2022 Wesleyan Heritage Conference

Scheduled Events

Monday, September 26, 2022

• 10 a.m. – Chapel
  Kenneth Collins: “Christ the Creator: Have We Forgotten?” (Col 1:15-17)
  Hughes Auditorium
• 4 – 5:30 p.m. – Presentation
  Steve Blakemore—Concert/Presentation: “The Gospel According to Charles: Singing Our Way to Holiness”
  George Luce Auditorium, Walt and Rowena Shaw Collaborative Learning Center
  

Tuesday, September 27, 2022

• 11 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. – Faculty Development Luncheon for full-time faculty of Asbury University
  Kenneth Collins: “An Interpretive Model for John Wesley’s Theology.”
  Dougherty Dining Room, Johnson Dining Hall
  

Wednesday, September 28, 2022

• 10 a.m. – Chapel
  Dr. Gareth Cockerill: “The End Game (Heb 13:1-3).”
  Hughes Auditorium

• 4 –  5:30 p.m. – Lecture and Q&A
  Dr. Gareth Cockerill: “‘Oh, Give Me that Book!’: The Bible and Its Wesleyan-Arminian Readers.”
  George Luce Auditorium, Shaw Collaborative Learning Center

Main Speakers

Dr. Kenneth Collins serves as the Professor of Historical Theology and Wesley Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary (Wilmore, Kentucky), a position he has held since 1995. In 2008 he was awarded the Professor of the Year Award for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Asbury Theological Seminary. He has lectured all over the world, from Russia to Costa Rica to South Korea. He is a member of many professional organizations, including The American Academy of Religion, The Oxford Institute, The Wesleyan Theological Society, The Wesley Historical Society, and The Historical Society of the United Methodist Church. He is also the Director of the Wesleyan Studies Summer Seminar and the Director of the Wesleyan Holiness Pentecostal Studies Center at Asbury Theological Seminary. Dr. Collins is the author of numerous books and scores of articles exploring topics such as Wesleyan theology, Evangelicalism, Christian spirituality, and the interpretation of Scripture. He is the co-editor of the 2020 publication, The Wesley One Volume Commentary. His most recent book Jesus the Stranger: The Man from Galilee and the Light of the World (2021) presents Collins’s penetrating meditations on Jesus in his full humanity.

Dr. Steve Blakemore is Professor of Christian Thought at Wesley Biblical Seminary, where he functions with versatility and skill as a pastor and philosopher. He is an alumnus of “both Asburys,” and spent fourteen years pastoring in the local church and four years as college chaplain and adjunct professor of Religion and Philosophy at Hiwassee College and Northeast State Community College in Tennessee. Dr. Blakemore is also a contemporary Christian musician and the co-founder of “Resurrection,” a youth convention that annually reaches thousands of young people with Christ’s call to radical discipleship. He is passionate about teaching philosophy and apologetics, working out Dostoyevsky’s dictum that “ideas have consequences.” Dr. Blakemore is committed to discipling minds to thinking deeply about “the faith once delivered to the saints”; he does this to strengthen the church and to communicate the gospel in our contemporary and fractured world. He and his wife, Carolyn, have four sons, and three grandchildren.

Gareth Cockerill was Professor of Biblical Interpretation and Theology at Wesley Biblical Seminary for thirty-five years, where he also held the post of Academic Dean. He is an ordained minister in the Wesleyan Church and served with his wife Rosa for nine years as missionaries in Sierra Leone, West Africa, prior to his professorial ministry. A testament to his stature as a New Testament scholar is his volume on Hebrews in the New International Commentary on the New Testament series (2012), which replaced the classic commentary by F. F. Bruce. He is the author of several other books, as well as numerous scholarly articles and book reviews, and remains active as a presenter at biblical and theological societies. Dr. Cockerill’s most recent book, Yesterday, Today, and Forever: Listening to Hebrews in the Twenty-First Century (June 2022). He is co-chair of the Old Testament in the New Testament study group of the Institute for Biblical Research, New Testament editor for the Evangelical Theological Society dissertation series, and an active member of the Society of Biblical Literature. He is very involved in his church (Olde Town Community Church, Ridgeland, MS) where he regularly teaches a Sunday School class. He and his wife, Rosa, have three daughters and four grandchildren.