Mondays with Peter Davids ... Part Seven

This is the seventh installment of an eight-part interview with Dr. Peter Davids, Professor of Biblical Theology at St. Stephen's University in New Brunswick.

JR: You are probably best known as a New Testament exegete, but having a bachelor's degree in psychology, you and your wife are involved in a counseling ministry, as well. Please tell us a bit about that.

DAVIDS: I went to Wheaton to study Bible, there is no doubt about that, but I was already interested in psychology. My old brother had taken an introductory course in psychology in university, and I had dipped into his textbook enough to be fascinated. One reason for this is that it put a name to my mother’s paranoid/ paranoid schizophrenic breaks that the family experienced but did not talk about.

Once in Wheaton I vacillated, for I knew I needed to study Bible, but (1) I learned that seminaries existed and (2) I realized that the Bible department was weak. In fact, my good friend had to take graduate courses for undergraduate credit because the Bible department could not offer him the courses he needed for a Bible major. So I took all of the support courses for a Bible major, including Greek and Hebrew, but majored in psychology. This was not counseling, although there was one course in abnormal psychology, but it did help me to look at human behavior on a scientific basis. I am, in fact, still fascinated by learning theory and studies of the human brain and its function.

I entered Trinity Evangelical Divinity School with advanced standing in languages and one or two other areas, so I could continue my two tracks. I took advanced courses in exegesis and biblical languages (e.g. I learned Aramaic), but I also took most if not all of the courses required for a MA in counseling. I did not do the internship, but at the suggestion of Dr. Busby, the psychiatrist who taught some of my courses, I did work for a summer at Lutheran General Hospital, ostensibly as an intern, but in fact so that he could give us access to his patients (and in practice to all of the patients on our unit). And following that my wife and I were houseparents for a year in a girl’s residential high school (we had our own newborn daughter and 23 high school sophomore girls, who were by no means Christians).


JUDY DAVIDS AND COUNSELING

Now my wife was educated as an elementary school teacher, not a counselor. Yet looking back we realized that she was focused on the two or three disturbed children in her class, not on the 22 or so with no emotional or behavior issues. Later in Germany she would spend time in the girls’ dorm listening to the girls. After that in Sewickley, PA she would notice that people might come along the street as she was gardening, stop, and pour out their lives to her. I suggested to her that she had a gift of counseling, she demurred, and I pushed her to take counseling courses in the seminary where I taught. She enjoyed them and also enjoyed learning about prayer counseling. So I suggested using my sabbatical so she could take those courses, add to them, and add a general theological education, and get a degree. That is why we spent the year in Berkeley, CA, and she received a M.C.S. from New College.

But the saga was not over. A year after she received her degree, I started working as teaching elder at Austin Avenue Chapel (Coquitlam, British Columbia) with the explicit agreement that I could split the job with her. After we got settled (with three children that takes some doing in a new country) she started doing pastoral visitation, which turned into starting a prayer counseling ministry (especially after John Wimber came to Vancouver in 1985), which turned into counseling as Burnaby Christian Counseling Group started to offer their Caretakers course, a two year internship-based counseling course (Judy did three years because she was in their first cohort and so after year one they had year 1.5 while they developed the program for year two). I might add that during this time Judy was discipled in spiritual direction by Prof. James Houston, so she can approach an issue from multiple aspects.

Meanwhile, because I had almost not done my Ph.D. in biblical studies but in clinical psychology (which I recognized in the end would have been a leaving of God’s call) and because I had some discouraging experience with marriage counseling as a chaplain in the US Army Reserve (I would later learn that marriage counseling was just too undeveloped at that time to have been helpful), I had backed away from counseling, but was still interested. Eventually I felt led to take Caretakers because, as God explained to me, it would help me understand my students and so be a better teacher. It did more than that, for it helped me grow personally. And I was part of a counseling group at Regent College, working together with Maudine Fee and Rosemary Green. That was for me a life-giving experience, and I more than once drove home praising God for the privilege I had had of entering into someone’s life. But I did not make that my vocation.

Meanwhile Judy sparked the formation of a Christian counseling ministry in Regina, Canada, became a registered clinical counselor with the British Columbia Association of Clinical Counselors, and worked in a Minirth Meir clinic. She had found her vocation. On occasion we would do marriage counseling together.

Judy started to teach counseling while we were in Austria, for she discovered that counseling Eastern Europeans through a translator was too unsatisfactory (she counseled German speakers, but did that in German), so teaching Eastern Europeans to counsel was far more helpful. She also got into working with burnt out pastors, one part of which was helping David Huggett with retreats for pastors.


VINEYARD COUNSELING

Then Judy received an invitation to provide pastoral care for pastors in the Vineyard movement in the USA and to be based in her home town of Houston. But there was no call for me. Well, the Bible says that a man is to lay down his life for his wife, so I believed (and still believe) that God was calling me to do just that – to practice what I knew was in scripture. We moved to Houston where Judy was employed by the Sugar Land Vineyard and ordained by the national director of the Vineyard movement. What she principally did was create and direct multidisciplinary recovery retreats for burnt out pastors and train, deploy, and supervise a group of recovery group leaders and lay counselors for the Sugar Land Vineyard (the team eventually had 30 members, of which I was one).


Meanwhile I taught as an adjunct professor in Houston, did a lot of traveling to teach, and had a lovely time as honorary assistant at All Saints Episcopal Church (which had a wonderful blend of sensitivity to the Spirit and liturgical structure, of contemporary and traditional music and practice).

Through my teaching at Houston Baptist University I was asked to take over a course called Formation for Christian Leadership. It combined the Christian spiritual tradition (e.g. Dallas Willard) with Bowenian family emotional systems. I had the background to teach this and I loved it. I went on to do post-graduate study at the Center for Family Systems in Bethesda, MD, a center started by the late Edwin Friedman, who had first applied Murray Bower’s family systems theory to church and work systems (and eventually to national systems). "Ah, that explains what was going on in that church situation," I realized. "This is what pastors need to know. My wife would have a lot less burnout recover work to do if pastors would take this to heart." More important personally, I realized I now had a tool for working on my own situations and my own issues.

We both decided that God was calling us to leave Houston and come here to St. Stephen, New Brunswick, to teach at St. Stephen’s University. Yes, there was a desire to work in the same organization. And, yes, there was some naivete about St. Stephen’s climate and some misinformation about the situation. But in the end it was surely a strong conviction that persuaded Judy to give up the best paying job either of us had had, leave her native city, her sister, her relatives, and her close friends, and journey to an impoverished county in Canada to work without a salary at a tiny university. My losses paled in comparison to hers. She is now pursuing her calling of caring for burned out pastors (especially Vineyard pastors), but now she has to raise the money to run the retreats.


I am using my family systems insights to help me navigate in this very interesting university setting. And I have slowly won my way in the local diocese, which is conservative liturgically as well as theologically and trying to cope with the fact that young people often leave the province upon graduation, so the province as well as the churches is graying. Serving as interim rector in the local parish gave me an opportunity to fall in love with the people and do a lot of grief counseling. And, yes, God was correct in that I do understand my students much better due to my counseling training.

NEXT MONDAY'S QUESTION: What writing projects do you have planned for the future?