Ask Jennie Anything - Part 2
This is part two of a Q&A that I did with Chloe. If you haven’t read part one, make sure you go back to that one first. Today we're continuing this conversation, and I’m going to talk about my time in seminary, some of my favorite books I’ve ever read, and a little dream that I’ve always wanted to do.
Chloe: So if you weren't in ministry, what would you be doing?
Well, I set out to be a producer of the news. And I still, deep down, wish I could do it. In fact, I'm going to sound braggy here just cause it's so entertaining. Get ready. I was ahead of my time, and if I would have created what I set out to create from college, it would be winning. It would have world dominance at this moment in time. Because I'll tell you what I wanted to create. I went into broadcast journalism with a minor in political science, if people can believe that, because I wanted to go to Washington D.C. and produce the news. I didn't want to be on the news. I mean, sure, Katie Couric. I would have loved to be on The Today Show. I would love all that stuff.
But my ultimate goal and vision was I wanted to produce the news, and I was going to create a new way to do news. This was before Fox News made this 24 hour news circuit like it is today, and this is before Fox originated. So it's basically a 24 hour news cycle where, and I've heard the history about it, where they played the same story over and over again and everybody gives their opinion. So it's opinion news that's on the same subject for 24 hours. And that model, which has obviously worked and become the way all news pretty much is done on the big stations, has changed us. And if I look back to the girl in college, before that even was the pattern at that point—in my classes, bias was nearly illegal. I mean, you couldn't be a viable journalist or reporter and have opinions. I remember writing my new stories and turning them in, and if there was ever a hint of what my opinion was, they would mark it out in red.
And so what I wanted to build was a place where there were no opinions shared. It was stories. And so if immigration was on the table, then go to the border and talk about jobs, talk about the difficult things about immigration, and then tell the story of immigrants, like tell both stories so that people can think for themselves. Because I think we want to think for ourselves, but we don't. We've lost the art. We literally don't even know how to have our own opinion. We watch Twitter for our opinion. We watch news cycles for our opinion, or we talk to people we know. But I think building our own opinion in an educated way, to actually understand the stories and the nuance, right? We've lost nuance. It's just this side or this side, and everybody's fighting.
Honestly, when I sit down with an issue, I usually can have empathy for both sides. I mean, if it's truly played out and I understand both sides. There's validity and truth to both sides, or we wouldn't be fighting. I know that every side on every issue thinks that the other side is completely unreasonable. But I usually can chase down like, you know what, I don't agree with this side, but it's not crazy and it's not lacking compassion. Usually it's just that they have compassion for different people. You know, abortion: one side has compassion for the baby, the other one has compassion for a teenage mom in poverty. It's not that they're hateful people. Their compassion has got a side one way or the other, and everybody's choosing what side. Now, the fight there and where I land is pro-life because we're talking about life and death, for one. And I believe life begins at conception, but that's not what everybody believes. And so their compassion is just falling in a different place.
And I think that's what I wish we spoke like toward each other is understanding that the other side isn't evil. They're coming at it with a different belief system. They're coming at it with different values. They're coming at it with different passions. I have great compassion. While I'm pro life, also, I'm like, we need to be eliminating poverty. We need to be helping build systems where mothers can more easily get better healthcare in impoverished areas. Like I believe in pro-life everywhere, right? Like not just in the womb, but also the life of that mother, what they need, how to help them thrive, and building a world where those women are taken care of.
So that's my big dream. I still have that dream, obviously. Get me talking about it. I still think it's needed. I haven't seen it done well yet. I've talked to people in the industry. A new friend that I've made that's at NBC News that I love so much and she loves Jesus. I won't say her name, but she worked in her way up and she's got that same exact vision. And when she told it to me, and she's doing it kind of underground in their digital stuff. I mean, I am like, Lord, just raise up those people in every industry that can bring redemption and compassion and love to it.
What would you call your network? Would it be a network or a show?
Sure. I mean, if we're dreaming, let's build a network. Let's go big. Here's the thing: I believe in people, maybe too much sometimes. I think people are reasonable. I think if you help them understand somebody else's point of view, I think they work with more compassion. And so I think the news should do a better job of showing compassion.
And I go back to my professor. I will never forget it. He was an African American, and I can't remember his name. He was fantastic. I just remember how much red ink he would use on my stories, but he taught me to write. It's why I write so succinctly. Like my sentences are pretty short and punchy because I learned to write as a journalist. I think he made me a better writer, and he taught me to not make assumptions about people and to not make assumptions about subjects but to go research it. I mean, it's one reason that I don't speak about things I'm not educated on. I was taught that you don't write even a 200 word piece without doing 200 hours of work on it, you know? So it taught me that you don't speak about things you're not educated on.
