Wiseman Lenten Worship Series
Wednesdays at Noon in Lent
Every year, First Presbyterian Church holds the Wiseman Lenten Worship Series on Wednesdays in Lent. This Lent, First Presbyterian welcomes a diverse group of professors, theologians and pastors. The service begins at noon in the Great Hall of the Bernsen Community Life Center (700 S. Boston Avenue), and immediately following the service, the church offers a special opportunity for all to share in a luncheon dialogue with each speaker. All are welcome.
The schedule this Lent is as follows:
March 16 Dr. Robbie Castleman, Associate Professor of Theology, John Brown University, Siloam Springs, AR
March 23 Dr. Phillip Cary, Professor of Philosophy, Eastern University, St. David’s, PA
March 30 Dr. Robert A. J. Gagnon, Associate Professor of New Testament, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, Pittsburgh, PA
April 6 Rev. Allan Poole, Pastor, Blacknall Memorial Presbyterian Church, Durham, North Carolina
April 13 Rev. Mateen Elass, Pastor, First Presbyterian Church, Edmond, Oklahoma
April 20 Holy Week – No Wednesday service
About the Speakers
Dr. Robbie Castleman
Dr. Robbie Castleman came to John Brown University from Florida State University where she was on staff with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship for 14 years. She earned her Bachelor's degrees in Biblical Studies from Loyola University, where she graduated summa cum laude. She has a Master's degree in Religion from Florida State. She graduated with honors and had her thesis chosen for a faculty forum. In the summer of 2002, she spent a week in Cambridge at the Tyndale House, working on her dissertation. Then she completed her doctoral work in the summer of 2003 at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary where she focused on Trinitarian ecclesiology. Her dissertation and doctoral project was titled "Teaching the Trinity."
Dr. Castleman is a published writer and has books published by IVPress (Parenting in the Pew, True Love in a World of False Hope, and Faith on the Edge ). She is currently under contract with IVPress for a book on the biblical patterns of Christian Worship. She has also published a Bible Study Guide on discipleship that looks at the whole New Testament picture of Simon Peter. She has other Bible Study Guides published through Shaw/Waterbrook Publishers in the Fisherman Bible Study Guide series: David, King David, Elijah, Miracles. 
Dr. Phillip Cary
Dr. Phillip Cary is Professor of Philosophy at Eastern University in St. David’s, PA, where he is also Scholar-in-Residence at the Templeton Honors College and Director of the Philosophy Program. His academic specialty is the work of Augustine and the history of Christian thought. He has also written a commentary on the book of Jonah. He is best known to the public through his audio and video lecture series on Augustine, Luther, The History of Christian Theology, and Philosophy and Religion, published by The Teaching Company.
His books include Jonah, (series: Theological Commentary on the Bible), Brazos Press, 2008, Inner Grace: Augustine in the Traditions of Plato and Paul, Oxford University Press, 2008, Outward Signs: The Powerlessness of External Things in Augustine's Thought, Oxford University Press, 2008, and Augustine's Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist, Oxford University Press, 2000.
Dr. Robert A. J. Gagnon
Robert A. J. Gagnon is Associate Professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. He came to PTS in the Fall of 1994 after a one-year position as Visiting Professor of Religion at Middlebury College in Vermont. He has a B.A. degree from Dartmouth College, an M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School, and a Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary. His main fields of interest are Pauline theology and sexual issues in the Bible. He is a member both of the Society of Biblical Literature and of the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas [Society of New Testament Studies]. He is also an ordained elder at a Presbyterian Church (USA) in Pittsburgh.
He is the author of The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001; 520 pgs.); co-author (with Dan O. Via) of Homosexuality and the Bible: Two Views (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003; 125 pgs.); and, as a service to the church, provides a large amount of free material on the web dealing with Scripture and homosexuality. In addition, he has published scholarly articles on biblical studies in Journal of Biblical Literature, New Testament Studies, Catholic Biblical Quarterly, Novum Testamentum, Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, Horizons in Biblical Theology, and The Christian Century. He is also author of article-length encyclopedia entries in Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible (Baker/SPCK), New Dictionary of Christian Apologetics (IVP), Oxford Handbook of Evangelical Theology (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), and Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization (Wiley-Blackwell).
Rev. Allan Poole
Rev. Allan Poole has been the head of staff for 10 years at Blacknall Memorial Presbyterian Church where he has served on the pastoral staff since 1985. He came to Blacknall from First Presbyterian Church, Winston-Salem, North Carolina where he served as an Associate Minister for 6 years. He has a BA in History from Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC, a Masters of Divinity from Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, S. Hamilton, MA, and a Th.M in Historical Theology from Duke Divinity School, Durham, NC. He has been married for 25 years, and he and his wife, Betsy, have three children, Ellie (22), Sam (19) and Sarah (17).
Rev. Mateen Elass
Rev. Mateen Elass was the second of four children born to a Syrian Muslim who had married an American while studying at the University of Wisconsin. Some years after Mateen’s birth, the family moved to Saudi Arabia where his father worked as an oil company executive. During his early teens Mateen began a search for God, largely through reading. For six years he focused on eastern mysticism and meditation including a stay at an ashram in India. Yet his nagging questions, Who is God? How can I know him? remained unanswered.
God guided Mateen toward an answer to those questions by bringing him into contact with genuine Christians. He found these people by visiting a friend who attended a small Christian University in Arkansas. The love and compassion of students there impressed him so deeply that he repeatedly asked them the source. They in turn repeatedly pointed him to Christ. And he repeatedly searched for some other explanation: culture, family ties, unwritten rules of relationship. Eventually they challenged him, “Read the four gospels of the New Testament. Get to know Jesus.” He took up the challenge. After days of reading, study, and prayer, at the age of twenty Mateen found salvation through Christ-and the fulfillment of his long search. As is common in Middle Eastern families, he soon paid a high cost for his newfound faith: isolation from his father for more than a decade.
By the end of his college years, Mateen sensed God’s call to Christian ministry. After completing a B.A. at Stanford University, he graduated from Fuller Seminary earning M.Div. and M.A. degrees in Biblical Studies and Theology. After several years of pastoral work he returned to school earning a Ph.D. in New Testament Studies from Durham University in England.
A frequent speaker about Islam, Mateen sees his experience on both sides of the Christian-Muslim divide as providing unique opportunity to create bridges of understanding. His great hope is that God will use him to reveal the love of Jesus to both sides. “God will provide direction to those who seek him and God will equip his people to do his will.”