NEWS SUMMER 2018
UPCOMING EVENTS 8 December Open morning at Oak Hill 19 January Why get ordained in the Church of England? event at Oak Hill
YOUR SUPPORT AND ENCOURAGEMENT Johnny Juckes, our new President, writes: It’s six months since I began work as President of Oak Hill, after a thousand Sundays in a local church in East Yorkshire, and 18 years on the college council. My appointment represents the commitment of the Kingham Hill Trustees, and the Oak Hill College Council, to more of the qualities Oak Hill is known for, including high standards of biblical studies, and excellence in doctrine and apologetics.
2 February Why get ordained in the Church of England? event at Holy Trinity Platt, Manchester 16 March Open morning at Oak Hill 27 April Open morning at Oak Hill
Photo: Johnny Juckes talking with a student at the Oak Hill summer party, June 2018. Oak Hill College newsletter 1
At the same time, I’m here to focus the life of the college community on the need for wisdom, evangelistic zeal and practical pastoral skills, as well as Christian character, and the human skills that are always required by the complexities of church leadership. As the former Chairman of the Kingham Hill Trust, I am conscious that Oak Hill has existed for the last 85 years as a gift, by God’s grace, to the church and the wider community in this country and across the world. To sustain and develop the ministry of the college, we need your support and encouragement more than ever.
OPEN MORNINGS The next Oak Hill open mornings take place on the following three Saturdays: 8 December 2018 16 March 2019 27 April 2019 Open mornings are for anyone who is thinking about theological training, full or part time, to find out what life and learning at Oak Hill is like firsthand. At our open mornings, prospective students hear about our ethos and programmes, chat with students and staff, sample a selection of lectures, and join a tour around the campus.
We would love you to pray for us on a regular basis. Please turn to page 5 of this newsletter for our current prayer list, where you can also find details of our online prayer page. We would love you to send us students. At a time of huge social change, there is a great need for faithful, word-based ministers, and this will only increase as the current generation retires in the next 10 years. Please recommend our regular open mornings (see the dates on the left) to the rising generation of young leaders in your church. We would love you to help us financially. Some churches spend a portion of their mission budget in the UK. Some of us have friends or church family members who are eager to support the training of the next generation of word ministers. If you are able to help us in these ways, or directly yourself, please visit our giving pages: oakhill.ac.uk/giving Please stay in touch. Do visit the college at any time, as we are always glad to welcome visitors. Thank you for all the ways you already help us, and please feel free to get in touch with me by phone or email. Yours in Christ Johnny Juckes, President, Oak Hill College president@oakhill.ac.uk
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TWO NEW ACADEMIC AND PASTORAL APPOINTMENTS We are very pleased to announce two new appointments at Oak Hill. Dr Matthew Bingham has been appointed as Tutor in Systematic Theology and Church History, while Kristi Mair has been appointed part-time Pastoral Support and Research Fellow. After completing an MDiv at Princeton Theological Seminary, Matthew was Senior Pastor at Flint Reformed Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia, until 2014. For the last four years he has been in Belfast completing a PhD in Church History at Queen’s University. Matthew says: ‘At a time when the church faces tremendous pressure from within and without, the need for serious theological and biblical training is more pressing than ever. It is thus with great enthusiasm that I look forward to joining Oak Hill’s outstanding faculty. I count it a great privilege to help the college’s students as they prepare for a lifetime of faithful service in Christ’s church.’ Kristi is a gifted young academic, apologist and evangelist. She has a BA in Philosophy and Theology and an MA in Philosophy from Birmingham, and has just started a part time PhD there. As part of her Oak Hill responsibilities, Kristi will be providing pastoral care for female students as well as undertaking some teaching. Kristi writes: ‘I am utterly thrilled to be joining the Oak Hill community. Not only does the college provide premier theological training, but there is also a wonderful recognition of the pastoral need to care for students, creating a dynamic environment geared towards their personal flourishing. I am so looking forward to mentoring female students and providing teaching cover.’
