Dr. Barry M. Foster

My Spiritual Experience and
the Ministry of Teaching

I am first and most importantly, a follower of Jesus Christ. Beyond that, I am a father and a husband before anything else. But I have learned that I am also, by the grace of God, a teacher. It is who I am. My spiritual experience then, revolves around those things.

            I cannot pinpoint the exact time of my initial coming to faith in Christ. There are several moments during my childhood in which I expressed, in a capacity generally fitting to my age, some kind of commitment of my life to Christ. But I cannot say which one of these moments was the one that moved me from unbelieving to believing. In the Presbyterian church in which I grew up, it was more a matter of increasingly greater understanding of and commitment to following Jesus Christ than having a crisis conversion experience. I was deeply active in my church, and growing in faith to some degree. Yet as a high school student I became increasingly uncomfortable with my own spiritually dualistic and compromised life–I was intently interested in serving God on Sundays and intently interested in living for myself the rest of the week. Although I was not involved in any of the typical “bad” sins of youth (drugs, alcohol, sexual promiscuity), I was aware that I was not walking with the Lord. Following a musical presentation by a local Christian group at our high school, I recommitted my life to Christ and began a turn-around.

            Shortly thereafter I became involved with an independent charismatic church, where I had a life-transforming, but rather unemotional, experience of being filled with the Holy Spirit. Since that time, over forty-five years ago, I have mostly fellowshiped in charismatic churches. My first years in college were spent with a loosely-organized group which later became a church. It was during these years that I was discipled and learned many of the foundational gospel truths and Kingdom life teachings that formed who I am. Later I was able to begin a more systematic exploration of the Scriptures and theology through my educational pursuits. Those studies, from the simplest courses at a church-based Bible institute to the most challenging seminars at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, have been some of the most important influences on my spiritual growth since the days of listening to Bob Mendelsohn teach Bible studies in the living room of the Mustard Seed in Lawrence, Kansas. Throughout my history, I attribute most of my spiritual growth to the fact that I have had some of the finest pastors and teachers it is possible to have, from whom I have gleaned a rich repository of truth.

            Perhaps the most important developments in my spiritual growth, however, beyond being mentored or instructed, come from my experience of being a husband and a father. For nothing can compare to the lessons I have learned when trying to live out Christian faith at home in front of my children, and teaching them to follow Jesus. By God’s grace, my wife and I have seen all of our children grow up to love and serve the Lord, and we are convinced that they are not only the best people on the planet, but our most important and enduring spiritual fruit.

            If I have learned nothing else in my life, I have learned that I must trust in the grace of God. If I am successful in teaching, or in ministry, or in any other endeavor, it will be because God’s grace will be sufficient in spite of my weaknesses–small or glaring, few or many–that the job will undoubtedly reveal. So I do not begin with the assumption that I will succeed, nor that my education and experience have prepared me to succeed. Rather, I have the expectation that if God has led me to this place in life, and there is a way in which I can serve him on this assignment, then what he has made me and how he has shaped me in the past will fit with the abilities and qualities necessary to do what he has sent me to do, and that he will continue to shape me and teach me in ways that will be beneficial to those I serve..

            Throughout my adult life, I have been told by those I have taught that I am a good teacher. I take that with a grain of salt, but the fact that this group includes college professors, peers in ministry, barely literate Mexican welders, Christians in another culture, and a range of people of different ages in several churches, gives me some hope that God has, in fact, gifted me to teach, and that if I continue to pursue his call, I may become a good teacher someday. When I taught at the Bible school, my classes were the hardest and most demanding, and yet they were usually the ones with the most students. I hope that I learned enough from those years to be able to retain the kind of excitement in teaching that draws and sustains students’ interest while finding a better balance of requirements and expectations so that the classes are not more demanding than is appropriate.

            In my educational journey, I have had to face a lot of difficult questions, issues that seriously challenged my faith. I have learned that God is not afraid of hard questions, and that there are answers which can satisfy the mind as well as the heart, if one is willing to seek them out. So I am not bothered by people with doubts or by hard questions, including questions for which I do not have the answers. Nor am I bothered if the journey to find answers takes a while. I have learned that it is better to listen to a person’s questions and to help him or her find the way than to attempt to force feed them answers and dogmatic lessons which they are not yet interested in or ready for while they are trying to understand the questions. And I have learned that a teacher must be patient, for students learn at different paces, depending on where they are in life as much as where they are in the school year and class calendar. I am also not bothered by questions that challenge our evangelical faith. For I discovered in seminary that critics often asked legitimate questions, even though they seldom found answers that were compatible with faith. But I also learned that such answers existed; one only needed to know that resources were available to help with the search.

            My faith journey, therefore, is one that has allowed me to experience both the richness of charismatic spiritual experience and the wealth of evangelical theology, to explore what it means to love God with my heart as well as my mind, and to embrace both pursuits as essential to genuine Christian faith. I deeply desire to serve the Body of Christ as a sort of bridge between the two oft-separated worlds of academia and church, of evangelicalism and Pentecostalism, and, I hope, to be of some help to those on both ends.