Video Transcript: Meet Professor Jeff Weima

Unit 05 02 Meet Professor Jeff Weima

Hello, my name is Jeff Weima, and I'll be leading you on these online videos on behalf of Christian leaders Institute. Now before we get started, I thought it would be important and hopefully helpful for me to introduce myself. Not that that's so important, but most people are curious by nature and probably wonder who's leading them in these series of instructions. And so please permit me to give you this brief introduction of who is this guy named Jeff Lima? Well, in terms of roots, I first have up there some wooden shoes, because both of my parents are immigrants from the Netherlands after the Second World War. And in one hand, that might not seem so important for my life, because after all, I was born in Canada, and I hardly speak any Dutch. But I've come to realize over time that my immigrant upbringing was more formative and shaping whom I was when I first realized, in fact, when I meet other immigrants, whether they're from a Dutch background, or Korean or whatever country, we often have a lot in common as we share our experiences. You also see up there a Canadian flag because I was indeed born in Canada. But a number of years ago, my wife and I moved to United States and after a period of time, become now American citizens. And we've lived now in the United States for the past 20 years. Speaking of my wife, there she is, we've been married now 28 years. As we're recording this the year is 2011. And we've been together then for a good while, and we hope the Lord willing to continue to be together for a good longer while yet we have four children here, going from the oldest to the youngest, from right to left. The oldest is married, and she is a Spanish teacher in a Christian school. And she and her husband live in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I live. Our second daughter is also married. This picture comes from her wedding from a couple of years ago. She is a special needs teacher, and she works in Niles, Michigan, and she has lots of challenging stories and experiences that come from teaching kindergartener and first grade special needs children. And her husband is a PhD student at Notre Dame in South Bend in chemical engineering. Our third daughter has always been a little bit independent and marking her own course. And so she went to school quite a ways away from our hometown of Michigan. She's studying at Seattle Pacific University, she's studying a combination of business and fashion. And then our baby, if I could put it that way, if you can call someone who's six, five, a little over 200 pounds a baby is Sam, and he is a sophomore at Michigan State University studying business. I do a lot of other things besides teach, although surprisingly, I have very few pictures of me actually teaching. And so I don't have one to show you of that. I also do a lot of preaching. In fact, I preach about 70 times a year, but hardly have any few pictures of that either other than this rare picture of me and an old fashioned pulpit in of all places, South Africa. But I think it's important for you to know that I spend a lot of time thinking about how do you communicate the gospel to a contemporary world? How do you move from the study and the academic world to the world of the pew? I hope that that practicality, that issue of relevancy will come out in our study sessions together. Here is a picture of me leading a two day seminar for pastors. I travel around the United States and Canada often leading these two day intensive seminars on a particular theme or subject, and then encourage these pastors to steal as much as they want. And they can kind of hit the ground running with a sermon series that will hopefully benefit them in their church.

I also lead biblical study tours, here's an image of me in front of Temple in Corinth, I lead the study tours, both to Turkey and to Greece and Lesotho, to Israel. And that's another important way in which our understanding of the biblical text comes alive when we visit these places. And we see the link between archaeology, history, geography, and the biblical text. Of course, I have to be involved in publishing. You can see from the title of the books that my area of specialty is a Paul and especially his letters, and even more narrowly the Thessalonian letters. I'm also in addition to these books, just about finished rather massive commentary on First and Second Thessalonians. But there's more to life than academics and so I've got a few other things to round out the picture of my life. You can see here, me a picture with my daughter and son in law participating in a triathlon. I selectively picked out a picture to in which it was a little more flattering to me, you didn't see me passed out from exhaustion. Here's another picture of me with my second daughter. I do a lot of running and five K's. But my real passion is actually waterskiing. So here's an image of me slaloming. And another interesting thing I do is barefoot waterskiing. This is actually one foot barefooting sometimes have a little picture and a caption underneath this picture outside my office door that says something like this. Why not barefoot? After all, Jesus walked on water to Well, friends, this is a little introduction into me and my life. And I hope it's been helpful to kind of round out some of the more academic things that we'll be talking about. I am glad to speak to you in this way and to work with you and understanding and becoming better readers of the biblical text. And I pray that our time together will be a profitable one for you, not only for now, but also for your future of ministry. Thank you