Above: Matthew Bingham and Kristi Mair.
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‘ENCOURAGING PEOPLE IS WHAT I REALLY WANT TO DO’
Paul Woodbridge has taught at Oak Hill for the past 30 years, and has been Director of College Placements, and Missions Coordinator. But now that he is retiring, we talked to him about the highlights of his time at Oak Hill
My experience of Anglicanism had been entirely negative before I came to Oak Hill. I was (and remain) a Baptist, and I’d been teaching at a C of E secondary school in Essex, where the Anglicans I knew were happier following liberal trends than sticking to the Bible. So I was slightly hesitant in coming to what was then mostly an Anglican college, until the Principal, Gordon Bridger, assured me that Oak Hill was very much evangelical first and Anglican second. In my time here, I’ve never felt that the college has been anything other than evangelical first. It’s one of the reasons I’ve felt so much at home here. People have always mixed well at Oak Hill. There’s not been any strong denominational bias. Of course, there have always been differences of opinion. I have my leg pulled a fair bit, and I pull lots of Anglican legs, threatening to immerse people with a big glass of water at lunchtime to be truly baptised! I don’t think I’ve ever met people at Oak Hill who want to defend their denomination at all costs and make it an issue which could be truly divisive. That’s a healthy thing. The Tottenham Hotspur ground is just four miles away from Oak Hill, and of course that’s the main reason I came here in the first place – I could get to matches so easily. I’m a lifelong Spurs supporter. Disturbingly, two of the principals I’ve served under have been quite fanatical Arsenal supporters, not least Mike Ovey, who would taunt me if Arsenal won and Spurs lost over the weekend. I can still hear him shouting at me down the corridor, ‘Why don’t you support a proper team?’
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When I taught Greek, I found some students had never been taught English grammar. So I started the course with some helpful sentences so they could grasp the different parts of speech. I used an example close to my heart: ‘Spurs scores goals.’ ‘Spurs’ is the subject, ‘scores’ is the verb, and ‘goals’ is the object. Or: ‘Arsenal give goals to Spurs.’ Here, ‘Spurs’ is the indirect object in the dative case. A student who was here in the early 90s was in touch with me recently, and said that he still remembers ‘Spurs scores goals.’ I see that as a considerable victory. I’m going to miss the students most of all. I think that will be the big thing. I get on well with all my colleagues and enjoy being with them, but I love being with the students. I’ve so enjoyed being among them, and they’ve always energised me. The heart of my ministry at Oak Hill has been encouraging people to keep going. It’s very easy to feel the work is too hard or too much, so talking with the students and offering them help and support has been a priority for me. In retirement, I’m looking forward to getting as involved as possible in our local church. We’re going to be living in Ely. I’m also going to be supporting pastors in the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion, which means I’ll be in contact with 20 or more churches around the country, visiting and encouraging them in their ministries. Encouraging people is what I really want to do.
PLEASE PRAY WITH US Please pray for our leaving students as they move on to their next step in ministry. Please give thanks with us for them, and for the promise of all that God will do through them. We are grateful to God for the many new students who have chosen to study at Oak Hill next year. Please pray for them and their families as they move to Oak Hill in the summer. Pray for Paul Woodbridge as he retires, and for Mel Lacy and Mark Pickles as they take up their new work (see pages 6 and 8). Please pray for our new staff as they prepare to start in September: Chris Stead, Matthew Bingham, Kristi Mair and Andrew Nicholls. For more prayer requests, see: oakhill.ac.uk/prayer Oak Hill College newsletter 5
MEL LACY TO LEAD NEW YOUTH CHARITY From this September, Mel Lacy will become the Executive Director of a new charity called Growing Young Disciples. This new work will seek to develop the ministry of the Growing Young Disciples conference, as well as cultivating new initiatives designed to train, equip and resource parents and those who serve in children’s and youth ministry in the local church.
