If you’re reading this, you probably saw us or someone else post about gaining support to earn a PhD in New Testament at the University of St Andrews in preparation to equip pastors with the best possible guidance in the Scriptures as a missional scholar. If that’s you, I bet you’re here to figure out a bit more of who this “Russell crew” is. If so, you’ve come to the right place! I want to fill you in with some more of our backstory, what we’re up to nowadays, and the kinds of things we are praying and pushing towards.
A bit of backstory
I was perfectly happy doing what I was doing. As a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed biology student at my local community college in the western Chicago suburbs, I was loving exploring the world of the God who had just awakened me with a passion and love for him and his Son. I was on a smooth track to transfer to a good school to wrap up my bio program, go to medical school, and help people out as a physician.
So you could imagine my bewilderment when, on a sleepy August 2013 day at a hotel just outside Nashville, TN, I was blindsided with a call from God to pursue full-time, vocational ministry. The call was as clear as it is hard to describe, but it was indeed clear, and I was indeed bewildered.
I spent the next school year fighting against that call. But I lost. My passion to study for my science and math classes quickly began to funnel down the drain and, more often than not, I found myself instead diving into the Bible and preparing sermons and Bible studies that I had no intention to preach and teach (it probably didn’t help that I often worked on my classes in the theology section at the Wheaton College library!). I was asked to start leading ministries at our local chapter of CRU, and then those close to me began to suggest that I think about going into ministry. This was not my plan, nor what I wanted to do.
All this came to a head when I had to choose where to transfer at the end of the school year. Two doors were open: Loyola University Chicago, where I would major in Molecular Biology, and Moody Bible Institute, where I would major in Biblical Studies. I finally admitted defeat when a mentor pushed me to Moody.
My time at Moody was a period of incredible growth and formation. I met professors who had an incredibly tight grasp on the Bible and were able to make the God of the Bible known with a richness I had not even come close to experiencing before. Their ministry to me awakened a passion within me: to get the best training in biblical studies I could, go where that is not there, and spend my life giving the Word of life to God’s people at the highest level of quality God would let me do it at. 12 years later, and this passion has not only ceased from burning, but has grown and solidified.
So I had this fresh passion to give God’s Word to his people in places that did not have biblical teaching of the highest caliber. Yet I did not want to go to do more school and wanted to just get out there and start ministering. The final year of my time at Moody was one where I was hoping to connect with a good missions agency focusing on church planting, go with a team to some far region of the world, and just start evangelizing and planting Christian communities. Yet, thankfully, the Lord used a couple of wise professors to help me move toward seminary training. One thing led to another, and the Lord opened the door to enroll in the Master of Theology (ThM) program at Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS), and off I went.
Oh, and before I move on, I can’t help but mention that I met at Moody the most amazing woman on the planet who gratefully stooped to be my wife, Anna. I could write a book about how grateful I am to be her spouse, but I must refrain for now.
The hardest semester of my 11-year-and-counting college career was undeniably the first one at DTS. And all because of a class I didn’t even mean to sign up for! Now, every ThM student is expected to take Greek I in their first semester. So, as a good first-year student, I signed up for the class. But what I did not catch when I was signing up was an “H” connected to the class code, “NT101-H.” What a providential miss! It turns out that the Lord has used that killer Greek class to shape the trajectory of mine and my family’s life more than almost anything else Here’s a couple of reasons why I say that.
First, this class was taught by a professor named Dan Wallace. Along with being a top-flight scholar of New Testament Greek grammar and textual criticism, his ministry is marked by a passion to personally mentor students whom he sees have promise to serve the church as biblical scholars through an organization he founded over 20 years ago called The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM; more on that later). For whatever reason, he reached out to me to consider an academic direction for my ministry. And this is when I started thinking that, perhaps, I could be trained in handling the Scriptures at an academic level and use that training to stoop and serve God’s people in under-resourced areas with the best that biblical studies has to offer.
Second, I realized that Greek was something that I had both a passion and a knack for, and that I should leverage whatever facility God has given me in this field to the maximum potential that I could for the sake of his people. So, it became clear that I should seek out the best training in the field of New Testament studies that I could.
