In their own words
By Jack Williams
A new classroom trend was emerging on college campuses coast to coast on the day professor Gus Jeeninga visited the office of his colleague, James Earl Massey. Anderson University was encouraging the concept of team teaching and Jeeninga wondered if Massey was game.
Jeeninga suggested that they try this new approach with Bible and Religion 101 and 102, two introductory courses required of all AU students. He recalls the encounter in his new book, Doors to Life: The Stories of Gustav Jeeninga. Thinking that he and Massey would make a good teaching team, Jeeninga reasoned that while he was, perhaps, more youthful looking, Massey was the “good-looking one.” While Jeeninga’s Dutch accent gave a unique flavor to his “simple language,” Massey was an eloquent speaker and teacher, using precise and perfect diction. And while Jeeninga could draw out the Old Testament half of the biblical narrative — punctuated with insights from biblical archaeology and church history — Massey could bring the latest in New Testament scholarship.
Their proposal met with administrative approval — and student approval, too. As Massey writes in his new book, Aspects of my Pilgrimage: An Autobiography, “Word about our course spread among new students during registration and Jeeninga and I had the enviable joy of having new students line up to get our signatures to be admitted once our enrollment quota was filled!”
In their recent autobiographies published by Anderson University Press, both Gus Jeeninga and James Earl Massey recall mountaintop experiences from their lives and from what many would call legendary teaching careers on the AU campus. In an afterword to his book, Massey writes of a joyful journey: “Because of received meanings and a sense of God’s presence, life for me has been an unfolding drama, a joyful pilgrimage, a sequence of guided steps as I have remained surrendered to the lure of what was held before me.” But, in relating their fuller life stories, neither author shies away from the harsh realities sometimes handed to them.
Life as a story
“Life is a trail of stories, tales full of joy, tragedy and meaning — especially when illumined by faith,” Jeeninga writes in a Shakespearesque line in the introduction to his book. Illumined by Jeeninga’s photography, Doors to Life captures “snapshots” from the life of the young man who migrated from the Netherlands to the New World to study for the ministry. Arriving on the AU campus as a freshman in 1947, Jeeninga had already experienced the verities of the world, having served as a slave laborer of the German Army in World War II.
Like a lot of new grads, Jeeninga wanted to see the world when he graduated from AU in 1951. Hoping to gain some form of global understanding, he embarked on a tour of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and the Far East. The ’50s also saw him pursue an academic journey that would take him to Union Theological Seminary in New York City, to the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, and finally to Northern Baptist Theological Seminary in Chicago.
In 1960 then-dean Robert Nicholson offered Jeeninga a one-year contract to teach in his alma mater’s Bible Department. The contract was renewed for the next 29 years, as Jeeninga shared with students his knowledge in Bible and Near Eastern studies and in the archaeology of the Near East and Latin America. He also founded a Bible museum, which began with his personal purchase of a fragment of a first-century Roman pot. When his many artifacts threatened to take over his small office, a Bible museum was officially established in the late ’60s. Upon Jeeninga’s retirement in 1989, the museum, in honor of its founder and director, became the Gustav Jeeninga Museum of Bible and Near Eastern Studies.
Two years after his retirement, Jeeninga and his wife, Aletta, moved to Penney Retirement Community in Penney Farms, Fla.
It was at Penney Farms that Jeeninga first began to put pen to paper — he wrote his book in longhand — beginning what would eventually become Doors to Life.
“Actually, I used to tell many of these stories to colleagues and friends around the dinner table in Anderson,” says Jeeninga. “And they would tell me, ‘Gus, you’ve got to write a book.’ ”
It wasn’t until he began to repeat his stories to a new circle of friends at Penney Farms and heard the same suggestion that he began to write.
He started with a story, which would later become the chapter titled “A Cup of Tea with Amos.” This story recalls a 1966 visit to the Holy Land with his wife and their search for the village of Tekoa, hometown of the Old Testament prophet, Amos.
The search met without success until Jeeninga spotted a Bedouin tent on a distant hillside. He climbed the hill to the tent and learned from the Bedouin that he was actually standing in Tekoa. When the tent dweller invited the couple to have tea with him, they also learned that he was a shepherd, that he had traveled to America and England and that he was a poet. After this experience, Jeeninga recalled that the prophet Amos was also a shepherd, an international traveler and the author of one of the more poetic books of the Bible.
As Jeeninga writes in Doors to Life, “Our visit with this modern Judean sheepherder, who was also a world traveler, opened the door to us for sharing a few intimate moments, at least in our imaginations, with the Old Testament prophet, Amos of Tekoa.”
Jeeninga dedicates a number of chapters to what he calls his “War Odyssey.” From his hometown of IJmuiden, near Amsterdam, Jeeninga was shipped to Berlin during World War II to serve the German war effort. From 1943 to 1945, he worked as a bread baker in Blankenfelde, a suburb of Berlin.
In a story he calls “Murder on My Mind,” Jeeninga remembers the day in the bakery when someone announced the news of a German setback. When Jeeninga rejoiced openly at the news, he found himself on the receiving end of a brutal blow to the face by a German truck driver. Jeeninga responded with a Judo move that landed the truck driver against a brick wall.
