Fresh Text

Fresh Text is a conversation about one Bible passage at a time, held with the practical aim of helping someone preach or teach it soon. John Drury hosts, introducing himself as professor of New Testament and Spiritual Formation at Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion, Indiana. His conversation partners change. The method stays the same, and each partner takes the close reading somewhere different. Passages come from the Revised Common Lectionary or are chosen to fit the church season, and Lent and Easter frame several of the recent ones. Ken Schenck, a returning guest whom Drury calls his teacher and friend, joins him on Matthew 28, and the reading is attempted straight from the Greek, with its rough edges admitted up front. Amy Peeler, who teaches Bible with a New Testament specialty at Wheaton, is the partner for John 20. That conversation stays with Mary Magdalene's deep, full-bodied grief. It reaches a gentle pastoral point: perhaps a grieving person should be measured less by how well they control their emotions. A break partway through lets it narrow to a single encounter. Brandon Charlton, associate director at the Imaginarium and now co-host and co-producer, works through a run of passages in Mark with Drury. In Mark 5 the line about Jesus perceiving that power had gone out from him opens a frank exchange about feeling spent after ministry, and about naming that experience for people outside Pentecostal settings. The same conversation observes that Jesus was not consciously setting out to heal the woman. In Mark 8 the question turns to what Jesus knew, and the talk weighs several models before settling on one that stays inside 'the sandbox of orthodoxy'. Students appear as well. Ireland Craig and Lauren Klein, from Drury's graduate seminar on the parables of Jesus, designed a series keyed to the seven woes of Matthew 23, pairing each theme with a parable aimed at Jesus's opponents or at those pressing him. Luke 10:25-37 is one stop along the way. The register moves easily between technical and plain, and Greek terms and theological vocabulary sit beside casual asides and an occasional laugh. Open questions become a reason to slow down and ask what the text allows. Some episodes begin with a brief meditation before the shared reading, and sign-offs wish the audience a good preach and a great week.