The rest of the five-year ThM program can be described as a further sharpening of this ministry trajectory: specifically, my wife and I realized that I need to pursue the path of becoming a biblical scholar in service to global pastors. You may be wondering, “Why focus on pastors?” So glad you asked! Over the course of the five-year ThM degree, the need that missiologists most frequently expressed was for theological training of pastors outside the Western world. Why is that, you may ask? In short, the supply of theologically trained pastors cannot keep up with the growth of the church in the non-Western world. What this means is the normal situation at a church in the majority world is one that is led and cared for by a pastor who has not been trained in handling the Bible, guiding people to maturity in Christ with a sure theological grounding and method, and communicating God’s truth effectively to his people (to get a bit better of an idea of what I’m talking about, check out this Christianity Today article that gets into this issue further). And this results in believers who are at a much greater risk of being malnourished and mis-nourished in the faith and prone to seeing a Jesus who is not the one that God has revealed. In light of theologian Frederic Buechner’s helpful definition of vocation (“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”), what we needed to do was unmistakable: I needed to gain expertise in the New Testament, at the doctoral level, and go to the majority world to do my part to help fill this huge need.
What we’re up to nowadays
By the grace of God, I graduated from the ThM program in 2022. Yet we’re still in Dallas and have only now enrolled in a PhD program. So, what have we been up to? This is where I can finally brag on my wife Anna. Like me, Anna has a deep desire to go overseas to make disciples. Unlike me, she has an incredible gift of hospitality. She has been on staff with a parachurch ministry called International Students, Inc. (ISI), a campus ministry on colleges all over the world, with the goal of making disciples of students from little-reached to unreached peoples. She is currently on the ISI staff at Southern Methodist University (SMU), where she leads a ministry comprising students from all over the world. The Lord has been using her in amazing ways, and I love to see how students have come to encounter and know Jesus through her ministry. And all this as a mama of our 2 year old, Owen!
To tell you what I’ve been up to is to pick up where I left off with being mentored by Dan Wallace. I decided to take Dan up on his offer and undertake the internship program at CSNTM with the intent of learning what it means to be a Christian biblical scholar.
As God would have it, my intended 1-year internship has morphed into a full-time staff position at CSNTM on the Research Team. I have been honored to contribute to this great organization in many ways such as (a) supervising the internship program, (b) serving as content creator and teacher for CSNTM’s lecture series’ that aim to give a sober account of the 2,000-year story of the New Testament between Jesus and us, (c) researching, presenting at academic conferences, and publishing, (d) and traveling the world to digitize ancient manuscripts of the New Testament. Along the way, Anna and I regularly get to combine our ministries by teaching her students about the veracity and historicity of our New Testament witness.
Along with all of this exciting work that God is letting us do right now, Anna and I are rejoicing in the Lord that we are now taking the next step toward our global goal: I have been accepted into the PhD program in New Testament at the University of St Andrews and have enrolled as a student. I plan to write a dissertation focused in some way on how the Second Temple Jewish diaspora context of the translator of ancient Greek text of Isaiah influenced his text and then consequently influenced the message found in the “B-related” and “so-called ‘Western’” texts of Luke and Acts (if anyone wants to nerd out with me on these things or is simply wondering what the heck this is, hit me up!). I can’t wait to see how this aspect of our ministry enriches the rest of our current ministry endeavors this year, as I will be studying this year remotely in Dallas.
What we’re aiming at
This leads me to tell you what we’re praying and pushing towards. We are currently in the process of being sent by our church, Park Cities Presbyterian Church, to minister in Scotland with ISI and complete my degree, with the goal of going from there to the majority world to train pastors as a missional scholar.
If what we’re doing aligns with your heart to further God’s kingdom, partner with us through prayer and financial support! We are praying that we get to serve with a community of people whose hearts are for missional scholarship and pastoral training.
https://www.givesendgo.com/Russells-on-Mission
Drop back into this blog! I plan to post things that I get excited about from my research into the New Testament, Early Christianity, textual criticism, and Septuagint studies, as well as life updates 🙂
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2 responses to “The Russell clan, Scotland, and missional scholarship: A bit of the who, what, where, when, why, and how of it”
Praising Jesus for this update! Thanks for sharing, what an honor to hear what the Lord is doing for y’all. Looking forward to hearing more about your research!
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Thank you, Lauren! It’s great to hear from you. I hope and pray you and your family are well!
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