Kevin and Barbara Kinghorn Blog
by Kevin and Barbara Kinghorn
If you’re involved in any kind of Christian ministry, we’d like to invite you into an ongoing conversation! My wife, Barbara, and I have been around Christian ministry all our lives, growing up in homes of ordained ministers and devoting our adult lives to pastoral and academic work in service to Christ. For the past several years we’ve been writing down our observations of the highs and lows of Christian ministry. We’ve now started a blog about these experiences; and we would love to hear from others as well! Our goal is that those who experience both the joys and hardships of Christian ministry will find encouragement. After all, in reading about the ways God has helped others in ministry to re-think their own life experiences, we can often find new frameworks for understanding what God may be doing in our own lives.
From Kevin:
Our blog covers the 11 ½ years we spent in Oxford, England. I completed a four-year doctoral program in philosophical theology, and then continued there teaching for an additional 7 years, before we moved back to Kentucky to be near our older parents. While in Oxford Barbara served for a decade as the families worker for a large Anglican church in Oxford. In her outreach to families both in and outside the church, she would sometimes ask me to “add a few thoughts from a philosophical point of view” to her talks to groups. What emerged is a ‘two voices’ format that you’ll find in our blog posts: Barbara reflects on experiences of the kind of deep spiritual formation God seeks to effect in the lives of all of us; and then I chime in with some further theological context for those reflections. My own tendencies are more academic and philosophical. Barbara is more creative and more tuned into the dynamics of community formation. What we share is an aversion to overly simple ‘pat answers’ to life’s complex problems. And we share a great love for God and for others who take up the often challenging call to follow Christ.
From Barbara:
In about 1995, I experienced koinonia in a small Disciple Bible study group. The Lord whispered a spiritual name to me in Hebrew. It was an unbelievably long time before I translated it (17 years!) and during that time I came to terms with the fact that, though I have been a Christian since early childhood and walked closely with God, making many of the self- sacrificial types of choices that help us grow in maturity, nevertheless I would always feel like a fringe person. When I found out my spiritual name was an ancient Christian symbol for a person who is passionate about the lost caught in the cracks in the walls and who stays in the cracks in the walls because Christ died in the cracks in the walls, that resonated strongly with my sense of being oddly on the fringes of things. We began compiling these chapters about the time that I was in a fringe person’s Bible study group that we came to dub as “The Chapter 1” group because we could never find materials that were very hearty after Chapter 1. We recently returned to England after nearly four years to visit the people we invested in during that time of our lives reflected in these blog posts, and we found our relationships we built in service were still profoundly strong, as if time had stood still. Before we moved, a fellow staff person said to me, “You made a place for them.” I did move church furniture at 5, 6, or 7 in the morning regularly. When we found that the people we did that for were still in the same place in our hearts, and we were still in the same place in their hearts regardless of the time and space between us, I received a foretaste of Heaven, being held together in a place in God’s heart. A few little words cannot describe what that journey was like. But this compilation of blog posts reflects some measure of the outpouring of souls that took place.