Generational Impact

Tim Green serves as dean of the Millard Reed School of Theology & Christian Ministry and is the 2024 recipient of Trevecca’s Generation Impact Award, given to a current or former Trevecca employee who has impacted students for more than three decades. Here he reflects on his own journey of faith and his time at the University.

You’ve spent your entire career at Trevecca. Was teaching always your plan?

When I began teaching full time here, I never anticipated Trevecca would be where I would spend my life. I always thought I would go into ministry. Even when I was working toward my master’s and doctoral degrees, it wasn't so I could teach. I wanted to make the Bible come alive in the church. I actually started out in youth ministry while completing graduate school. Now I can’t imagine my life apart from Trevecca. I have loved every minute of it.

What shaped your initial desire to work in ministry?

My father spent 30 years as a pastor in a local church. He and my mom spoke frequently and honestly about their experiences, including the things that were challenging. Through their transparency, you could tell they loved the church—not just the local church but the universal church. Their honesty and love for ministry in the life of the church became a true means of God’s grace for me as far as my own interest in ministry.

When did you decide to transition to higher education?

As far back as my college years, I began to recognize how various people, particularly university professors, can make all the difference in the good times of college life and in the times of crisis. This was certainly a reality for me.

During my sophomore year of college, my father was diagnosed with acute leukemia. Every weekend I would drive over 100 miles to spend time with him in his hospital room so my mother could return home for a breather.

My dad passed away when he was 52 and when I was a junior in college. He had been my best friend. He modeled a life of faith and genuinely loved people and the Lord. During those years when I had so many questions, fears and doubts, a couple of professors literally became for me the Lord’s presence of grace and healing in my journey. Perhaps it was this reality that compelled me into a calling of preaching and teaching Scripture in a Christian University. It truly was and is a pastoral, shepherding role in its purest sense. 

After college, the church in Cincinnati where I was serving in ministry allowed me to take a leave of absence for a year to complete my doctorate. I returned to Nashville and during that time was invited to serve as an adjunct professor at Trevecca. I started to fall in love with teaching and began to see how teaching young adults was truly a way of fulfilling the Lord’s call in my life to ministry.

Your former students speak fondly of the early-morning courses you taught at Trevecca on biblical faith when you were just a 23-year-old adjunct professor. What do you think made those classes so special?

I think those classes were memorable because I invited students into the stories of the Bible. It was a method of teaching I eventually came to know as narratology, where the teacher or preacher of the Bible is actually not just telling a story, but instead welcoming people into it. As students become a participant in the story, they can be transformed by it through God’s grace.

For example, in the early days, I likened the experience of studying the Bible to the journey two fictional teenagers took in the 1989 sci-fi comedy “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” They set off on a quest to prepare the ultimate school history presentation with the help of a time machine in the shape of a phone booth. It was a funny example but it became a memorable way of understanding what the journey behind, in and in front of the biblical text looks like.

I’d tell my students: “Get into the phone booth. We're going to dial up these dates; we're going back in time. We're going to experience that ancient biblical world and learn about people’s customs and ways of life. But we're not going to leave those characters in the past. We're going to bring them back to our modern time and ask questions. Where would they go today? What would they say? Which injustices would they confront?”

What cultivated your strength as a storyteller?

In middle school, I started doing puppet shows for children at my church on Sunday nights, telling Bible stories through puppetry. I would write scripts every week and then perform the stories for an hour. Two of my youth leaders allowed me to do it. Those leaders didn’t know it at the time, but they were empowering me.

On that note, to this day I believe imaginative thought is crucial to education. An education that transforms is one that goes beyond relaying knowledge of content to igniting the imagination so that a person is invited to take information and begin to imagine and see the world differently.

In teaching Old Testament literature, which theme from Scripture do you think students today most need to grasp?

I believe what’s needed is a rediscovery of what it means to authentically reflect and be the image of the nature of God in this generation. This involves allowing Scripture to invite us into community. Every generation has its own drive to individualism and isolationism. Both the church and the academy often appeal to this by encouraging you to find an inner spark within you. You can discover it, but in many ways this promotes a form of ancient Gnosticism. To be fully human in the image of God, we must live in communion with each other, with God and with God's creation.

As you study Scripture for yourself, which piece of biblical literature do you see as the most relevant for your own life and in your own story?

In recent years, the wisdom books of the Old Testament as well as the book of James have taken on profound meaning in my life.

The theme of wisdom is actually a thread interwoven throughout the Old and New Testaments. The more I’ve read Scripture in light of this theme, the more I see it everywhere—from the way the creation story is told to the description of Jesus in the New Testament as the wisdom of God in flesh and blood.

I think we've almost lost our grasp of what wisdom and foolishness mean and how character is formed. The very essence of wisdom in the Bible is an understanding that there is order in life— that God has created things to be orderly. The search for wisdom is an examination of how we live within the order of God.

Which of your own books was the most meaningful to write, and why?

As crazy as it may sound, it’s the commentary I wrote on the first six minor prophets in the Old Testament.

Beginning with Hosea, those prophets saw their communities struggle to remain faithful to the Lord. They repeatedly dealt with the reality of the Israelites turning away from God. Whether it was through idol worship or disobedient political alliances, they ultimately thought it was up to them to save themselves even as they claimed to worship and rely on the Lord. The people were so set on keeping themselves going that survival became their idol.

Studying those prophets helped me understand how deep that kind of human drive can be. Yet Jesus teaches us that whoever wants to save their life is going to lose it. Whether it’s an individual, a minister, a teacher or the church in North America—if our mission ever becomes survival at all costs, we’ve already guaranteed in the end we’re not going to survive. There is something beyond the mission to survive we need to recognize: that we are not the author of our own lives or our survival. God is.

On Friday afternoon, Nov. 1, Green will offer a special presentation on the ways the Old Testament can shape our understanding of holiness for life and ministry today. You’ll also have the opportunity to pick up some of his books and get them autographed. The following afternoon, a reception will be held in Green’s honor. Learn more and register to attend! →

Tim Green is an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene, and prior to arriving at Trevecca, he held pastoral roles in Hendersonville, Tennessee; Cincinnati; and Nashville. Over the course of 34 years, Green has served as the University chaplain, a professor of Old Testament literature and theology and now as dean of the Millard Reed School of Theology & Christian Ministry for the past 32 years. He has authored numerous books and articles and is a frequent speaker and lecturer throughout the United States and around the world, teaching theology classes in Central and Eastern Europe.