And I mean I appreciate all of the classes because I think, what if the major networks just obeyed that? I mean everybody's talking heads about everything. You know, they have the same people talking about every subject. And I'm like, there's real people that spend their entire lives on immigration, and I know they'll have those people on and all that, but they don't even let them talk long. You know, I want to hear from this person. They've given their life to this work. So I think that just not being quick to speak about everything when we may not understand the nuance and all the issues that the people are really facing.
And I think that's what our culture is craving because of the rise of all these shows on Netflix, like Reese Witherspoon's really cute show where she is getting people's stories.
I hope a change is coming. I think it might be. I mean, we're all sick of this. We're all sick of the way the news is being reported. We saw that in 2016. We're headed into 2020, and there's gotta be a change. It just didn't work. It's not building a climate of hope and a climate of relationship and in a climate of moving forward.
What are the three most influential books you've ever read?
Oh gosh. Okay. Well, I mean this is easy because I've put them on repeat all the time. A.W. Tozer’s The Pursuit of God. I read it regularly. In fact, almost every time I write a book, I read it before I write it because no matter what, I basically want to repackage that and give it away over and over again and with different themes.
The next one is Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology. It taught me to love theology. It’s the reason I went to seminary. I read it cover to cover when I was in my twenties, and it taught me about God. And I needed to learn about God because I was a teacher. I knew I had the gift of teaching, and I was teaching everywhere, and I didn't know what I was talking about. So I'm such a lover of theology because the more we understand who God is, who we are, and what the earth is for, the more we will live rightly into it. So I hope everybody that reads me and that listens to the podcast senses and is not surprised that I call myself a theologian. I hope that what I'm always giving you is a sound understanding of who God is, what his word says, and why we're here, which good theology should cause in your life.
My next one would be Humility by Andrew Murray. I think that one, and again I could cry talking about all three of those books and how they've shaped me, but I think that one matters the most to me, and I read it the most often and the reason why is because of what I do. And there's a deep fear in me that somewhere I would lose my humility. And by humility, I don't mean probably what you think of when you hear humility. What I mean is that I would have a rightful view of God. That I have a rightful view of myself and a rightful view of God. I value and prize that so much because I want to end well, and I have been given a lot of your trust and I've been given a lot of influence. You know, there's a lot of people who have a lot more, but to me it's a lot and enough to make me feel really sober about what I do with it and to make sure that I'm humbly taking people to Jesus and not to myself.
We're in a culture where it's just widely accepted that you can build a platform and you should and people should follow you. And, and again, I'm part of that. It's not like I'm not writing books or not on a podcast here. But I hope all of it for me and what I pray and why I read that book all the time is I hope that it is making much of God and that what people know of me is him. That rightful view of God and that rightful view of myself helps with that. You know, I can't get all my words perfectly right or make sure that I'm never boasting, you know. I don't think that's humility. I think humility is just understanding your position and understanding God’s. That's why I love Pursuit of God, too. It's just this big God and before him we just feel like all we want to do is worship. And we want to help everybody else worship. And I hope that's what my work does.
And for anybody who's curious about Systematic Theology, there actually is a podcast that Wayne Grudem did years ago. I think it's him teaching through the entire book, and they're all free and if you go on Apple podcasts or probably anywhere podcasts are and search “Systematic Theology” or “Wayne Grudem” they pop up. Those have been huge for me because there's only so much time in the day to read really dense theological books sometimes, but listening to those has been awesome because it walks through each chapter.
Okay, what advice would you give someone who has tried to make deep friendships and it's not reciprocated?
Didn't we do a whole podcast on that? Didn't we do a whole season? Find another friend? I get it. Some people don't have capacities. Some people aren't people people, they're cranky. Some people don't like you. That's okay. That's just the way it is. Move on, move on, keep trying. Don't quit. Don't get discouraged. Just don't feel sorry for yourself. Don't make it a bigger deal than it is. Don’t get insecure. Just go to the next person. If that doesn’t work out, go to the next person.