Dan Strange, College Director, says: ‘This new venture continues Oak Hill’s commitment to providing training for youth and children’s ministry, and the vital part that plays in equipping ministers to evangelise the UK. We look forward to further developing our provision in the forthcoming undergraduate programme review.
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We are looking forward to supporting Mel in this new venture, as she will continue to be the Director of the Theology and Praxis for Children’s and Youth Ministry (TCY) stream at Oak Hill, and she will be fully involved in teaching the stream for the 2018/19 and 2019/20 academic years. Mel will be resident at college for a number of days each week, but will be permanently based further north. All our teaching programmes are subject to a planned cycle of review and revalidation by our partner Middlesex University. In the case of our undergraduate provision, including the TCY stream, we have now started our preparation for implementation in the academic year 2020/21.
DAVID WHEATON: ‘A GRACIOUS MAN OF LOVE AND FAITH’ Former faculty member Mike Butterworth offers a personal reflection on the life and ministry of David Wheaton, who served as Oak Hill College Principal 1971-86. David died earlier this year. Many people have noted what a great encourager David was: friends, students, people he’d met – often quite briefly – in all sorts of situations. In my own case, I particularly valued his support when, starting as a staff member in an environment completely different from educational and pastoral work in India, he offered a steer on what adjustments were needed. Also in his encouragement to launch what became Oak Hill Extension College. He continued this support and eventually became a distance learning tutor for the course. My first conversation with David was a phone call from him to Bangalore in 1979 where we were working, asking if I could come to the college for a few days for interviews. My last conversations were also by phone: David struggled with health, but the qualities he had always shown shone through: his absolute concern to be faithful to Christ, and his keen interest in the welfare and progress of others.
Read Mike Butterworth’s complete tribute to David Wheaton on the Oak Hill blog: bit.ly/david-wheaton-tribute Also see Gerald Bray’s tribute to David Wheaton on the Church Society website: bit.ly/david-wheaton-1930-2018
David was universally loved by those who knew him and respected by those who dealt with him in a professional capacity, including those with very different theological viewpoints. He was a gracious man of love and faith and a wonderfully constant friend over many years. Our thoughts and prayers are with the family at this sad time, but we are assured that, reunited with his beloved Joy, he has his place with Christ, his Lord, for all eternity. Oak Hill College newsletter 7
MARK PICKLES TO BE NEW DIRECTOR OF NORTH WEST PARTNERSHIP STAY IN TOUCH! Due to recent changes in the law about personal data, we need your explicit permission to stay in touch with you. If you haven’t returned the ‘keeping in touch’ form we recently sent you, or updated your details on the Oak Hill website, please take a couple of minutes to do so on this page: http://bit.ly/oak-hill-contact Thanks!
Oak Hill College Chase Side Southgate London N14 4PS Phone 020 8449 0467 Fax 020 8441 5996 Website www.oakhill.ac.uk President Revd Johnny Juckes 8 Oak Hill College newsletter
We are delighted to announce that from the end of this academic year, Mark Pickles, who has been Director of Anglican Ministry Training at Oak Hill, will become the new Director of the North West Partnership. Given Mark’s great contribution to Oak Hill, which have included teaching the Homiletics and Gospel Driven Leadership modules, we are very sorry to see him leave. But we are excited about his new appointment, which will undoubtedly strengthen Oak Hill’s relationship with training in the north-west. We are also delighted to announce that Johnny Juckes will be teaching the Gospel Driven Leadership module, bringing his 30-plus years of ministry experience to the programme. In addition, the Revd Dave Walker will be involved in teaching Anglican Ministry. Dave is Vicar of Christ Church North Finchley, and graduated with an MTh from Oak Hill in 2007. Please pray for Mark in his new role with the North West Partnership, and for Johnny and Dave as they take up these important teaching responsibilities at Oak Hill.