Jeeninga recalls that as a young man he had adopted the philosophy of his father, who was an avowed conscientious objector and pacifist. But now, his anger stoked, Jeeninga arranged to get a gun from a friend so he could kill the truck driver. But soon after the gun was delivered, Jeeninga realized that his murder weapon was only a starting pistol. Musing on the experience, he wrote, “I now realize that if I had succeeded with my plot, I most likely would have been captured and put in front of a firing squad. If I had gotten away with the murder, I would have been living in the shadow of the life of a criminal. Looking back years later, I am thankful for the hand of God in my life during these most critical and frightful days.”
In the story, “A Birthday Gift for Hitler,” Jeeninga tells of the final days of the Third Reich in Berlin and relates an incident witnessed by few. Because his bakery stood just 15 miles from Hitler’s underground bunker, Jeeninga was frequently in the “bull’s-eye” of the Allied forces. On April 20, 1945, he barely escaped machine gun fire when seven American fighter aircraft skimmed the housetops of Blankenfelder and strafed the village streets in “celebration” of the Fuhrer’s birthday.
For the slave laborer who would soon be heading home, it was a pivotal experience: “It was a day of maturing and gaining a new understanding of the human race on a new and broader moral and ethical scale. In wartime, even one’s allies may harm their friends. If this frightening day in 1945 taught me anything, it was the truism of the saying, ‘War is hell.’ ”
Many of Jeeninga’s experiences rely on war diaries that are now 60 years old. “My Long Journey Home” recounts his odyssey home after the Russian army captured Berlin. The 750-mile, month long trip to his hometown proved to be treacherous but ultimately returned him to an awaiting loving family, including a brother he had not seen in five years.
The “journey” is a recurring theme for Jeeninga, who participated in six major archaeological digs during his days as a professor. He recounts his excursion to Mexico City to view the Aztec ruins of Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon in the company of another professor-legend, Val Clear, who taught sociology at AU for 33 years. Jeeninga’s trip to Mexico opened the door to his interest in pre-Columbian archaeology and four excavations in Mexico and South America.
Jeeninga also writes of a harrowing trip in Iraq when he and Aletta, attempting to retrace the footsteps of Abraham, lost sight of paved roads and found themselves in a dust storm in the middle of an uninhabited wasteland.
Then there was Jeeninga’s seventh archaeological dig, which sought to unearth a baptismal pool known to exist on campus from the early days of the Church of God camp meetings. Although the dig yielded a few coins, nails, tin cans, bottle caps, scattered bricks and fragments of concrete, the pool remained in its original — and undiscovered — site.
In early September of last year, Jeeninga returned to the Netherlands to visit family and to shoot photos for his book in progress. He also planned to visit many friends across Europe. The terrorist attacks in the United States cut his trip short, but he would bring back this stirring memory from his visit to the centuries-old St. Bavo Cathedral: While standing in the nave, he spotted the exact chairs where he and his wife had attended a Christmas midnight service in 1975.
“I thought back over the years and remembered,” writes Jeeninga. “Aletta had lived only four blocks from this cathedral. On several occasions we had visited this historic church together. Opposite from St. Bavo, Aletta and I had said our wedding vows in the Haarlem City Hall. How painful it was now to be here alone. But how enriching were the wonderful memories that filled my heart, memories of the years we had enjoyed being together.”
Jeeninga dedicated his book to his wife, who passed away in the fall of 2000, writing, “These stories are dedicated to my loving wife, Aletta, who comforted me when I failed, who taught me humility when I was honored, and who made our marriage a success.”
The team teaching experiment with James Massey inspired some incredible “teaching moments,” says Jeeninga. For example, there was the day he was talking about the important role that singing the Psalms has played in the history of the church. To enhance his lecture, he sang a Dutch Psalm recalled from his father’s church in Holland. A few days later, Massey touched on the Psalms before breaking into song.
“The class was spellbound, and so was I,” writes Jeeninga. “He sang with a beautiful voice and with great clarity the well-known and beloved Scottish rendition of Psalm 23. Of all the years of team teaching, the highlight and best memory I have of what we did for the students and for ourselves was listening to Dr. James Earl Massey pour out his heart in this lovely hymn of praise.”
Life as pilgrimage
Massey points out in Aspects of My Pilgrimage that he had heard the call of music from an early age, having played the family piano since age 7. A progressive music program at his Detroit high school fed his fascination with the works of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. It was not unusual for the young Massey to carry his musical scores to church so he could study them.
At age 16, Massey already had built a reputation for his piano playing in Detroit’s black community, accompanying some of the top local musicians. He was certain that he would become a classical pianist.
Massey pondered a waltz by Chopin on that Sunday when he heard the “call” to be a preacher. Although music would still be his first love, he knew that he had experienced a change in priorities.
“In all the years which have transpired since that holy hour, I have never had any reason to reinterpret what happened to me during that great listening moment of grace,” he writes. “The Voice that called me was so clear, and its bidding, though gentle, bore the unmistakable authority of a higher realm. Since that time of encounter during worship I have known the work to which my head, heart and hands were to be devoted.”
