Keith Berger is a self-described mutt — culturally speaking, that is. All his life, in God’s sovereignty, Keith has been placed in situations where he’s had to learn to fit in. That’s what happens when, like Keith, your father was Jewish, your mother was Protestant, you attended a Catholic high school, you went to college in North Carolina after growing up near Philadelphia, you served five years in the Army, you lived in Florida for a year, you attended RTS Jackson — OK, you get the picture.
Today, after all his cultural transitions, Keith serves as an area coordinator for Reformed University Fellowship, the official campus ministry of the PCA denomination (see “RTS and RUF: A Common Legacy” on page 35). In that role he has found a distinct ministry fit, through which he helps RUF campus ministers carry out their callings more effectively.
Keith’s own calling to vocational ministry followed the aforementioned circuitous route. That path began in his teen years, when he came to faith in Christ through the influence of peers who evangelized him, as well as his studies in high school.
“One year in school, one of my teachers’ curriculum for the entire year was man’s inhumanity to man,” Keith explains. “I read all these books on, basically, human sin and how it affects one another.
By the end of my sophomore year I was pretty undone, and I remember being by myself in my room, [thinking about] all the care of my friends and their talk about Jesus and the gospel, and I prayed, ‘Lord, if you’re true, if you’re real …’ I felt the weight of my sin, and it was a real turning point.”
Keith attended Duke University on an Army ROTC scholarship, matriculating there alongside many future gospel ministers, including Mark Dever (co-founder of Together for the Gospel) and others he later joined in the PCA. After graduation, Keith served his mandatory five-year Army hitch at Fort Campbell in Kentucky, where as a platoon leader he learned many lessons about leadership that helped prepare him for his future calling.
“Taking orders and giving them, leading folks who were twice my age, I had to outgrow a huge intimidation factor at first,” Keith recalls. “But I learned that age didn’t matter if they knew that you cared for them and had their best interests at heart, even if you had to make hard decisions. You earned trust with them over time.”
Part of the trust-earning process involved seeing some of his fellow soldiers come to faith in Christ. “It was a wide array of people,” he says. “One was a fellow platoon leader who was a self-proclaimed deity. Another was my company commander’s driver, a guy from a broken, poor family in Chicago. Another was an atheist — we met the first day at Fort Campbell and struck up a friendship, and three years later he came to faith. It was a sweet season of reaping.”
Keith finished his time in the Army at a self-proclaimed crossroads. “I could’ve stayed in for a career or applied to medical school,” he recalls. “But through seeing some gifts and being involved in a PCA church plant, my pastor was encouraging me toward ministry, and some friends were also encouraging me in that regard.”
The next step in that direction involved a stint as a full-time college minister at a church in Tennessee. “I said to myself, ‘I’m going to give this a shot and see what happens.’ They gave me the keys to two vans and gave me 26 students, and said they wanted me to take them all to [RUF’s annual] summer conference. It was an eyeopening experience — I had a lot of questions about ministry and the sense of knowing just enough to be dangerous, not knowing what I was doing, but knowing I didn’t know what I was doing. At that conference I saw guys who loved what they were doing and who loved students, and I resonated with the ethos of what they were about. I saw a thoughtfulness to ministry that valued students and their questions.”
Along the way Keith met Bebo Elkin, an RTS alumnus and a longtime RUF campus minister. Through Bebo’s influence, Keith spent a year as an RUF intern at Florida State University, which was “a sweet time” (“sweet” is a favorite word of Keith’s). At the end of that year Keith began looking at seminaries, during which he met Dr. Ligon Duncan, now chancellor and CEO of RTS, but then senior pastor at First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, Mississippi. Through Dr. Duncan, Keith made the final decision to attend RTS Jackson. Keith served on the First Presbyterian staff and for RUF at Millsaps College while attending RTS.
When Keith reflects on his time at RTS, he talks about the “Four Horsemen” — not of the Apocalypse, but rather four professors who influenced him most: Dr. Ralph Davis, Dr. John Currid, Dr. Knox Chamblin and Dr. Dennis Ireland.
“There was a pastoral kindness in Ralph Davis and Knox Chamblin that was really sweet, and I needed. John Currid was helpful because he was willing to say things as they were, but he showed me how to do it in the right way. I appreciated Dennis Ireland because he was in charge of our prayer group, but he was willing to say, ‘I don’t think we’ve done this well so far.’ There was a humility in him that was helpful for me.”
After graduating from RTS in 1998, Keith and his wife, Paige (an RUF intern he met while in seminary) moved to Baton Rouge, La., where he became the RUF campus minister at Louisiana State University. After 10 years at LSU, Keith transitioned in the role of area coordinator with RUF. That position carries three responsibilities: shepherding, coaching and consulting.
“Shepherding involves pastoral care for campus ministers and their wives and families, with an understood limit to that role of that based on proximity and frequency,” Keith observes. “There’s also a coaching aspect that involves teaching young campus ministers, but also helping veteran ministers rethink and retool in light of a fixed theology and philosophy of ministry. The consulting piece involves helping [PCA] committees understand what effective ministry looks like, being an advocate for the campus minister to the committee, but also an advocate for the work to the presbytery.”
Keith acknowledges that his current area coordinator role was somewhat undefined when he started — as he puts it with a laugh, “I think we were building a plane as we were flying it.” But if anyone has been equipped to take on such a distinct role in ministry, it’s a mutt like Keith who’s had to learn to adapt to a new culture at every stage in life.
Learn more about Reformed University Fellowship at www.ruf.org