Snapshot: by Philip Gaines
Most of the Fellows blogs this year have been deep dives into theology, reflections on recent Fellows events, or meditations on what God has been showing us through our time in Nashville. With this one, I decided to try a slightly different tack—especially as we are smack in the middle of the application and acceptance season for the program, I thought it would be valuable to have a picture—a snapshot, if you will—of what life as a Fellow looks like, at least in this Covid-inflected year. So, without further ado, here’s a look at a week in my life, flattened into two dimensions and captured in words.
Class: We spend Monday mornings and early afternoons in class. Two periods take up the morning, Metanarrative of Scripture and Practical Theology. At this point in the year, we have made it through most of the Bible in our first class, so this week we examined two sections of the book of Hebrews (ch. 1 and 3), discussing what the writer has to say to us about the person of Jesus and His supremacy to all other forms of revelation, worship, and intercession God had provided in the past. We also mined the formidable mind of Scotty Smith, our Bible teacher, for greater understanding of the interconnected roles of God’s grace and the believer’s perseverance in the Christian life. The book Jesus Outside the Lines by Scott Sauls, Senior Pastor at my Fellows church, Christ Presbyterian, provided the context and framework for our second class discussion. We considered the relationship between Jesus’ gentleness and His righteous indignation, segueing into a conversation about how to have difficult conversations across lines of belief with Christians and non-Christians alike. Every week of class looks quite different, as we use different Scriptural passages and books as our source texts and our teachers rotate, but they always have in common the depth and richness that characterized the conversations we had this past week.
Work: Tuesday through Friday, I work for St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church—it is a congregation that has long supported the Fellows program, but I am the first to be directly involved there as part of the program. In this season, as we near the end of Lent, my time is split between youth ministry and communications. With an end to the pandemic finally in sight (Lord willing), our youth ministry is implementing plans for the rest of the spring and beginning to consider what types of formative activities will best fit into the landscape of the summer. Additionally, as the church prepares for Holy Week, I assist in developing communication strategies and materials to deploy to the St. B’s worshipping community as Easter inches closer.
When I graduated last May with a B.S. in biochemistry, I would never have predicted that 10 months later, I’d be planning youth events and flexing unworked visual design muscles to build mass emails! Including myself, only two of the current Fellows work for churches—the others are scattered across various industries, including healthcare, education, interior design, and the non-profit thinktank space. And yet, a common thread for all of us has been a healthy stretching of our assumptions and our self-knowledge. We have grown in our understanding of the things of which we are capable and the environments in which we thrive, and we will take those lessons wherever we go next.
Church: I serve every Wednesday night in Christ Pres’ student ministry, helping to lead the 6th grade boys’ small group. As the year has gone on and I’ve been able to build real relationships with my co-leaders and my students, I’ve increasingly enjoyed youth group. We just finished a series on Romans 5-8 (also called Snapshot, as it happens. Coincidence? Plagiarism? The world may never know), and we are about to enter into one focused on the issues of racial injustice and reconciliation in this country. I am so excited to continue diving into the Word of God with students who are hungry to learn and to know more about who Jesus is, and what His call on us means for the rest of our lives. On Sundays, I have the opportunity to serve at Christ Pres on the Welcome Team, since Covid has nixed our Sunday morning youth programming. Currently, the clergy are working their way through a sermon series on Mark. I have been particularly struck by the teaching surrounding the Lord’s Supper in recent weeks, the way that it is a marker of the New Life of Christ and the way that it models for us messy, generous, loving tables, opened and hosted by Christians for any- and everyone.
Community-building: Every Tuesday evening, the whole cohort gathers (usually at the Allen’s home, but sometimes we are hosted by another member of the broader Fellows community in Nashville), and a couple of the Fellows cook a meal for everyone. After eating together, we share a conversation—in the fall, each Fellow shared their testimony, but this semester, we are each hosting a discussion on a topic of interest to us. For instance, Robbie and I co-hosted a conversation on the nature of Christian storytelling and Christian art more generally, but each week’s topic is utterly different. Because we have had the beautiful (and difficult and demanding and fulfilling and so many other adjectives) opportunity to live together in community housing rather than staying with host families, our Fellows community is an enormous point of focus in the rhythms of my life. For those of us who can, we work from home together almost on a weekly basis. We go for 1-1 coffee dates. We watch movies and television shows. We have book club, reading together in silence. This week, DeLacy and I spent an afternoon and evening crafting homemade pizza and salad for our cohort (it was delicious—do yourself a favor and check out Carla Lalli Music’s Sheet Pan Pizza on Bon Appetit’s YouTube channel). Last week, Robbie and I got to practice our parenting skills by housesitting for our director, John Allen, watching the Allen’s dog, Gus, and their son, Wilder. We had a blast eating, talking, and sharing life with Wilder and the other Fellows; it’ll be a forever highlight of this year in my book. If you’re reading my blog post and considering applying for Fellows, know this: in this community, you will find a disparate collection of Jesus-centered people who will love you fiercely and well. My fellow-Fellows will be my forever-friends, and I wouldn’t trade them for anything.
For Fun:
What I’m Watching: Survivor, Grey’s Anatomy, Downton Abbey
What I’m Reading: Jesus Outside the Lines, Acts, Psalms, Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik, Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer. Just finished Prayer in the Night by Tish Harrison Warren, and cannot recommend it highly enough.
What I’m Listening To: The Gospel Coalition’s new playlist, Steadfast, is keeping me in the zone currently. Also Tasha Cobbs Leonard’s album Royalty: Live at the Ryman. Also various pop songs and covers.
There! That’s a snapshot of my life as a Fellow! God has been so good to me and to all my cohort-mates through this season. He is using an incredible community of committed and sacrificing Christians in Nashville to pour into us and shape us into the young men and women of the Kingdom that He desires us to be. As I look to what’s coming next, the things I’ve learned about the Person of God, about myself, and about how to serve and foster community march alongside me, transforming what could be a terrifyingly unknown future landscape into an exhilaratingly free season, bursting with potential and the sure and certain knowledge of God’s utter faithfulness and lovingkindness, pursuing me to the ends of the earth. I can’t wait to see what He’s going to do.
