Five Distinguishing Elements of Asbury Seminary’s Called Community

David J. Gyertson, Ph.D.
Interim President & Affiliate Professor of Leadership Formation and Renewal

Fall Convocation
September 3, 2024

• Welcome to our 101st year
• Time to review our “ebenezers”
  • Thanks to Steve O’Malley for his centennial history
• We are a “community called” to five distinctives:

  1. We are a community called to the Great Commission Mandate

  • To go “teaching” them
  • The Wesleyan commitment to education – Francis Asbury
  • Theologically – Biblically & Christo-centrically
  • Morrisons’s theology of essentials anchored to a deep understanding of Biblical exegesis “The whole Bible”

  2. We are a community called to the Great Commandment Motivation

  • To love fully and freely what and whom God loves
  • The whole Bible for the whole world
  • A global and inclusive challenge.
  • The sun never sets on Asburians

  3. We are a community called to sacrificial service

  • focused on the “lost, the last and the least of these” among us.
  • Willing to go to the places of greatest need and opportunity

  4. We are a community called to social wholeness & holiness

  • embracing the “we, our and us” in our discipleship and service – a “community called”.
  • The “we and us” trinitarian understanding –“let US create man in Our image”
  • Our Kingdom calling is too great for any one individual to think they are great enough to accomplish it alone.
  • Adam and Eve, Moses and Aaron/Hur David’s mighty men, Nehemiah and Ezra, disciples in twos etc
  • The Jerusalem Council’ “it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” Acts 15:28

  5. We are a community called to be filled with the Holy Spirit

  • We understand that being a thinking, loving and serving community is only possible through the sanctifying agency of the Holy Spirit.
  • Council’s “it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us”
  • Morrisons’ “Pentecostal Herald”
  • To be filled with the Holy Spirit we need to be emptied daily of all that would compete with the Spirit’s work to set us aside wholly and holy for our Lord’s sacred callings
  • “Kenosis” in Ph. 2’s “mimetic hymn” captures that calling as modeled in the life and ministry of Jesus
  • The radical humility emptying of self-will but not of self-essence is the continuing work of the Holy Spirit in and through us.

So let us embrace the Kenotic Covenant modeled in Ph. 2, so filled with the Holy Spirit, that we might truly be His community called to think deeply, love fully and serve sacrificially like Jesus.

1. A charge to keep I have,
   A God to glorify,
   A never-dying soul to save,
   And fit it for the sky.
2. To serve the present age,
   My calling to fulfill:
   Oh, may it all my pow’rs engage
   To do my Master’s will!
3. Arm me with jealous care,
   As in Thy sight to live;
   And O Thy servant, Lord, prepare
   A strict account to give!
4. Help me to watch and pray,
   And on Thyself rely,
   Assured, if I my trust betray,
   I shall forever die. Charles Wesley 1762