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Verily, A Servant of the Living Word |
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by Charles L. Bartow
Continued
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AN INNER LIGHT
by Jack R. Van Ens
He wasn’t the flashiest star blazing in the Speech Department’s
constellation from 1969 to 1972, when I was a PTS student. Bill Beeners
could launch or sink our thousand fabled ships with a mischievous twinkle
of his eye. Bill Brower’s was the golden voice of the poet. Virginia
Damon’s droll wit put us hopeful “pulpit stars” firmly in our less-than-centerstage
places.
But Bob Jacks beamed an inner glow as he taught us that preaching is true
theater, and God’s story is the true story. Bob Jacks lit the same fires
of enthusiasm in me that novelist Reynolds Price did when he wrote that
“the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives.”
Bob Jacks, in an unassuming yet profound way, shaped me as a
storyteller. He put, as it were, God’s mark on me. With
quiet, inner light he dazzled me, articulating the truth of
the Divine Dramatist who works all the wonders the world
will ever need.
 Jack R. Van Ens, Class of 1972, is a minister, a storyteller, and the vice
president of Majesty Ministries in Avon, Colorado.
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Bob graduated from Princeton Seminary in 1959, was ordained to the
ministry at Tabernacle Presbyterian Church, and was called as assistant
pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Medford, Oregon. There he
worked with youth (junior high, senior high, college youth, and young
marrieds). In successive pastoral assignments his focus remained on the
young. He took groups to synod meetings, led retreats, and organized and
conducted mission trips. With one group of youth from Indianapolis, Bob
and Rosanne hiked and bicycled through Norway for three weeks. If you can
believe it—and if you knew Bob Jacks, you can believe it—junior high
youngsters used to call “Uncle Bobby” on the phone and ask him to read
them bedtime stories, which he did with great delight. He never tired of
ministry with children and youth, nor of encouraging his seminary students
to consider carefully—and rigorously prepare for—ministry among the young.
His basic speech classes always included a segment on storytelling for
children.
Finding his fascination with storytelling irresistible, students flocked
to his course on narrative preaching, originally team-taught with PTS
professor James F. Kay, and to his course “Writing for the Ear.” In his
teaching of speech arts, Bob went beyond the technical areas such as
pronunciation, voice, phonetic analysis, and correction of faults. He was
influenced by Constantin Stanislavski’s approach to acting and by a
theological understanding of the preacher as servant, not master, of
divinity. In writing and in speaking, attention was given first to the
Word, then to one’s congregants. The self was last. The self, in fact, was
to become transparent through the mastery of technique. It was by the
“presence of the Word” that congregants were to be engaged, not by the
personality of the minister.
Bob practiced what he preached. In his classes he prayerfully expected to
be engaged by the Word made flesh even through encounters with “the least”
of his students, maybe especially through them. Next he focused on his
students as individuals with specific aptitudes and needs. Bob’s last
consideration was himself. He never pursued an academic career as such.
Instead he pursued the vocation of minister of Word and Sacrament in an
academic venue, and he did so with distinction.
His scholarship at the University of Michigan (linguistic studies in
consideration of a possible call to missionary service or translation),
his S.T.M. studies in drama and the communicative arts in service to the
church at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, and his Ph.D.
studies at Columbia University (culminating in his translation and
symbolic, theological, and dramaturgical analysis of five dramas of the
Swedish church-drama movement by Olov Hartman) all demonstrated the work
of a fine and totally dedicated intellect.
Bob Jacks had a delightfully whacky sense of humor. Who else could render
wild lyrics for popular songs strung together to celebrate the
distinguished achievements of six colleagues retiring from the Seminary
faculty and administration? From whom else could one hear the story of
Cinderella told with all the words Spoonerized and delivered at what
seemed to be 440 words per minute? Bob’s playfulness careened among the
chairs in his classroom and cavorted through his two books: Getting the
WORD Across and Just Say the WORD!
Bob began teaching in the speech program at Princeton Seminary in 1967 at
the invitation of W.J. Beeners, then professor and director of speech.
From 1972 to 1975, he also taught as an adjunct associate professor at
John Jay College of the City University of New York. In the academic year
1980–1981 he did a stint as lecturer in speech at the Lutheran Theological
Seminary in Philadelphia. For several years he produced and directed plays
at Princeton Seminary, including his own musical verily, verily, verily
MERRILY!
 In a more serious vein, he also produced Olov Hartman’s
Counterpoint, a
searing antiwar liturgical drama. In his heart—I have no knowledge at all
of his politics—Bob Jacks was a pacifist. And the term he used most to
describe his approach to the study of speech communication in ministry was
“irenic.” So it followed that his treatment of his students was
fair-minded and honest, yet always affirming. He happily walked in his
integrity, and he afforded others the right to do the same.
Beginning with an auto accident in August 1987 (he was hit by an
unlicensed driver), Bob walked not only in his integrity but in pain. Two
vertebrae in his upper neck were injured. For three years, he “toughed it
out.” At last, at his wife’s insistence, he had surgery, and it proved
successful. But then his toes, his right foot, his back, and his hips
successively developed problems. One surgery, meant to repair a tendon in
his right foot, led to the discovery that the tendon had disappeared
entirely. There was nothing there to repair. All in all, in the 12 years
between 1990 and 2002, Bob underwent nine surgical procedures for
skeletal, muscular, and internal ailments, none of them life-threatening,
but all of them to a greater or lesser degree debilitating. Still, he kept
his sense of humor intact. He made his way to classes with a cane, with
crutches, with a motorized scooter-chair, determined to get where he had
to go to do what he loved to do, teach speech for ministry. The last thing
I remember him saying to me just weeks before his death was this: “Chuck,
I’m tired. I’m really tired.”
In the early evening of June 5, Bob said to Rosanne, “I’m simply
exhausted.” And he went upstairs, lay down to sleep, and in his sleep, he
died.
“Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from henceforth: yea, saith the
Spirit, that they may rest from their labors; and their works do follow
them.” (Rev. 14:13, KJV)
Charles L. Bartow is the Carl and Helen Egner Professor of Speech
Communication in Ministry at Princeton Theological Seminary.
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