultural and emphasize what's wrong in American life and society. While American evangelicals in the South may have too often wedded patriotism and piety, the Dutch have often had the opposite problem.
Let's ask where the PCA is seeking to grow. This isn't intended as a criticism of Tim Keller or his emphasis on urban ministry, but just how many highly educated urban and suburban professional families ever consider military careers for their teenage children? Yes, some do, but it's nothing like a typical small rural Southern town where it's actively promoted in high schools as a great idea.
The same applies to much of the YRR movement.
As for the Korean Presbyterian community -- the emphasis on going to college is so strong in America that, for Korean immigrant churches, it has overwhelmed the emphasis back in Korea on virtually all able-bodied men serving in the South Korean Army. I know what I'm talking about here -- my father-in-law was a ROK Army SFC and Korean War combat medic, and my brother-in-law was in the ROK Special Forces. Military service is assumed in Korean Presbyterianism in Korea. While not completely unknown in the Korean-American Presbyterian community, an emphasis on college is the norm and military service is rarely considered.
Given the lack of a Reformed presence in the main demographics from which the American military recruits, we probably should be surprised that the military has a disproportionately high percentage of Reformed people. Why? A Reformed world-and-life view will make a good soldier. But the soldier, when he goes back to his church community, may be met with indifference or lack of understanding.
I think this is less of a problem in the PCA because of your denomination's Southern roots. But it is still a problem and it's worse for the NAPARC bodies outside the PCA.
My thoughts, for whatever they are worth.
There's probably a masters' thesis here for a chaplain in the Army War College on the role of denominational demographics in Reformed military recruiting, but I'm not the right one to write it.
You are spot on as our cousins across the sea are fond of saying. I was critical of those practical theological visions that left out the rural communities as lacking "strategic significance." God chooses the small things, the hidden things, to glorify Himself.
BTW, as for church planting in rural and military communities, if you haven't seen it, you might like to look at this:
https://www.facebook.com/ReformedAtFLW
(Ignore the most recent Heidelberg Catechism message on Q&A20. There were audio problems that I didn't catch until after the event was over, and I'm going to have to figure out what happened and fix it.)
We're regularly getting an online audience of 400 to 600, and sometimes well into the thousands. Most people watching are connected in some way with the military and for a variety of reasons either can't attend a Reformed church or are non-Reformed evangelicals looking for serious biblical exegesis, which is sadly lacking in too many broadly evangelical churches.
The short version is after twenty years of complaining about lack of a confessionally Reformed option anywhere close to Fort Leonard Wood that will accept infant baptism -- we drive well over an hour to church in Springfield -- my wife and I decided to stop complaining and start doing something. When a local Methodist church closed, we bought the building and began an evening Heidelberg Catechism program. Without going into details, the fact that we paid cash for the building indicates pretty clearly that we have no need for a salary or any outside financial support. Not everybody can do this, obviously, but there are plenty of Reformed businessmen who own their own businesses and drive long distances to church who could do something very much like this.
We in the Reformed world need to ask why the Baptists took over the South and the Methodists took over the North during the expansion of the American frontier in the late 1700s and early 1800s. The number one factor was inability to provide Reformed ministers for the frontier, and by the time that villages expanded to towns and became cities large enough to support a full-time paid Reformed or Presbyterian pastor, the Baptists and Methodists had taken over and the older traditional denominations were playing catch-up.
I firmly believe we need to be using the ruling elders in church planting, and with the availability of the internet, there's no reason that much smaller groups of Reformed people can't be starting a small group that can't support a pastor but can come under the auspices of a Reformed church, even many hours away, that is willing to look at what the Baptists and nondenominational churches are doing today, and taking what we can that works and isn't contrary to Reformed principles.
Amen, brother! (To use a Southernism.) BTW, "spot on" is also Canadian, not only "across the sea." I grew up in Michigan and heard it regularly because of cross-border contacts with Canada.