Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20a basketball coach myself, Jennifer and I packed up and headed to Dallas Theological Seminary in 1990, hoping eventually to teach and coach at a Bible college. But after I graduated from DTS in 1993 with a ThM we realized that becoming a Bible college professor was perhaps more involved than I’d realized. I went back to my Alberta hometown with my wife and young son. I considered the pastorate but then applied at a weekly newsmagazine, the Alberta Report. I knew little of and had less interest in politics, business, crime, society—the stuff of modern journalism. I never read newspapers and seldom watched TV news, but I needed a job right away and the magazine needed a reporter. They sent me to the Calgary bureau. My first months with the magazine were, charitably speaking, a pretty steep learning curve. I made dumb mistakes, was hornswoggled by a stock promoter, and inadvertently insulted more than one source. But I survived (and my editor endured) largely because of practical skills acquired at DTS, like how to gather and arrange large amounts of information. Learning Hebrew and Greek taught me to think analytically about language. I had always loved reading stories, but my Bible classes at DTS and Briercrest taught me to understand literary structure and techniques. I recall devouring The Art of Biblical Narrative and then trying to apply the same principles to the stories of Samuel, Saul, and David. Knowing how narratives work made constructing news stories much, much easier. Most importantly, my education at Briercrest and DTS reinforced my conviction that for interpreting contemporary events the Scriptures provide the only reliable basis: foundational truths about the nature of God, Man, sin, salvation, and the world. As a journalist I had a front-row seat to watch how those truths played out in society. I also saw the fallout when those biblical truths were bypassed or ignored. The Alberta Report tracked the advance of abortion on demand, gay rights, sex education in schools, and a host of other issues. In short, being a reporter introduced me to the idea that ideas have consequences—for everybody. One day I asked a fellow reporter, a tall, cheerful guy named Shafer, why he left the pastorate for journalism. “I always wanted to be a reporter,” he told me, “but when I was in high school, my pastor took me aside and said, ‘God doesn’t need journalists, He needs preachers!’” But Shafer realized after years in church ministry that God calls different people to different vocations, and that every society also needs people to show them what, truly, is going on. 10