If eventually you've been to like 10 people, you might need a counselor. You might need to go, what's wrong with me? Why don't I have friends? And there really might be some unhealthy codependency or something you need to work through. I'm not joking about that. If you're sitting there going, “gosh, I've never been able to make good friends,” go to counseling. Pay someone to be your friend for a little while. And by friend, I mean what a friend should be is somebody that tells you the truth. That's a good friend. That's what Proverbs says. So pay them to be your friend for a little while to get you in a healthy place. That's nothing to be ashamed of. We've all done it. Those of us that are healthy. I always say, I don't know many healthy people that haven't been to counseling. So do it, come out of it, and learn better what it looks like to have healthy friendships.
Some of you don't have friends cause you're just dang busy. Some of you don't have good friends because you live in a little bitty town and there's not a lot of people. And I would say just don't categorize a good friend as someone in your exact life stage, as someone your same age. Chloe is one of my best friends. I had to call her awkwardly and tell her that when I was with my sister in Colorado. We were at my sister's birthday, and my sister because she works on a dude ranch, she has friends of every age. Some of them are like 21 and Chloe's a lot younger than me, but yet, she's one of my best friends. I had to call her from that retreat and say, “Hey, I just want you to know, I know we work together, but you're one of my best friends because we spend so much time together and we like each other”. So it doesn't matter. Life stage doesn't matter. Age doesn't matter. You’ve just got to cross every barrier and find the people that are following after Jesus, and then go with them.
Look outside your circles, too. I think sometimes people get stuck in certain realms in your church or your community, and you miss out on who could be outside because it's not who you thought would be your friend.
Okay. We get a lot of questions about your time in seminary. How did you decide to go?
So my husband was going, he was about to go. He had been in youth ministry for several years, and I was teaching my Bible left and right. And it was my dream. I remember awkwardly telling somebody on New Year's Eve, a group of new friends that I had. They went around and said, “what's your dream? What do you dream of? And if you could do anything, what would you do?” And everybody was like, “Oh, I'd live on an Island!” You know, everybody's was cute and fun. And I was like, “I'd go to seminary”. And these are new friends. And they were like, “okay, you’re so weird”, but it really was my dream.
I just wanted to go so bad because at that point I’d read Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology cover to cover. I'd been discipled by somebody going to seminary, and so she was coming home and teaching me everything she could. And I just realized that I wanted to know God as well as you could on earth. I know that sounds really dramatic, but I did. I wanted to know everything there was to know about my Bible. I was teaching it already, and I wanted to be sure I was doing that correctly.
I do not think, by any stretch of the imagination, that to teach the Bible, to do ministry in any context you need to go to seminary. But I think you need to be very committed to studying very hard if you don’t. You don't want to get God wrong if you're talking about him all the time to other people because then you're giving everybody a wrong God. And I remember my husband when I had worked up the courage to say I would love to go. He looked at me and said, “well, candidly, I'm scared if you don’t go because I'm scared you're just going to butcher him. Let's get this right.”
And so we used our entire life savings at the time. We didn't have a lot, but we had inherited a little bit of money from a relative, and we used every penny, I believe. And we were poor. We were renting a little house with two kids. I graduated nine months pregnant, had my daughter a week after I walked and graduated from seminary. I took three years to do a two year degree, and I took mostly summer classes, Christmas classes, you know, one or two on a Tuesday and Thursday. People were like, “how did you do it with young, young kids?” I didn't do anything else. I didn't have other Bible studies. I didn't play tennis. You know, I didn't do anything else. That's what I did for three years. And I wrote 20 page papers at night after they went to bed. But I never ever minded. I just, I loved it that much. It fed my soul, and I'm still that girl. Like I love being in that environment. I mean, I would love to go back and go again. I don't know that it makes any sense and it's so expensive. But yeah, I'm such a learner. Like I just always want that to stay a part of who I am.
You never get to the end of understanding God, you know? So I had really good professors. It's a seminary where I don't agree with absolutely everything they taught, but most of it I do. And the professors I had were humble, and they were good at teaching both sides of doctrinal issues within orthodoxy. It was helpful. I feel like, again, it built compassion in me. I'm not a seminary jerk. You know, the people that walk out and are like, “this is the right way”. I never really ever get in those kinds of fights with people. It's like, well, when it comes to is there free will or is he fully sovereign? I think there's a little bit of mystery to him, and my sweet professor used to say, “embrace the tension”. Embrace the tension that somehow he's both. Scripture definitely is clear that we have free will, and scripture is definitely clear that God is omniscient and knows all things and that he's fully sovereign over them. So somehow it's both.
