Asbury Theological Seminary

Rev. Greg Coates (2008) is an ordained elder in the Free Methodist Church and has been senior pastor at the First Free Methodist Church of Indianapolis. He has a wife, Courtney, and two little girls, Lydah and Eve.

Dorothy, when I first met you, you scared me. You were so rough, so ghetto, so very, very black. Your heavy African-American dialect was almost a foreign language to me. And the anger behind your eyes betrayed a deep hurt, a past I feared to even peek into (only much later did I learn about the father who would beat you senseless with an extension cord). When you got in my face and yelled at me after being in the inner city for only a week, I thought, "Well, Greg, you're not in Kansas anymore." You awakened me to a world of darkness and hatred and bitter animosity. I must say that your words were hurtful. The gruff, calloused tone you used with me made me feel belittled and childish, and I wanted to retreat to suburbia where people are decent to each other. Sometimes, you were downright out of control, like when you stood up in church on a Sunday morning and berated your pastors for not visiting you often enough. We stood there -- shocked like deer in the headlights -- and took it. And licked our wounds later when the sanctuary emptied.

Lyman Coleman, D.D.

Lyman Coleman grew up in the South on black-eyed peas, corn bread, fried chicken and the Bible, attending a “shouting” Methodist Church with an “Amen corner,” altar calls, and revivals every summer. At Baylor University, he fell under the spell of the Navigators and carried boxes for the Billy Graham Team in New York’s Madison Square Garden Crusade, where he fell in love with and married the Team secretary from Great Britain. He finished his education at Biblical Seminary of New York and New York University, where he specialized in small group dynamics in the late 1950’s.  There, Lyman learned from pioneers in the church renewal movement, such as Sam Shoemaker and Bill Wilson (of the “12-step program”), Bruce Larson, Elton Trueblood, and Keith Miller.

From The Pentecostal Herald:

January 12, 1898;

an editorial by Rev. H.B. Cockrill

If you come to Christ, He will in no ways cast you out. But so many fail to come. They soon get to where they either won’t come or can’t come. Christ never fails to take the one who comes to him no matter what his sin may have been. But many a man fails to take advantage of Christ’s goodness and is lost forever.

We compare lost souls to diamonds in the rough and say that the power of God polishes them up for usefulness and heaven. A pretty illustration, but something more than polish is needed to prepare a soul for right living and for God. It must be transformed, regenerated, and sanctified. Education and refinement polishes, but it takes the gospel to fit for heaven.

Rhonda Stapleton (2004) received a Master of Divinity from Asbury Seminary.

Orlando, “the City Beautiful,” is the tourist capital of the world and was the travel destination of some 46,586,000 visitors in 2009. The top twelve area theme parks hosted 74,098,000 guests last year. But the Orlando I’ve come to know and love does not make the Chamber of Commerce brochure or the Official Visitors Bureau statistics. Instead, my Orlando sits just across the tracks from the heart of the city and is light-years from the enchantment of Magic Kingdom. Its statistics are measured in terms of crime, abandoned homes and failing schools.