Five years after sensing the call and just two months after being ordained, Massey received another call. The call from Uncle Sam sent him to Fort Jackson, S.C., for basic training. His overseas orders sent him to Austria where he served as a chaplain’s assistant and manager of a chapel office.
Massey describes how his military assignment in Austria placed him in a musical climate. In time, he was hired to play the organ at camp chapel services. Visits to nearby Salzburg afforded him the opportunity to browse music stores, where he bought albums of classical music. While in Salzburg he met a woman who was a student of Heinz Scholz, a Mozart scholar who taught at Salzburg’s Mozarteum. Massey describes a tense audition with the renowned Austrian pianist who agreed to take Massey as a student. At the Mozarteum, he heard and met many world-class pianists. The young man who had surrendered his career aspirations to God soon found a new period of creativity and began to compose again for piano and to write pieces for voice and choir.
Probably no chapter in the Massey autobiography is as gripping as the one titled, “A Chronicle of Crises.” In this chapter Massey revisits his return from military duty to his home church, the Detroit Church of God. This is the church where he had been nurtured, where he first answered the call to preach and served as associate pastor before he left to begin his military tour of duty. Painfully, Massey recalls, this was the same church where he began his spiritual apprenticeship under the Rev. Raymond Samuel Jackson. But his re-entry into Detroit Church of God congregational life would set Massey up for a major life crisis.
When Jackson lost the church’s vote of confidence, the leadership was left in the young Massey’s hands. Unfortunately — and erroneously — a core in the church accused Massey of undermining his mentor. The controversy eventually led to the founding of the new Metropolitan Church of God. A year later, Massey sought and eventually found reconciliation with Raymond Jackson and the Detroit Church of God.
“As I thought back on that experience of estrangement and how it had at long last concluded, I was thankful for the trust of a loving and faithful congregation, a dedicated wife and wise leaders who also had the courage to act,” Massey writes.
Campus unrest was the story in the late ’60s. Massey recalls his move to Anderson in 1969 to become the university’s first campus minister and the Anderson revival in 1970.
“While some other campuses across the nation were in chaos, Anderson College was experiencing revival,” he writes. “The whole city of Anderson was affected. Prayer meetings were held in the City Hall every day during the noon hour, and the meetings were always well attended. As word of the happenings continued to spread, many requests came from pastors in the area to have students come and share their stories.”
Massey listened as one student came to his office and confessed that he had grown up in a home where prejudice was practiced. Massey remembers trying to help the young man make sense of his past and how to think about his future as a man free of the constraints of prejudice.
In addition to serving as campus minister, Massey taught religion courses in the undergraduate school and homiletics at the School of Theology. But one class would return him to his first love. One January term, he taught “Religious Insights in Great Music,” a class that looked at the religious impulse in the music of the Classical and Romantic periods.
After a five-year stint as dean of the chapel and university professor of religion and society at Tuskegee University in Alabama, Massey returned to campus in 1989 as dean of the AU School of Theology. Massey remembers returning to campus with a demanding assignment: boost faculty morale, increase student enrollment, improve the seminary’s image in the church and make much-needed revisions of the curriculum.
So that he could stay at the center of the seminary’s daily mission, Massey would serve as a “teaching dean.” His chief administrative accomplishment was the launching of the university’s first doctoral program, the Doctor of Ministry Studies Program. By the end of his five-year term, Massey felt positive about a modest increase in student enrollment, new curricular programs to meet the needs of local congregations and healthy relations between the seminary and church.
But when retirement came in the spring of 1995, he had another significant memory to relish. In 1991 he had journeyed to Wiesbaden, Germany, to attend the World Conference of the Church of God where he was keynote speaker. In preparation for the trip, he couldn’t help but notice that 1991 was the bicentenary year of the death of Mozart. As might be expected, his journey included a side excursion to Salzburg to attend the Salzburg Festival and to visit the Mozarteum. Standing there in the office of the historic school, he inquired about Professor Scholz and learned that he had passed away in 1988 at age 91. This trip back in time was a defining moment for Massey. As he returned to his hotel that day, he thought back over his pilgrimage.
Toward the end of his book, he writes, “I breathed a prayer of thanks to God for the musical teaching and inspiration received from Heinz Scholz as a special student of his 39 years earlier at the Mozarteum. I finally paused over a cup of coffee in the hotel pastry shop, mindful of what my life had embraced and emitted across the years as a sent preacher rather than a skilled pianist. Blessed by the understanding that I was busy doing what I was really born to do, I suffered no regrets and therefore enjoyed the music-making of others there in Salzburg all the more.”
Jeeninga’s book has been released, and Massey’s book will be available in mid-June. Doors to Life and Aspects of My Pligrimage can be ordered through Warner Press via telephone at (800) 741-7721 or by e-mail at wporders@warnerpress.org. For bulk orders of 10 or more at a discount, contact Dr. Barry Callen, editor of Anderson Univeristy Press, at (765) 641-4559 or by e-mail at bcallen@anderson.edu. To review other available titles published by Anderson University Press, visit their Web site at www.anderson.edu/aupress.