And I think that's what I walked out of seminary with is a ton of humility that I don't even understand like the hem of his garment. I'm in awe of him. I love him more because of the experience. I hope that it has shaped in a healthy way, my teaching and everything that I give away, that there's a groundedness to it because there's a lot of work. You know, when I'm teaching on the podcast, when I'm giving you guys those episodes where I teach, I'm thinking to myself, you know what, that teaching is rooted in decades of study. That's what I'm pulling from. I'm pulling from decades of study, and it's cool because there are notebooks on my shelf. We didn't have laptops back when I went, which is crazy, or they were just too expensive for me to own one. So what's in my closet right now, currently at the top of my closet is about 100 3-ring binders. And I pull them off every time I'm about to teach on a subject. I'll pull off two or three of them and look back at them. So I'm really grateful.
And Zac always says, don't take for granted your knowledge. And what he means by that is don't just speak as if they know what you know. Pull them along. Give them a theology and understanding of sadness. Help them have that same knowledge, and that's what I felt. I remember being in seminary, I think I wrote about this in a book. I remember being in seminary and just weeping in the back because I felt like how come I get all this? So few people get this much of God. So few people can just feast like this—where they just think about God for three whole years and think about angels and think about heaven and think about hell and think about theology of sanctification, which means basically our walk of faith, how does that work and justification, which is basically what happens to us when we're saved. So all these big deep things, but they mean so much to us. They mean so much to you. They mean so much to everyone. Even if you don't ever think about them, they mean a lot to you. I remember just crying and thinking, okay, I have to go give this away with the rest of my life. I hope I'm doing a good job with that.
You are very much so. So to the person listening who seminary’s just not in the cards. I mean, even for me, like seminary is not in the cards. What are some of your favorite tools that we could go either get today from the library or wherever or listen to that could help us understand our Bibles more?
So everybody needs a few good commentaries. The first most basic ones I think we ever owned were Bible Knowledge Commentaries. There's a New Testament and Old Testament one that's a great thing to get right away. Absolutely get Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology. What I like about it is it's written really simple, and it's written based on questions. So it's like, what are angels? When I find out that somebody is feeling called to teach the Bible, I will gift them these things because I do feel like those were my most basic, helpful tools. And I've told young women before that are called to preach or to teach. I've told them, you know, you don't have to go to seminary, but you're going to have to commit to study harder if you don't.
So another resource that I hope is still in print is a book by Tommy Nelson. Not just the publisher, “Tommy Nelson”. His name is Tommy Nelson, and it's called The Big Picture. And it's the big picture of the Bible. It's the story of the Bible, and that was super helpful. Until I understood the big story of the Bible, it was hard to figure out prophetic books and the Psalms—where they fit and how all these different types and styles of books work together to make my Bible. That really helped me understand the history of the Bible. And not in an academic way, but a story way. You'll love that book. I hope it's still out there.
Of course, I mean it's expensive, but Logos is a great resource. I use it almost every single time I'm preparing a talk. Certainly every time I'm doing an in depth study for a Bible study or anything like that. I am pretty deep into resources within Logos.
Another one that has shaped my view of theology and continues to is Tim Keller. His sermons and his podcast, we have recommended it to many of you many times, but he has continued to teach me and to give me healthy theology. I think there are Bible teachers, which are like verse-by-verse. They start with Ephesians 1:1 and now Ephesians 1:2. There are those people, and then I think there are more theologians. And I think Tim Keller is more in that category, even though we both would consider ourselves Bible teachers.
I think I'm more of like a “motivational theologian” is what I would call myself. Like at my core, I'm trying to help people understand the big picture and how that changes their lives. And I'm using the Bible to do that. But ultimately I'm after you understanding who God is, what he's done for us, and how that changes everything. And that's theology, you know? So those are going to be typically where I do work. I think having an understanding, Greek and Hebrew and all that—y'all, we're going to be in heaven soon, and we've got work to do. And if we try to overthink this for too long, we're missing souls. Like let's go about the work of God with what you know—always growing and learning more because there's no end to him. My favorite professors who have given their life’s work to understanding God and giving him away, they still are learners. They're still readers. They are still learning. So we can do that for the rest of our lives, but if that's not the end goal, right? The only reason we learn is so that we can give it away. We'll know everything, we'll get to heaven and we will know everything about God. So we don't need to absolutely understand everything before we start giving him away. Some of the best evangelists in the Bible were the ones that just got saved a minute ago. You know, the woman at the well, she goes and tells the whole city. Go with what you know. And as you're going, keep knowing more.
